From her dashboard, above the combat-grade instrument cluster with its eerily glowing global-positioning device, a hollow plastic Virgin Mary filled with holy water from Cap-dela-Madeleine, hands open at her sides, smiles wryly at Honey as if to say, Let me tell you about stiff upper lip.
It’s difficult to say just how badly Nina is sweating inside her Olympic mascot costume, as even under ideal circumstances she is the Lance Armstrong of perspiration. If there were an Olympic medal for sweating, there she’d be, on the tier of the podium closest to heaven, her Athens-vintage Roots singlet plastered to her body, brandishing gold. She blames her Eastern European heritage, something hirsute and unfavourable embedded in her twist of DNA, combined with a childhood of pork fat, too many root vegetables, and polyester stretch pants. Yet there is something distinctly working class about excess sweat, which is why she’s never followed up on her mother’s suggestion (may she squirm in eternal unrest) that she have some of her eccrine glands removed. I secrete therefore I am, Nina liked to scoff. And really, is there anything more bourgeois than elective surgery?
This is where a lifelong commitment to battling environmental degradation has led her. She is a thirty-eight-year-old woman lumbering around Granville Island Public Market dressed like a roly-poly Vancouver Island marmot, an animal that in real life is about to tip into the abyss, but who crookedly grins from all the banners spanning the city’s bridges, and whose smaller but no less roly-poly Beanie Baby™ version is clutched by American and British and German and Japanese children passing through upgraded security at the Vancouver International Airport, children who (kids will be kids) Olympics organizers are counting on to relentlessly badger their parents to bring them back four years from now for the Games (cue visual of Eternal Flame).
Community service, they call it. Her week-long jail sentence has been commuted to this: a month of waddling through zombie-like crowds anaesthetized by all manner of smoked salmon tidbits. Nina waves in what she’s decided is a jaunty manner, while giving the finger from safely inside a fat, plush paw to anyone who has a sharp crease ironed into her professionally laundered jeans or looks even remotely aware of what a stock option is. Armies of pigeons swoop low overhead at regular intervals in eerily coordinated phalanxes. Toddlers lurch erratically at the birds that land on the wharf outside the market. Gulls screech and dive for rogue french fries with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. In the distance, a guitarist is trying to bring a Roberta Flack tune back from the dead. There are many who call this paradise.
Two teenaged girls stop in front of Nina. It’s fall already, but they wear halter tops, nipples on high alert like shark fins patrolling the dangerous fabric, and too much kohl, making their porcine eyes look even smaller and meaner. By now sweat has puddled in Nina’s sneakers, moisture squelching between her toes as if she’s been traipsing through Burns Bog. She still has over an hour left to go. One of the girls starts poking at Nina’s marmot belly. “He’s soooo cute! Aren’t you cute?” The girl makes her mouth go all round and tight and bends over, feigning a blow job. The other one holds her sides and shrieks in that way only fourteen-year-old girls can.
To hell with this. Nina wants to whack them, to wreak revenge for tens of thousands of bus passengers and moviegoers who’ve been held hostage over the years by potty-mouthed, hysterically shrieking adolescent girls, and in fact raises a padded hand to swat at them—already picturing the crowd parting like the Red Sea while some heroic German tourist, a Heinz, a muscled tool-and-die maker from Mönchweiler, drops his smoked salmon kebab or salmon fajita and springs forward to wrestle the crazed Olympic mascot to the ground (Sayonara, community service! Hello, jail!)—when, at the outer edge of her field of vision, which is pretty limited considering the marmot head and the sweat stinging her eyes, she sees Dan and Patricia O’Donnell. Not a couple with a vague resemblance to the pair in the magazine ad, but them. Or a perfect simulacrum.
Patricia is sniffing a fennel bulb. She holds it out to Dan and then laughs as the licorice-scented fronds tickle his nose and he lightly shakes his head. The moment looks scripted (cue tinkling laughter), and Nina can’t help but glance over her shoulder for a camera crew and klieg lights. A small boy in a private-school uniform stands between them, reaching for the fennel. As the three walk away, hand in hand, a luminous arc of white light envelops them. A trick of the late-afternoon sun.
No. A vision. But Nina, who’s been a determined unbeliever for years, no longer has the vaguest notion of what it means to be confronted by a vision.
How can we measure disbelief? How many cubic tonnes of topsoil and almost impenetrable glacial till and granitic bedrock must be removed without recovering a single wall stud, newel post, or fragment of ceramic tile, how far into the substrata must workers delve without a trace of the chef-quality Amana gas range or the collection of stubby beer bottles (bought at auction), how many heavy-equipment operators must make limp jokes about digging a hole all the way to China and shake their heads at the homeowners’ evident derangement as they ask them to excavate just one metre deeper, how many times must their daughter sob, But I don’t want a new Costa-Rica-Survivor Barbie™, I want my Costa-Rica-Survivor Barbie™, before the bereft owners—who cringe at anything that smacks of the supernatural, pretend to gag at the words chakra and aura, and roll eyes skyward when anyone speaks of faith— must accept the unfathomable? Their house, all 3,217 square feet of it, and its entire contents have vanished without a trace.
Then there’s the dog. A formerly amiable wheaten terrier who circles the perimeter of the yawning pit, endlessly snuffling at the loose earth, snapping at anyone who comes near, possibly mourning in his canine brain a soggy tennis ball left on the mat by the back door, or a beloved chew toy (the peppermint-scented Orbee bone) that felt so good against his aging gums, or simply an ambient memory of a sweet spot in the master bedroom where the late-afternoon September sun edged through the skylight and onto the kilim rug where he wasn’t technically allowed but where he whiled away the empty hours in a kind of existential bliss.
Dan and Patricia are everywhere, spreading like toxic mould. On the No. 14 bus on Hastings a few days ago, Patricia looked primly at Nina from the dimly backlit panel ad, eyebrows winched skyward, as Nina glared back. If you’re looking for the best of everything, sister, you’re on the wrong bus. Dan still had his smirk, but didn’t meet her eyes. He looked out past her at a young woman wearing a Happy Planet T-shirt that appeared to have been designed for an eight-year-old and shakily crunching Doritos, sallow pad of her stomach overexposed between the well-worn shirt and her low-riders, studded white belt pockmarked with cigarette burns, a rail yard criss-crossing her inner arms. Nina could’ve sworn Dan had to adjust his pants at the crotch.
Even the billboard at the entrance to Granville Island, just the other day advertising the delights of the Vancouver Aquarium and its imprisoned beluga population, now shows the couple, toothy smiles set on stun, in their kitchen, an assault of stainless-steel surfaces and grey-blue slate. Patricia is poised to slice a fennel bulb. The knife in her hand glints under halogen light while Dan leans across the cooking island as if whispering something naughty in her ear. Here’s the really weird thing. They look less like Dan and Patricia than the real Dan and Patricia Nina saw last week on the wharf outside the market.
It’s only much later, when she’s trying to get back to sleep around four A.M.—the time she often wakes and can’t remember which side of her chest houses her heart, even though it’s thrumming so violently she fears the landlady will start pounding on the floor above her bed, yelling, “I thought I told you to keep it down!”—that it dawns on Nina: the real Dan and Patricia O’Donnell were not Caucasian like the actors in the ad, but Chinese. Tall for Chinese, but unmistakably Chinese. Odd that she hadn’t noticed at the time.
Never make the mistake of showing how much you really want something. That’s Honey’s philosophy. She reels in uncommitted buyers by appealing to their unclothed desires. If yo
u want four competing bids above list price on your aging ranch-style on Eagle Harbour Road, go ahead and give Honey Fortunata a call. Because Honey knows what to watch for and Honey doesn’t talk too much.
That childless couple in their mid-thirties, the wife who hovers a little too long in the doorway of a second bedroom? That fifty-eight-year-old civil engineer who seems disproportionately interested in the empty carriage house out back and mentions having gone to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design a lifetime ago? Honey knows just what to do. She calls them to come and take a second look; the sellers are very motivated (real estate code for getting a divorce).
The couple returns, and when the wife looks into the bedroom again she sees a pine crib with an Anne Geddes photograph above it of a baby dressed like a bumblebee. The room smells of talcum powder and a limitless future. Bewildered, she turns to Honey and says, “I didn’t notice a baby’s room before!” Honey smiles. “You went through so quickly last time.” The workaholic engineer returns to find the carriage house partially transformed into a painting studio, stretched canvases and splotches everywhere. “Excuse the mess,” Honey says, shrugging, “but the owner has this little hobby.”
But even Honey makes mistakes. That day two months ago when she finally tracked down Charity—her sister walking along Blood Alley with the herky-jerky marionette steps of an addict, small, untethered breasts straining against her Happy Planet T-shirt, while Honey negotiated with her pimp and dealer. He told her Charity had ripped off some very scary people and was alive only because of his personal munificence (although he called it something less poetic), and Honey had said, “Name your price.”
Nina holds a pair of ski poles awkwardly in her lumpy paws and pretends to slalom in slow motion through the Granville Island crowd watching Byron-from-England, a flame-haired, flame-juggling comedian who specializes in homophobic jibes. People step back to clear Nina a path and smile good-naturedly; children point and yell: “A bear!” (The marmot is actually a rodent, but no one on the Olympic Committee wanted kids pointing and yelling, “A rat!” so they’ve erred on the side of the ursine. After all, who, except for those trying to save the doomed Vancouver Island marmot, has actually ever seen one?) But there’s this one guy, a large man eating fries from a paper cone, who doesn’t budge. Just gives her a look Nina knows all too well because she’s seen it staring back at her in pale, aggrieved reflection from SkyTrain and shop windows and her own bathroom mirror.
The noise in her head is like one of those fireworks kids launch all through the night at Halloween, a high-pitched squealer that ends, not quite with a bang, but with a loud pop. Greetings, fellow misanthrope, now get the hell out of my way!
She heads straight for the French Fry Guy as if he’s the finish line, ski poles flailing to the left, to the right, to the left. A woman yells, “Curtis!” and yanks a Jack Russell on an extendable leash out of Nina’s way. Poles high in the air now, well over her head, sweat coursing from her armpits like ill-fated bison streaming over the last rise at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. With a warrior cry, Nina slams into the man and bounces backwards off him as if she’s a character in a Saturday-morning cartoon. You can practically hear the requisite Boing!
“Mascot busts a move!” someone announces, DJ-style. Nina’s head should be cracked open, her durian fruit of a brain fouling the sea-spiked air, but the marmot suit has cushioned the fall. She staggers to her feet to scattered applause, woo-hoos!, and the insistent, machine-gun laughter of someone going off his meds. The salmon eaters think it was all part of her act.
As she straightens, Nina sees the same little boy in the private-school uniform from last week standing in front of her, like a miniature security guard in his blazer with its cheesy golden crest. The light behind his head is dazzling, reminding her that it hasn’t rained for several weeks; the reservoirs are unusually low, and residents have been asked to share baths and take short showers. Dan and Patricia no doubt still fill their Jacuzzi tub to the brim, hot water tumbling unchecked from the gilded modernist faucet. Nina pictures Dan sliding in behind Patricia, kneading the knots in the small of her back as she releases a tight little sigh, reluctantly, as if she’d never willingly let go of anything.
The sun fires the tips of the boy’s hair into a spiky penumbra, a hazy crown of thorns. He gazes up at Nina with something approximating concern in his eyes and reaches out.
A little hand in hers. It would be so easy.
Of course, there are those who say, “The mountain is angry.” The disappearances of the North Shore houses now number in the high hundreds, and as downtown hotels fill up with the moneyed homeless, letters to the local papers speak of Gaia’s revenge or God’s displeasure. To voice these kinds of beliefs in the wake of the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina would have invited instant censure. But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they’re being either cosmically punished or held up as “a warning to us all?” (Vancouver Sun editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces.
And that slurry of twittering that can be heard around every corner? That’d be the sound of schadenfreude.
Unlike those who act as if they’re on speed-dial to the Earth goddess—those men on recumbent bikes and those women who rub baking soda into their fuzzy armpits and think fetal-monitoring machines are the work of the devil—rationalists who’ve always harboured a secret penchant for Greek mythology know full well that Gaia is in fact the daughter of Chaos.
Still, there is talk of healing. The chief of the Squamish Nation is invited to say a few words over the deep hole where a house had stood, a place that was once tribal land. The event evolves into something rather ecumenical, with smudge sticks, button blankets, trickster stories, and didgeridoos. As a dog howls forlornly, the elder quotes from Chief Seattle’s famous 1854 speech. “It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will come, for even the White Man … We may be brothers after all. We will see.”
And the mountain in answer? Not so much as a burp.
“I didn’t know marmots could drive!” The boy twists and turns in the passenger seat of Nina’s car, punctuating each breathless pronouncement with body language. He has proved to have an insatiable appetite for all things marmot and an endless arsenal of exclamation marks. It’s as if he’s cornered the market on enthusiasm and is doling it out without regard for the niceties of supply and demand.
Nina envisions the look on Patricia’s face as she turns from applauding Byron-from-England’s Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket and padlocked chain to find her Cracker Jack prize of a son gone, and feels a rare frisson of self-satisfaction.
She is finding it hard to keep her paws on the steering wheel, and shoulder-checking is impossible with the mascot head still on. She doesn’t usually drive if she can help it and her mid-’70s Toyota Corolla is practically in its death throes, but this morning she was running late after a savage bout of insomnia, and trying to make her shift by bus was not an option. The walk back to her car, parked on a side street just outside Granville Island, felt impossibly long, with the boy chittering away at her side as he trotted to match her pace. But there were remarkably few people about and she’s fairly certain no one saw them get in the car and pull away.
It seems he’s only in kindergarten—what kind of people would put a five-year-old in a uniform, complete with blazer?— and that his teacher, whose name sounds something like Miss Peach (the boy talks so fast Nina can’t make out everything he’s saying), has made the Vancouver Island marmot the official class animal. “There’s only about a hundred of you left in existence!”
Nina nods. She tells him she’s come to the city as an ambassador for her fellow marmots, to make people understand that they have to stop hacking away at the old-growth forests and destroying their habitat.
“And they sent you because you’re the biggest!!”
“And because I’
m the only one who could drive a standard,” Nina says as the car shudders onto her street just off Commercial Drive. Breathing in her own expelled carbon dioxide in the confines of the car is making her giddy, as if her brain cells are multiplying too rapidly, spawning an overpopulated subsidized-housing project in her skull cavity.
In front of the just-completed reno on the corner, a hired gun in a surgical mask is blowing leaves from the lawn and the sidewalk with a backpack blower. They gust madly, whirling like the calendar pages in Citizen Kane before settling into the gutter. Nina can remember when there was a clear divide in the city, a line in the sand all parties respected. West of Main was where you found the leaf blowers, east of Main people still retained a genetic memory of how to wield a rake and a broom. But when property prices started spiking wildly there began a drift of Westside sensibilities into her formerly bohemian and Italian neighbourhood, along with their implements of destruction.
“Satan’s little helper,” she says.
“What?” says the boy.
“The two-stroke terrorist.” She points towards the leaf blower.
The boy’s eyes go wide. “My dad has one of those.”
She doesn’t answer, letting him draw his own conclusions. The boy sucks in his lips until his mouth disappears. Nina can feel the sweat pooling in her ears as the car grinds to a stop in front of her place.
It’s the leaf blowers that undo her every time. They’re the reason she’s trapped in this sauna-hell of a mascot costume in the first place. That day in late August, as Nina hurried along Napier to her shift at the food co-op, there was a woman out in front of the new heritage-style infill that towered over its neighbours; she was blasting a blower back and forth across her lawn as if she were divining for water. With her tidy silver-grey pageboy and batiked sarong wrapped around her sturdy, late-middle-aged body, she exuded an obnoxious serenity. The grass, smooth as a green sheet yanked tight over the yard and tucked in with hospital corners, appeared spotless save for a few stray leaves from a Japanese maple. Nina stopped, ignoring the warning in her head that was whooping like a car alarm, and stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips.
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Page 7