Free The Sky Is Falling by Caroline Adderson Page A

paths with Belinda in the hall or on the stairs, I’d be the one to blush. “Then why did she move out?” I asked.
    â€œIt was getting too intense,” Sonia said, disappearing inside the anorak then shucking it like a cocoon.
    â€œHow many people applied?”
    â€œTo move in? Lots.” She smiled. “I’m glad we picked you.”
    Belinda had picked me. She’d picked me to keep her boyfriend safe. I was offended. Hurt. I was sensitive. Overly sensitive, my mother told me all the time. “It’s not always about you,” she would say. Last year Kopanyev had written it on the bottom of my paper. And then the lights dimmed and the movie started and I didn’t think about the humiliation of being Belinda’s foil again, not for years and years.
    The funny bits were first, clips from old black and white Ronald Reagan movies and hokey newsreels from the war. I leaned back with my popcorn and my drink. Then Dr. Caldicott, lecturing in a pink blouse and pearls, began to describe what happened the morning the bomb fell on Hiroshima, her Australian accent counterpointing the chorus of angels on the soundtrack. I had seen footage of an atomic bomb exploding. It was not unfamiliar to me: a white ball of light gradually detaching from a flat plain of smoke, rising slowly, levitating, while underneath it a boiling pillar formed. Then the head, the ball, changed too, expanding, growing petals of ash. The glow inside was horrible, yet beautiful too, the way it folded in on itself and bloomed. And the angels sang higher and higher until they were keening, and the flattened city stretched before us, a treeless ruin. There were mountains behind it, just like Vancouver. That bomb was small, Dr. Caldicott said. Today’s hydrogen bombs were twenty megatonnes, equivalent to twenty million tonnes of TNT, and today the United States had 35 , 000 of these bombs, enough to kill every Russian forty times, while the Soviet Union had 20 , 000 bombs, enough to kill every American twenty times. The probability of a nuclear war occurring by 1985 , a little over a year away, was fifty-fifty. Many famous and brilliant scientists believed this to be true.
    I set my drink on the floor. It tipped over and some detached part of me could hear the can rolling all the way down to the front of the theatre. The other part listened as Dr. Caldicott explained in exact clinical detail what would happen in the event of a nuclear war. In the remaining eternal half-hour she presented to us our certain fate. How every person within six miles of the epicentre would be vaporized, then up to a radius of twenty miles killed or lethally injured, thousands severely burned. The film showed what these burns were like on Japanese survivors. I saw a skinless child lying on a cot, a man face down, his back a map, the countries burned on him, rivers of scars. Living people melted, like wax. We saw footage of houses imploding in nuclear test blasts, dummies being sucked out windows, dummies lying dismembered in the rubble. She warned us about the flying glass, the steel thrown around like toothpicks. What was left of the buildings would be lying in what was left of the streets. And if you looked at the blast even from forty miles away, if you happened just to glance at it, you would be blinded. As she said this, the hideous burned face of a living person turned its poached eyes toward us. Everything that was flammable within an area of three thousand square miles would start to burn, creating an unstoppable conflagration so that everyone idealistic enough to have taken refuge in the bomb shelters would be pressure-cooked or asphyxiated. Afterward, the millions of decaying corpses would cause uncontrollable outbreaks of disease—polio, typhoid, dysentery, plague—uncontrollable because no medical infrastructure would remain. Unlike in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there wouldn’t be an outside world to come and help.