I continued to look at her, and she looked back at me, and I tried to fathom what, if anything, was going on behind those brown eyes of hers, as the mob surged and roared through the city I called home. I pulled Heather close, hugging her in a way I hadn’t for decades, keeping her warm and safe against the flickering flames. My eyes stung—but surely it was from the smoke. Sirens blared from all directions, and we waited, my sister and I, together and yet oh-so-apart.
31
The rioting continued for hours. Fire trucks and ambulances were stymied by overturned cars and barricades made of whatever torn-down fences, garbage cans, recycling bins, loose lumber, and other junk people had pushed into the middle of the roads.
I had a plan that I hoped would get us to a safe haven, which started with having us backtrack along Main Street to Lombard Avenue. On the way, we saw another car being flipped, and three more that already had been. A pair of red Canada Post mailboxes had been knocked over, and one of them had spilled its contents onto the sidewalk. The building on our left had five large square ground-floor windows in a row, and Heather and I watched as a guy used a crowbar to smash each of them in turn, a perfect bingo of destruction.
We exited Lombard at Waterfront Drive by a railway bridge that crossed the hundred-meter width of the Red River. I’d hoped we could clamber up and get over to the residential neighborhood on the east side, but there were already a bunch of people on the tracks, the safety fencing having been torn down. And so, instead, Heather and I headed south along Waterfront Drive, the trees of Stephen Juba Park between us and the river on our left and the deserted Shaw Park baseball stadium on our right. The air was thick with smoke—some of it burning wood, some of it marijuana. We continued cautiously forward. Several of the streetlights high atop their standards looked like they’d been shot out with rifles.
Two young punks came at us from out of the row of trees, each brandishing a two-by-four. I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness, but it was clear we were going to be attacked when one of them said, “Holy shit! It’s Professor Marchuk!” They turned and hightailed it into the night.
My heart was pounding, and Heather looked scared to death as we continued cautiously along. One drunken guy lying in the grass waved a knife at us and called out in slurred voice, “Come here, asshole! I’ll cut your balls off!”
There was no way to make it the ten kilometers to my home on foot with Heather in high heels, and there was too much broken glass now for her to continue to go shoeless. But looming ahead to the south was the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now just a few hundred meters away.
We pushed forward, but if there was rioting in the Exchange District, there was rioting in The Forks, as well; I could hear a roar coming from that direction, and flames were licking up from just about exactly where I’d taken Kayla to dinner not that long ago.
Heather and I hurried along. We passed close to two guys involved in a knife fight—reminding me of that night all those years ago, except—
Except that night was just my imagination; this one was real—and so much worse. There was a scream from behind us as we pushed ahead, followed by someone growling, “That’ll teach you!”
Finally, we made it to the long, roofless, stone tunnel leading to the museum’s entrance. I pulled out my phone and scrolled until I found the number for the security desk, which I’d called occasionally in the past for after-hours access.
“CMHR Security,” said a man’s voice.
“Hello. This is James Marchuk. I’m on the Board of—”
“Oh, hi, Dr. Marchuk. This is Abdul.”
“Abdul, thank God! I’m just outside the main entrance to the museum; it’s crazy out here. Can you let me and my sister in?”
“Oh, my, yes—two secs,” he said, clicking off. We waited anxiously; it was more like two minutes than two seconds, and felt like two hours. At last, Abdul opened the farthest left of the four glass doors, and Heather and I scurried inside; the guard locked the door immediately behind us. “We’ve got three calls in to WPS for support,” Abdul said. “They’re trashing the grounds on the south side. The Gandhi statue has been toppled. It won’t be safe to leave again tonight.”
“God,” said Heather, shaking.
“Let me take you guys upstairs,” Abdul said. “At least there are couches you can sleep on.” We nodded, and he led us down the stone corridor and past the giant wall panels proclaiming in English and French, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the interior lighting was off, and I could only make the words out because I already knew what they said.
Much of the museum’s shell was made of glass, so when the sun came up the next morning, the building was filled with light. I hadn’t been aware of actually falling asleep, but I must have at some point because it was the brightness that woke me. I staggered out of the curator’s office I’d been sleeping in and went to find Heather.
She was standing at a railing, looking down at the alabaster-clad bridges crisscrossing the museum’s cavernous interior. I’d stood here before, also looking down, and the spectacle always reminded me of the scene in Forbidden Planet in which Dr. Morbius shows his visitors the twenty-mile-deep cubic interior of the dead-and-buried Krell city on Altair IV. Morbius’s words from that classic film popped into my head. The heights they had reached! But then, seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire history this all-but-divine race perished in a single night…
“Hey,” I said, joining my sister staring into the abyss. “You all right?”
“I guess.”
“Let’s see if we can get back to my place, okay?” I tried to make a joke of it. “It was bad enough being out there last night; wait till the school buses full of kids on field trips arrive here.”
“School’s out for the summer,” she said, her tone flat.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess it is.” And that’s when I turned around, looked out through the great curving glass, and saw the plumes of black smoke against the blood-red dawn.
It was a shocking bus trip back to my home. I was used to other passengers chatting with friends or having their heads bent down, thumb-typing on their phones, but everyone was looking out the streaked, dusty windows. Many people, including Heather, had mouths agape; the pedestrians I saw were likewise looking shell-shocked.
Of course, most of the damage was superficiaclass="underline" smashed windows, torn-down fences, obscene graffiti; there was only so much mayhem people who’d arrived unprepared could cause. Still, it was distressing to see, and the CJOB app said there had been eleven fatalities—one of which was almost certainly from the knife fight Heather and I had passed—and thirty more people were in hospital.
I’d called Kayla from the museum to let her know I was all right, but we only spoke briefly. She hadn’t been aware of the riots here; we arranged to Skype this evening.
The bus let us off at the far side of the strip mall from my condo building. We walked through its parking lot, past my building’s outdoor pool, into my lobby, and headed up. My unit had two washrooms but only one shower; we both desperately needed to clean up, but I let Heather go first. While she showered, I went out on the balcony and looked out at the river implacably rolling along. About fifty meters upriver from me, near one of the picnic tables, a couple of guys were fishing.