The Sky Is Falling (18 page)

“I see.”

She bristled. “What do you see?”

“I see you're in the back.” When he started the car, it was the engine that sounded angry. Belinda gathered up her hair, hurled it behind her. “God.”

Carla tapped my shoulder to say hello. My smile felt exaggerated, stretched, but as soon as I faced forward again and started stuffing the radiation suits in my pack, all I felt was nervous. Off we drove, off to save the world in that crazy quilt of a car, a confirmed lesbian in the back.

We parked a few blocks from the hotel and pooled our change to feed the meter. Our group hug blocked the sidewalk. (Let the capitalists walk around us!) Then we split up, Dieter and I, support, going ahead. We had decided to pretend to be a married couple staying in the hotel. “In you go, my darling wifey,” Dieter said, ushering me inside the revolving door. Centrifugal force propelled us into the atrium, where we stood blinking and disoriented, as though we had passed through to another dimension, one shiny with marble, bulwarked by velvet couches, inhabited by suited men with name tags. In that chandeliered world, almost everyone carried a briefcase. There were other guests, obvious tourists, not conference goers, but despite our efforts at dressing up we were out of place among the suits and uniforms.

I was much more nervous than I'd been at The Bay. Surprisingly, though, now that I was actually in the hotel, I discovered getting arrested wasn't what I really dreaded. Hanging around the lobby, wondering what the others were doing, wondering if they'd been caught yet, seemed worse now that every minute of every day was spent waiting—waiting for the world to end. There was a fifth suit, a spare, in my pack. If they tried to arrest me, I would run.

I pushed on the door to the ladies' room, slippery with my sweat, and said to Dieter on his way to the men's, “I'm going up.”

“What?”

“I changed my mind.”

A quick glance up and down the corridor and he came over to where I was still holding open the bathroom door, my pretend husband, so chivalrous a minute ago. “This is the first rule in any action: do not stray from the plan. Maybe nobody explained that, Jane.” All at once I pictured him losing at Monopoly the night before, rubbing his hands together, cackling over the play money. He hadn't seemed that disappointed. “You're jeopardizing the whole action,” he told me.

I stepped inside where he couldn't follow me and, in a stall, put on the extra suit. Carla came in a minute later and I handed hers to her. “I'm going up too.”

“Oh, good. You remember about going limp?”

“Yes.”

Now that these words had passed between us, I could be myself again with her.

Sonia hugged me when I told her. “Dieter's mad,” I said.

“Never mind. This is more important.”

We were going in two trips, the women then the men, starting at the top and working our way down. Timo and Pete would leaflet the odd-numbered floors, the rest of us the even. As well as distributing the suits, it was supposed to have been my job to stand at the end of the corridor and make sure the coast was clear, but Dieter did this on his own now, shooting me a disgusted look when I stepped out with the others. At his signal, we sauntered into the lobby and over to the elevators.

“Act normal,” Belinda had primed us, adding with a snort, “if that's possible.” It seemed to be working. We waited with downcast eyes and, somehow, in that logic peculiar to toddlers and ostriches, no one paid any attention to us. Even as the elevator door slid away and we stepped aside to let the descending passengers exit, we received no more than a few curious glances.

An elderly couple got in with us. “Thirty-two,” said Carla and I pressed the button. The man, stooped and sporting bulbous hearing aids, asked for the sixteenth floor. We ascended in silence, my gaze flitting nervously from Sonia to the numbers illuminating in excruciatingly slow sequence above the door. I could hear the elderly couple breathing behind us, no doubt staring at the radiation symbols stencilled on our backs, putting two and two together. The elevator stopped—on the fifth floor, not the sixteenth—and in that eternal pause before the door retracted, we exchanged a look of panic. To be caught so soon, with the pockets of our radiation suits bulging with undistributed leaflets.

It was Pete. Pete alone, staring off to the side, the mask under his chin like a huge white goitre. Until then I wasn't aware his charm was something he could control, that it was more than the sum of his good looks and orthodontic work, but now he saw us in the elevator and turned on all his lights. (
Radioactive
sprang to mind.) When he beckoned, Belinda took a tranced step toward him. We all did. We shuffled obediently out. Behind us, the old woman said to her husband, “There's another one! Is there something going on in this hotel?”

“They have conferences!”

“Oh!”

The door closed on them, leaving us standing in the hall with Pete. “What are you doing?” Belinda asked. “Where's Timo?”

“I want to talk to you.” He made a sweeping motion to dismiss the rest of us and Sonia pressed the elevator button.

“Are you crazy?” Belinda said. “We're in the middle of an action!”

When the elevator came, Sonia held the door for Carla. “Go,” Pete told her but Carla crossed her arms and wouldn't budge. Sonia and I got in and travelled up alone, floor numbers lighting up all over the panel as though we were already being pursued. We got out on the thirty-second floor, according to the plan, and worked the long hall without incident, sliding a leaflet under each door, meeting no one, the only sound the friction of our suits. In the thrill of the work, we forgot about Pete being such a hot-head, finished, and went down two more floors, also as planned, stooping before each door again, sliding our warning through. I was taking action. As long as I was taking action, we were safe. Here and there a room-service tray bore the congealed remains of a midnight snack, pop stagnant in the bottom of a glass, wadded napkins—a still life of waste. I stepped right over it. I'd fallen into a rhythm: stoop, drop the leaflet. One sharp tap to send it under the door. Three paces to the next room: repeat. Tap. The leaflet shot through.

“What's this? Pizza?”

I was still bent over, staring now at a pair of long bunioned feet with frosted nails. Slowly, I straightened, the way you would if you chanced upon a bear. Against the bright white of her robe her paper-bag cleavage seemed years older than her face, her raised eyebrows two thin lines in a child's drawing. I turned to see where Sonia was. Way down at the end of the hall, staring back at me. Condensation formed inside my mask.

The woman leaned out the door. “Oh. There's two of you.” She beckoned to Sonia, kept moving her hand, winding her in. I searched Sonia's eyes above the mask as she drew closer. We could easily bolt but Sonia showed no sign of wanting to. The woman, meanwhile, tried reading the leaflet from several distances before giving up and asking us in. She hummed a few bars of “London Bridge” as we shuffled under her arm. “You are girls?”

Sonia pulled her mask down. “We're women.”

All the gold in her mouth showed when she laughed. “Fine. Little women. I'll call you—can I see you?” We both took off our hoods and she scrutinized me. “I'll call you Jo. And you,” she told Sonia, “you are surely Beth.”

She walked over to the beds with their unmade floral spreads. Her glasses were on the side table next to some prescription bottles. She put them on and looked around for the leaflet, turning a complete circle before Sonia picked it off the floor and handed it to her.

“Thank you. Sit down. There's—there they are.” By the window, two armchairs no one made a move to sit in. Sonia and I watched her read. “Oh. You're protesters.” She looked at us over the top of the glasses. “Sit down.”

Sonia sat on one of the beds, so I did.

“Can I offer you girls—excuse me. Jo. Beth. Can I offer you a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Sonia said. “We're working.”

“I'll have one if you don't mind. Jo?”

I shook my head.

She crouched before the miniature fridge so her legs jutted through the robe's opening, all the way to the tops of her veined thighs. I averted my eyes. When I looked next, her backside was swaying before us, huge and white. She had dropped onto one knee and was gripping the shelf of the mini bar, trying to get back on her feet. As soon as she was steady again, she disappeared into the bathroom. Though there were clean glasses right there on the bar, she came back with one that had a toothbrush in it, adding a few shards of nearly melted ice from the bucket, then the clear contents of the bottle she uncapped with her teeth. She crossed the room and sank into one of the armchairs. “Now,” she said, stirring with the toothbrush, tossing it aside. “Tell me all about this awful missile.”

Sonia told her. She opened one of the leaflets and referred to the grainy pictures and graphs as she talked. “It's a first-strike weapon. They think—”

“Who?”

“The Americans. They think that nuclear war is inevitable and that they can win by launching a pre-emptive strike. But they're insane if they think you can win a nuclear war. It's suicide. Back in September? After the Soviets shot down that Korean airliner? Do you remember? We were this close. And Trudeau is allowing the Americans to test the cruise missile in Alberta. So we're implicated as much as they are.”

She talked about how many weapons the Americans and the Soviets had amassed, how many times over we would all be killed. She mentioned the Doomsday clock. “That's awful,” the woman said. “Just awful. They really are a bunch of bastards,” and she drained the glass and slammed it on the table. “I see you have more of those flyers.”

“Yes,” we said.

“Because, Jo, Beth, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to go early to dinner tonight and I'm going to put them under everybody's plate.” She thrust her chin in the air the way I'd seen Belinda do. “
Everybody's
. What do you think of that?”

Sonia stared. “Are you with the conference?”

“Not really. I get dragged around.” She sniffed and waved a hand toward the window behind her. “I do like this Robson Street.” Then, as though reminded of the world outside, she turned, showing us the sleep-matted back of her head.

Sonia and I got up and went over to the window and the three of us looked down. The West End high-rises looked so tiny. We saw Stanley Park, a miniature Lion's Gate Bridge, water water everywhere giving off a silvery sheen. Sonia tapped the pane. “We live over there. In Kitsilano.”

With my eye I followed the beaches—Jericho, Locarno, Spanish Banks. Around the end of Point Grey was Wreck Beach, the nudist beach at UBC. I couldn't see it from here, but the Buchanan Towers, where Kopanyev had his office, were perfectly visible. He was probably sitting there right now, puzzling over my absence.

“What's that big island?” the woman asked.

“Vancouver Island.”

“I thought we were on Vancouver Island.”

Sonia leaned against the glass, prepared, it seemed, to fall right into the city. Her mouth left a foggy circle, like the translucent shadow of the radiation mask.

“It's very beautiful here,” the woman said, yawning.

“Yes. Can you imagine it destroyed?”

“Unfortunately, I can. I'm from Detroit.”

Sonia turned to her with clasped hands. “Would you really put leaflets under the plates?”

“Oh, Beth. It would give me tremendous pleasure. You have no idea.”

Sonia went over to the bed and counted out twenty leaflets and placed them on the table. “Will that be enough?”

“Whatever.”

“Thank you so much. Now we have to finish handing these out.”

The woman was still gazing out the window, her eyes half shut, glasses cocked, but she came to enough to wave to us. “Farewell, little women!”

In the hall outside, Sonia bounced on her toes. “Jane, I'm so happy. See how easy it is? No one wants to die. We just have to explain the situation like we did with her.”

I wasn't so sure the woman would even remember the leaflets by dinner though I didn't say this. I let Sonia bounce. I let her be a rabbit. After all, who knew what effect our words would have? Maybe we would be her provenance. We continued leafleting and soon came to a door propped open with a cleaning trolley. The maid was standing in the middle of the room, a rag in her hand, hypnotized by something on the television. Sonia had her in her sights, but I wanted to try now. I tapped on the door. The maid snapped the TV off and swung around to face us. “Sorry to bother you,” I began. “We're wondering if we might talk to you about something that's going on in this hotel.”

She gestured vigorously. “No Ingleesh!”

In the elevator I still felt charged. It was what kept the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses going despite how many doors are slammed in their faces. If one soul could be saved, even one. Sonia said, “Now I don't know what to do. I feel like we should keep talking to people. But
someone
has to get arrested.”