“That’s spray paint, isn’t it?”
“I’m going to modify some signage.”
It seemed to take a week to reach the corner. When Pete, or Ronald, called for me to stop, I hit the brake harder than I meant to, sending both of us lurching forward again. He plunged out of the car, towel in one hand, paint and cardboard in the other, leaving the door ajar. In fluid, practised movements, he swabbed the stop sign, slapped the cardboard on it, blasted it with paint.
STOP
the arms race!
By the time the cloud had settled, he was back in the car telling me to drive.
“I start to get this itchy feeling, Zed. It’s unbearable. I have to act. Can you possibly go any faster?”
“No,” I said.
He rocked side to side in the same rhythm as the windshield wipers. “Stop then,” he said the second before he jumped out, arms and legs pumping below the grotesque cartoon head, all the way to the next stop sign. When I pulled up beside him, the job was done. He opened the door, said, “Bayswater,” and took off running again.
Bayswater Street was busier. I had to pull over to let a car pass, which was when I finally noticed the wipers shrieking against the dry glass and shut them off. Two blocks ahead, under the street light on the corner, Pete was lingering at the scene of the crime. He waved, then darted across, forcing me, if I wished to follow, to turn onto Point Grey Road where there was even more traffic. For the whole long block until the fork onto First Avenue, I held my breath. By then I’d lost him. One moment he was streaking ahead of me, then he wasn’t. I drove all the way to Trafalgar Street, but the sign there was intact.
The neighbourhood looked unfamiliar through a windshield. I was lost just blocks from the house. I considered abandoning the car and walking back, but didn’t know how I would face Pete later, so I carried on, trawling the treed streets, avoiding the main arteries, alert in my peripheral vision. Other nocturnal creatures popped up green-eyed in the headlights—a cat, a raccoon. A man with a dog crossed the road and, while I waited, I read the street sign. Balaclava. Not the face mask. The Crimean War. There was a Blenheim, too, a Trafalgar, even a Waterloo. The streets were all named after famous battles. It was the first time that I noticed.
I came to more stop signs that had been changed and, confident I was on his trail, kept driving, a full five minutes before something else occurred to me. He was intentionally evading me. He’d promised fun. Was this what he meant? A game of tag? I pulled over and shut the engine off. Kropotkin revolved slowly in his dervish’s robe while I huddled, thinking of Ruth, how Pete had humiliated her, how he was humiliating me now.
A loud smash, like something had dropped out of a tree and landed on the trunk. I swung around. Nothing. When I faced forward again, I screamed. Ronald Reagan was pressed up against the windshield, doubly grotesque.
Pete got in the passenger side, laughing and breathing hard.
“You scared me!” I said. “Take that off!”
He tossed the mask onto the dash, shook his hair out. He looked elated.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I was right behind you. Here. Slide over. I’ll drive.”
It was awkward switching places. For a moment, when I was almost in his lap, he seemed to hug me. I could feel the bellows-like movement of his chest. He turned in the seat. “What’s wrong? You seem angry. Are you angry, Zed?”
“Let’s go.”
“Are you angry?”
“Stop it!”
“Are you?”
“Yes!” I said.
When I wouldn’t meet his eye, Pete took my face in both his hands. I was too rattled to pull away. I thought he was going to kiss me. He seemed about to, but then he didn’t. “Sonia wants you in the group,” he said. “She brought it up at the last meeting. Do you want to help save the world, Zed?”
It turned out that the liveried garden statues were more than booty. They were functional too, propping the flip-chart agenda against the fireplace, Warm Up: Sonia the first item of business. Last week, when Sonia returned from Christmas holidays, I’d been shocked by her advancing thinness; now, as she got to her feet, she actually had to hoist her pants. She looked around at our expectant faces—Pete and Dieter, Belinda and Carla, Timo (the facilitator that night), me (spurting sweat)—and began to sing. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands . . .”
Sonia wasn’t the singer I’d heard so often closing their meetings, the one with the shivery voice, but soon the others drowned out her off-key warbling. They clapped and stomped and danced around the living room, taking wild swings at each other with their hips, giving up a rousing Yeehaw! when the song dictated. They were at ease with each other. They knew each other. I knew no one, barely myself. Yet I wanted to be there. I’d been dragging my loneliness around for too long. Also, I didn’t want to die. When it was over, after Belinda had, to my mortification, implicated me in a polka, and everyone had collapsed on the floor, a silence fell, or rather everyone stopped laughing so the only sound was our common struggle, at that particular moment the struggle for oxygen. I lay panting, inhaling everyone’s commingled exhalation, and vice versa, feeling close to these people, at least closer than I had to anyone in years.
We resumed our places, me on the chesterfield buffering Sonia from Dieter, Timo perched on the hearth, a giant baby in overalls, cheeks flushed from the warm-up. He was the only one in NAG!, the only Nagger, I hadn’t been introduced to, the one with the big rubber boots and blond, dessert-like lashings of hair, and that curious affectation—the right pant leg rolled. As he read over the rest of the agenda, some of the words stalled in his mouth. It seemed arbitrary which ones would trip him up. “Does anyone have anything to aaaaadd?”
Hands went up and, while Timo wrote new names on the agenda, Belinda, who was leaning against the beanbag chair Pete sprawled in, gathered her hair from behind her and tossed the scarf of it over her shoulder, striking Pete full in the face. I saw him flinch, then lift the hair that had fallen across his chest. He examined the ends, sniffed them. Then he put them in his mouth and, suddenly, he seemed so vulnerable, like a kitten weaned too young.
My acceptance in the group had been contentious, I was pretty sure of that. Nevertheless, when my name came up on the agenda, Welcome Jane!, they came over and one by one initiated me with a hug. I really hated this part. I didn’t want to die but neither did I want to be hugged all the time. There would be no escaping the hugs. Timo was the softest. Pete crawled across the dirty shag and laid his golden head, heavy with ideology, in my lap. Carla presented me with a Guatemalan peace bracelet she’d woven herself. And here was proof that Sonia had diminished over the holidays; while still in her skeletal embrace, I decided I would be the one to fatten her up.
The main task of the evening was to revise and approve the rough copy of a leaflet we were going to distribute at a technology conference that was taking place in a few weeks at the Hyatt Regency. Some of the participants were involved in arms manufacturing; one in particular made components for the cruise missile. What struck me especially was that the cruise missile was being tested in Alberta, my home province, because the northern terrain there resembled the Russian steppe. The missile flew low, below enemy radar, following the contours of the land and, because it couldn’t be detected, it was considered one of the new “first strike” weapons in the American arsenal, evidence that they had moved away from the old policy of deterrence.
A long discussion followed about whether or not to have contact information on the leaflet. “As if we don’t have phone trouble already. Now we’ll have assholes calling up,” Dieter said.
Sonia put a hand on her heart. “If a hundred assholes call and we reach one of them, it will be worth it.”
Dieter sniffed. “Okay. Fine.”
Sonia volunteered to deal with the assholes, Timo to photocopy the leaflet. Belinda would get the suits. “Help, anyone?” she asked. Sonia and Carla put up their hands, then I did.
“Liaison SPND,” Timo read off the agenda. He was the liaison. “They’re having a rummage and bake sale on campus to raise money for the Walk for Peace. Do we want to get involved?”
Dieter pulled a sock off and threw it into the middle of the room. “They can have that.” Everyone laughed.
Next, Pete gave a report on his stop sign work. Over the Christmas holidays he’d changed thirty-one signs. “Half of those I did with Zed.” Everyone turned congratulatory eyes on me and Sonia squeezed my hand and kept it. Until we finally took a break, it grew clammier and clammier and the only thing I could think about was when she planned on letting me go.
I used the downstairs bathroom, the one with the broken toilet tank lid and the poster about Bolsheviks. I thought of it as Sonia’s bathroom as she was the only one with a bedroom on the main floor. The bottles on the side of the tub were hers, among them, unsurprisingly, No More Tears shampoo.
In the kitchen, Carla and Belinda were picking at what was left in the dirty potluck dishes, their heads together, like conjoined twins. Belinda looked up and said, “Oh, Jane. We were just talking about you,” as Carla edged past me and out of the room. I couldn’t have been more surprised by what Belinda said next. “You didn’t sleep with Pete, did you?”
“What?”
“You were here with him over the holidays, right?”
“For a few days.”
“You seem so friendly now. He didn’t try anything?”
“No!”
“Okay. I’m not accusing.”
She didn’t sound accusing. She was smiling, but I remembered another time her expression hadn’t quite matched her words. After we’d finished putting the stickers on the war toys, we met up again at Santa’s Workshop. It had been Belinda’s idea to get our picture taken. We lined up and, when our turn came, crowded onto Santa’s lap. Santa got quite jolly, his droll little mouth drawn up like in the poem, until Belinda said in a girlie voice that what she most wanted for Christmas was for men to stop staring at her breasts. In a twinkling, he spilled us off. Everyone seemed to agree that she’d really put old Saint Nick in his place.
“You’d be the first to say no,” she told me now.
“Sonia’s slept with Pete?” I asked.
“God, no. Not Saint Sonia. She’s saving herself.”
Carla popped her head in and we both looked at her. Belinda said, “God! He wouldn’t dare! But everyone else has, believe me. SPND is at his feet.”
She was warning me. I stepped away and got my drink of water, drank it down in relieved gulps while Belinda waited. Then, with her freckled arm draped over my shoulder, we went back to the meeting. “My feminism’s in conflict with Pete’s anarchism,” she confided in a low voice.
“He says he’s a feminist.”
“Words aren’t important. Actions are.”
We resettled in the living room to deal with the new business. Pete’s name came up on the agenda again and he repeated what I’d told him about the street signs. “Which ones are battles, Zed?”
“Trafalgar. Balaclava. Blenheim. Waterloo. Dunkirk—”
All around the room heads shook in outraged disbelief.
“—Alma and Dunbar.”
“Dunbar! The food co-op’s on Dunbar!”
“Warmongering in hippy Kitsilano. Shocking, isn’t it?”
“God!”
“We’ve ggggot to rename them.”
A committee was struck.
Sonia got the last word. She rose to her feet. “This has been such a good meeting. I missed you guys at Christmas. I love you all so much.” Then she started to cry. “It’s 1984—”
“Shades of Orwell,” someone whispered.
“I feel like we have one year left. Just one year. If we can’t stop this madness in the next twelve months, we’re doomed. All of us. I know in the past I’ve always been a support person.”
Dieter became defensive. “Support is just as important. We’re all equal.”
“Yes, but I was a support person because I was worried about having a criminal record and not being able to teach when I graduate. Over Christmas it finally sank in. There won’t be any kids to teach if I don’t act. I want you all to know that this year I’m going to do everything I can.”
Everyone formed a silent scrum around Sonia, embracing her in layers of arms and bodies, a swaying mass of love, while Sonia sobbed. Someone began to hum, then they all joined in. Strangely, it was Carla with the husky man’s voice, the beige hair and beige eyelashes and, more often than not, beige clothes, who had all her colours in her throat. “We shall live in peace,” she fluted, “we shall live in peace . . .”
They formed a chorus. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”
Then I, too, overcame my shyness and began to sing. “Deep in my heart, I do believe . . .”
It didn’t matter how I sounded. It mattered that I meant it.
I ran into Dieter in the upstairs hall. During the meeting, during one of the many diversions, people had talked about the holidays. Belinda said she’d fought non-stop with her mother, mostly because she’d wanted to spend Christmas with her dad. “He’s a film director,” she said, tossing her hair. He made cable TV commercials for local businesses. Carla had been as miserable. She was adopted and didn’t fit in. There was a big scene when she wouldn’t eat any turkey. For Dieter, it had been his first Christmas without his father.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” I told him now.
He blinked rapidly behind his glasses, “Me too,” and for a moment we stood in embarrassed silence, in the no-man’s land between each other’s room. In Pete’s land, actually, his music leaking out around our feet. Riders on the storm. When I turned to go, Dieter asked, “Can I talk to you?”
We went to his room where the monochrome Che loomed on the wall. I didn’t know anything about Che. I knew a bit about Trotsky, how he’d been stabbed with an ice pick in Mexico. Che was just a black and white stain to me, but he reminded me of Hector, probably because of the beret. Hector hadn’t slept on our chesterfield since before Christmas when he’d got an under-the-table job in Victoria delivering pastries.
Dieter sat on his desk chair, leaving me the bed that Pete had been in with Ruth. I hadn’t told Belinda. It never crossed my mind to tell Dieter. “You’re a good friend of Sonia,” he began.
I smiled. So I was. It was as though I needed someone objective, not my mother, to point it out. When I got back after Christmas, I’d written Sonia a note of welcome, tied it to a piece of yarn, and left it hanging from the grate. Every night and every morning since her return I’d checked the grate, hoping more for her reply than an actual letter from my parents in the mailbox. Now I felt like flying to my room and calling down to her.
Dieter kneaded the back of his neck. “And you get along with Pete.”
I seemed to. I liked him now. I knew he was as vulnerable as anyone, maybe more so, because it was hard to live by your principles. Hardly anyone understood that. They either idolized him or thought he was an asshole, or both. Why? No one thought Misail was an asshole. They thought he was a fool.
Ostensibly Pete and Dieter’s conflict was ideological. Dieter, because of his interest in Central America, leaned toward Marxism and rules and procedure, which naturally irritated the resident anarchist. But theirs was also a conflict of personalities. Dieter was insecure. He wanted Pete’s approval. He didn’t seem to understand as I had early on that Pete respected people who stood up to him. You could call him on anything and he would consider your point of view.
“Sometimes I think he hates me,” Dieter said. “Everything I say, he questions.”
“That’s his anarchism.”
“You make it sound like a disease.” He dropped his head to his chest then slung it over his shoulder and around the back until it cracked audibly. “You’re like me,” he said, not noticing how I recoiled. Dieter was an incurable corrector. He had a single eyebrow like a headband, concealed by the frames of his glasses. �
��You study hard. School’s important to you. I care about my marks, too, right? And then there’s my family. And what Reagan’s doing in Central America. Not to mention this whole nu-clee-ar situation. Then I come home and Pete’s arguing with me constantly. I’m so fucking tense all the time.” He looked pleadingly at me. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, until he told me.
“I was wondering if you’d put in a word to Sonia for me.”
Finally, in the morning, a reply to my Welcome back! I threaded the yarn up through the fretwork and plucked the twist of paper out.
I have to talk to you.
Fulfilling the promise I’d made to myself at the meeting, I stopped at the store on my way home from university and bought a tiny tub of the most expensive brand of ice cream, the one with the faux German name, happy to squander my meagre allowance on an umlaut. Except that Sonia refused it. She sat on her bed with her head hanging, face curtained by her mournful hair.
“Why not?”
The curtain opened, revealing the earnestness behind it. “I’m trying not to eat so much. There won’t be any food left after a nuclear war.”
“Sonia,” I said.
She sighed and, looking wretched, squeezed shut her eyes. I popped the lid off, dug into the pink with the teaspoon, tapped on her pursed lips; reluctantly, they parted. As the ice cream melted inside her, I read the predicament on her face. She was an ascetic. Pleasure actually hurt her.
“How is it?”
“Delicious,” her anguished answer.
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“The meeting,” she said, and I took advantage of her reply to spoon more ice cream in. “What did you think?” she asked, coughing.
I doubted the plan they had—we had—for leafleting the Hyatt would bring us any closer to world peace, yet for those two and a half hours that we talked about it I felt less helpless, as though our death sentence had been temporarily stayed. I admitted to her now, though, that I didn’t want to get arrested. “My parents would kill me,” I said.
“You can be support with Dieter. It’s just as important.”
The Sky Is Falling Page 11
