Apocalypse for Beginners Read Online Free PDF Page A

in front of the family fleet of cement trucks. Hope stooped down to read the little bronze plaque:
Bétons Bauermann Inc.—Fiers Bâtisseurs Depuis 1953
.
    Hope stepped toward me with her towel wrapped caliph-style around her head.
    “Algebra problems?”
    I grunted. She grabbed a pencil and, drying her hair with her other hand, cleaned up my calculations. In a few seconds the unknowns gave way to an elegant solution. Then she gestured with her chin at the picture of my aunt Ida.
    “Your family is in concrete?”
    I smiled. My family was indeed in concrete. Just as Hope was pressing me for more information, my mother arrived at the top of the stairs to ask if we felt like waffles. An altogether rhetorical question. I promised Hope to disclose all the facts on the Bauermann tribe, but some other day. We went upstairs.
    The kitchen was filled with a sugary aroma. Laid out on the table were a basket of freshly microwaved waffles, some oranges and a pitcher of corn syrup. My father was reading the business section of the paper, while my mother perused the obituaries. The coffee maker was hard at work and the muted radio provided some ambient noise.
    My father, obviously in a good mood, addressed Hope in a booming voice.
    “Well, what’s new, Miss Randall?”
    Hope beamed a huge smile in his direction and speared three waffles.
    “The usual. Major riots in Leipzig in protest against the Communist regime. Oh, and cold fusion has apparently turned out to be a load of bull.”
    I studied my parents’ faces while she spread a kilo of Nutella on her waffles. Father: amused. Mother: bewildered. My mother folded the newspaper and swept away a few crumbs with the back of her hand.
    “And how is your mother?”
    “Okay, I guess. She works a lot. Doesn’t eat well. But if you
really
want my opinion, none of that’s as interesting as cold fusion.”

11. PERFECTLY LIVABLE FOR EXTENDED PERIODS
    Hope was spending more and more time in our basement. Given the rather peculiar atmosphere at the Randall Pet Shop, I couldn’t blame her. She needed a change of scenery, so her Russian textbooks gathered dust while we spent all of our evenings ensconced in the huge, squashy sofa, watching TV with a bowl of pretzels close by.
    The Nature of Things
having just ended, we slipped into a slight trough, as we always did on Friday nights. For Hope, no act was worthy of following
sensei
Suzuki.
    Flipping through the channels, I found a BBC report on the archaeological dig at Pompeii. Hope pretended to pay attention only when the commercials were on—probably just to infuriate me. At every commercial break she would go into raptures, act as if she were in a trance or search for coded messages in the tampon ads (maximum freedom, supreme comfort).
    Why is archaeology so underrated?
    In Pompeii, the sun was beating down on a group of poorly paid trainees who scraped the ground with trowelsand brushes. An Italian archaeologist pointed out one of the site’s particularities: The excavation occasionally uncovered hollows left by the victims’ bodies. By simply pouring plaster into one of these cavities and later prying the cast free with a chisel, they could obtain a 3-D Polaroid of a Pompeii inhabitant at the exact moment of death. (This detail briefly snagged Hope’s attention.)
    The camera ranged over a warehouse filled with dozens of such castings. Shelves upon shelves of asphyxiated Roman citizens—recumbent, curled up, snuggling against each other—an entire population turned into concrete.
    I wondered if the eruption of Vesuvius had surprised some Pompeians in a final act of copulation and, if so, whether the archaeologists had managed to make convincing casts of these events.
    Hope yawned and scratched her navel. She stretched out her arm only to find a few grains of coarse salt at the bottom of the bowl.
    “Any pretzels left?”
    I handed her the bag. The TV showed walls covered with ancient graffiti. The Romans hadn’t waited for the