The Sky Is Falling (27 page)

Me: “Tell him about our chances.”

“Fifty-fifty,” Sonia said. “That's according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“Who?”

“The generals. The generals themselves say a nuclear war will probably happen by
1985
.”

“Nineteen eighty-five? That's, like, nine months away!”

Sonia took my arm now and the three of us moved along as one. I remembered going to the beach with her after the film. It had been a November night, but this was April, the trees budding and blooming, songful with birds. The birds were singing,
Look! Look at all you stand to lose!
And back in November there had been no one around, but tonight lovers were out strolling. Families. Children. Someone was flying a kite. Run! I wanted to scream. Hide! But where? With Sonia between us, her arms around us both, we sat on a log. The mountains. Surely they were indestructible.

We worked so well, Sonia and I. I really believed that, together, we could save the world. We would do it just by talking, just by telling the truth. It was why I loved her.

Pascal opened his sketchbook and began to draw. The pen scraped across the page, never lifting until the mountains appeared, first the line of peaks like a vital sign, then their bulk, shaded in. “That's so amazing,” Sonia said. “Can I see?” She took the book and started from the beginning. “Are these your parents?”

“Yes.”

“In Esterhazy?”

“Yes.”

She asked if he'd taken the bus to Vancouver and when. When she reached her own picture, she smiled. “Is that me?”

“Can't you tell?”

She laughed. “Look, Jane.”

“I saw,” I said.

Pascal flipped forward in the book. Here was something new: an entire page dedicated to her, scores of miniature Sonias. She grew flustered. “When did you do this?” Yet it was obvious she was flattered. She couldn't keep up the frown for long. Where was our terror now, I wondered. It had passed without our noticing. I wanted it back.

Sonia, sensing my discomfort, asked, “Did you draw Jane?”

“I did,” he said, turning the pages. “There.”

“Ah! It's you, Jane.”

It was not a flattering portrait, but I didn't care. It was those adoring little scribbles, all the Sonias, that upset me. I got up and walked away. Sonia called after me and, when I didn't stop, she chased me across the sand. “Jane? What's the matter?”

“Nothing. I have to study. I'll see you later.”

By the time I reached the house after the long march back, I'd managed to calm myself. I was already regretting having bolted, mostly because it made me seem childish. Dieter was in the kitchen, his books spread out on the table. He glanced at, but didn't acknowledge, me. I plugged in the kettle and waited with my back to him, annoyed because he'd never set up shop in the kitchen before.

“Where did you go?” he asked after a minute.

“To the beach.”

The kettle finished its thing. I dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured the water in. When I turned, Dieter was staring at me, the lenses of his glasses misty, his face boiled. “I came down and everybody was gone!”

“We went to the beach,” I said.

“Nobody ever includes me!”

I was going to point out that he had been invited, but I could see it would only make things worse. I was rattled by his anger, his hurt, as he probably was by mine, the way I'd dragged it in behind me, chained to my ankle. Between the two of us, the kitchen was thick with adolescent misery.

“So where's Sonia?” he asked.

“She's still there.” I added, sulkily, “With your friend.”

“Who?” Dieter asked.

“Pascal,” I said.

“He's not my friend.”

I remembered Dieter telling Pete that he and Pascal were from the same town, as though they had just discovered it. But Pascal had asked for Dieter by name when he showed up at the party. When I told this to Dieter, he said, “I drank a lot of beer that night.”

“Well, he asked for you specifically. I thought that's why he was staying here. Because he's a friend of yours.”

Dieter's nostrils dilated. Already he looked happier. “What the hell is going on?”

We sat around the table waiting while Dieter breathed on his lenses, while he polished them, solemn and half-blind. There it was, that furry eyebrow, all of us gaping at it, unable to look away until the glasses were back on his face and the shocking eyebrow hidden. “We have a problem.” His voice was low, stiff with its own seriousness.

This was the next day, after Dede had left, making Pete available. “Who's we?” he asked.

“All of us. Jane and I realized something last night.”

I reddened, furious to be included, and Sonia, who assumed we confided everything, cast me a wounded look. Dieter: “Pascal is a spy.”

“I never said that!”

“It's pretty obvious.”

Sonia: “What are you talking about?”

“Fact: he showed up here the night of the party when the house was filled with activists. He stayed till God knows when talking to people, getting their names,
drawing pictures of them
. Next thing we know he's moved in.”

“You said he could stay,” Sonia said.

“Because I thought you knew him! Turns out he's going around saying he's a friend of
mine
. Fact: I never saw him before the party. Who is he? I've never seen him at UBC.”

Sonia shrank down. I felt queasy too. Then Pete, gusting a sigh, pushed his chair back and strode out of the room, in protest we assumed. “This is a meeting!” Dieter called after him. From where I sat I could see him stop at the French doors and knock. He returned a moment later, a bobbing Pascal in tow. “Sit,” Pete said and Pascal did, wrists pinned between his knees, eyes madly darting. “Where do you know this guy from?”

“Esterhazy.”

“See?” said Dieter. “He's lying. He's probably never even been there.”

“I'm from there. It's the potash capital of Canada.”

We waited for more. The lump rose and fell in his neck. Above it, his jawline was flecked with minute scabs where the whiteheads had been decapitated. Passing the bathroom that morning, I'd glimpsed him standing at the mirror, struggling with the razor, wearing only a towel around his waist.

Dieter: “Why aren't you answering? It's a simple question. Where do you know me from?”

“You taught me to swim.”

Dieter drew back.

“Remember?”

“I remember teaching swimming obviously. But I taught about a hundred kids.” He looked at us. “This is going back three years at least.”

Pascal leapt up and mimed a front crawl to the sink. He backstroked back then turned to us with a laugh. We all smiled, more than charmed—relieved. So he wasn't a spy. But something else occurred to us—that there was still an impersonation going on. The way he flung himself in the chair again, limbs flying, as though he were made of cloth—it was suddenly clear that we weren't the same age, that he was younger. That he might not be a
man
at all like Pete and Dieter.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Checking out UBC,” he said, evidently forgetting this would sound familiar to us.

Sonia: “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” Dart, dart.

“Come on,” said Pete.

“I'm turning seventeen.”

“Sixteen!” Sonia cried.

We were shocked. He was close to six feet tall and maturely built. I'd seen him in the bathroom practically naked, but now that I knew his actual age, it was clear that he was going around in a borrowed body. “You should be home with your parents,” Sonia said.

“Why me?” Dieter asked.

“I heard you were in Vancouver.” He looked around at us. “Esterhazy's small. It's so small.” A grin for Dieter. “Right? I phoned your place and said I was a friend of yours. She gave me your address. I guess it was your mom.”

“And what? You thought you'd just show up and I'd let you stay?”

“That's what happened. Except you don't remember me. Or do you now?”

“No!”

“You were so great,” said Pascal.

“I was?” Dieter said it, not us, but we were equally surprised.

Sonia asked: “Do you have enough money to get back home?”

“Sure, but I don't want to go back.”

“You have to.”

He shook out his waves. “Can't.”

“You can't stay here,” said Dieter.

Pete: “Why not?”

“We have four bedrooms. Four people sleep in those bedrooms.”

“We have a chesterfield.”

“He can't just move into the living room.”

“Why not?” said Pete. “Hector did.”

“Hector is a refugee. He was tortured.”

“Maybe Pascal's getting beaten at home. Are you?”

Pascal thought about it. “No.” He sounded sorry that he wasn't.

“There are other kinds of torture,” Pete said. “There's psychological torture, arguably as bad. We've got a kid here who hates his parents so much he's fled the province. I know exactly how he feels. Just because he doesn't speak Spanish doesn't mean he hasn't been oppressed.”

“Tell us what's happening,” Sonia urged. “Can you talk about it? Are they really that bad?”

He sat for a moment, making fists and opening them, tucking them in his armpits. When he began to cry, Sonia hurried around the table to him. “There's so much screaming,” he said. “They won't listen to what I want. What I want doesn't count. Only what they want. But it's my life, too. Right? It's my life.”

“Yes, it is,” Sonia murmured, clutching him to her.

Pete: “Hear, hear.”

“It's like I don't even have a vote or anything!”

Pete: “The nuclear family is inherently fascist.”

Pascal wrapped his arms around Sonia. When he sniffed, it seemed to me that he was trying to smell her hair. But I felt genuinely sorry for him, too, having suffered parental tyranny myself. In fact, I only now realized that I'd finally escaped it, that my parents were far away in another province and I wasn't emotionally dependent on them any longer—I had friends now. It was like the pillow of their love had finally lifted off my face.

“We have to let him stay,” Sonia insisted. “At least until he finds another place.”

The next day Pete, Dieter, and Timo went to Seattle. Before they left, Dieter knocked on my door to say, “No matter what I see there, I'm not changing my mind.”

“Why are you telling me?” I asked.

The men weren't expected back for supper so Pascal offered to cook for Dieter. When I took a break from studying, I found him in the kitchen reading one of the recipe books from on top of the fridge,
The Anarchist Cookbook
, the Ronald Reagan mask on the back of his head like a rubber snood. If I hadn't before, at that moment I forgave him for his drawings. He was just a kid in trouble.

What he eventually came up with was macaroni. Following Sonia's directions, he made the journey on foot to the food co-op to procure the harmless sort of cheese she'd eat. The pasta was overcooked, the sauce infiltrated with soft lumps; it had the look and nearly the texture of baby food. Nevertheless he seemed pleased with himself. He told us it was the first meal he'd cooked in his life.

“It's time you learned,” Sonia said. “It's sexist to expect women to do all the cooking.”

“My mom does all the cooking,” he said, fondly, so that Sonia observed, “You don't sound all that mad at her.”

“I'm not
mad
,” he said, serving himself another helping.

Sonia: “What's the problem then?”

“I told you yesterday.” Then he said the sweetest thing. He said, “I didn't say I didn't
love
my parents. My mom's my main squeeze.”

He raised the serving spoon, cobwebs of cheese trailing off it, and asked us if we wanted more. When we declined, he pulled the pot closer and ate directly out of it while we watched, amused, and let the subject drop. Dieter and Pete behaved like this too, like pigs, though when they did we were disgusted.

At Sunday's meeting I read “A Case History” in Russian as the warm-up. This is not true. I actually read the first page and a half up to the point where Dr. Korolyov is being driven by the little coachman wearing the peacock feather—the bobbing
pyero
—into the factory yard where
everything was covered with
a rather strange grey deposit that could have been dust.
There is something apocalyptic about the story. The ominous metallic sound of the night watchman beating out the hour. The grey deposit I translated as ash.
Pyepyel
. Everything was covered with ash.
Vsyo pokryto pyeplom
. And then I read the answers to the last exercise I'd done in my Russian class, which was on indefinite pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs.