The Sky Is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  Isis spoke up from the back: “I’ll do the talking.” She took over the driving as well, tying her red ropes in a kerchief as she ran around the van. “Now y’all,” she said, getting in the driver’s seat Timo had vacated for her, “put on your happy faces, you hear? You too,” she said to Sonia. And to Pascal, “Now you behave yourself, Pyetia. Everybody? Shut up. Is that understood? You’re all climbing the walls here.”

  The park came into view, a lawned expanse with the Peace Arch in the middle of it, standing on the 49th parallel, a symbolic door between two countries, monumentally American despite the fact that one of the two sodden flags on the roof was ours. Beyond was U.S. Customs. All we had to do was move patiently through the waiting line of cars. Isis let Dieter pick a lane; he chose the only one with a black man in the booth. When our turn finally came, Isis drove slowly, unrolling the window. Beside me, a sound like a groan issued from some fathomless place inside Sonia.

  “Hi!” Isis showed all her teeth to the guard in the booth. He kept his to himself. “The purpose of our visit?” she repeated. “We’re a children’s theatre troupe. There’s this festival in Seattle. Playtime. Have you heard of it?” She produced a typed letter, a letter typed by Isis, confirming our attendance at this imaginary festival. One glance at it and he asked for ID.

  “ID everyone!” she called and we all reached into pockets and backpacks for our birth certificates and driver’s licences. Isis handed them in a bunch to the guard. I watched, unbreathing, while he shuffled through them, exhaled when he handed them back. He leaned in the window to look at us.

  “I need to get out,” Sonia gasped.

  Isis started to say that she would pull over on the American side, but Sonia cried, “Now!” and crawled right over Carla. She struggled with the door until Timo leapt up and opened it for her. Two wobbly steps across the asphalt then she vomited.

  “Great,” said Dieter. “Now she’s puking too.”

  “She has what he had,” Isis told the guard, pointing to Pascal, out of the van now too, standing by Sonia in his glowing boots, hands in his pockets, bobbing, neither of them speaking. They seemed to be divining a message in the puddle she had made.

  “It’s going around,” Isis said.

  “Pull over there,” said the guard, indicating the customs building.

  “Can we wait for her on the other side? We’re somewhat in a hurry.”

  Then Pascal said in a pleading voice loud enough for us all to hear, “I’ll go. I promise I will. I just want to do this one last thing with you. It’s going to be so cool.”

  And Sonia bolted. We couldn’t believe it. We just turned in our seats and watched her go, watched as our much-rehearsed plan completely disintegrated. Back the way we’d come, back toward the park and the arch and Canada. Pascal went after her, but she pushed him away. It must have been what she said rather than her feeble shove that sent him hurrying back to us.

  “What’s she doing?” everyone started screeching when he got in the van again.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull off here,” the guard told Isis, “but I suggest you collect your friend and get on home.” He pointed to the service road bordering the park that led to the Canadian-bound lanes.

  “You’re not going to let us in?” She jutted her chin in indignation, but did exactly what he said, reversed the van and turned it around. “Fuckity-fuck-fuck, fuckity-fuck-fuck, look at Sonia go,” Pete started singing under his breath, the whole way back to the corner of the park where Isis pulled to the side of the road. Sonia was halfway to the arch by then, jogging more than running, the bottom of her jeans two-toned from the wet grass. Isis pressed her head against the steering wheel. The wipers went slap, slap, slap.

  “What’s happening?” Pascal asked, sounding like a lost child.

  Isis reared up with a hammy smile. “It’s fine,” she chirped. “We’ll go get a coffee, wait an hour, then try again.”

  “What about Sonia?” I asked.

  “Leave her,” Pete said.

  “We can’t do that!” It wasn’t only me saying this. Timo did too, and Carla.

  Pete: “Why not?”

  “I say we forget about the action,” Dieter said. “We’ll never get across now. I say we go home.”

  “You would.”

  Dieter swung around in his seat to face Pete, but Isis aborted their exchange. “Just cool it! Calm down everybody! I’m going to pick up Sonia! We’ll figure it out from there!”

  She drove the road that bordered the southern edge of the park, then turned north toward the Canadian booths. When she was parallel to where Sonia was slogging along at barely a trot, Isis honked the horn. Sonia looked over at us and, taking fright, picked up the pace again.

  “Is she really sick?” Pascal asked.

  “You gave it to her, didn’t you?”

  “It’s nerves,” Carla said.

  “She was really into it,” Timo insisted. “I don’t ggggget it.”

  I glanced back at Pascal and, for the first time, saw he was afraid.

  Nearer to the booths, Isis pulled over again to wait for Sonia. “I know what we need,” Timo announced. “Chchchipits!” He rooted through his bag, passed the package along. Pascal ripped it open and took some. When it reached me, I declined. I wiped a circle on the window, a peephole, to watch Sonia through. There were no other Chipits takers so, hand to hand, like a church collection plate, the bag made its way back to Timo.

  Sunday morning border traffic goes the other way. Canadians go shopping in America. Americans stay home and go to church. The guard stuck his arm out the window of his booth and impatiently waved us forward. “Okay,” said Isis. “This is it. Act normal. Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.”

  “Wait for Sonia,” I pleaded as Isis drove up beside the booth. When she was face to face with the guard, she tried out her smile on him.

  He asked how long we’d been in the United States.

  “Actually, we haven’t even been yet. We were just about to cross when we realized we left someone behind. She should be coming up any second now.” Isis leaned out the window. “There she is.”

  Marching over to us, head down as though pushing against the drizzle, hands in fists, Sonia was a little soldier of determination. Carla opened the van door for her, but instead of coming around and getting in, Sonia stayed on the other side where she was in full view of the guard. “What’s she ddddoing?” Timo asked.

  She was pointing. Pointing frantically at the van. Then she dropped her arms, came round, and got inside. Carla, still standing so Sonia could sit next to me again, closed the door.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Pete asked, but Isis shushed him.

  “Are you sick, Sonia, or are you nervous?” Carla asked.

  She was shivering violently beside me. I was shaking too, because I knew what she’d been doing. Look inside, she’d been saying. He’s in the van. Look.

  Carla: “Maybe you should be support.”

  “Everybody present and accounted for!” Isis chirped to the guard, who came out of the booth now and asked what was in the back.

  “Costumes. Props. We were on our way to a children’s theatre festival in Seattle. I have a letter. Do you want it?”

  “Is it open?”

  “The back? I think so.”

  “I’ll need to see your ID,” the guard said.

  He headed for the back of the van. I watched him through my peephole, tall and hale, an entirely whole person in brightly polished shoes. A middle-aged father of three, I would later learn. Dieter turned in his seat and said to Sonia, “What if we can’t even get back into Canada now? You idiot!”

  The guard opened the back door and began a methodical inspection of our things.

  “ID everyone. Again,” Isis sighed. “Those are our costumes,” she called back.

  Pascal opened the sliding side door and—whoosh!—leapt out at a run. And then we heard it, the sound we had been waiting for all that time.

  The bomb
went off like a practice run for that other, bigger one. With a weird popping sound and a scream, it came, the end of the world as we knew it. Somehow I ducked and when I straightened and turned, it was Timo I saw, Timo holding the side of his head, blood coursing down his arms, though someone else was screaming, someone I couldn’t see rolling on the ground outside. There was crying too and smoke, broken glass and the smell of burning chocolate. Pete was yelling, “What did you do? What did you do?” All of us scrambling over each other and out of the van as fast as we could, except Pascal, who was long gone. From how fast he ran, you would never have guessed there was anything the matter with his leg.

  The second before, in that stunned pause between the future and the past, I glanced down. Pieces of someone were scattered around. An eye lay in my lap, gawking up. I thought it was Timo’s and became hysterical. But it was only plaster. The gnome, turned to shrapnel.

  2004

  I dreamed I was walking along a path through the woods. The trees were ordinary—nothing flowery—except that one had a door in its trunk about the size of a kitchen cupboard. Of course I stopped. I stopped and opened it. Inside was a baby, either petrified or charred, its tiny brown knees drawn to its chest. He must have been there a long time to look so ancient and discoloured. To look so cold in his nest of moss.

  I just stood there thinking: what should I do? What should I do now?

  A few hours later we were driving along Kingsway, that diagonal slash across the city. Without any trees around the auto body shops and strip malls, it could have been any season; spring never shed its delicate petals on these vinyl awnings. It could have been anywhere for that matter, any generic, over-franchised thoroughfare in North America, until something from another era unexpectedly appeared, the old 2400 Motel with its little modernist cabins, completely out of place, as though the eighties had never been here and wrecked everything. I tried pointing the landmark out to Joe Jr., but his eyes were closed, eyebrow rings clicking arrhythmically against the passenger window, earbuds screwed in tight.

  He came to as I pulled over. “Here?”

  “I’m not driving all this way with you plugged into that thing, Joey,” I said. “The idea was to have someone to talk to.”

  “I can talk and listen at the same time.”

  I had the car radio off because it seemed too weird, the two of us in such physical proximity, yet mentally so far apart. Different music, different thoughts, mine anxious. What would Sonia be like? Why did she even agree to see me? I would enter his space, I decided and signalled for him to pass an earbud over. “Hendrix?” I said after a minute.

  First he gaped, then he cradled his head. “Mom. Mom.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t have any idea?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “How cool you are?”

  I laughed. “Jimi Hendrix was actually way before my time.”

  “You’re bad,” he said.

  Which reminded me of Bazarov’s words to Arkady: “Don’t you know that in our dialect ‘not all right’ means ‘all right’?”

  “Would it be possible, Joey?” I asked sweetly. “Do you think? You can listen on the way back.”

  He looked at me strangely, but unplugged himself nonetheless, wound the wires around the little white box, and put it in his jeans pocket.

  We were driving out to New Westminster, which is technically another city, though each municipality flows into the next, undemarcated, unless I missed the signs. After a few minutes of non-conversation, Joe Jr. finally initiated one. “What is an anarchist?” he asked in exactly the same tone he might have used ten years ago to ask why the sky was that particular colour.

  “I don’t know. There must be a hundred definitions.”

  “There are thirteen schools of thought.”

  “You know better than I do then. I guess you Googled it.”

  “But you weren’t one?”

  “An anarchist? No!”

  He ticked his rings against the window again. I wondered what he was expecting from Sonia and if I had done the right thing bringing him. When he was little, if a dog approached us in a park I’d always put myself between them. This was more like me needing another body to step behind. Because, what if I fell in love with her again? We’d talked on the phone for a few awkward minutes while I took down the address. She hadn’t hesitated to invite me. What if the very sight of her, my first crush, made me forget my darling Joes?

  “Why didn’t you go to jail?” Joe Jr. asked.

  “I did. While I waited for my bail hearing.”

  He straightened in the seat. “You did ? For real ? Why didn’t you say? Why don’t you tell me anything?”

  Touché.

  “I honestly don’t remember anything except I wasn’t allowed to take a shower.”

  Then he asked me to tell him about the bomb, like I’d promised. How did they make it? Why did it go off at the wrong time? But once again, I knew less than he did.

  “You can use ordinary birthday sparklers wrapped in electrical tape,” he said. “Or sand down pop cans and pack the shavings in a pipe.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “It must have had an anti-tamper trigger. Probably an arming switch too, so they could move it around.”

  “Joey. I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Talk like this.”

  “You said you wanted to talk!”

  Nowadays bombs go off all the time, but not back then. Back then, Pete’s bomb made the front pages. (Not that I read them, or I’d know more about it.) It was obviously small, or pathetically amateur, despite his genius. Or intentionally so. (This just occurred to me.)

  I told Joe Jr.: “I guess the guard messing around with our stuff set it off. No one was killed, but they could have been. Which was why it was taken so seriously. The guard lost two fingers and an eye. One of us was practically scalped by shards of plaster.”

  “What was the plaster for?”

  “The bomb was in a garden gnome.”

  “Man! That’s brilliant!” Joe Jr. said. “And then what happened?”

  We were all arrested. Sonia confessed. Because the rest of us knew nothing about the bomb and were cooperative—except Pete—we were only charged with attempting to cross the border for the purposes of committing an indictable offence. We all pled guilty and got two years’ probation. Pete went to trial, but wouldn’t open his mouth, not even in his own defence. There was so much circumstantial evidence he didn’t have a hope.

  “He was living in the garage where the bomb was made, where The Anarchist Handbook was found. Do you know what that is?”

  “I looked it up.”

  “Of course you did. Also, the trial of an actual terrorist group, the Squamish Five, had just finished. Public opinion was against Pete.”

  “But Sonia didn’t do it?” he asked.

  “No way.”

  “And this English guy, he did?”

  “I guess so. It still seems hard to believe. He wasn’t like that. Or maybe he was. His girlfriend had just broken up with him. Maybe that had something to do with it. Anyway, you read all that stuff, Joey.”

  Then Joe Jr. asked me if I was sorry for what happened and I told him that I regretted many things, the injuries in particular, not just to the guard—to our families too. The waste of two good people’s lives. But I couldn’t truthfully say that I wished it hadn’t happened because then he wouldn’t have happened. Back then, when I was nineteen, I thought I would always be miserable, and I should have been. I should have ended up like a Chekhov character, always in galoshes, or like my aunt with her expired bus transfers and her flattened cans. Or I should have been incinerated along with everyone else. That was all I expected, but look what I got instead. Statistically, it was infinitesimal—my chance at happiness.

  Somewhere Kingsway changed names and now, as we descended, a view opened out before us. We saw the river, the triple span of bridges, the metastasizing su
burbs on the other side. I asked Joe Jr. to get out the map at the same time I spotted the street we were looking for. We drove past several blocks of near-identical apartments before finding Sonia’s. There was parking right in front, the way there hardly ever is in Vancouver, because, I realized as I was taking the flowers out of the trunk, a lot of people here probably didn’t own cars. The cars they did own were beaters, like the one I’d parked behind, its muffler lacy with rust, a clutch of talismans hanging from the rear-view mirror, likely the only insurance the owner had. The bouquet had cost sixty dollars. I felt like leaving it on the beater’s hood.

  On the little square of lawn in front of the building, dog shit was hardening next to a plastic trike. We went up the walk and looked through the glass door to the lobby where a year’s worth of flyers was stacked on the floor. One wall was tiled with mirrors and, amazingly, a knee-high artificial Christmas tree stood before it, decorations intact. Once, long ago, I’d prepared a trousseau—tea towels, dish cloths, a set of utensils with pink plastic handles. The pots and pans we could get at a thrift store, but I wanted some of the things in our new life to be new. I wanted to buy Sonia a kimono to wear when she drank her tea. Now I asked myself, is this where we would have ended up?

  I was sweating when I pressed the intercom button. (The name beside the number was the same as all the others: Occupied.) The one with the smoked vocal chords answered. I said my name, that I was there to—The door buzzer cut me off.

  Inside, we walked the gloomy hallways until we found the apartment. I knocked, then heard her name called out. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if I could rip my heart out of my breast somehow! The sound of chains being removed. I was trembling now.

  Muscular, T-shirt so tight across her biceps the tattoo looked like it was being squeezed out. Half pit bull, half dyke. She looked right at Joe Jr. and I know he felt her animosity too, because he stepped back, almost behind me. Even her hair seemed to threaten us—natural spikes such as Joe Jr. could only dream of. “Who’s he?” she asked. Before I could answer, she called over her shoulder, “She brought a guy!”