The Sky Is Falling (22 page)

I went back inside where Sonia was telling a man in a Question Authority T-shirt about the renaming of the streets. “Far out,” he kept saying. “Far out.” Ruth was bubbling away to Pete, who unwound the scarf from her neck and draped it over her head like a dust cloth over a lamp. She carried on giggling and saying flirty things, even after Pete walked off. Then Moon Boots came in for a second time and, noticing Ronald Reagan hanging on the nail, stopped to put the mask on. The notebook slid out from under his arm and he stooped to retrieve it, almost tripping someone else coming in from the deck. He tugged the mask off, bobbed an apology, was just attempting an exit, seemingly before something else could go wrong, when Sonia nabbed him. “You don't have a drink.”

His eyes darted. “Milk?”

Sonia poured him a glass out of her carton, handing it to him with a suppressed smile. We watched him glug it, saw the pump in his throat and the residue above his lip, the only moustache he looked capable of growing. His jawline was spackled with zits.

Sonia: “I like your boots.”

He looked down at them. We all cracked up.

A siren woke me. I thought it was a scream until the fire truck rumbled past. It would be hours before anyone else got up, I assumed. But Sonia was at the kitchen table when I went down, in her pyjamas, cradling her headache in her hands. First I surveyed the devastation, then I put the kettle on. “Go back to bed,” I told her. “I'll clean it up.”

“Why should you?”

Because I wanted to. Because I loved her. Because I wanted to make her happy.

“It was fun last night,” she said. “I feel so guilty whenever I have fun. That's when it's going to happen. When we least expect it. Reagan's just waiting for me to look the other way so he can press the button.”

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“No. Tell me the truth, Jane. Is my insomnia honourable or am I just torturing myself?”

This was a reference to Dr. Korolyov in “A Case History.” “
So you're not sleeping
,” he tells Liza, the young, conscience-stricken textile factory heiress. “
It's lovely outside, spring has
come. The nightingales are singing and here you are sitting in the
dark, brooding.
” Outside, the watchman bangs two o'clock, and Korolyov sees Liza tremble and notices that
her eyes were sad
and clever, and clearly she longed to tell him something
.

Korolyov: “
Your insomnia is something honourable: whatever
you may think, it's a good sign.”

“I want to be a Liza,” Sonia said. “I want it so badly.”

“You already are one.”

“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.

The 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.