Nod Read Online Free Page A

last two nights I’ve been completely awake, all night long. I don’t even feel sleepy. So six days to insanity, then thirty two days, max, until total body breakdown and death. Watch. This guy’s been on like every five minutes.’
    She stabbed the remote at the Monolith, upping the volume. Some lab rat gussied up in a white coat. Bulging eyes, thick eyebrows, and fat lips. I couldn’t stand to see the self-importance in his eyes.
    ‘He says they’ve done studies where they’ve tried to see how long they can keep people awake, but nobody’s ever been able to handle more than six days totally awake before their brains shut down. He thinks that—’
    ‘Turn it off.’
    ‘But I’m not—’
    I grabbed the remote, cutting off both Tanya and the rat.
    ‘Let’s go out and get some breakfast.’
    She didn’t say a word as we dressed. I grabbed a printout of my latest draft of
Nod
, and we headed for the nameless greasy spoon where we ate breakfast once a month or so. Eggs, hash browns, toast, and unlimited coffee, all for five dollars a head. Battery eggs, white bread, waxy cheese: the place was a hate crime against both nature and nutrition. The food
tasted
terrible, too—‘food in only the strictest technical sense of the word’ was how Tanya put it—but the soup kitchen pricing kept us coming back, balanced out the expense of our Friday night sushi fest.
    It was a joke between us how we could never remember what the place was called. In fact, it had become our custom to lower our eyes when we approached the restaurant’s faded green awning; we didn’t want to spoil the fun. The Saturday Breakfast was also a chance for me to run my latest pages past Tanya. And even though this clearly wasn’t a normal Saturday morning, it seemed necessary to pretend that it was.
    * * *
    The streets were quiet. Not quiet as in empty, but quiet as in
lots of people, but nobody saying much
. Bright and blustery, then, as we glided down Denman Street among the human beings, none of us fooling anyone with our poorly-performed pantomimes of normalcy. During the early days of colonization, native people, on the verge of starvation and comically outgunned by European religious maniacs, would sometimes profess religious conversion in order to obtain food staples for themselves and their children. In return, our ancestors mocked their desperation by calling them Rice Christians. Well, that morning in Vancouver we were all Rice Christians, treading lightly, hoping not to piss God off. Which was a good thing because all around us was a city of glass.
    Green glass apartment towers in the background of every breeze-blown view, big glass fronts on all the stores—the West End was a place where everybody wanted to see and be seen: a place for promenading, for reflections and transparency. All that glass added up to a kind of war cry:
this is how mighty we are, this is how bold: we’ll build a city out of glass on the edge of the ocean, God, and dare you to smash it down
. No fear of insurrection or weather, of hurricanes or invasion, the towers declared in their gargantuan fragility. The wind was a mere amusement, a pretend-wind threading its way between the skyscrapers like a clown with a handful of balloons weaving through a birthday party. And in the face of all this smiling glass, the people walking by had seemed indestructible, as dense and centred as black holes. Until this morning. Now the city had tipped somehow and we were all slowly sliding toward English Bay.
    Strangeness glazed all the normal sights; everything looked the same as before, but no one could have taken in the scene and not known something was very different. This morning we were a city of glassy eyes.
    ‘Those guys,’ Tanya whispered, pointing to a gay couple and their matching black labs, ‘They aren’t walking their dogs. Their dogs are walking them.’
    And I saw it, literally saw her metaphor made real. The dogs looked calm and confident while the humans