Nod by Adrian Barnes Page A

know? Do you see?’
    I didn’t. Instead, I thought of Tanya and Zoe all alone back in the apartment and felt the school’s walls press in on me. How stupid we’d been to remain in the city this long. All I could think to do was keep him talking and look for an opportunity to make a run for it.
    ‘I don’t understand. Can you explain?’
    By feigning interest, I ran the risk of sounding patronizing, but I couldn’t think what else to do.
    ‘Glad to, Paul. What’s real? What’s fake? Is what we intend to do ever what we
really
want to do? And if not, can it matter?’ He laughed. ‘I can see I’m losing you, Paul. I’ll try again.’ He slapped my rolled up manuscript against his thigh. ‘You wrote this book, right?’
    ‘I’m—I was writing it.’
    ‘And this book explicates the things I’m seeing, that we’re all seeing and thinking. Colours are bleeding. Spirits are flashing past. You know all this.’
    I thought of the Blemmye from the other evening and felt my ribs creak in rhythm to my throbbing head, my throbbing fucking universe.
    ‘But how can it do that? It’s just a book, for Christ’s sake.’
    Now that I was asking a real question, Charles got angry. He snarled, keeping his words on a short tether. ‘It’s not just a book! Of course it’s not. They’re not just words. It’s a map. All these words have been hidden away and now they’re coming back to the main stage, Paul. You’re a prophet, Paul.’
    Each time he said my name I found myself grinding my teeth.
    ‘But the question is, ‘how did you know?’ How did you prognosticate it, Paul?’
    Charles loved big words, loved forcing them into his sentences no matter how much they squealed.
    All around us, glass cases on the walls were filled with student drawings and papier-mâché sculptures. Every piece of kiddie art looked as insane and distorted as anything I’d seen outside or written about in
Nod
. Charles caught me staring and smiled even more widely, until I began to fear his face would split from the strain.
    ‘I noticed it too. All those grotesque heads and jagged lines. And just a week ago, just think of it, Paul—all those adults smiling so condescendingly because they thought their kids were too stupid to get reality right. Oops. What do you think?’
    He waited while I thought fast. What did I have to say to get away from him and his greasy mob? One thing was clear: to refuse to play the part he had written for me would probably be to invite more danger than I’d be able to handle. So I started making things up.
    ‘I don’t know. I guess I was fascinated by what’s buried beneath, by what was buried beneath the old reality. Sometimes I felt like those words were more real than the world around me. But I don’t know what…’
    I’d run out of words. Faces peered through the glass in the skinny windows beside the doors—trees behind them, shaking their fists at the sky.
    ‘The folks out there want to come in and see you, but I don’t think you’re ready to meet them yet. Let me make this easy for you, Paul. Okay?’
    I bowed my head.
    ‘Just ask me what you can do to help.’
    ‘What can I do to help, Charles?’
    He clapped his hands, and I jumped.
    ‘We’ve got to get organized, Paul. It’s all a piece of shit. Just think of me as the martini man, sipping away. It’s all shit but not
really
. Understand? Well, you will. We need a guide, Paul. A leader, a figurehead, a guru, a plaster saint. We gotta get
organizized.
Did you ever see
Taxi Driver
? Robert DeNiro? You should. Have. It’s gone for good now. No more movies, ever. Hah! People are staggering around out there, smacking each other on the heads with bricks, Paul. It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing for the species! Who’s insane? That’s insane. People aren’t insane: it’s the things they do that are crazy. Clearly, clearly, clearly. So we need to make some sense here. ‘What we can’t change has to be a church’, Paul. Get it? We