Books of Merit
The Sky Is Falling
ALSO BY CAROLINE ADDERSON
Pleased to Meet You
Sitting Practice
A History of Forgetting
Bad Imaginings
CAROLINE ADDERSON
The Sky Is Falling
A NOVEL
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 Caroline Adderson
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems – without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Adderson, Caroline, 1963–
The sky is falling / Caroline Adderson.
ISBN 978-0-88762-613-5
I. Title.
PS8551.D3267S59 2010 C813'.543 C2010-903596-8
Editor: Patrick Crean
Cover design: Black Eye Design
Cover image: Oliver Barmbold / Source: PHOTOCASE
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
www.thomas-allen.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of
The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which
last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the
Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
We also acknowledge the support of the British Columbia Arts Council.
10 11 12 13 14 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in Canada
In memory of my mother
Contents
2004
1983
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
Acknowledgements
2004
Last night I had one of those dreams again. Nothing happened, nothing ever does—no central dramatic event. Usually I’m so busy puzzling over some vague inconsistency, some hint that I’m actually asleep, that I hardly notice the drifts of dread settling all around me. This time I found myself downtown at midday, or so it seemed from the quality of the light, the eyesmacking noonishness, though the empty streets contradicted it. I came to Eaton’s, which is Sears now. (This was what I was puzzling over, not the eerie lack of traffic, the bizarre absence of pedestrians, but Was Eaton’s back in business? Since when?) I pushed open the glass door and wandered around for a bit. Cosmetics. Women’s Shoes. Soon I began to feel uneasy. Sick. Something wasn’t right. Where was everyone? Well, in the shelters obviously, I realized just as the shrill whine of the approaching missile became audible.
The slap of the newspaper landing on the front porch woke me. These early-rising immigrants who fling the news on our city streets, they’re unsung heroes in a way. How many innocent sleepers have they saved from annihilation? I should leave ours a card. I thought of this after my perfectly timed rescue, when I couldn’t get back to sleep because of Joe making glottal sounds. Eventually I must have slept because the alarm went off, reset by Joe, who has to be at the hospital early. This time I got up well before the apocalypse.
Our front door mat reads “Go Away.” Lying on the joke, helplessly bound by elastics, was the very paper that had saved me. I carried it to the kitchen, poured the coffee, sat at the table. It had snowed in the night. No. Spring had come. Spring was right outside the window. Filling the frame, our snow-white magnolia, peaking. I thought of The Cherry Orchard, all of us reading it on the front porch while we swilled plonk. The truth is every spring when the trees bloom I think about Chekhov and everything that happened, how Pascal betrayed my friend Sonia and she him in turn. We wanted to get rid of all the bombs, but look what happened. It was partly my fault, that bad, bad decision that we took. Only this year it all came together because, when I peeled the rubber bands off the Vancouver Sun and laid it flat on the table, Sonia was staring up at me. Not a recent picture, but Sonia when I knew her all those years ago.
The shock of seeing her again, the dis-ease of the dream. The inevitable self-loathing. Pete’s picture was below hers. It took me a moment to notice him. As soon as I did, I turned the paper over. It was a funny thing to do, a token of respect, like covering the face of the dead. Except both of them are still alive.
But what about the boy? Whatever happened to him?
1983
I’m not from Vancouver. I came in 1982 to attend the University of British Columbia and, until I met Joe, I didn’t know anyone who had been born here. Everyone in the group was from elsewhere, Sonia from up north, 100 Mile House, Pete from Toronto, Belinda—Isis!—from somewhere in Nova Scotia. I don’t remember where Carla or Timo were from. Pascal had escaped the same small town in Saskatchewan that Dieter had grown up in, Esterhazy, which turned out not to be a coincidence after all. I’d fled too—a strip-malled neighbourhood of Edmonton where I’d been miserable for no good reason other than there always has to be someone to pick on and it’s usually the smart, socially awkward person with the funny last name, skulking the hallways, binder raised up like a shield. Me.
During my first year at university I stayed with my father’s sister, my aunt Eva, who manned her stove in a suburb to the east of Vancouver, cooking through cases of dented cans and frostbitten cuts of meat, by the vat, as though against some desperate contingency. Every day I had to travel all the way across town to the city’s western point, the UBC campus, a three-bus journey. The commute took an hour and a half or more each way, I explained the following summer to my father, who had wanted me to go to university at home in the first place and now didn’t want to pay for me to live in residence. “Read on the bus,” he said. “I get sick,” I lied. In fact, I’d grown so accustomed to the trip I never looked out the window any more, not even to check if my stop was coming up, somehow always feeling for the cord and ringing the bell at just the right moment even while absorbed in the evolution of Doric-order proportions or the impact of the Crimean War on modern warfare. I just wanted to be closer to campus and to get away from my aunt, who seemed more and more an embodiment of all I was destined to become, lonely and eccentric and obsessively cheap. By the end of the summer, I succeeded. I convinced my father that my grade point average was in jeopardy despite the fact that, hitherto, everything I handed in came back scarletted with the letter A.
When I returned to Vancouver in the fall to begin my second year, I stayed with my aunt again while I looked for somewhere closer, the very next day taking the long, familiar bus ride and spending the morning at the Student Housing Office making calls. I had come too late. The inexpensive basement rooms with a hot plate and a bathroom sink to serve all washing functions had been snapped up. The idea of a shared house unnerved me, but I made a few calls anyway only to discover that the cheaper of these had been taken as well. Although I had a full scholarship, it covered only tuition. An apartment was out of the question.
My preferred place
to study the previous year had been in the stacks under the old stone Main Library. I went there again after my disappointing morning, descending to the remotest and deepest parts of the bunker-like levels where the obscurest, bookiest-smelling tomes were stored. The carrels were tucked away singly wherever there was a bit of space. Under the glare of the fluorescents, the books emitted their wise scent. (I imagined print powdering off the pages, that I was breathing knowledge.) I found the Russian books and selected one at random. Cyrillic seemed vaguely runic. Latin letters were sprinkled in but the cases were mixed. R was backward. I should have been looking in the classified ads for a room but for the moment I felt so perfectly alone and happy.
Afterward I went to the Student Union Building to buy a cookie, a detour that entirely changed my fate. I actually went for a newspaper, then, overcome by temptation, got in line at the cookie kiosk, hiding behind the paper the way I used to hide behind my binder, like some cartoon Cold War spy. A new study had just come out of MIT predicting that more than 50 percent of Canadians would be immediately killed in the event of a nuclear war. The pretrial hearing of the Squamish Five, a local terrorist group, had begun. The Great Lakes were an acidic broth. All of it reminded me why I never paid attention to the news. The line moved forward, bringing me closer to a bulletin board next to where the coffee was accoutred. Rides. Used textbooks. Accommodations. I stepped away, losing my place, drawn by a notice with a fringe of phone numbers on the bottom.
A man answered immediately, like he’d been poised by the phone. “Did you hang up on me a second ago?”
“No,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m phoning about the room,” I said. “Is there a good time to come and see it?”
I could almost hear him shrug. “Come right now.” Then he hung up, forcing me to dig in my change purse for another dime.
“What!”
“I need the address,” I whimpered.
It took fifteen minutes to get to the house, which was in Kits, one lot in from the corner, on a street otherwise lined with genteel homes. Next door was a knee-high garden statue of a black man in livery holding up a lamp, as though to illuminate the adjacent eyesore. I walked past the Reliant patchworked with political bumper stickers parked in front—Extinction is Forever. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Impeach Reagan—and up the path that cut through a steppe of unmown grass, climbed to the wide, crowded porch—bicycle, wearily flowered chesterfield, cardboard placards with their messages turned to the wall—and knocked on the rainbow on the door, knocked several times until at last a young man appeared, shirtless, but wearing a kerchief on his head. The year before, fishing for a major, I had cast my net wide over many subjects, among them Art History. Only now did I understand what the professor had been saying about beauty and its relationship to proportion.
He looked right at me, unblinking, in a way I was unused to. “I phoned,” I said and he smiled. To show me he was capable of it, I thought, or to show off the investment (which was patently wrong, I would find out). In their perfect even rows, his teeth glowed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Look.” I stepped into the vestibule and, since he was barefoot, stooped to remove my shoes. By the time I straightened, he was gone.
To the right was a set of French doors, each pane painted with a dove or a rainbow or some other optimistic symbol. I kept thinking about the fifteen minutes. How my life would open up if I were living just fifteen minutes from campus. I poked my head in the living room. Shag carpet, beanbag chair, posters. A fireplace extruding paper garbage. On its hearth stood a statue identical to the one in the next-door garden except for the sign taped to the lamp: It’s payback time!!! Instead of curtains, a poncho was nailed to the window frame. Then I started because someone was sleeping on the chesterfield, lying on his back with a beret over his face. I ducked right out.
Bathroom: chipped, claw-foot tub, tinkling toilet. The cover of the tank was broken, half of it missing, the workings exposed. It embarrassed me to see someone else’s plumbing. Above it hung a poster buckled with damp. Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?
I peeked in the bedroom at the end of the hall and, seeing it looked well lived in—there were stuffed animals on the bed—returned to the vestibule with its battered mahogany wainscotting and went up the stairs. None of the three bedrooms on the upper floor was empty either. All had bare fir floors and plank and plastic milk crate shelves. The front-facing room, the largest, had a view of the mountains and the ubiquitous Rorschach Che painted on one wall. The middle room was an ascetic’s cell with a pitted green foamie for a bed, the end room a postered shrine to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, reeking of incense. I went back downstairs to the kitchen, which also smelled but of a more complex synthesis—ripe compost, burnt garlic, beans on the soak—so different from the cabbage and mothball overtones at my aunt’s. It was untidy too. Dirty, in fact. I glanced at my socks with their dust and crumb adherents. The fifteen minutes more than made up for it.
The shirtless one was outside on the deck smoking, leaning against the railing, his back to me. I could make out each distinct vertebra. They seemed decorative. When I tapped on the window, he waved me out through a door beside which a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hung on a nail. Out there in the overgrown yard the decorous history of the house still showed in the unpruned roses in their unmade beds and the old pear tree scabbed with lichen. The garage though, slouching and moss-covered, was practically in ruins.
“Which room is available?” I asked.
He exhaled his acrid smoke and pointed up to the window of the O’Keeffe/Kahlo room.
“I’d like to take it.”
“You have to come for an interview. There’s a sign-up sheet.” He threw the cigarette over the deck railing and led me back inside where a loose-leaf page lay on the kitchen table, three names and phone numbers already written on it. I felt sick and made my writing neater than the others’, only realizing after the fact that it would probably work against me.
“Jane,” he read off the paper before flashing his teeth again. “How do you say your last name?”
Most of the rooms that were advertised in the newspaper and still available were almost as far away as my aunt’s, near Fraser Street or Knight. I went to look at a few only to leave undecided and anxious that someone else would get the place if I took too long to make up my mind. Then someone called “from the Trutch house,” she said, though the house I’d seen was actually on one of the numbered east-west streets. Trutch was the cross street. She told me to come at six-thirty.
I got there too early and waited on the steps. In the house across the street, the living room curtains were open and I could see through to the dining room, where a family was sitting down to supper. A child lobbed an oven mitt across the table. Someone and his dog walked past the stickered Reliant. The dog smiled but the man’s straight-ahead gaze seemed to emanate hostility.
At exactly six-thirty, I rang the doorbell. A thin girl answered, her hair long and dark and not particularly clean. Despite this, despite dressing like a scarecrow and the deep shadows under her eyes, she was quite pretty, which made me leery and more nervous than before.
“Are you Jane?” She introduced herself as Sonia and led me in.
Pete from two days before was sitting at the kitchen table. Today he wore a shirt, almost a blouse, with full sleeves and a ruffled front and cuffs. He’d dispensed with the kerchief and I saw now that his hair was dirty blond and shoulder-length; he’d seemed Greco-Roman when we’d met previously, but my second impression was Renaissance for sure.
Two other men were at the table, one of them wearing glasses with big plastic frames and a T-shirt entreating the U.S. to vacate Central America. His hair was dark and wiry, nose very narrow, like it had been squeezed in a book. This was Dieter. The third man seemed cleaner than the rest. It took me a moment to notice the girl leaning against the counter, but as soon as I did she became the
most obvious person there because of the deep coppery mane hanging halfway down her back and how her freckles contrasted with her creamy skin. Belinda, Sonia, Pete, Dieter, this other person—five complete strangers who didn’t know anything about me, not my tormented high school years, not how I had blown it last year. Last year had been my chance to start over, to make friends, but I had forfeited it, blaming the bus ride. I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with me.
Seeing me hovering in the doorway, the cleaner man stood and shook hands smilingly all around. My heart sank when he picked a violin case off the floor and walked past without acknowledging me. He was my competitor. I felt like turning and running because no one would ever choose sweaty, bookish me over someone who could play the violin.
I sat and Sonia introduced everyone. Pete uncrossed one arm to wiggle his fingers at me. “This is Jane,” Sonia said.
“Jane Zed,” said Pete.
“That’s easier,” I admitted.
Except for Pete, they looked everywhere but at me so I felt cut out of the picture, as I usually did. Then I was flooded with embarrassment, for I knew it was childish to want two contradictory things: to be left alone and to be included.
“I’m Belinda,” said the girl at the counter, who had not been introduced.
“Belinda’s the one moving out,” Sonia explained.
Pete: “She needs her space.”
With two exaggerated tosses of her head, Belinda threw her hair over each shoulder. Years later, on nights I couldn’t sleep (frequently, in other words), I would sometimes scroll the muted channels in search of a soporific. Belinda would flash past, executing this same ribbon dance, in the service of selling hair conditioner. But now she was indignant, telling Pete, “I do!”
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