The Sky Is Falling Read online

  No more Hiroshimas!

  We worked for half an hour then all of us but Pete were done. “I need a smoke,” he said. “I’ll finish later.” When Dieter tried to read one of his messages, Pete pounced, slapping his hand over it. “Do you mind?”

  Dieter stalked away, offended. I stayed and offered to help Sonia fold the cranes. “Did you write this?” she asked, reading one of my banal messages.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good, Jane,” she said.

  “What did you write?” I asked.

  She showed me.

  Give peace a chance.

  Later that night as I lay reading in my room, something made me look up from my book: a green square sliding under the door, fed slowly through from the other side. Then an orange square, then a red.

  UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT

  ANARCHISM !

  1. What is Anarchism, Uncle Peter?

  Why, that’s a good question! Let Uncle Peter tell you. Anarchism is the name of a political philosophy based on the rejection of any form of compulsory government.

  2. What a funny word, Uncle Peter!

  Yes, Sonny. It’s derived from a Greek word meaning “without rulers.”

  3. How can I tell if someone is an Anarchist?

  Judge people by their actions, not their appearance. Above all, beware of men in suits.

  4. But Uncle Peter! My daddy wears a suit!

  See #3.

  UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT ANARCHISM ! (PART TWO)

  1. Uncle Peter! I’m only eight years old How can I be an Anarchist?

  It’s never too early to start living by the principles of Anarchism, Sonny! The first thing you must do is identify the authority figures in your life.

  2. What are authority figures, Uncle Peter?

  The people bossing you around. Mommy. Daddy. Big brother or big sister. Teacher. Principal. These are the most likely culprits. At this stage of your life, they stand in for “compulsory government.”

  3. Then what, Uncle Peter?

  Question everything they say. If they say, “Eat your peas,” you say, “Why?”

  4. Uncle Peter, what if they answer, “Because I said so”?

  You say, “That’s not a good enough answer.”

  5. Uncle Peter, do Anarchists often get spankings?

  Yes.

  UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT ANARCHISM ! (PART THREE)

  1. Uncle Peter, how can I be a good Anarchist at school?

  The same way you are a good Anarchist at home: question authority.

  2. Dear Uncle Peter, can you give me an example?

  Certainly, Sonny. Never turn in your homework.

  3. Why not, Uncle Peter?

  Because homework is simply a tool for authority to extend its control of children outside of school.

  4. But I’ll fail, Uncle Peter!

  You won’t. You’ll take the test and ace it.

  5. What else can I do, Uncle Peter?

  Take this crane to school and show it to your classmates.

  In the morning I woke to find a whole paper mat of squares at my door. I read them while I was eating my toast in my room. By the time I’d finished folding them into cranes, Pete’s music had come on (The Doors) and, with the men jockeying for the bathroom, the day’s fresh disputes began.

  “Zed!” Pete called to me later as I was coming down the stairs. “Did you see what I put under your door?”

  “Yes.”

  He stepped out of the kitchen, peanut butter jar in hand, and, taking the spoon out of his mouth, asked, “What did you do with them?”

  “I turned them into birds.”

  He threw his head back and let loose a peanutty peal that filled the hall. “Did you read them?”

  I’d barely recovered from mid-terms and now I sensed another test. He’d stopped Dieter from reading what he’d written, but I settled on the truth. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  I zipped my jacket, hefted my texts onto my back. “You really want my opinion?”

  “Yes.”

  “I laughed.”

  I thought he might be offended, but he looked pleased.

  Pete had a suit! At supper, it induced a fit of giggling in Sonia every time she looked at him. “What?” he asked, deadpan. “It’s Halloween.”

  “What are you supposed to be?” I was innocent enough to ask.

  “A capitalist,” Sonia told me.

  Pete smirked as he margarined his bread. “You can say that again.”

  We were still eating when the first chorus sounded. “Trick or treat!” Pete got up, plucked Reagan’s face off the wall, snugged it over his own, and tucked his hair in.

  Dieter: “You should have said you were dressing up. I would have been Margaret Thatcher.”

  “You’ll scare them,” Sonia said.

  Reagan: “That’s the whole idea.” The mask distorted his voice. He didn’t even sound like Pete, and I recoiled though I had only ever thought of Ronald Reagan, if I thought of him at all, as affable and doddering. Pete threw open the front door, booming: “Who have we here?”

  “Trick or treat!” UNICEF boxes jingled furiously.

  “Here’s a little something for each of you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A peace crane. And there’s a special message inside it. When you get home, ask your mommy and daddy to read it to you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Reagan.”

  “You’re welcome. Now be careful tonight. You never know when I’m going to drop the Big One.”

  He shut the door and came back to the kitchen, still the president. Dieter had gone for the belt of his bathrobe and was tying a tea towel over his wiry hair. “Who are you?” Reagan asked.

  “Arafat, you Yankee scum.”

  Sonia and I went to the living room where, kneeling on the chesterfield, we watched the procession out the window. Voices rang out all along the street, screeches too, then a firecracker discharged, and Sonia cringed. “Oh God. It’s like a war.” As soon as she said it, I saw it too, a tattered exodus, pillowcases stuffed with belongings, dragged along. They carried on right past our house, though our porch light illuminated a welcome. When a pirate broke free and started for us, an adult called him back. Finally a few older, unchaperoned kids took a chance. Reagan and Arafat answered.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a peace crane. Inside there’s a special—”

  “Don’t you have any candy?”

  “No, you ingrate. You’re fat enough already.”

  “Fuck you!” said the child.

  Sonia leapt off the chesterfield. “What do you guys think you’re doing?”

  The kids fled down the walk. Two of them were playing with the cranes, using them as bombers, flying loop-the-loops, colliding mid-air. Sonia dismissed Pete and Dieter. “Go. Leave. Jane and I will hand them out.”

  We put on coats and shoes and took the bowl of cranes with us. From our new post at the end of the walk, we intercepted the next group that came along, Sonia crouching before a child in a hooded coat with rouge-appled cheeks. “Hello, sweetheart. Are you having fun?”

  “I’m cold,” the girl said, and Sonia cupped both her hands and breathed on them until a smile appeared.

  “Do you want a birdie?”

  I had relieved Sonia of the bowl so she could conjure the smile. Now I thrust it at the child. Her mother asked, “What’s that you’re giving out?”

  “Origami cranes.”

  “What for?”

  “They’re pretty,” I said.

  She frowned. “Okay,” she said to the little girl, “just take one and say thank you. Jeremy! Wait for us! Say thank you.”

  “Thank you,” the girl told Sonia.

  “You’re very welcome,” Sonia told her, standing again. “Stay warm.”

  As soon as the woman turned her back, Sonia stuck out her tongue. “She doesn’t want her kid to have a paper crane. It’s okay, though,
to rot her teeth with candy. People are so stupid. They hate us on this street. Have you noticed? They never talk to us. The woman next door gives me a dirty look every time I walk by. They think we’re Communists. If you want peace you must be a Communist. It’s stupid.”

  “Are you Communists?” I asked.

  “No!”

  More children came. Sonia stepped in front of them too and, scooping a crane from the bowl, flew it, twittering it into a sack. The children watched her, rapt. I watched their father, saw him take note of the house, its psoriatic paint and overgrown yard, then Sonia—her mournful hair, the button on her anorak: Think Peace. She was speaking to his children in birdsong, exuding harmlessness, but his lip curled anyway and he bustled them along.

  And so it went, all Sonia’s overtures rejected. Then a loud WEEEE!! sounded, followed by a BANG!, and she grabbed the nearest child and clutched too hard. She only wanted to protect him, but he started wailing; his outraged mother snatched him back. The bowl was empty anyway so we went back inside where I put the kettle on. Sonia gnawed her nails, looking miserable. Don’t, I wanted to say, just as a single voice called out from our darkened porch, “Trick or treat!”

  We both went to the door. “Oh, God! What are you doing?” Sonia cried.

  The fruity weight of the breast, nipple projecting into the cold air. The left one. The other side was draped in filmy white fabric that hung off one shoulder and fell in folds around her Birkenstocks. “Come on,” Belinda said. “You have them too.”

  “Not like that!”

  The freckles petered out on her chest, making her look snowed on. She raised her arms. White feathers were attached and, in her armpits, aigrettes of auburn. “I am the Goddess,” she intoned, flapping.

  “Inside,” Sonia hissed. “The neighbours.”

  Belinda followed us in and through to the kitchen. “How did it go with the cranes?”

  “Okay, I guess. Jane helped hand them out.”

  “Did she?” The Goddess glanced at me through judgemental slits.

  “Please,” Sonia begged. “Put it away.”

  And the general mood was autumnal, Chekhov wrote. My umbrella was on the porch with the old placards, drying out. A beaded curtain of rain poured off the ruined eaves. Things had changed. I thought it was that fall had officially come and with it the infinite rains, the dirty batting of cloud, the sadness. I looked forward to the sadness. It made me feel like I shared something with other people, even though it was just a mood. I went down the front steps, past Pete’s car. The next-door neighbour was standing in her front window in her flowered housecoat, hugging herself, face resigned. I felt like calling out, “Me too!”

  At the bus stop I joined the ranks of the damp, our small shivering group physically separate but united by this resigned melancholia. Soon the bus came, but as it neared we saw that it was full. No one was surprised, not even when, in passing, it sent up a tidal wave of dirty water. By the time I got to campus, my hair would be stringy, my runners saturated. My feet were already cold and would be for the rest of the day. I could switch the hand that held the umbrella and warm the other in my pocket, but my feet were defenceless. If I’d been a character in a Chekhov story, I would have put on galoshes. (It was the same word in Russian: galoshe.) Ga-losh-es. Losh like slosh. Sloshing through puddles. Through luzhi. Galosh, galosh. A comical word, yet how sad they actually looked on a person’s feet!

  And so, standing in line for public transit, I found a subject for my first Russian Lit paper of the year. Chekhov and shoes. The stories are filled with them—galoshes, felt boots, slippers. Dr. von Koren in “The Duel” challenges the dissipated Ivan Layevsky partly because he wears slippers in the street. Podorin in “With Friends” (I’d read the story the night before) feels at home with the Losevs only when he borrows a pair of slippers. Later, weary of the visit, the slippers define his estrangement. Then he sat silently in one corner, legs tucked under him, wearing slippers belonging to someone else.

  The following Sunday, when I came home from my aunt’s, I stood staring at the jumble of shoes in the vestibule, wondering what I could discern about the group behind the closed French doors based on what they wore on their feet. Sonia’s clogs were set neatly against the wall. I already knew she was from 100 Mile House, that both her parents were high school teachers. Her mother taught Home Ec and her father Math. She had a younger brother, Jared, and a Sheltie named Skipper. They lived on an acreage where they raised sheep. But the clogs allowed me to imagine her slipping them on in spring and running out to the barn to greet the lambs that had been born in the night. Kicked in the corner were Pete’s Birkenstocks, the cork soles crumbling, plastic bread bags stuffed inside them, his trust fund untouched. Dieter’s Adidases were there too, a Marxist-leaning red. As for the other shoes, including a giant’s rubber boots, I couldn’t begin to guess who owned them because what had really changed with the season, with the arrival of autumn, was that my housemates were starting to become fleshed-out characters.

  I decided to study in the kitchen. With the addition of the bookshelf, my furniture situation had greatly improved, had, in fact, doubled, but I still didn’t have a desk. In the kitchen I would have the luxury of a table. They always broke with that song and, as soon as I heard it, I could flee upstairs. I brought down my translation homework and cleared a space among the potluck dishes.

  1. Comrade Popov says that he received a letter every day from his wife in London.

  2. This author will spend a long time writing and in the end he’ll write a good novel.

  3. Where was Masha going yesterday when we saw her?

  I could hear their voices in the other room, the different pitches—when a woman was speaking and when a man was—the melody of assent, the appassionato of disputation, but I couldn’t make out the words. Outside, rain drummed impatient fingers against the window. I struggled, brain attempting to convert the English word into its Russian equivalent, hand to write the symbol that corresponded to the Russian sound, all the while feeling that maybe it was English I couldn’t understand. When I had got through about half the exercises, the French doors clattered open unexpectedly and Dieter said, “Let’s take five.” A man I didn’t know, tall and heavy with a head full of sloppy yellow curls, passed by the kitchen without looking in. One of his pant legs was rolled to his knee.

  Then Belinda appeared, the only person I’d ever met who made freckles seem glamorous. Without acknowledging me, she headed to the sink where she filled a glass with water and drank from it, her back turned, forcing me to be her audience. She was so dramatic I could see why Pete enjoyed being cast as her leading man, but I didn’t want to be in the play about her. Despite how enthusiastic she’d sounded when I was chosen for the house, in all our subsequent encounters her disdain for me was plain. I was finally starting to feel comfortable and knew she could easily ruin things for me by just a few calculated comments. The popular and beautiful have such powers.

  Belinda drank a glass of water three feet away from me and, when she finished, she set it on the counter with an attention-getting rap, turned, and swept over, saying, “Hmm. I wonder what Jane studies? Accounting, I bet.”

  Instinctively, I covered the page—too late. She hovered above me, hair grazing the table. “Is that Russian?” she asked, dropping the stage voice.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re studying Russian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say something.”

  Of course I couldn’t. The stones stuck. I tried to read what I’d written, but I hadn’t worked out the pronunciation yet. Then out of my mouth came one of the sentences I’d translated. “Tovarishch Popov govorit, chto on poluchil pismo.”

  Dieter bellowed for everyone to gather, and Belinda, first hesitating, blinking at me with new respect, swished out again. “Jane knows Russian,” she said to the blond man I’d seen a moment ago with the rolled pant leg who was coming back down the hall.

  “Who-who-who’s Jane?”

>   “The other housemate.”

  He looked in at me. His cheeks were round and pink, like a baby’s. I heard Belinda in the other room: “Pete! Guess what? Jane knows Russian.”

  I’d already closed my book and was just waiting for the opportunity to bolt upstairs when Pete strode in. “Do you speak Russian, Zed?”

  “A little. I read and write it better.”

  “Say something.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He came over. “Show me the writing then.”

  Now Sonia appeared and, behind her, Belinda again, followed by a pale girl I’d never seen with shorn beige hair. Pete held the page in the air. Belinda snatched it and passed it along. “Jane!” Sonia cried. “What does it say?”

  I repeated the Masha question. “Where was Masha going when we saw her yesterday?”

  Dieter was there now. “Say something.”

  Pete: “She doesn’t want to.”

  Belinda piped up, “She said something to me. It sounded delicious.”

  Dieter: “I prefer the Romance languages.”

  “You would.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you prefer the Romance languages,” Pete said. “Why are you offended? You said it yourself.”

  “It’s your tone.”

  “Are you the Tone Police?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, making a break for the door.

  “Let’s finish the meeting,” Sonia pleaded and they all followed me out, though I turned right at the stairs and went up where they turned left at the living room. They didn’t bother closing the French doors this time and a few minutes later, the song started up.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Sonia asked the next day.

  “I said I was in Arts.”

  “Arts is anything. Dieter’s in Arts.” She added quickly, “Not that there’s anything the matter with Dieter.”

  “He has a lot of rules,” I said and Sonia cringed. A few days ago he’d tied a grease pencil to a piece of twine and taped it on the fridge door. It was for writing our names on our bread and yogurt and milk. Only supper was communal. But Pete, of course, was drinking from any milk carton he liked. He’d drunk from mine right in front of me.