Apocalypse for Beginners Read Free Page A

part of the screen was dead, but as long as the set stayed turned off it did the trick.
    As soon as the TV was installed in the dining room, the social workers’ attitude shifted. They took note of this positive sign and their visits became less frequent. Between inspections, however, the television had to be stowed away. Ann Randall would not tolerate an apparatus that caused retinal cancer and rotted the brain.
    The arrival of the television represented a turning point in Hope’s life. Until then, the only source of information available in the house had been her mother’s bible collection. Hope had read the King James version once, without skipping a single page, and that was enough, thank you very much.
    Now, however, she locked herself in the closet every night to watch the international news on CBC, old late-night feature films, and, above all—that inviolable appointment—David Suzuki and The Nature of Things . Astronomy, genetics, chemistry: there was nothing that did not interest her. Every Friday night the good news emanating from Vancouver, British Columbia, was relayed from repeater to repeater across the continent via the Hertzian highway and touched down in a beat-up television inside a closet in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where it irradiated the brain of a young girl with a craving for science.
    The Cold War was drawing to a close. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a good omen, perestroika was a good omen and glasnost was a very, very good omen. From now on, there would be no more talk of nuclear holocaust; instead, speculation focused on the imminent opening of a McDonald’s on Red Square.
    Hope had the foresight to make collect calls to every Halifax bookstore with the aim of locating a Russian-language textbook. She finally tracked one down at the Book Room. The following week, a highly disgruntled postman delivered three enormous packages, tightly wrapped in brown paper, containing the seventeen volumes of Teach Yourself Russian at Home .
    While her mother chewed on her nails in the kitchen, Hope shut herself in the closet, furtively turned on the TV, and in the stroboscopic glow of the screen learned all about personal pronouns, conjunctions and conjugations.
    She was in the midst of memorizing her first irregular verbs when the Chernobyl accident occurred.
    A simple maintenance oversight, a mere thirty seconds of negligence, and a nuclear power plant in the middle of the Ukraine began to melt down as easily as caramel on the stovetop. Hope stayed glued to the TV for three days. For the first time, the whole world could follow every moment of a calamity unfolding on Soviet soil, a scenario that two or three years earlier would have been the stuff of science fiction.
    For Ann Randall, on the other hand, Chernobyl was one of several omens—there were, after all, only three years left before 1989—and she once again was stricken with a blend of anxiety and insomnia as well as abrupt and inexplicable bouts of feverish excitement. And there was something new: she began to speak Assyrian in her sleep.
    Assyrian or Hebrew or possibly Sumerian, was what Hope surmised, on grounds that were actually rather thin. Her mother fell asleep each night reading a bulky multi-language bible. Was some sort of contamination taking place? At any rate, whatever it was bore no resemblance to Russian.
    For Hope, self-appointed guardian of domestic balance, this apocalyptic psychosis was not some quaint family idiosyncrasy but a bona fide problem. So she dragged her progenitor to the psychiatrist, who confirmed that the dosage of clozapine, after many years of effectiveness, seemed no longer to be working. A new dosage and a new routine were prescribed.
    What accounted for this sudden lack of response to the medication? The doctor could not say for sure. He raised various possibilities: the natural history of the illness, changes in the body’s metabolism, the effects of habituation. For her part, Hope believed there might be