Believing Cedric Read Online Free PDF Page B

corrosion, mechanical grease, and bird droppings. It made her think about how far this one car had travelled, how many times it had made its way across the country. Then she thought about that greater context, picturing the nation’s trains whistling over desolate tracks, then of its planes, like stubby pieces of chalk pressed sideways and pulling across the length of blueboard skies, and the night roads that stitched the cities together through a patchwork of cricket rumours and bat-fluttering expanses; binding us, dividing us.
    But these thoughts were soon interspersed by wonderings about school and debt, where she was going in life and why, about travel and where she would find the money to do it, thoughts about her chances of becoming just another woman living a mostly painless fifty-two-week-a-year emptiness, interrupted, at best, twice, by all-inclusive resort packages. Thoughts that the chances were pretty good.
    It’s interesting how countries, considered Melissa, have a way of having their way with us. Though, she countered, so does the world really, our biology, our nature, time, the cosmos. They all have their way with us. In the end, those inspirational posters and movies and New Age propaganda professing how one individual can make an enormous difference are wrong. In the end, there is room for our smallness, our insignificance. Infinite room.

October 23, 1962
    It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and Peter Kushnir was in his backyard striving for numbness, taking generous swigs from what was now his third glass of whisky. But it wasn’t working. Instead, with each coating of warmth that drained down his gullet, he felt his despair mount. Within hours, he was sure of it, a nuclear holocaust would sweep the globe as bare as a slate, and he couldn’t do anything— no one could do anything—to stop it.
    He was, however, doing a pretty good job of getting himself drunk. He had never had much tolerance for alcohol, only really partaking at Christmas and New Year’s get-togethers, retirement parties, and when he was handed a cup with an ounce of sour champagne at the railway yards, to be raised into the sooty air at the welcoming of another newborn. Other than that, he avoided it, convinced that drink was one of those things that made people turn on you, made seedy colleagues into friends and friends into enemies. Today, of course, none of that really mattered anymore.
    Peter emptied his glass and poured a fourth, the spout of the bottle wobbling above the edge of his tumbler. As the liquid neared the rim, he heard the distant sound of voices and laughter, which belonged to a group of boys who gradually came into view. The boys were walking along the crest of the coulee that his yard opened onto, and he recognized them as kids who lived in the neighbourhood on the other side of the draw.
    As they came closer, three of them broke into a jog and steered themselves down a long hill, their feet slapping at the dirt to keep up with their bodies. The last boy looked to be limping a bit, like he’d just twisted an ankle in a gopher hole or foolishly jumped from a branch that was too high, and so continued walking toward Peter’s house, where the trail that dipped down and crossed the draw wasn’t as steep or long. He recognized him as the Johnson kid, who lived close by and whose father worked down at the flour mill. Hearing the others call up to him, he learned that his given name was Cedric.
    He watched the boy as he limped along, oblivious to what was happening in the world, oblivious to the very volatility of his own existence. There he was, concerned about his sore ankle, about catching up with his friends, or maybe just about finding something sufficiently rotund to topple down the hill. Lost in play, on the eve of the Third World War. Much in the way, come to think of it, that Peter had been (for a short period at least) during the First World War. That was, until he had