Apocalypse for Beginners (23 page)

It appeared there were about fifty Hope Randalls on the planet, including a real estate agent, a Triple-A Midget hockey player, a Carmelite renamed Mary Rose of Jerusalem (1842–1903), a post-doctoral researcher in nuclear physics and an orthophonist specialized in glossalia. There were also a certain number of Randall Hopes, in particular an Olympic wrestler, a Jesuit with a degree in Danish literature and a trucker who collected tutus.

I sifted through the results, in vain. After twenty minutes, I took a different tack. I found the telephone number of the Canadian embassy in Japan and logged on to the nearest atomic clock. In the Tokyo time zone, poetically baptized +0900 UTC, it was nearly two in the morning. Most human beings there (including the Canadian diplomatic corps) were softly snoring on futons as thin as soda crackers.

A disturbing detail: as Tokyo was located to the west of the International Date Line, the local calendar already indicated July 17, 2001. The countdown had just begun, and there were only about thirty hours of anxiety left to endure.

Assuming that Tokyo had meanwhile not been wiped off the face of the earth, the embassy offices would open at around 7 p.m. Montreal time. I wrote down the telephone number, taking care not to omit any of the fourteen digits.

92. MADAME HIKARI

A typical day at work—nothing worth mentioning. On the way home I stopped at Ngô’s, the local convenience store, where old Ngô himself was sitting behind the counter, laboriously filling in sudoku grids.

I bought a dozen shrimp rolls—one of Mrs. Ngô’s culinary masterpieces—a ripe-to-perfection mango, three limes and a six-pack of Heineken. As I was paying, I noticed a series of Aloha prepaid telephone cards pinned up behind the cash. The list of rates covered every country on earth, including a few dubious states not even recognized by the UN. The rate for Japan was ten cents a minute.

“Do these cards work okay?”

Mr. Ngô replied with a gently enthusiastic nod, and I added a twenty-dollar card to my bill.

When I got home, I put the rolls in the oven and the beer in the fridge. Then I picked up the telephone and dialed the twelve digits on the card followed by the fourteen digits of the Canadian embassy in Tokyo. I succeeded in getting the numbers right—a good beginning.

The embassy receptionist had trouble understanding what I was after and shunted me on to hold. Japanese-style music, faint electronic fizz. The Aloha card was doing its job, despite the slight distortions. At ten cents a minute, a degree of tolerance was in order.

My call was finally transferred to a certain Mrs. Hikari, whose French was passable. I explained my problem: I was trying to get in touch with a Canadian citizen who had been living in Japan for a number of years and whose mother had just died. Could the embassy help me find her?

Mrs. Hikari listened to me without speaking, promised to do whatever was possible (God knows what that might mean in diplomatic parlance) and took down my contact numbers at home and at work. Before hanging up she offered me her very sincere condolences.

I ate my shrimp rolls on the rear balcony with my feet up on the guardrail, inhaling long gulps of ice-cold beer. The breeze was heavy with the fragrance of flowers—the neighbour’s balcony was crammed with dozens of flower boxes and pots. A genuine Buddhist sanctuary.

It was a while since the sun had gone down amid the smog, but an orange glow lingered on the horizon—an enormous blaze consuming the entire western part of Montreal.

93. AN ORDINARY DAY

Five hours of sleep, lukewarm shower, glass of juice, and away I went to punch in like a model citizen.

The scene at the Rosemont Metro station looked like something straight out of the Blitz: hundreds of travellers crowded the platform, some of them sitting on the ground. The ticket attendant explained to me that half of the underground network would be out of service for an indefinite (and, therefore, considerable) length of time. Three separate incidents were to blame: a suicide at the Berri station, a fire in the electrical system at Lucien-L’Allier and a gas alert at Jarry.

Up to that point, July 17, 2001, had looked like an ordinary day.

I went back upstairs to take the emergency shuttle, but the situation was hardly better on the street. Two or three hundred people were waiting on the sidewalk. The usual lineup had melted down to an aggressive mass, and each time a bus stopped in front of the station, the crowd rushed the doors as if a humanitarian evacuation was under way. An ambulance was parked on the median next to someone who had been trampled or crushed against the doors, no one really knew.

I resigned myself to the pedestrian alternative. The walk downtown would take forty-five minutes, but that seemed more reasonable than risking one’s life to take the bus.

When I arrived at the office, it smelled of strong coffee and panic. A California multinational had just launched a vicious takeover bid on our company, and all the signs suggested that this torpedo would reach us shortly after the financial markets opened. The future: uncertain.

I was strangely immune to the ambient anxiety. I floated outside my body, a few metres above the scene.

Midmorning, our department head called a meeting. The buyout was indeed going ahead, but it was essential to stay calm: the buyers had promised that no jobs would be cut. For the time being we would have to crank up our output because the transition required that we finish up a number of projects.

In other words, we had seventy-two hours to do several weeks of work.

The situation was crystal clear: they planned to make us sweat before announcing the layoffs. The Romans had already used this sort of method in the galleys. Around the room, my colleagues talked timetables, schedules, achievability, priorities and unpaid overtime. The union representative was on his cellphone, and the department head was slinking toward the exit.

Still hovering a few metres above myself, I observed the Styrofoam cups in which the coffee was growing cold and thinking that those damned containers would not decompose for another three thousand years. One hell of a lot of timetables.

94. TAKE HEART!

The rest of the day continued along the same lines: a power outage, two computer system crashes and a twenty-minute evacuation due to a (false) fire alarm. Emails were going around, spreading rumours of sabotage. Inevitably, the backlog built up and some of us had to be sacrificed for the common good. Single, no children—I had all the prerequisites to qualify for overtime work.

The usual quitting time had long passed when my telephone rang. A double tone, signalling an outside call. The call display said
undisclosed number
. I immediately recognized Mrs. Hikari’s voice, proof positive that on the morning of July 18, 2001, Tokyo had not been swallowed up. Take heart!

But the good news stopped there.

With unsettling candour, Mrs. Hikari told me that the options for locating a Canadian citizen were quite limited. As a rule, it amounted to consulting the embassy’s database (a two-minute procedure). If this produced no results, they simply gave up.

Hope was not registered in their database, but, in light of the circumstances, Mrs. Hikari had taken the liberty of giving the Japanese immigration agency a call. There was no sign of Hope there either, which meant that she had no visa and no visitor’s permit.

To sum up, Mrs. Hikari explained, this left only three possibilities:

1. Hope had a tourist visa that she renewed every ninety days by leaving and then re-entering Japan (an option both onerous and costly).
   
2. Hope lived in Japan illegally.
   
3. Hope had simply left Japan.
   

Of course, none of these three hypotheses fell within the embassy’s jurisdiction.

I could always post a small advertisement in a daily newspaper, but without harbouring any illusions: Tokyo’s population was in the vicinity of thirty-six million. In order to get results, I would likely have to repeat the operation in several periodicals over a number of weeks, if not months. Mrs. Hikari offered to send me a list of addresses if I wished.

No, I did not wish.

In fact, I felt as though I did not wish anything any more.

I thanked Mrs. Hikari and hung up. The clock on my computer showed 7:14 p.m. I glanced over the partitions of the cubicles. No one in sight.

95. ETHNOLOGICAL OBSERVATION NO. 743

The human race had invented an antidote to this sort of day: Mrs. Ngô’s shrimp rolls.

Out of luck: the store was closed. “Back in 5 minutes” the makeshift sign said, but even though I had a whole lifetime (or what was left of it) ahead of me, I went across the street to the MaxiPrix. Not a great place to be vaporized, but no worse, when you thought about it, than in front of a Vietnamese convenience store.

In the pharmacy, the air conditioners were set to full blast. Standing behind the cosmetics counter, a saleslady in a smock was holding a spray bottle and polishing the glass with as much enthusiasm as a clerk at the city morgue.

I headed for Aisle 5—cleaning products and food.

The ramen display was utterly mind-boggling. MaxiPrix stocked every flavour in the universe! It had been years since my last bowl of ramen—my last year of university, no doubt—and I looked around for Captain Mofuku. Not that I really had a craving—far from it—but I somehow felt nostalgic. Maybe it was just the desire to give the whole story a kind of closure with a familiar taste.

I searched all through the ramenopedia but there was no Mofuku to be found there. The company must have been absorbed by another instant-food Cyclops based in Asia.

All this rot-proof food made me lose my appetite and I quickly moved away from Aisle 5.

I strolled around the pharmacy looking for an omen and ended up in the sanitary napkins section. What sort of omen could this be?

Ethnological observation No. 743: MaxiPrix sold almost as many varieties of sanitary napkins as of ramen. Super-absorbent, extra-thin, super-mini, long with wings, 3-D system, overnight Protection-Plus, patented solution, assured freedom. I discreetly peeled open the lid of a box. Inside, each napkin was individually wrapped in a plastic sleeve. I pictured these delicate rose petals at the bottom of the municipal dump, cheek by jowl with the Styrofoam coffee cups.

I carefully inspected the box for an expiry date. There was none.

I left the MaxiPrix empty handed. Across the street, the convenience store still announced that it would be opening in five minutes. What if the sign had been hung up two hours earlier and old Ngô had accidentally shut himself inside the beer refrigerator? I would have to face the end of the world without Mrs. Ngô’s shrimp rolls. There was no end of nuisances that I would have to bear.

On the corner of the street an old orange Datsun had just overheated. The driver had lifted the hood and a plume of black smoke drifted skyward. A big Italian man burst out of the nearby jewellery store armed with a fire extinguisher, and he blanketed everything—the Datsun, the fire and the driver—in a cumulus of carbonic snow.

What sort of comedy had I stumbled into?

Back home, the mailbox had come under assault: a bagful of circulars, three bills, an offer for a credit card and the menu of a sushi bar. I climbed the stairs slowly. My head was spinning and I urgently needed to find something edible within the next five minutes. The sushi option suddenly looked a little more attractive.

I flung down the pile of mail, which fanned out on the dining table, and I noticed a light blue envelope with a red border. Airmail paper.

A dozen Japanese stamps covered half of the envelope.

96. TODAY’S ACTIVE YOUNG JAPANESE WOMAN

I went to sit on the balcony holding the letter in one hand, a Heineken in the other, and my penknife between my teeth.

Sipping my beer several times, I looked at the envelope. I was reluctant to open or even touch this supernatural, blinding apparition. I almost expected it to disappear at any moment. But it stayed there, in my lap, unmistakably tangible.

On the reverse side someone had written an interminable address. A Tokyo address.

I imagined Hope giving the flap a lick, wiping away a pearl of saliva with her thumb and then, as serious as a child, doing a series of unbelievable quantum calculations with the stub of a pencil to make sure that the envelope would leave at the right time, cross the entire planet, going from one plane to another, from one post office to another, and arrive in my hands exactly today, at sunset.

The stamps were exquisite, a veritable trove of Japanese iconography: giant squid, Mount Fuji and several Hello Kittys.

What was I afraid of?

I finished my beer and gathered my courage. A stroke of the knife and the envelope was slit open. There was nothing in it except for a bland plastic wrapper, empty as well. Nothing else. Not a word, not a letter, not even a haiku on a Post-it.

Just an empty wrapper.

I smoothed it out with the palm of my hand and examined it carefully, intrigued at first, then incredulous, and finally a hair’s breadth away from a nervous breakdown. Despite the absence of any Latin script, there could be no ambiguity as to the product that this wrapper had contained.

Sanitary napkins.

More specifically (based on my recently acquired expertise), these were extra-thin, hypoallergenic napkins with NanoNikki™ micropores and super-leakproof-yet-ultrasoft wings. A model made for today’s active young Japanese woman.

Hope Randall was no longer a medical mystery.

97. WHAT CAME NEXT

Mirabel Airport was gently sliding downhill. Its impending death had been announced for years. Decried, despised and soon decommissioned: the great cycle of life.

As for me, I was quite happy to depart from Mirabel. Given the growing rumours of closure, I felt like a visitor among virtual ruins—the ideal blend of archaeology and science fiction. Shielded by the glass wall, I tried to imagine an abandoned airport. How much time would it take before the couch grass crept into the joints of this flawless concrete? Before the tarmac was breached by tufts of straw, by willows and dogwoods and alders?