Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner Translated by Lazer Lederhendler Read Free Book Online Page A

using oil lamps to light their houses.
    My grandfather, Wilhelm Bauermann—who had grown up with the steam engine, mustard gas and the Model T Ford—was unable to grasp that the atomic bomb was fundamentally different from dynamite. When he talked about Hiroshima, he imagined a mountain of those cardboard sticks they used in the gypsum quarries.
    The children of the postwar years had witnessed the advent of the Boeing 747, LSD and the H-bomb, and by the time my generation arrived on the scene, 100-kiloton intercontinental missiles already belonged to ancienthistory. They were like the microwave oven, Captain Mofuku chicken-flavoured ramen or satellite TV—an ordinary component of everyday reality.
    No, Grandpa Wilhelm could never have understood how the Hiroshima bomb differed from good old dynamite, and even less how it could be compared to lemons.

19. EINSTEIN WAS WRONG
    My parents had gone down to Montreal until Wednesday to take part in the annual convention of North-Eastern Cement Producers—forty-eight hours of scintillating discussions on all the latest additives, the whole event awash in weak coffee and lukewarm beer.
    Lounging on the couch with our feet up on the coffee table, Hope and I were doing our best to diminish the reserves of frozen mini-pizzas. While I flipped through the
TV Guide
, Hope kept half an eye on a news report about Berlin. Nothing new under the sun.
    I asked about Mrs. Randall: Was she making any headway with the date of the end of the world? Hope sighed. No, her mother was getting nowhere. As a matter of fact, she was showing dangerous signs of restlessness. Hope wondered how much longer the clozapine wouldcontinue to keep her condition stable. Fundamentally, the issue was not pharmaceutical. All she needed was to find that date and her mental health would immediately improve.
    Hope threw her head back and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
    “The problem is in her method. She mixes everything up. Mysticism, bogus mathematics, the Kabala, astrology … It lacks elegance.”
    “Elegance?”
    “An old mathematical concept. The more an idea is unnecessarily complicated, the less elegant it is.”
    “I see. So absolute elegance would look something like
E=mc
2 ?”
    Hope blinked and sat up with a start.
    “Do you have dice?”
    Of course I had dice. Every North American home worthy of the name had an old Monopoly game stored away in a closet. It took me two minutes to find ours. Hidden under the bundles of banknotes, property titles and miniature bungalows was a pair of dice. But, as hard as I tried, I could not see the connection with the theory of relativity.
    “There’s no connection. Except that it reminded me of Einstein’s famous statement: ‘God does not play with dice.’ ”
    She gave me a lopsided smile.
    “But Einstein was wrong. God does play with dice!”
    Assembling pen and paper, she drew a grid and wrote down a series of numbers. I tried to follow but lacked some basic data.
    “It’s simple. I’m going to find the date of the end of the world by chance.”
    “By chance?”
    “Can you think of anything more elegant?”
    No, I couldn’t. Hope would throw the dice. Even numbers would mean “yes” and odd numbers would mean “no.” This simplest of conventions would allow her to determine the date through a process of elimination.
    The dice clattered across the coffee table. I loved that sound. It took me back to my childhood when my family would spend entire evenings around the Monopoly board. It had been years since we last played, and it felt rather bizarre, in hindsight, to picture my family gathered around a small-scale model of the world, taking part in simulated financial wars.
    While I daydreamed, Hope tossed the dice. Between throws, she wrote certain numbers down and crossed out others. This method was not only elegant but quick, and two minutes were enough for her to determine that the apocalypse would happen on July 17, 2001.
    Well, at least