The Sky Is Falling (16 page)

The main task of the evening was to revise and approve the rough copy of a leaflet we were going to distribute at a technology conference that was taking place in a few weeks at the Hyatt Regency. Some of the participants were involved in arms manufacturing; one in particular made components for the cruise missile. What struck me especially was that the cruise missile was being tested in Alberta, my home province, because the northern terrain there resembled the Russian steppe. The missile flew low, below enemy radar, following the contours of the land and, because it couldn't be detected, it was considered one of the new “first strike” weapons in the American arsenal, evidence that they had moved away from the old policy of deterrence.

A long discussion followed about whether or not to have contact information on the leaflet. “As if we don't have phone trouble already. Now we'll have assholes calling up,” Dieter said.

Sonia put a hand on her heart. “If a hundred assholes call and we reach one of them, it will be worth it.”

Dieter sniffed. “Okay. Fine.”

Sonia volunteered to deal with the assholes, Timo to photocopy the leaflet. Belinda would get the suits. “Help, anyone?” she asked. Sonia and Carla put up their hands, then I did.

“
Liaison
SPND
,” Timo read off the agenda. He was the liaison. “They're having a rummage and bake sale on campus to raise money for the Walk for Peace. Do we want to get involved?”

Dieter pulled a sock off and threw it into the middle of the room. “They can have that.” Everyone laughed.

Next, Pete gave a report on his stop sign work. Over the Christmas holidays he'd changed thirty-one signs. “Half of those I did with Zed.” Everyone turned congratulatory eyes on me and Sonia squeezed my hand and kept it. Until we finally took a break, it grew clammier and clammier and the only thing I could think about was when she planned on letting me go.

I used the downstairs bathroom, the one with the broken toilet tank lid and the poster about Bolsheviks. I thought of it as Sonia's bathroom as she was the only one with a bedroom on the main floor. The bottles on the side of the tub were hers, among them, unsurprisingly, No More Tears shampoo.

In the kitchen, Carla and Belinda were picking at what was left in the dirty potluck dishes, their heads together, like conjoined twins. Belinda looked up and said, “Oh, Jane. We were just talking about you,” as Carla edged past me and out of the room. I couldn't have been more surprised by what Belinda said next. “You didn't sleep with Pete, did you?”

“What?”

“You were here with him over the holidays, right?”

“For a few days.”

“You seem so friendly now. He didn't try anything?”

“No!”

“Okay. I'm not accusing.”

She didn't sound accusing. She was smiling, but I remembered another time her expression hadn't quite matched her words. After we'd finished putting the stickers on the war toys, we met up again at Santa's Workshop. It had been Belinda's idea to get our picture taken. We lined up and, when our turn came, crowded onto Santa's lap. Santa got quite jolly, his droll little mouth drawn up like in the poem, until Belinda said in a girlie voice that what she most wanted for Christmas was for men to stop staring at her breasts. In a twinkling, he spilled us off. Everyone seemed to agree that she'd really put old Saint Nick in his place.

“You'd be the first to say no,” she told me now.

“Sonia's slept with Pete?” I asked.

“God, no. Not Saint Sonia. She's saving herself.”

Carla popped her head in and we both looked at her. Belinda said, “God! He wouldn't
dare
! But everyone else has, believe me. SPND is at his feet.”

She was warning me. I stepped away and got my drink of water, drank it down in relieved gulps while Belinda waited. Then, with her freckled arm draped over my shoulder, we went back to the meeting. “My feminism's in conflict with Pete's anarchism,” she confided in a low voice.

“He says he's a feminist.”

“Words aren't important. Actions are.”

We resettled in the living room to deal with the new business. Pete's name came up on the agenda again and he repeated what I'd told him about the street signs. “Which ones are battles, Zed?”

“Trafalgar. Balaclava. Blenheim. Waterloo. Dunkirk—”

All around the room heads shook in outraged disbelief.

“—Alma and Dunbar.”

“Dunbar! The food co-op's on Dunbar!”

“Warmongering in hippy Kitsilano. Shocking, isn't it?”

“God!”

“We've ggggot to rename them.”

A committee was struck.

Sonia got the last word. She rose to her feet. “This has been such a good meeting. I missed you guys at Christmas. I love you all so much.” Then she started to cry. “It's
1984
—”

“Shades of Orwell,” someone whispered.

“I feel like we have one year left. Just one year. If we can't stop this madness in the next twelve months, we're doomed. All of us. I know in the past I've always been a support person.”

Dieter became defensive. “Support is just as important. We're all equal.”

“Yes, but I was a support person because I was worried about having a criminal record and not being able to teach when I graduate. Over Christmas it finally sank in. There won't be any kids to teach if I don't act. I want you all to know that this year I'm going to do everything I can.”

Everyone formed a silent scrum around Sonia, embracing her in layers of arms and bodies, a swaying mass of love, while Sonia sobbed. Someone began to hum, then they all joined in. Strangely, it was Carla with the husky man's voice, the beige hair and beige eyelashes and, more often than not, beige clothes, who had all her colours in her throat. “We shall live in peace,” she fluted, “we shall live in peace . . .”

They formed a chorus. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”

Then I, too, overcame my shyness and began to sing. “Deep in my heart, I do believe . . .”

It didn't matter how I sounded. It mattered that I meant it.

I ran into Dieter in the upstairs hall. During the meeting, during one of the many diversions, people had talked about the holidays. Belinda said she'd fought non-stop with her mother, mostly because she'd wanted to spend Christmas with her dad. “He's a film director,” she said, tossing her hair. He made cable TV commercials for local businesses. Carla had been as miserable. She was adopted and didn't fit in. There was a big scene when she wouldn't eat any turkey. For Dieter, it had been his first Christmas without his father.

“I'm sorry about your dad,” I told him now.

He blinked rapidly behind his glasses, “Me too,” and for a moment we stood in embarrassed silence, in the no-man's land between each other's room. In Pete's land, actually, his music leaking out around our feet.
Riders on the storm
. When I turned to go, Dieter asked, “Can I talk to you?”

We went to his room where the monochrome Che loomed on the wall. I didn't know anything about Che. I knew a bit about Trotsky, how he'd been stabbed with an ice pick in Mexico. Che was just a black and white stain to me, but he reminded me of Hector, probably because of the beret. Hector hadn't slept on our chesterfield since before Christmas when he'd got an under-the-table job in Victoria delivering pastries.

Dieter sat on his desk chair, leaving me the bed that Pete had been in with Ruth. I hadn't told Belinda. It never crossed my mind to tell Dieter. “You're a good friend of Sonia,” he began.

I smiled. So I was. It was as though I needed someone objective, not my mother, to point it out. When I got back after Christmas, I'd written Sonia a note of welcome, tied it to a piece of yarn, and left it hanging from the grate. Every night and every morning since her return I'd checked the grate, hoping more for her reply than an actual letter from my parents in the mailbox. Now I felt like flying to my room and calling down to her.

Dieter kneaded the back of his neck. “And you get along with Pete.”

I seemed to. I liked him now. I knew he was as vulnerable as anyone, maybe more so, because it was hard to live by your principles. Hardly anyone understood that. They either idolized him or thought he was an asshole, or both. Why? No one thought Misail was an asshole. They thought he was a fool.

Ostensibly Pete and Dieter's conflict was ideological. Dieter, because of his interest in Central America, leaned toward Marxism and rules and procedure, which naturally irritated the resident anarchist. But theirs was also a conflict of personalities. Dieter was insecure. He wanted Pete's approval. He didn't seem to understand as I had early on that Pete respected people who stood up to him. You could call him on anything and he would consider your point of view.

“Sometimes I think he hates me,” Dieter said. “Everything I say, he questions.”

“That's his anarchism.”

“You make it sound like a disease.” He dropped his head to his chest then slung it over his shoulder and around the back until it cracked audibly. “You're like me,” he said, not noticing how I recoiled. Dieter was an incurable corrector. He had a single eyebrow like a headband, concealed by the frames of his glasses. “You study hard. School's important to you. I care about my marks, too, right? And then there's my family. And what Reagan's doing in Central America. Not to mention this whole nu-clee-ar situation. Then I come home and Pete's arguing with me constantly. I'm so fucking tense all the time.” He looked pleadingly at me. I didn't know what to say, what to do, until he told me.

“I was wondering if you'd put in a word to Sonia for me.”

Finally, in the morning, a reply to my
Welcome back!
I threaded the yarn up through the fretwork and plucked the twist of paper out.

I have to talk to you.

Fulfilling the promise I'd made to myself at the meeting, I stopped at the store on my way home from university and bought a tiny tub of the most expensive brand of ice cream, the one with the faux German name, happy to squander my meagre allowance on an umlaut. Except that Sonia refused it. She sat on her bed with her head hanging, face curtained by her mournful hair.

“Why not?”

The curtain opened, revealing the earnestness behind it. “I'm trying not to eat so much. There won't be any food left after a nuclear war.”

“Sonia,” I said.

She sighed and, looking wretched, squeezed shut her eyes. I popped the lid off, dug into the pink with the teaspoon, tapped on her pursed lips; reluctantly, they parted. As the ice cream melted inside her, I read the predicament on her face. She was an ascetic. Pleasure actually hurt her.

“How is it?”

“Delicious,” her anguished answer.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“The meeting,” she said, and I took advantage of her reply to spoon more ice cream in. “What did you think?” she asked, coughing.

I doubted the plan they had—we had—for leafleting the Hyatt would bring us any closer to world peace, yet for those two and a half hours that we talked about it I felt less helpless, as though our death sentence had been temporarily stayed. I admitted to her now, though, that I didn't want to get arrested. “My parents would kill me,” I said.

“You can be support with Dieter. It's just as important.”

“How many of you have been arrested?”

“None so far, but it's going to happen. It might happen at the Hyatt. I'm ready. You've heard of the Berrigan brothers? They're brothers and priests. They broke into a silo and hammered on the nose cone. They poured their own blood on the missiles.”

“We're just putting the leaflets under the doors, right?”

“Yes.” Then, despite what she'd said at the meeting, she confided that she felt estranged from the group. “How can Dieter make these plans to go to Nicaragua next summer? We don't even know if we'll be alive. They have all these other causes. When Belinda and Carla start talking about equality, I want to scream that it'll happen soon enough. Soon we'll all be equally dead. We have to focus on peace. Because, without peace, there won't be anything left.”

She met my eye. “You're right,” I said.

“Really?”

“Logically, yes.” I held the spoon out again.

“No more.”

“You have to eat or you'll lose strength.”

Dutifully she opened her mouth. “I'm jealous of you, Jane,” she said and I almost dropped the spoon. “You've just found out how things really are. You're going to get more and more empowered. I'm afraid of burning out.”

“You won't,” I told her, for which she rewarded me with her most wistful Anna Sergeyevna smile.

A few nights later we went together to the Blenheim house to help work on the radiation suits. From the outside it looked less like student digs than ours, except for the portly papier mâché Venus of Willendorf blown up to four feet standing guard on the porch. Belinda opened the door, brandishing a smile and a slip of paper checkered with creases. “What does it say?”