The Sky Is Falling (19 page)

“Pete will, I bet.”

“I hope so,” she said as the elevator opened and we stepped right out into the waiting arms of a crimson-faced security guard. “Stop,” he said. It was a plea, rather than a command. I was momentarily horrified, but Sonia could not believe our luck. She smiled and put her hands up like in a Western.

“Thank you,” he told us, breathlessly. “I've just been chasing your friend around.”

“Who?” Sonia asked.

The guard took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, the one appliquéd with the Hyatt crest, and wiped his face. Now that he had us, he switched to sarcasm. “Sorry. I didn't catch his name.” A staticky ejaculation sounded from deep inside the jacket and he whipped a walkie-talkie out, clearly deriving a childish pleasure from handling it. We got a brief glimpse then of the other thing in the jacket—the belly straining against the belt. “Interception on twenty-eight. Two more coming down.” He reholstered his toy. “You have to come with me. Not that way. We gotta take the stairs. Here.” He seized Sonia's arm, then mine. This was when we were supposed to go limp. I waited for Sonia to go first. She pulled her mask off. “We won't run away.”

“Sure you won't.”

“What did he look like?”

“The big guy?”

“Timo,” Sonia said to me. “If he was alone, that's not good. Where's Pete?”

When we got to the stairwell door, the guard nodded for Sonia to open it since both his hands were full. It shut heavily behind us and we found ourselves in a concrete shaft much like a bomb shelter. A vertical bomb shelter with thirty-some floors of Escher handrails. Our steps echoed as we started down, the suits swished, and the guard's breath came in nasal spurts. “Are you going to call the police?” Sonia asked him.

“That depends on how much trouble you are.”

“Oh, we won't be any trouble.”

“Then you should be fine.”

“It's the people at this conference who are making trouble,” I said, with a glance at Sonia. She nodded, adding, “But you can call the police if you want. We'll go peacefully.”

We reached the next landing. She pulled her hood down and shook out her hair, which I took as a signal. “You probably wonder why we're here,” I began.

“Nope.”

“There's a conference in this hotel. One of the companies involved is making the guidance system for the cruise missile. Do you know anything about the cruise missile?”

“Sure. I read your leaflet.”

“Then you understand,” I said.

“No, I don't. I don't understand at all. You look pretty young. You should be in school, shouldn't you?”

“That's true. We should be, right, Sonia? If we felt safe, we would be in school, but we don't. We feel—imperilled.”

Sonia liked this word. She smiled. By this point the guard's hold on us was procedural rather than restraining. The more laboured his breathing, the more symbolic his touch, which alarmed me for we were only going down. He wasn't old. Aftershave emanated from him, stronger as he heated up.

“Are you married?” Sonia asked.

“I don't have to answer your questions.”

She raised the arm he was holding and looked at his wedding band.

On every second landing, we passed a heavy metal door like the one we'd entered through, with the number of the floor painted on it. The guard was perspiring copiously now and, worried for him, I asked to take a break. He looked relieved as he shepherded us into the corner of the stairwell, spreading his legs wide to block us in, yanking out his handkerchief. “Sorry about the trouble,” Sonia said.

“Sure you are.”

“We are. We really are.”

He swabbed the back of his neck and face, then meticulously refolded and restored the soggy cloth. I sensed he was stalling. His chest heaved. Sonia asked, “Do you have kids?” just as the walkie-talkie woke up with what might have been “Jack?”

“Yeah. We're on our way down,” he answered. We heard the word
situation
in the reply. “So I should just leave these ones here?” he asked.

“
Ah?
”

“I'll be there when I get there. Over.” And he sighed.

“Is your name Jack?” Sonia asked.

“He called me Jock.”

“It's Jock?”

He looked at her sidelong. “It's a joke. No more chit-chat. Let's get going.”

“I'm Sonia. This is Jane.”

He smirked as we started down again. I could hear that his breath sounded more normal now for a too-fat man. I kept glancing at Sonia, who was making tartar of her bottom lip. She was, I guessed, thinking of another plan. Sure enough, as we neared the next landing, her eyes slid sideways, slyly, to meet mine the second before she slipped. Her bum hit the concrete stair and, with the guard still holding us, she almost brought me and him down on top of her. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” Her howls reverberated in the shaft. “My ankle!” she cried, rubbing her tailbone.

“I'll get some ice,” I said.

“Wait!” Jock shouted as I bounded back up the stairs and burst into the hotel proper. I was gone less than three minutes, jogging the halls in search of an ice machine, but when I returned, Jock was sitting on the stairs with Sonia, showing her a photograph, apparently to distract her from her pain. She beamed over her shoulder at me. “See? I told you she'd come back. Look, Jane! Aren't they cute?”

I exchanged the ice I'd carried in the bowl of my mask for the photograph. Two little girls posing on a fur rug. One was missing a tooth. “How old are they?” I asked.

“Seven now. They were five when that was taken.”

Sonia rolled her sock down and delicately painted her anklebone with an ice cube. When the walkie-talkie sounded off again, she told him, “Just don't answer it. Is it fun, having twins?” “It's fun now, but in the beginning—oh, my God. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.”

“
Jock? Jock?
”

“Can you put any weight on it?”

“I'll try. Ow! Ow! Just a sec.” She sank back on the stair and filled the sock with ice. It actually looked sore then. Using the railing, she hoisted herself to her feet. The grimace was real. “This should be interesting,” she said, hopping down a step.

“I think we can use the elevator.”

“No,” said Sonia. “I don't want to get you in trouble. I can do it.” She hopped down another step. I tried to look as blank as possible. There was a kind of bird that did this very thing, I remembered. It would feign a broken wing to save its offspring.

“That's the way,” said Jock. “You're doing great.”

When we had made it down to the twelfth floor, Sonia said, “I can't believe you don't worry about them.”

“Who?”

“Sara and Michelle.”

She knew their names!

“Who says I don't?” Jock said.

“I mean that you wouldn't do absolutely everything in your power to keep them safe. You seem so nice.” He pulled his head back, insulted, and a few extra chins appeared. Sonia said, “I'd do anything for my child. Except that I don't have one and I never will.”

“Why not, if you're so keen on them?”

“I couldn't. I couldn't bring a baby into the world knowing what's going to happen.” She gripped the railing. Hop.

He stopped. “It's just a job, okay? A person has to have a job.”

I jumped in again. “That's what everyone says. The people at the conference who make the weapons. Reagan. Andropov. They're just doing their jobs.”

“We live in a free country,” said Jock. “I'd like to keep it that way.”

“Me too,” Sonia said. “I hate politics. But this isn't about politics. It's about life.”

“I get your point. I even agree with you—somewhat. But I still can't let you run around in here dressed up like that. I'll get fired. Then how am I going to feed my girls?”

“Would you call the police?” Sonia asked.

“Why? I'm here so the police don't have to be. I'm going to escort you out. Peacefully, right?”

“Of course,” Sonia said.

I thought of something then. “We still have leaflets. You could put them with the tourist brochures later. No one would ever know it was you.”

To see a person change his mind. It seemed more beautiful and moving than any sunset or spring flower. Here was a man who had believed one thing twenty minutes ago, who, before our very eyes, became convinced of something else. I gave Sonia all the credit. How had she done it? Not so much with words, though pleading was part of her success. It was mostly that you took one look at her and saw she embodied the fears of every child. You wanted to save
her
from any harm.

She took her remaining leaflets and turned to me for mine. The guard accepted them, slipping them into some secret pocket of his wonder jacket without a word. We went down the last three flights in silence, holding our breath in case he changed his mind. “Thank you,” Sonia told him when we reached the bottom. Her eyes shone. “Thank you. You did a good thing today for Sara and Michelle. For the world. You should be proud of yourself.”

He blushed, more so when she kissed him. Then she turned to me and did the same. She wrapped her thin arms around my neck and pulled me close. It was the first time anyone not related to me had kissed me and a tingling sensation started up where her lips touched my cheek. Jock opened the door and, cued by Sonia's nudge, took our arms again. We stepped out into a short corridor. Until we reached the lobby, the commotion didn't register. I was still dazed from the kiss.

“Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

A pair of guards in the same navy jackets was dragging Pete toward the revolving doors. All around the marbled atrium people stood and stared—the clerks at the front desk, the bellhops and the doormen, the men in suits, some scandalized by, some laughing at, Pete's tormented flailing.

“Fucking warmongers! I hope you all die!”

They shoved him—“Die, warmongers, die!”—into the glass cell of the door where we couldn't hear him any more. But we saw him—pounding on the glass, face twisted and unbeautiful.

Meeting afterward at the car was about the only thing that went according to the plan. No one got arrested. Except for Dieter, who had slipped unobtrusively out, we'd all been dragged or shoved out, depending on our state of limpness. Sonia and I didn't even try to go limp. We were too horrified by what Pete had yelled.

“What the fuck was that about?” Dieter asked him as we drove away. But Pete was disinclined to explain himself, why he had ignored the plan and, worse, discredited us.

“Something happened to me and Jane,” Sonia piped up tearfully from the back. “We met this woman from the conference? She took a bunch of leaflets. She's going to give them out.”

Pete snorted.

“She said she would! Didn't she, Jane?”

“He's always so negative,” Belinda said.

“I'm always so negative? Why is that, I wonder? Maybe it's because the world is run by homicidal despots. Maybe the death sentence we're living under makes me feel just a little bit down.”

He honked the horn. We were passing Timo on his ten-speed, crossing the bridge to meet up with us in Kits, one pant leg rolled to the knee so it wouldn't catch in the chain. He lifted his giant mushroom helmet and, when he saw us, glumly waved.

“And we made friends with our security guard. He was going to hand out leaflets too,” Sonia said.

Pete: “Really? Maybe he'd like to join the group.”

“Ha ha. He wouldn't anyway. He wouldn't because you yelled horrible things at everybody.”

“Pete,” said Pete, “was only trying to get arrested. Pete thought that was the point.”

It had been. All over the world it was happening, all over Canada too. There was a group in Ontario, CMCP, the Cruise Missile Conversion Project, whose members were arrested regularly. There was ANVA, Alliance for Non-Violent Action, and ACT, Against Cruise Testing. All the way home I kept thinking that if we got pulled over, we would probably be arrested because Pete had cut the seat belts out of his car. And I wished we had a better acronym. Mostly, though, I thought about Sonia's kiss.

“Drop us off,” Belinda ordered.

“I thought we were going to debrief,” Pete told her, keeping his eyes fixed on her in the rear-view mirror—until I got nervous and tapped him on the arm. “Fuck,” he muttered, accelerating.

After we let Belinda and Carla out on Blenheim Street, we drove home. Dieter stalked straight into the house while I lingered by the car. Neither Pete nor Sonia showed any signs of getting out. Pete was still behind the wheel in some furious kind of trance. Though Sonia had opened her door, she seemed to lack the strength to stand. “Is your ankle all right?” I asked.

“It's my bum that hurts,” she said.