Apocalypse for Beginners Read Free

entrusted her to a psychologist, who in turn transferred her to a psychiatrist, so that she eventually went home with a hefty prescription of 250 mg of clozapine, to be taken every morning with orange juice, along with a tablet of doxylamine for nausea.
    Now that the psychotic episodes had stopped, Ann could resume her tasks at the library. Everything appeared to be under control. She floated in a state of euphoria, swelling at the midriff, shelving books, stamping cards. It was through this veil of medication that Hope came into the world, three weeks early (punctuality was undeniably on the wane for the Randalls).
    Grandfather Henry came to the nursery, answering the call for help and stayed just long enough to take a quick look at the baby and declare that her name would be Mary Hope Juliet.
    Mary Hope Juliet—airdropped into a cuckoo’s nest.

5. A DISTURBING LOGIC
    As an infant, Hope was perceptive and independent-minded. She rarely cried and refused the breast very early on. She had not inherited her mother’s fragile beauty, but there was an undeniable gracefulness in her figure and her gestures. Her hair was straight and unruly, and the freckles that blossomed on her face during the heat wave of 1977 rounded out the impression of a little girl who had been abandoned in the heart of the Amazonian jungle.
    The years went by. Ann shelved books and followed her prescribed dosage. Hope attended the elementary school across the street. She had few friends, and family visits were rare. The Randalls gathered at the funeral parlour every two months or so, each time an aunt or a cousin succumbed to her or his personal apocalypse, and such evenings were just about the only social life they had.
    All in all, it was a life that held no surprises.
    Things began to fall apart the day that Ann quit her job at the library, taking with her the collection of bibles (whose removal, as it happened, went quite unnoticed). She found a job as a cashier at Sobeys, and set about hoarding considerable quantities of food—enough to keep a large family self-sufficient for many months.
    This food-related disorder was governed by a disturbing logic: Ann refused to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, that is, food whose value was necessarily ephemeral. She thought in terms of calories per cubic metre, protein and nutritional benefit. Above all, no perishables. She came home from Sobeys with enormous provisions: five-pound bags of rice, ten-pound sacks of potatoes, four cans each of red beans and stewed tomatoes, twenty cans each of tuna in oil, pears, peaches, peas. And ramen—hundreds of packets of ramen that she stored in every available space.
    When her daughter asked her what the purpose was of all these supplies, Ann Randall answered mysteriously, “To barter, when the Chinese show up.”
    Hope was only eight and a half but already found her mother’s sense of humour suspect.

6. TEACH YOURSELF RUSSIAN AT HOME
    After a few relatively uneventful years, Social Services reactivated the Ann Randall file. A routine visit had made clear that something about this family was not quite right. Specifically, aside from the legal guardian’s psychiatric history, here she was, storing packets of ramen and tins of sardines by the thousands. Suspicious.
    Fortunately, Hope was on the alert. Whenever a social worker threatened to drop in on them, Hope would scrub the floor, pour a litre of bleach into the toilet bowl and fill a pretty wicker basket with apples and oranges. In this carefully prepared environment, Ann Randall managed to look almost ordinary.
    The stratagem was repeated every six months, and Hope gradually learned to create an illusion of normalcy. She soon grasped that certain details appeared fishy, especially their not owning a television, which served not merely as another home appliance but as proof of one’s allegiance to society. So Hope went out scavenging and came back with someone’s discarded old black-and-white Zenith. The bottom