Free Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner Page B

other mysterious fluids. She had swallowed barium, had had iodine injections, had been smeared with strange gels, had subjected her pelvis to X-rays and ultrasounds and had even gone through an MRI exam, of which she gave me a description worthy of Steven Spielberg.
    I was surprised at having been completely unaware of all those trips to and from the hospital. Hope truly had a talent for camouflage.
    “And did they find anything?”
    She shook her head.
    “The plumbing is in working order. I produce the right hormones and ovulate every twenty-eight days. In fact, my ovaries are more reliable than an atomic clock. The mucous membranes of my uterus refuse to vascularize, but the doctors still don’t understand why. They’re baffled.”
    Diagnosis: Hope was afflicted by amenorrhea mysteriosa: “an inexplicable lack of menstruation.” In other words, modern gynecology was throwing in the towel. Hope reached toward my cup of hot chocolate, fished out a marshmallow and slipped it into her mouth.
    “I’ve become a medical mystery. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
    I pictured Hope floating in a jar of formaldehyde—but quickly brushed the image out of my head.
    “But, um … you’re feeling all right?”
    “I feel like the Bermuda Triangle.”
    “What does your mother say?”
    “That there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a good old end of the world.”

30. RANDALL THINKING
    I had dozed off in the middle of a documentary on the Guajá, an aboriginal tribe recently discovered in the depths of the Amazonian basin, one of the most secluded regions of the planet. These natives wore loincloths, painted their bodies and had never had any direct contact with post-Columbian civilization. Also, they had greeted the anthropologists’ helicopter with a volley of arrows. Good, upstanding people.
    The documentary had long given way to an infomercial when the telephone rang. I opened my eyes. The VCR display showed 12:43 a.m. and a bleached-blond motor-mouth was working away on an abdominal exerciser. My hand lifted the receiver and my brain went into gear (in that order).
    At the other end, Hope’s voice had a sombre ring to it.
    “Is it a bad time?”
    As a response, I yawned.
    “Can you come over to the Pet Shop? I could use a hand.”
    “You could use a hand? At a quarter to one in the morning?”
    “I don’t feel like explaining on the phone.”
    “Okay. I’ll be right there.”
    “Bring some bandages.”
    “Bandages? Are you hurt?”
    She had already hung up.
    I listened for signs of activity upstairs. Dead silence. My father had been putting in long days at the cement plant, and I suspected that my mother had been popping sleeping pills for a number of months. The conflict between my brother and father had churned up some choppy water in the vast ocean of her maternal love. Life in a typical North American bungalow.
    I got dressed, filled my backpack with whatever might serve from our medicine cabinet—band-aids, gauze, tape, compression bandages with clips—and stole out the back door like a Sioux.
    In the street, ice crystals swirled over the pavement. Winter. Endless winter.
    Hope was waiting by the door with folded arms and a furrowed brow. I looked her up and down and, seeing no sign of injury, let out a sigh of relief.
    Inside the Pet Shop the usual chaos prevailed: dishes and dirty laundry scattered throughout, dust in every corner and a faint odour of reptilian feces. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary, except for Mrs. Randall, who was lying in the middle of the floor unconscious and hastily covered with a shabby bathrobe. Under her head, a bloodstain was soaking into the carpet. Her upper lip—which had probably split when she fell—was still bleeding despite an improvised compress of paper towels. The cleanup would not be easy.
    Hope gestured nervously, almost impatiently, in her mother’s direction.
    “I think she’s okay. Aside from the lip, I mean.”
    “What happened?”
    She