The Sky Is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  I dropped my gaze to his feet. He was wearing dress shoes and socks.

  “You are coming back next year, ya?”

  “That depends,” I said. I meant the end of the world might change all our plans, but when I looked up at his face again, skipping the parts in between, I saw that he was hurt. With a brusque nod, Kopanyev walked away, bestowing on me a long, receding view of the hair concentrating in his crack.

  I was wretched after that. I felt expelled from Kopanyev’s favour and, by extension, Russian literature. Sonia didn’t ask me what the matter was. She didn’t ask about that hairy apparition, my former favourite professor, because she was too upset herself. The entire bus ride home her pale forehead pleated with worry; she tenderized her bottom lip. Pascal put his arm around her and she didn’t even pull away like she usually did. When we got off at the stop, she asked me, “What’s that word again? For ice cream?”

  Morozhenoye.

  We stopped at the corner store so she could buy some. Pascal bought a bag of chips, two chocolate bars, a pocketful of penny candy. Konfyeta. He was like a kid. He was a kid. A kid blowing his allowance and dancing around Sonia, trying to get her to eat a chip. “No,” she kept saying. “No, please.” Then she gave in and closed her eyes as though it was his last request, allowing Pascal, with a delicate, priestlike gesture, to place the rippled wafer on her tongue and laugh.

  As soon as we got home, she asked me to keep him in her room while she went to get a spoon. Then she asked me to stay. Pascal sat cross-legged on the bed and ate the ice cream with Sonia beside him sucking on her cross. Now and then he held out the little tub for each of us to vehemently decline it. When he had eaten it all, he fell back groaning, so his capacity for taking in food was finite after all. “Listen,” he said, still on his back. He pulled one leg of his jeans up and, clasping his hands behind his knee, set to pumping the leg madly. “Leg farts!” he crowed. “Leg farts!”

  It was that leg.

  It seemed so strange, the way he acted. Because I didn’t know any teenage boys. They’d never been an object of fascination for me, or even interest, like they’d been for other girls. Their capacious appetites, their Rip Van Winkle slumbers, their bravado and invincibility—all this was new to me. Sonia, though, she had a younger brother. Sonia was pretty and popular. She had experience.

  That night everyone in NAG! but Dieter met at the elementary school near our house. It was a Catholic school with a high chain link fence and, above the door, a white statue of the Virgin Mary in a giant clamshell of radiant light. We had come for the fence. Sonia brought Pascal, exiling him to the playground while we worked. No one objected to him being there. He ran up the teeter-totter until it tipped, then turned and ran back in a mad race against gravity. He hung upside-down on the monkey bars. All the while he was acutely aware of what we were doing at the fence. His antics made this obvious.

  We had waited till it got dark, which was happening later and later now. Pete and I unloaded the chains and locks from the packs. Isis had brought the stopwatch. For the purpose of timing the action, we divided into two groups, those who would be chained and those who would chain. In reality, we had too many chainees, particularly if Dieter wouldn’t join us (and it appeared that he wouldn’t since he wouldn’t even come out for the practice). I paired with Timo, which required me to press against his softness spread-eagled to the fence while I struggled to weave the chain behind his back and through the links. Giggling further hindered the task and soon the whole exercise disintegrated. Then we tried with two chainers, which was faster when speed was the point; the stopwatch told us just over a minute. But only Pete and Timo were attached to the fence when we finished, leaving four of us to slosh the fake blood around.

  Isis got an idea. This was her forte—telling people where to stand, how to move, what to do. We tried it in a chain. As soon as Sonia and I had finished attaching Pete, Sonia leaned against the fence. Carla, who had just chained Timo, simply turned to her left and helped me with Sonia. Then Carla and I went over to Isis, who was waiting, patient as a caryatid, wrists crossed above her head. Though this worked much better, we knew that valuable minutes could be saved if someone got a head start chaining Isis.

  “This is bullshit,” said Pete. “Pascal! Come here!”

  This time we dramatized it. We pretended we were on the tour with Isis as our guide. “Go!” would be our cue to dash to the fence.

  “Right this way, folks. Now we’re going to enter the plant itself and see just where we manufacture our world-famous first-strike weapons. Yes, folks. Right here is where we make nuclear holocausts happen.” And she mimed waving us through the gap that led to the playground. “Go!”

  We were better at it now that we’d done it a couple of times. Pete and I stepped back from chaining Timo and saw the result: Isis chained to Carla, Sonia to Pascal. And I wondered what kind of bonds they really were.

  There was an argument that night. It started in the kitchen while Dieter was bent over the smoking toaster saying to no one and us all, “Who put this on high?” Out on the deck, Pete was corrupting his acolyte. They came reekingly in, both of them staggering for the granola jar. Pete clawed inside it then headed for the fridge.

  “What happened?” Dieter asked Pascal. “You were going to play Monopoly with me tonight.”

  Pascal bobbed, trying not to giggle. “I went with them.”

  I could see this hurt Dieter, probably more than he showed. Pascal had run away to Dieter, and for a time Dieter had taken him under his wing. But then Pascal transferred his allegiance to Pete, despite how Dieter kept trying to reinforce his and Pascal’s shared Esterhazy connection, quizzing Pascal about places and people they knew in common. The more Pascal sensed Dieter’s neediness, the more he distanced himself. That, or he was too weak to resist the magnetic pull of Uncle Peter.

  Kneading the back of his neck madly, Dieter turned. Pete was standing before the open fridge drinking out of a carton. “That’s Sonia’s milk,” he said.

  And Pete exploded, spraying granola around the room. “There are so many fucking rules around here! It’s like you’re working for the Mounties! Are you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean!”

  “Sonia’s right here.” Pete pointed to where she cowered in the doorway waiting for Pascal to be released into her care. “If she doesn’t want to share her milk,” Pete said, “she can tell me herself. She’s a big girl. She doesn’t need you to speak for her.”

  “You twist everything to suit your purposes! We’re supposed to run this house by consensus! We’re supposed to respect each other’s personal property!”

  Pete turned to Pascal with an aha look. “See?”

  Dieter: “And we’re supposed to run the group by consensus too! But when that consensus goes against what you want, you ignore it! Or you start name-calling!”

  “Wrong. I start calling a spade a spade. You’re the one misusing consensus. It’s called filibustering.”

  “Did I bring that kid into the group tonight?”

  Pascal, slitty, blandly chewing, burst into titters when he realized Dieter meant him. Pete: “Why wouldn’t you come?”

  Sonia begging them to stop. “This is crazy. We have to work together. We have to do this action. It’s our last chance. Why don’t we all play Monopoly?”

  The last time we played had been the night before the Hyatt action, when we were getting along so well. Sonia pleaded until Dieter finally agreed and fetched the game from his room. He explained the inverted rules to Pascal and, miraculously, tensions subsided. We might even have brought the evening to a peaceful close if we had chosen a different game. A game that took less time to play. Because the longer we played, the greater the chance that tempers would flare again, which was what happened an hour later when Sonia rolled and landed on Community Chest. It was as inevitable as Monopoly is endless.

  “You have won second prize in a beauty contest. Collect $10.”

  “You should have won f
irst prize,” Pascal said, reaching for her.

  She retreated behind her hair. “Beauty contests are sexist. We shouldn’t even have that card in the game.”

  Pete retrieved it from the bottom of the pile and tore it up. “What do you think you’re doing?” Dieter cried.

  “Isn’t it a house game?”

  “No! It’s mine!”

  “Go then,” said Pete, tossing him the dice.

  Dieter passed Go and paid his $200, grudgingly it seemed, then immediately earned it back by landing on Income Tax. “Hold on,” he said when I went to take my turn. He was still tallying his funds, trying to calculate the greater sum, two hundred dollars or 10 percent.

  “Roll,” Pete told me. “Just go.”

  “I haven’t finished my turn yet,” Dieter said.

  “Just take the two hundred for fuck’s sake.”

  “Now I’ve lost count.” And he started again, meticulously counting out his ones until Pete flipped the board closed, sending all the pieces flying. “Earthquake!” he sang.

  Pascal laughed but Dieter was livid. “We weren’t finished!” The rest of us, bored too, started to disband, Sonia ducking underneath the table to pick the houses and tokens off the floor. “Let’s at least count our money,” Dieter said.

  “You lost,” Pete said.

  Pascal: “You’re the biggest capitalist!”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Pascal looked sorry for having said them. But Dieter turned to Pete, as though Pete had delivered the insult and, in a way, Pete had by so assiduously indoctrinating Pascal. “You’re one to talk.”

  Pete: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I sail. I play field hockey. I spend all my daddy’s money.”

  “Fuck you,” Pete said. “Leave my sister out of it.”

  “Your sister’s sacred. Mine’s not?”

  Pete blinked. Clearly, he didn’t even remember Dieter had a sister. He certainly didn’t recall making a comment about her, but evidently he had. “You’re such a hypocrite,” Dieter went on. “About everything. You say you’re anti-government, but I can’t help noticing you have no problem taking what the government provides.”

  “What are you talking about?” Pete asked, and Dieter opened the Monopoly board like a book and pointed to the squares. “Water Works. Electric Company.”

  Pascal said, “All that should be free anyway!”

  “Excuse me? Who said that?” He squinted molishly around through the big glasses. “Oh, you! You’re still here? Sorry. I understood you were looking for other accommodation.”

  “He’s fine here,” said Sonia, emerging from under the table with a handful of pieces. Pete took them and, tossing a house high into the air, caught it in his mouth. We gasped when he swallowed. When he did it a second time with one of the metal tokens, Sonia lunged and pried the remaining pieces away from him.

  Pete: “I’m giving Pascal my room.”

  He went upstairs. We sat there, stunned by what had just happened. Pascal, obviously ashamed, started helping Dieter put the game away, replacing the cards and pieces and all the coloured money in their respective slots. No one spoke until Pete came back down, dragging his sleeping bag and foamie. Under his other arm was a milk crate full of clothes. He told Pascal he could have whatever was left in the room.

  “No,” said Pascal.

  “Take it. It’s yours.”

  “Even the boom box?” Pascal asked, incredulous.

  Sonia: “Where are you going to sleep, Pete?”

  “I’m moving to the garage.”

  “It’s horrible in there, Pete. It’s disgusting.”

  We followed him. From the outside, the garage looked uninhabitable, compost mounded on one side, shoring it up, and not a shingle visible for the moss. He wasn’t going to change his mind, so we helped with the magnitudinous task of clearing out all the decades of forerenters’ crap. There was an overhead light but it was burned out. I went back to the house to get a working bulb and, once it was screwed in, all was revealed: the cobwebs strung like tinsel, a hundred rusted paint cans, smashed flower pots, tires, disintegrating cardboard boxes, rodent pellets, heaps of dubious rags. There were two wooden doors at the back that swung outward, though probably hadn’t in a lifetime. Pete kicked them open—squawk!—and we started moving the boxes out to the alley. The bottom fell out of the one Sonia was carrying and a reeking nest of shredded blanket landed at her feet. Both of us screamed. The remaining boxes we pushed and kicked out, then we carried out the cans. The floor, finally exposed, turned out to be planks laid across dirt. Sonia fetched the broom and swept and swept, but it wasn’t ever going to make a difference.

  Going by Sonia and Pete’s faces, the nasty things in their hair, by the time we finished I looked as filthy as I felt. Sonia and I went inside while Pete stopped at the outside tap and washed there. I took a long bath. Later, I looked out my bedroom window into the back yard. The light in the garage was off. I never saw it on again.

  The next morning when I looked out, Pete was urinating on the compost pile. He ducked briefly into the garage for a plastic bag of bread and a mug from one of the boxes we’d left in the alley. He filled the mug from the outside tap then, finding a sunny place in the long grass, sat and ate his breakfast.

  As the day progressed, it became obvious that Pete didn’t intend just to sleep in the garage, but to live there and not enter the house at all. Sonia went to talk to him late in the morning, only to return almost in tears. She woke Pascal, dragged him down, and, with strict instructions to bring Pete back, sent him out. After half an hour, the two of us reconnoitred in the garage ourselves. Pascal was sketching in his book while Pete lounged on his foamie. “Pete,” said Sonia in the doorway. “Please.”

  He kept his gaze fixed on the cobwebbed rafters. “I told you. Pete doesn’t live there any more.”

  “You do!”

  She had one last idea. Commanding me to stay where I was, half in the garage, half leaning into spring, she went back to the house. The pear tree was blooming in the yard. Pascal held up a sketch of the neighbour’s gnome. Pete said, “You’re nuts.”

  Finally, Sonia reappeared with Dieter, who looked like he’d just had his ears boxed. “Dieter has something to say to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dieter said, red-faced. “I didn’t mean what I said. Pascal can have the living room. I don’t care.” He cupped his nose. “Sometimes I feel like nobody—” Then he threw up his hands. “Never mind!”

  Pete looked right at his former housemate. It was the first time I’d heard him use a gentle tone with Dieter. “Forget it, man. You were absolutely right. Pete was acting like a hypocrite. He wasn’t living by his own principles. You showed him that.”

  I found a note hanging from the string on the grate. Pulled through the fretwork and unscrolled, it was a newspaper article. Sick Boy Still Missing.

  What was I thinking? Why didn’t I do more to get him home? He’d talked about his parents, shown us drawings of them, but I never thought of trying to contact them. I never considered the hell they were going through. I wish I could blame Sonia, but I blame myself, my half-heartedness. I was neopre-delennaya. (In Russian there are eight words for vague.) Already Pascal’s cancer had started to feel unreal to me, even though I had really felt it with my own hand, skin to skin. This was probably what had happened to Pascal, too, what would have happened to me a few days after seeing If You Love This Planet except that I had Sonia there constantly stoking my dread. Everyone was going to die this horrible death, probably very soon, and we all knew it, but everyone carried on as usual. It was as easy for most people to forget about the missiles as it was for me to forget there was anything the matter with Pascal. He didn’t seem sick. On the contrary, he was the liveliest person in the house.

  That day on Wreck Beach Sonia abandoned her exams so she could devote herself to the problem of getting Pascal home. Having seen her in action many times, knowing how persuasive she could be, I had no
doubt she would succeed in convincing him to go. And so I abdicated. I abdicated all responsibility for him.

  Pete moved into the garage and Pascal became his gofer, a boy to bring him what he needed from the house. Pete needed books, Bakunin and Kropotkin, The Anarchist Handbook, his engineering texts. He needed the two garden statues without which the hearth looked bare and the living room unironic. The Ronald Reagan mask, too, went missing from the nail on the kitchen wall. Sonia brought him food because Pete wouldn’t eat with us. But Pete was still in NAG! and he turned up for our practices every few nights (Dieter too), unnerving everyone by the way he kept referring to himself by name, in the third person.

  That week we held our meeting around the fire pit Pete had constructed. The issue for him was electricity. This was why he wouldn’t come into the house. He told us, “Pete will not live with state-supplied light. Pete will no longer be bought out by the forces of government.”

  Hunched by the fire, erratically illuminated by its flames, Pete looked weird, spooky, passing around a five-fingered bag of marshmallows. Surprisingly, the practices were going well and the decisions we made that night came easily too, perhaps from having to keep our voices low. (The neighbours were more concerned about the smoke from Pete’s fire than the ultimate conflagration we hoped to save them from.) Our forced whispers and half-tones precluded argument, or the marshmallows sweetened our words, or we were just too freaked out by Pete. We settled on a date for the action—the last Sunday in April, traditionally the day of the Walk for Peace, the peace movement’s Christmas, the highlight of the year. Estimates for that year’s walk broke all records: one hundred thousand people. But we in NAG!, we Naggers, disdained the walk for being merely symbolic, hardly more than a parade. On April 29, 1984, eight months before the world was scheduled to end, rather than be usurped by Trots as we tramped across the Burrard Street Bridge shouldering our papier mâché cruise missiles, we would be acting to save the world, not just singing songs about it.