DAY 9: Panjandrum

A village boss, who imagines himself the ‘Magnus Apollo’ of his neighbours

Dear Diary, So what’s the deal with all this dear diarizing?

In order to write or, more precisely, to be sane and write, one needs either an audience or at least some idea of an audience; there’s a fine line between ‘writing’ and babbling to oneself. You can’t just write to no one—even if no one ends up reading what you’ve written. And with the world about to end and everyone I’ve ever known either dead or done for, that’s a problematic caveat as I sit here scribbling away on this pad of yellow paper. I tell myself writing helps keep me awake, keeps me from drifting off permanently into the golden light, but that’s not really the whole truth.

So who are you, invisible reader? You’re not one of the Awakened, and I don’t think you’re the kids in the park, either. Neither of those groups strike me as particularly bookish. Are you one of my fellow Sleeper adults? But surely I’m not spilling any beans here that haven’t already been pelted down on their heads by the million. They’ve had the dream. They’ve lost everything and everyone. They don’t need this little memoir. Besides, they won’t be hanging around Nod much longer either: their dreams will swallow them up whole about the same time the Awakened pass on out of this world. So who are you?

Maybe you’re alien archaeologists and you’ve discovered this yellow tablet a thousand years from now. Maybe you’re a diary-snooping God. But then again, maybe you’re the truth, and you just need some figuring out.

Shortly before dawn, Charles’s red-veined hands jerked me from my Dream and back into Time. Time for our chat with the loping, oozing citizenry of Nod. Time for my debut.

While I gnawed at a rancid bagel that tasted for all the world just like a rancid bagel (one retrieved from a dumpster and given a good polish by a sticky shirt sleeve), Charles fussed about where the speech was going to happen.

‘We could have it in the gym, but there are only fifty of us and it might look empty. We could have it outside, but who knows what could happen out there.’

His school marm-ish anxieties were almost endearing. You could tell he wanted to ask my opinion but was worried I’d mock him. In the end he decided we would speak on the front steps of the school. There, we’d be within earshot of the street and available to the walking wounded, but, if we found ourselves under sudden siege, we’d be able to retreat and barricade the double doors behind us.

Outside, a grey day. The faithful were garbled together, waiting and restless on the lawn. A fight erupted at the back of the crowd as two burly, bearded guys set about ripping one another new assholes—literally from the sound of it—while everyone else either pretended nothing was happening or egged on the combatants. I watched, Charles watched, we all watched. Drawn by the smell of violence, strangers kept drifting up, alternately bold and fearful, until the audience was about two hundred strong.

I’ve given some serious thought as to how I should present the speech—or speeches (in the end I spoke three times)—I gave while under Charles’ leathery wing. I think the best way will be to include it as a text. Some of it was improvised, much of it came from the introduction to Nod, and bits of it—the shrill and polemical bits—came highly recommended by Charles. My words varied slightly with each reiteration, but not that much.

‘What has happened is no accident!’ Charles was waving my manuscript back and forth. ‘It all makes sense and this man,’ here he dragged me forward, ‘this man wrote it all down before the curse of sleep ended, before we Awoke! It’s good news!’

The crowd went completely still, so that the bored screaming of the seagulls was the only sound until I began to speak:

Is this a surprise? If so, ask yourself what you imagined would happen when the old world died—or you did. Did you imagine some lame Heaven where you’d be kissed up to by hosts of angels fascinated by all your wonderful qualities? Would there be better food in the Afterworld? Better sex? Better television? Looking around you today, are you ready to admit that, at the very least, you lacked imagination?

Where did you think you were two weeks ago? In a place called ‘Vancouver’? On a planet called ‘Earth’? Did you really think those words named something real? Well, they didn’t. It was just a story—a story we told one another and agreed to believe in. We looked at the people around us and agreed to call each other ‘brother’ and ‘lover’ and ‘friend’ and ‘boss’. And we felt these agreements made us permanent. And we cared about hockey and democracy and phone bills. And we clung to those words like a barnacle clings to a rock.

And so we went from sunrise to sunrise, slipping in and out of sleep [I quickly learned to pause here for a round of teeth gnashing] but never once thinking that there was anything more to this ‘world’ of ours than kneeling buses and ghost friends on our computers and fat-free cookies.

But we were wrong. There was a lot more to the world than that: there were a lot more words out there. There was Nod.

Nod was always out there, always peeking around a corner and watching us. In poverty. In the misfiring DNA of cancer cells. Embedded in the hoods of drunken SUVs that ploughed down innocent children. But now the pretending is over! Nod is the full meal deal, the director’s cut of the world with all the ugly, nasty bits put back in. It’s not a world for cowards. It’s not a world for the weak. There are demons here in Nod, and monsters, and giant spires that poke through the sky. Eight mile high mushrooms. Flaming swords and Brazen Heads. Anything you can imagine. Angels walking through the alleys, demons beckoning from the shadows.

Nod is what we’ve been given. It’s what we deserve. We’d better get used to it.

When I finished, Charles stepped forward to make his plea for brotherhood and unity among the cracked masses, but for a good five minutes they wouldn’t listen, just kept whooping and stomping for me. I’d taken the hard, bitter line, and they’d looked around them and seen a hard, bitter world. The scene playing out in front of us looked like the mosh pit at a punk rock festival in some deeply damaged Eastern European country. As he watched, Charles kept his smile in play, but when he glanced sideways at me, beneath his contorted red face I could glimpse a rawer and even redder one, a flayed face. A flaying face.

Eventually, the mob simmered and Charles spoke some more, growing larger as he began by reciting lines from Nod—or, more properly, a passage from Genesis, as quoted in my manuscript:

‘And Cain went out from the face of the Lorde and dwelt in the lande Nod on the east syde of Eden. We are the race of Cain, all of us. But good news! The punishment is now complete! The barren old world of our wanderings is now over. Here in Nod we’re called on to establish the new Eden. The old world ended in Fire—did you see the flash? But did you hear what Nodgod said at that moment? I did!’

And so on—the standard evangelical pitch. After Charles finished, most of the crowd stayed for the metaphorical juice and cookies; after all, they had nowhere else to go that didn’t involve being alone, hungry, and homi- or suicidal.

It began to rain gently, and nobody except me seemed to notice that the drops that ran down over my upper lip and into my mouth tasted funny. Neither had anyone else seemed to notice the slimy grey film that had begun appearing on white surfaces. Later that afternoon when I crouched in a remote corner of the playground and took my first shit in three days, my stool was crayon yellow.

While Charles’ people, Tanya among them, began to shepherd the newcomers toward the school, Charles himself wasted no time dragging me back inside, to a dim corner where no one could see or hear us.

‘What was that, Paul?’ Something new in his eyes. Fear, I hoped.

‘What?’

‘The way you spoke.’

‘I did what you asked. Charles.’

My little power play was blatant. I knew I’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, my secret weapon having been the fact that I didn’t give a damn about a world that didn’t give a damn about human beings: my contempt had spoken to the crowd. Now Charles would have to deal with the fallout—with the Seattle in my words—if he wanted to keep the spotlight focussed on him.

‘You’re good with words, Paul. But of course that’s not news.’ His self-mastery was impressive, despite the wildness of his eyes and the slack condition of his skin. ‘I don’t mind if you call me by my old Sleeper name when we’re alone, Paul, but you need to know that we’re renaming everyone out there. New Eden. Take up where Adam left off.’

‘Save it for your zombies, Charles.’

He reddened three times. First shade, anger. Second shade, rage. Third shade, the strain of repression of said rage.

‘Are we done here?’ I asked. ‘Or am I still your prisoner?’

My mind flew, on paper wings, to the Book Room and perched there.

‘Give me my thousand. Then you can go.’

But go where? Through the hundred kilometre gauntlet of suburbs that sprawled to the east? North toward the mob on the Lion’s Gate Bridge? South toward the mushroom cloud? West into haunted, hunted Demon Park? No. Charles’ plan would be that I’d go straight to martyrdom, skewered on a kebab stick. There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around—or into a Catholic priest’s chamber while the altar boy’s frock is pulled up over his head. At some point it’s inevitable that the prophet has to go. When you stop and think about it, that’s the take-home message of the entire New Testament: off the prophet. The rules were set, then. Zoe and I had until Charles got his ‘thousand’, whatever that was.

‘A thousand? Why not? I’ve always liked round numbers. Charlie.’

And I left him there, swallowing, swallowing.

Pacing the halls that day, I was both famous and feared. The two states are inextricably linked; the famous always have the power to negate the existence of the non-famous in much the same way a light bulb takes out unwary moths—unthinking annihilation in the face of what Rainer Maria Rilke called, referring to angels, ‘overwhelming existence’. Charles had lifted me up in the eyes of his followers, and I had to be grateful for that. The haggard Awakened Uriahed and Heeped all over me as I passed by; they Pecked and they Sniffed. When people crawl, they always remind me of Dickensian grotesques. His novels were Nod-like with their small contingents of ‘normal’ people constantly under siege from the massed hordes of the twisted and absurd. The hard thing when reading a Dickens novel is to keep faith with the normal, not to be seduced and swept away by the freak show.

All in all, being feared suited my mood; I wore my new role gladly, like armour donned against the assaults of my own heart. As I strode through my day, I felt my face adjust to its new role of prophet: my chin rose, my cheeks drew down, and my eyebrows tightened and drew nearer one another. And then, when I turned a corner and found myself alone, I would laugh. At myself, and a little too intensely for my own liking. Then I’d frown, then laugh again: dizzy circles of me, spinning around.

I made sure that Zoe was fed and watered. She seemed the same as always, content to play with her bear and other toys she’d found in the classroom’s cupboards. She was goodness and sweetness, but I could only watch her wordless world from a distance. I was alone and would have to get used to it as best I could.

So long I was able to maintain my status as Rice Jesus, I was confident that I didn’t need to fear for Zoe’s safety: no one would dare enter our classroom without permission. No one would question why I chose to keep a ‘demon’ there either. The fermenting imaginations of the Awakened would fill in any gaps left lying around. There were no more gnawing questions in anybody’s mind: just a plethora of fantastical answers, gnawing away.

Twelve more days until the Awakened were mostly dead and those who remained would be so incapacitated that they’d be incapable of hunting anything, and Zoe would be safe. We were pretty much half way there, and the odds were that Charles’ little kingdom was the safest place to pass at least a few more of those days.