#Titanuary #BookExtract ‘Nod’ by Adrian Barnes

‘Nod’ by Adrian Barnes was my book choice for today’s #Titanuary focus, and as I was leaving a review on Goodreads, I noticed that there is an extract for the Titan published UK edition.

It is an extraordinary book, a meta fictional tale on the nature of sleep and dreams, so if I can persuade anyone to take it out of a library, or borrow it from a friend, hopefully this piece will encourage you. A short read which is threaded with weighty concepts, I loved it and hope that you will too!

DAY 18: Words
The object of words is to conceal thoughts
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the living from the dead.
Most of the remaining Awakened lay sprawled on the asphalt of Birchin Lane, six storeys
below my balcony. Down there, everything’s akimbo: heads flop, tongues loll, and mouths are
corkscrewed holes. Some of them are still ambulatory and stagger around in unsprung circles,
clawing air. Others sit mannequin-still among the rubble, staring up at me from their laps, eyes
blazing.
They sacrificed another Sleeper last night, some poor chump in Birkenstocks who’s now
lashed to a lamp post across the street by bloodstained bungee cords. The head, as always,
has been painted lollipop yellow. And speaking of colours, there’s no sign of the Admiral of the
Blue this evening: his rickety stage, cobbled together from smashed-down doors and thrashed
trash cans, is bare. For a while the Admiral and his people treated me like a prophet, but I
always knew it wouldn’t last. It’s Prophets-R-Us down there: what’s in desperate short supply is
disciples. It reminds me of poets, before all this–how the sensitive souls who submitted their
work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of
ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening. Some things never
change. Maybe nothing’s really changed.
What else do I see? Packs of dogs, heads hovering low, roam the periphery of things.
The long-standing human-canine alliance has been irretrievably severed, I’m sincerely sorry to
report–the gnawed bones and matted chunks of hair scattered along the shores of Lost Lagoon
testify to this. It’s sad, but then again those plump collies and German shepherds don’t seem
too weighed down by nostalgia for bone-shaped vegan treats and belly rubs from the
opposably-thumbed as they wander about, licking their chops. Anyway, it’s not their fault. We’re
the ones who broke the deal.
The Awakened spot me, and the crowd’s insect noise ratchets up: Beetlemania! I raise my
arms, just for old time’s sake, and the street falls silent. I hold the pose for a moment then let
them drop—a cue for the haunted house screaming to begin.
I’m sure this all sounds pretty terrible, dear hypothetical reader, but you might be
surprised to learn that I’m of the opinion that while things are bad now, they really weren’t much
better before. All that’s different here in Nod is that the molten planetary core of pain that used
to roil away behind our placid smiles has now blurped out into open air. How we used to
fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust!
We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was
all pain–all of it–all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All
that’s different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen
and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and
naked.
And what about Love–our alpha and omega, our porn and our purity? Well, here’s the
real news: when you dug right down to the root, even love was pain. Especially love, as I will
shortly testify. With Death always staring over our shoulders, whether we acknowledged him or
not, how could it not be?
And so the question arises: what isn’t pain?
I stand there on my balcony as the question rises, coiling into the sky above Vancouver,
and hangs still, with no breath of breeze to make it blow away. The orange sun, made hazy and
huge by the million square kilometre dust cloud that used to be Seattle, is slowly sinking into
English Bay. I can almost hear hissing as the day, maybe the last day, extinguishes itself.
Directly across the street from my apartment, in Demon Park, a siege of great blue
herons bob on overburdened cedar boughs. The names we give gatherings of birds are telling:
murders of crows, sieges of herons, unkindnesses of ravens. They must have made our
ancestors nervous. Birds pick at bones and lap at eye juice. Maybe they reminded our
ancestors that they’d be bones themselves, soon enough. The sight of pigeons waddling along
the pavement has always seemed eerie to me; I’ve never been able to get over all that
armlessness.
Behind me, the stairwells gag on fifty apartments’ worth of furniture: everything but the kitchen
sinks. The building’s risen bile cost me a couple of days of heavy labour, but it also bought Zoe
and me some time. Since yesterday morning, though, I’ve been hearing ripping and snapping
sounds coming from the lower floors. I’m pretty sure that Blemmyehs are burrowing up toward
us. White moles, digging into ceilings, discovering floors. Escheresque. Three floors below
now? Two?
And speaking of Escher, it’s worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right,
literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call ‘reality’ there was always an Escheresque,
a Boschian, a Munchian fact–a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered
once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. Who’d have thought that the real high wire act
of imagining was the old world, that seemingly bland assemblage of malls and media that came
to a crashing end less than one month ago? Who’d have thought that the real fantasists were
the Starbuckling baristas, the school teachers, and the pizza delivery boys? If we’d really
stopped and thought, it would have been obvious. A cursory look at the latest appeal from subSaharan Africa should have told us that our privileged world was a pretty slapdash affair, always
smouldering at the edges.
But no one stopped, and no one thought.
Christ, I’m tired in a million ways. We’ve been staring into the whites of each other’s
eyes for weeks now, the Awakened and I–all of us coming up blank. But that’s okay. I really
don’t mind. I’m just about ready to give it all up anyway.
But what about poor, silent Zoë, already asleep in the spare bedroom, curled up with the
stuffed grizzly that Tanya gave her? I may be about done with the whole sorry human comedy,
but I still want her to survive this farce. I want something that Tanya loved to live on. But tell that
to those flayed faces down there, freshly-arrived for the night shift, insomniac suns thrust deep
inside their pockets, scorching their thighs.
What about Zoe? What about the child?