DAY 17: Churchyard Cough

A consumptive cough, indicating the approach
of death

As the next day began, the skyscrapers began to direct their long shadows toward the park, pointing accusingly toward the wreckage of the Rabbit Hunt. The streets were utterly quiet, except for the familiar whoomph of herons landing and taking off from the cedars across the way. They’d launch themselves and disappear, but the bough they’d abandoned would bounce up and down in slow motion for a good thirty seconds longer.

The way I saw it, the longest Zoe and I would have to survive up here would be a week before the remaining Awakened were either dead or completely incapacitated. In the meantime, I was pretty sure I could scavenge enough food from the building to keep us going. In fact, I’d already managed to secure a few cans of lonelyhearts food: kippers, asparagus, and water chestnuts. Yellow label stuff mostly. Even demented foragers had their standards.

In order to last the week, though, the main thing we’d need would be water, and I had a theory that I was eager to try out. When I envisioned the building’s water supply, I pictured an incredibly intricate three dimensional grid—a completely sealed unit. But it couldn’t be a perfect grid: there had to be slopes and sags. And if this was so, there would be water trapped in the lines at various points; flat runs of copper behind walls and inside ceilings that previous scavengers would almost certainly have missed.

With this in mind, I found a hacksaw and set to work kicking in the drywall behind sinks, tubs, and toilets. I’d hack through copper tubing and direct the severed ends toward a plastic bucket I’d found. And it worked. Not a lot came out, just a trickle here and a trickle there, but by noon I had almost two litres of metallic-tasting but clean water for Zoe and me to drink. I felt like the most resourceful guy in Vancouver and—given the nature of the competition—I probably was.

Back in the apartment we ate lunch: cold mushroom soup with crackers and stale water. It was a silent meal, needless to say. Zoe fed the grizzly crackers (it was a messy eater) with her typical attention and contentment.

As I watched her, I wondered what would become of these children when we were gone. Would they grow up into mute adults and, in turn, have mute babies of their own? If I’m to be honest, part of me recoiled slightly at the thought of a planet populated by Zoe’s kind. The thought of a universally-benign species taking over the planetary reins seemed like a kind of cheat, seemed pointless. What about struggle? What about confusion and turmoil? All those tried and true character builders? What about words?

But if I’m forced to hazard a guess, Zoe and her friends are probably just some sort of next step in evolution. In that case, I’m one of the throwbacks and my opinion doesn’t count any more than that of a Neanderthal surveyed about the potential of stone wheels or harnessed fire. Ug.

After we finished our lunch, I went out on the balcony and saw, as I’d expected, Charles.

He was standing on the sidewalk glaring up at me. Around him were gathered what was probably the last ten of his yellow-faced Thousand. Zoe appeared beside me, her chubby hands clutching the iron rails of the balcony like the world’s tiniest jailbird.

Watching Charles’ trembling face turned up at me, I thought of something my father had said a few years back about his cancer diagnosis and the anticlimactic tumour that had failed to kill him. He said the worst thing about having cancer was that nothing really changed. You were still you, even in the middle of that potentially-life-ending drama. The phone calls and tinfoil-wrapped lasagnes lasted for a few days or a week, then they stopped and you were just lumped with cancer like you were lumped with a job or a mortgage or a second-rate marriage. That, he felt, was the disease’s most terrible secret: not the suffering it prompted, not the death it dealt in, but its ultimate mundanity. Well, that afternoon Charles looked as though his body housed a cancer too phlegmatic to finish him off. And he looked as though he’d been trying to scratch the cancer out of himself with his fingernails for decades. Nod was nothing new to Charles—it was an old and bitter dream. In the end, it wasn’t some sort of monster that stared silently up at me until night fell and he crept away, but an ordinary man. And that was the most terrifying thing I ever saw in Nod: humanity.