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kissed her on the forehead. Ten seconds later, Mrs. Randall was droning away in Aramaic.
Hope sat down at the foot of the bed and rubbed her eyes. The negotiations with the policeman had demanded an output of thousands of kilowatts in the space of a few minutes. I fidgeted with the car keys and looked around me. The Pet Shop was cold, dark and even messier than usual. An odour of rabbit piss hung in the air. The dining table buckled under piles of paper, notebooks, cash receiptsand boxes of Kraft Dinner. I noticed a stack of bills, probably unpaid.
I was embarrassed to be a witness to all this and badly wanted to be somewhere else, and yet I didn’t want to turn my back on Hope.
She stopped massaging her eyes and scanned the room. She, too, would have preferred not to be there. I suddenly understood how there might be something reassuring about the end of the world.
Hope sighed.
“Do you know what I dreamt of last night?”
I sat down beside her without speaking. The sofa groaned. Behind us, bits of Hebrew and Akkadian could be heard.
“I dreamt that the animals were coming back to the Pet Shop—giraffes, elephants, zebras. A long line of exotic animals stretching back to Lafontaine Street. They came through the door two at a time and took over. Parrots in the curtains. Lizards in the drawers. Chimpanzees in the closet. They ate our food supplies, but my mother didn’t care. She was lying on the couch without any clothes on. I tried to cover her with a coat, but she refused. She laughed and drank wine straight from the bottle, saying that everything was over.”
Hope sighed again. She kissed me on the temple.
“Go home. It’ll be all right.”
Stepping outside, I drew a deep breath of icy air to cleanse my lungs of the smell of the Pet Shop. I brushed my finger over my temple, where Hope had kissed me. All at once, I liked that part of my body.
I got behind the wheel of the Honda and headed home, where my absence had most likely been noticed. Already, I anticipated the barrage of questions. What sort of story could I think up? The car’s interior weighed down on me and I switched on the radio. Nana Mouskouri was still pa rum pum pummelling the airwaves.
27. HUNTER-GATHERER
After Christmas, things quieted down. Mrs. Randall regained a modicum of stability thanks to the triple doses of clozapine that Hope meted out to her each morning. At that rate, however, the reserves would probably be depleted by the summer, and no pharmacist would accept a prescription that had been repeatedly crumpled and ironed out. These problems would have to be dealt with in due course.
Since the Christmas episode, I felt I’d been entrusted with new responsibilities. Every day, I made sure that Hope was all right and that her mother had not instigated some new psychodrama. Hope never needed anything but seemed happy to know I was close by.
The end of the winter holidays coincided with the outbreak of the biggest flu epidemic of the decade, a particularly virulent strain concocted in the megalopolises of Southeast Asia. My grandmother swore that this was the Great Return of the Spanish Flu. At school, the classrooms were riddled with unoccupied desks, and everything was running in slow motion. “Carnage” was number one on the word-of-the-week chart.
At the Bauermann residence, my mother’s immune system was the first to give way. She found herself bedridden with a temperature of 40, and the slightest movement was enough to make her moan with pain. My father dispatched me to the Steinberg supermarket with a list consisting essentially of large amounts of vitamin C and ground beef. Ultimately,
Homo sapiens
had remained a hunter-gatherer.
I took advantage of the errand to stop by the Pet Shop, since it had been forty-eight hours since I’d last heard from Hope. She hadn’t shown up at school or at the Bunker, and she wasn’t answering the phone. I had already begun to fear the worst.
As I parked the Honda, there was Hope,
Hope sat down at the foot of the bed and rubbed her eyes. The negotiations with the policeman had demanded an output of thousands of kilowatts in the space of a few minutes. I fidgeted with the car keys and looked around me. The Pet Shop was cold, dark and even messier than usual. An odour of rabbit piss hung in the air. The dining table buckled under piles of paper, notebooks, cash receiptsand boxes of Kraft Dinner. I noticed a stack of bills, probably unpaid.
I was embarrassed to be a witness to all this and badly wanted to be somewhere else, and yet I didn’t want to turn my back on Hope.
She stopped massaging her eyes and scanned the room. She, too, would have preferred not to be there. I suddenly understood how there might be something reassuring about the end of the world.
Hope sighed.
“Do you know what I dreamt of last night?”
I sat down beside her without speaking. The sofa groaned. Behind us, bits of Hebrew and Akkadian could be heard.
“I dreamt that the animals were coming back to the Pet Shop—giraffes, elephants, zebras. A long line of exotic animals stretching back to Lafontaine Street. They came through the door two at a time and took over. Parrots in the curtains. Lizards in the drawers. Chimpanzees in the closet. They ate our food supplies, but my mother didn’t care. She was lying on the couch without any clothes on. I tried to cover her with a coat, but she refused. She laughed and drank wine straight from the bottle, saying that everything was over.”
Hope sighed again. She kissed me on the temple.
“Go home. It’ll be all right.”
Stepping outside, I drew a deep breath of icy air to cleanse my lungs of the smell of the Pet Shop. I brushed my finger over my temple, where Hope had kissed me. All at once, I liked that part of my body.
I got behind the wheel of the Honda and headed home, where my absence had most likely been noticed. Already, I anticipated the barrage of questions. What sort of story could I think up? The car’s interior weighed down on me and I switched on the radio. Nana Mouskouri was still pa rum pum pummelling the airwaves.
27. HUNTER-GATHERER
After Christmas, things quieted down. Mrs. Randall regained a modicum of stability thanks to the triple doses of clozapine that Hope meted out to her each morning. At that rate, however, the reserves would probably be depleted by the summer, and no pharmacist would accept a prescription that had been repeatedly crumpled and ironed out. These problems would have to be dealt with in due course.
Since the Christmas episode, I felt I’d been entrusted with new responsibilities. Every day, I made sure that Hope was all right and that her mother had not instigated some new psychodrama. Hope never needed anything but seemed happy to know I was close by.
The end of the winter holidays coincided with the outbreak of the biggest flu epidemic of the decade, a particularly virulent strain concocted in the megalopolises of Southeast Asia. My grandmother swore that this was the Great Return of the Spanish Flu. At school, the classrooms were riddled with unoccupied desks, and everything was running in slow motion. “Carnage” was number one on the word-of-the-week chart.
At the Bauermann residence, my mother’s immune system was the first to give way. She found herself bedridden with a temperature of 40, and the slightest movement was enough to make her moan with pain. My father dispatched me to the Steinberg supermarket with a list consisting essentially of large amounts of vitamin C and ground beef. Ultimately,
Homo sapiens
had remained a hunter-gatherer.
I took advantage of the errand to stop by the Pet Shop, since it had been forty-eight hours since I’d last heard from Hope. She hadn’t shown up at school or at the Bunker, and she wasn’t answering the phone. I had already begun to fear the worst.
As I parked the Honda, there was Hope,
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