Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  “I’m not. I’m not. I won’t be able to save anybody. The bomb will fall. We’ll all die.”

  She’d saved me. I wanted to tell her that but just then she turned away, toward the window. I brought the teapot and jar of jam over, clearing a space in the mess to set them down. Then I saw what she was looking at. Someone was coming up the stairs to the deck wearing a bizarre sort of robe, long and padded with a fur-trimmed hood. He walked like he was dragging one leg behind him. My first reaction was shock, that some crazy person had wandered into our yard. Then the robe detached from the hood and became the sleeping bag he slung over the deck railing. I saw the moon boots. “That’s Dieter’s friend,” I said.

  Sonia tapped on the window. He swung around and looked at us and, in that moment, hair flopping in his eyes, he seemed very, very young. It was hard to tell how old anyone really was. Sonia looked young too, because she was small, while Pete, so forceful, seemed older. Belinda always struck me as being at the height of maturity—maybe as much as twenty-five. Hector probably was that old, but all of us in NAG! were eighteen or nineteen at most. We may have called ourselves women and men but we were barely adults.

  Sonia opened the door to the deck for him. “Tea?” she asked, flitting to the cupboard for another mug. Sand rained on the floor as he shed the coat. He took the white boots off, then his socks, which were wet and, like the bottom of his pants, encrusted with sand. “Sorry.” He tiptoed to the sink and wrung them out.

  “Is it raining?” Sonia asked.

  “No.” He set the ball of socks on the table next to his mug.

  “We’ve been drinking our tea with jam,” she said. “That’s how they drink it in Russia. It’s delicious.” She nudged the jar toward him and he added several spoonfuls, dipping each one again and again until the spoon came out clean and the tea looked like diluted blood. Sonia and I traded smiles the way we had the night before when he chose milk over beer.

  “I slept on the beach,” he said.

  “Wasn’t it cold?”

  “No. It’s like spring.”

  “It is spring,” I pointed out.

  “Really?” he said, which Sonia seemed to find funny. “Then, in the middle of the night? I woke up? There was water right up to my knees!”

  “The tide came in,” she said.

  “I didn’t know it did that.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pascal.”

  2004

  The residue of a dream was still on me when I woke, not surprisingly, given my conversation with Joe Jr. the night before. As for the dream’s content, I remembered nothing; it was flying below the radar, low against the contours of my dread. My head ached at the temples and I lay there hoping the pain would pass. Eventually I gave in, put my slippers on, and went and took a pill. By then both Joes had already left the house. Joe Jr. must have had track practice. When I saw his empty bed, I felt even guiltier for having sat on him.

  I looked at Tuesday’s paper. (Tuesday—Maria was coming.) There was no mention of Sonia and Pete. It was old news now and I left it on the table for Maria to do with as she pleased. A second cup of coffee in hand, I went to my office and found lying on my computer keyboard the article that had caused so much agony the day before, retrieved by Joe, I guess. So I finally read it and, like he said, there was nothing new in it other than Sonia had completed her sentence and Pete had five more years to serve. It hardly warranted the fuss I’d made over it. It certainly didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

  When I checked my e-mail, the promised manuscript was there to distract me, a novel, 528 pages long, partly historical, starting with the discovery of some letters in a Toronto basement. The headache intensified as soon as I started reading, not so much because the device of found letters always rings false, though it does. Why? I know my own mother has kept every letter I’ve ever written her and probably stores them in a proverbial trunk. There was nothing wrong with the writing other than it strained to be poetic and wasn’t by Turgenev or Tolstoy.

  “Hello, Jane! I am here!” Maria called as she came in. I shouted back a greeting, then tried to forget about her even though I could hear her maniacal humming as she got to work bashing around in the cleaning cupboard. I glanced in the stained bottom of my mug, took down the first volume of the Shorter Oxford, checked the word annealed. What could she be doing to make so much noise? Finally she stopped but then a clank, clank, clank started up. Somewhere someone was banging on something. Nice for the headache. Very soothing.

  I read more of the manuscript, but it was tough going by then and I felt like a member of a search party, whacking my way through excess description, desperate to find the missing story.

  Several years ago I copied a quote out on an index card and tacked it to the wall above my desk. I had no idea where it had gone. Probably it fell behind the desk and, since it was obviously important, Maria vacuumed it up. The book I originally took it from was on the undusted shelf. (She sucks up cards but she doesn’t dust.) I flipped through it until I found the familiar passage.

  Here is more advice: when you read proofs, take out adjectives and adverbs wherever you can. You use so many of them that the reader finds it hard to concentrate and he gets tired. You understand what I mean when I say, “The man sat on the grass.” You understand because the sentence is clear and there is nothing to distract your attention. Conversely the brain has trouble understanding me if I say, “A tall, narrow-chested man of medium height with a red beard sat on the green grass trampled by passersby, sat mutely, looking about timidly and fearfully.” This doesn’t get its meaning through to the brain immediately, which is what good writing must do, and fast.

  It’s from a letter Chekhov wrote to Maxim Gorky. The comment box on the screen expanded as I transcribed it, stretching halfway down the margin of the page. When I finished typing, I reread it, then, remembering my lowly station as a copy editor, I backspaced it all away.

  Until that moment I’d assumed the clanking was coming from outside, but all at once I recognized the sound. The clank, clank, clank of the watchman beating out the hour. The past catching up. So this was it? The past was here? Now? I felt a wave of nausea and put my head down on the desk.

  Actually, it was Maria. Two more clanks passed in dishpan annoyance, then I got up and followed the sound down the hall. When I peeked in the kitchen, I saw her broad back, lumpy around the bra straps, turned toward me, the cutlery basket from the dishwasher tucked under her thick arm. With a furious robotic regularity, she was tossing them, knife, fork, spoon, into the drawer.

  I sighed and went in. It’s my kitchen, after all. “How are you, Maria?”

  “Wonderful,” she said, lifting a red hand to wipe her forehead.

  “Spring is here.”

  “Ya.”

  Maria is one of those short, broad women who compensate for lack of stature with radiant health and intimidating energy, a sort of Slovakian Mrs. Claus. Joe and I have reinvented her life story many times during the three years she’s cleaned for us. We know for a fact she’s a mail-order bride. Her aged Canadian husband, her cleaning pimp, drops her off and picks her up in one of those big American guzzlers that have got us into this latest mess. He looks about eighty so we know she must have escaped something awful to be so cheerful about her new life. Sometimes it’s a sausage factory, sometimes a remote pig farm in the Tatra Mountains.

  I started making a fresh pot of coffee. “I do it,” she said.

  “You’re busy with other things.”

  “I do both. Sit.” She pointed to a chair and, before she could take me by the shoulders and force me down in it, I obeyed. I hate how I go limp in her presence. I know I should be ordering her around, but she orders me. I watched her scoop the grounds into the filter basket with one hand and with the other remove the burner rings off the stove and immerse them in the sink full of soapy water with zeal enough to drown a bag of kittens. It made me so tired that I picked up the newspaper again.

  T
he main story was about the ongoing commission of inquiry into the treatment of a Canadian man who had been arrested in transit in New York, flown in shackles to Syria, his country of birth, then kept in a grave-like cell for over ten months until a false confession was tortured out of him. Maria paused in her scrubbing to look over. “Ah,” she tsked, seeing the innocent man’s photograph. “Those terrorists.”

  Last night my son asked me if that was what I had been. When he said the word, I sank onto the bed, clutching my heart. “Is that what the article said?” I asked.

  “No. It said those other two were.”

  “Pete and Sonia? It’s not true.”

  “We Googled you.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and Simon.”

  I should have guessed. This explained Simon’s peculiar behaviour, the aberration of the normal optical pattern, the slowing of the dart, the interest. I was embarrassed on another count as well. I’m thirty-nine years old, I earn my living on a computer, yet I’ve never even thought of Googling myself.

  Joe Jr.: “You got, like, three hundred and twenty-six hits, Mom. Simon’s mom? She’s a zilch.” He puffed up a bit when he told me this. “Want to see?” The laptop was there on the floor, asking to be stepped on.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  He was too excited to keep what he’d learned to himself, or to notice that I didn’t want to hear it. “A couple of sites said you went by an alias.”

  “I did?”

  “Zed.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “They said you were anarchists, or anti-nuclear activists, or terrorists. Did you help make the bomb?”

  “Are you serious? I didn’t know anything about it.”

  He canted forward, finger raised, and tossed the covers aside. “Hold on a sec. I have to pee.”

  I would never get back to sleep now, so I asked, “Do you want hot milk?”

  “Sure.”

  I went to the kitchen and put the pot on the stove. My hands were shaking as I poured the milk, but I also felt a sort of wonderment to be talking to my son like this. I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t in competition with the soundtrack, the last time we’d had a real conversation. I talk all the time, of course, but without any confidence that what he hears bears any relation to what I’m saying, if he hears anything beyond an incessant flow of blahs. When I came back with the mugs, I couldn’t help but smile; he’d fixed his hair for me. “Thanks,” he said as I passed him his drink.

  “Joey, Dad told me he called you at school. I’m annoyed at him for going behind my back.”

  “Oh, he does it all the time,” said the son we raised to be honest. “Just little things! So who made the bomb?”

  I sat on the end of the bed, leaning against the wall, cringing. “We were peace activists. We dressed up in radiation suits and handed out leaflets.”

  I thought this would sound pathetic enough to douse his interest, but instead he asked, “For real? Where?”

  “The Hyatt Regency.”

  “No way. Where did you get the suits?”

  “They were paper coveralls like painters use. With radiation symbols drawn on the back.” I guess he pictured me in this get-up with my trusted slippers on because he smiled. “Pretty hokey,” I conceded. “Anyway, like I said, it was harmless.”

  “But you just mope around all day and read! You hardly even leave the house!”

  “I do too!” I said. “How do you think all that food gets in the fridge?”

  He filtered more hot milk through the smirk. “That’s just so cool, Mom. It’s so cool I’m having trouble believing you.”

  “I can see that. And I do work, by the way. I have a contract right now.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this stuff? I wish you had!”

  He didn’t understand. How to explain the terror? “Remember 9/11? Remember how scared you were? That’s what we felt like all the time. There were so many missiles pointed at us. The last thing we wanted was that somebody would get hurt. But people did.”

  “Just that one guy.”

  I didn’t correct him. I didn’t tell him about Pascal. I said, “One is too many.”

  “So where did the bomb come from?”

  We could be up all night. He had school tomorrow if it wasn’t too tedious, so, mustering some parental sternness, I relieved him of his empty mug. “It’s almost three. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

  “You won’t,” he said. “You’ll change the subject.”

  “I promise.” My stomach churned as I said it, but Joe Jr. lay down. As a joke, I tucked him in and kissed him above his piercings. And he actually let me do these things.

  That was last night. Now I found out my cleaning lady was caught up in the current “terrorist” frenzy. (“Communist” used to be the catch-all label.) “They should shoot them,” Maria said, gesturing at the paper. “They are animals.”

  I bristled. “Maria, this man was falsely accused. No one denies it any more. He suffered terrible treatment. He was tortured.”

  The coffee maker made a loud, intestinal sound. I might have taken that as a warning, but I didn’t. I decided to make a case for due process with my cleaning lady. I explained that even though al-Qaeda disdains due process, Western democracies have to take the high road. “They can’t start playing dirty and kidnapping and torturing people, or holding them without charges for years. Then we’re no better.” And while she polished the stove and put it back together like a puzzle, I said, “I’m not condoning what real terrorists do, or saying that people who have been properly tried and convicted shouldn’t be punished. But dissent is what strengthens democracy, not suppression. And while we’re at it, we might listen to some of their complaints. They honestly believe that Western society is evil. I mean, I honestly believe some aspects of Western society are evil. I believe, for example, that excess materialism is evil. That plastic bags are evil. I heard on the radio the other day that samples taken from remote beaches in the Orkneys and Outer Hebrides—do you know where they are? These tiny islands in northern Scotland where there are practically no people?”

  She set my coffee down on the newspaper.

  “The samples were heavily, very heavily, contaminated with plastic molecules.”

  Standing there with her hands on her hips—yet another overbearing Slav in my life. How? I wondered. How had she got herself hired? And how had I got on to plastic bags? And what about the missiles, for that matter? The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and almost overnight the arms race ended, making the entire anti-nuclear movement obsolete. A succession of causes rushed in to fill the void. Land mines. Globalization. War in the Middle East. Climate change. The sky keeps falling. But what happened to the missiles? No one mentions them.

  No. What has really been bothering me, what has been eating me for twenty years, is that Sonia was no terrorist.

  “Do you realize, Maria,” I said, deciding to drop both the bags and the missiles and focus on the real point, that the innocent, sadly, are expendable, “like this man”—I moved the coffee cup to point at his photograph. It left a damp ring behind like we were seeing him through a marksman’s sights—“many, if not most, of those people they’re holding without charge over there in Cuba? They’ve done nothing wrong.”

  As I waited for her reply, I remembered how tragically she lost her first husband, in one version to crazed pigs, in the other when he fell into the meat-grinding machine. Yet she could still smile! Such fortitude! What an example she was! Her rosy face fairly crinkled with mirth as she told me, “Chop their heads off. That would be better. That’s what they do to us. I get you sugar.”

  1984

  At first I didn’t realize he was still with us. The morning after the party he helped us clean up, literally running the vacuum up and down the hall. He asked to use the shower, then hung around the rest of the morning waiting for his sleeping bag to dry out. I saw him roll and stuff it into the duffle bag and assume
d, when he walked away, it was for good.

  Most of the following week there was no sign of him when I got home, only Pete strung along the chesterfield, cheering on the Road Runner with the peanut butter jar balanced on his chest. But on Thursday I came home early because something upsetting had happened in Kopanyev’s class. Pascal’s book was lying on the kitchen table with a felt-tipped marker tucked in its pages. I opened it, saw our address and phone number on the inside cover. The rest of it was drawings.

  In the beginning they were all of the same two people, a man and woman, each captured in an ordinary act—shovelling snow, cooking, reading the newspaper. There was a sketch of a ranch-style house I assumed the sketch couple lived in, then a self-portrait in a bathroom mirror. A Greyhound bus. The driver. Dozing passengers. Scenes out a window. I turned the page. Sonia! In a few lines he’d managed to capture her worried, soulful essence. There was a drawing of Carla braiding Belinda’s hair. Of Dieter gesticulating. I hadn’t noticed Pascal creeping around the party, executing us in ink.

  Next (assuming he filled the book chronologically), he’d drawn scenes down at the beach: the view across to the mountains, an empty lifeguard chair, a huddle of old Vietnamese men fishing off the dock. The rest of the book was blank. He must have left it behind the morning after the party. Someone had found it and set it out. Or so I thought.

  But that night it poured. When Sonia got up to practise with the stove, I woke too and hurried downstairs to stop her. I found her in the living room, cross-legged on the floor with something white cradled in her lap. I had to look twice.

  A boot.

  “Shhh,” she said.

  He was asleep on the chesterfield, palms together, cheek resting on the back of his hand. “He looks so peaceful,” she said.

  “There’s a chore sheet on the fridge.” Dieter pointed to it. “Sign up for something.”

  “Okay. Now?”

  “Sure.”

  Pascal abandoned his toast, all the pieces making a crooked tower on the plate.