Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “P.K.!” The Steadicam guy and the stunt double, a disconcertingly pale, double-jointed woman who went by the name The Body, were playing hackeysack with a vigour born of pent-up energy (sexual? drug-induced? feigned? Can such a thing be feigned?) that Patrick himself hadn’t felt for weeks, even months. They gestured to him. Stoked. Always stoked. He put his hands to the small of his back, exaggeratedly wincing, indicating no-can-do, and tapped his watch face with what he hoped was a purposeful look.

  Patrick Kakami, who had just turned thirty-three two months ago, the same age as Jesus Christ was when he died (and Alexander the Great and John Belushi, men of untethered ambition all—stoked?), felt old, much older than he had any right to. It was as if his recently replaced mitral valve had kick-started an accelerated aging process; this ticker he called his “pig heart” triggering a sped-up degeneration of living tissue. Cell death racing along like actors in a Mack Sennett picture. It was 2009. And time itself was melting, oozing over the edge of his days like Dali’s clocks.

  Patrick made a deal with himself, right there, right then, feet planted in mud, rain misting his rimless glasses, his compromised heart in his mouth, as small and sour as a dried apricot, to reclaim some essential part of himself before it was too late, before the bastards (they, them) did him in.

  After all, Syd Gross, whom he trusted, who was his friend, had allowed those eunuchs at CBC, their “broadcast partner,” to talk him into cutting the scene in Rain Dog that meant the most to Patrick—the scene he now thinks of in eulogy as the Rosetta Stone of the entire picture. He couldn’t even bear to think about the concessions necessitated by the Chinese co-production deal.

  All around him, little dramas, micro-movies, were being played out. Gideon-spouting actor David Mathers was engaged in a flirty game of cat’s cradle with the thirteen-year-old Victoria girl who played the novitiate, Sister Incarnata. Mathers with his high beams on, the girl’s fingers hopelessly tangled, her laughter like a cat choking on cream. Gita Chapelle, rogue actress, was napping high up in Old Gnarly, one dirty bare foot dangling off her protest platform. The Body pumped her legs like pistons, tossing the footbag from one knee to the other as the nun extras gathered around her counting out loud, urging her on with her pointless task.

  The light filtering through the canopy of old-growth cedars and Douglas firs made everything look as if it were being shot in stop-motion. As if all these people were puppets or Claymation figures, their movements exaggerated, grotesque.

  Patrick’s skin tightened against his skull.

  And the first AD still standing there, rattling the script in his face as if he hadn’t already answered her question.

  Months back, before all the real problems with the production began—before the second female lead took to an enormous Douglas fir, nicknamed Old Gnarly, with a megaphone and an endless supply of energy bars and Red Bull to protest against globalization (as far as Syd knew, she was still up there, may she choke on her armpit hairs), before he had to negotiate the crazy deal points for the director of photography, a high-school pal of Kakami’s whose head had swelled to the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters after working on Lethal Weapon 4 as the clapper loader (just recalling the initial deal letter made Syd clutch at a phantom pain somewhere in the vicinity of his heart), before Syd found out that Kakami had gone AWOL (as in vanished without a trace, poof! as if the man had never existed—described this way to Syd by the hysterical location manager as though Kakami had performed a magic trick)—before all this, before they could secure the permit to shoot on the rainforest island, on native land, Syd Gross had had to attend a sweat lodge ceremony.

  How bad could it be, he’d thought, it’s just a sauna, right? A friend of his who’d taken part in one during an Outward Bound course said it helped him relieve his aggression. “I didn’t feel like killing anyone for about a month,” he told Syd.

  The only access to the island was by private boat after taking the ferry from the mainland to the Sunshine Coast and driving north, taking yet another ferry, and driving some more. Syd had been told to bring light, comfortable clothing, a gift for the elders (cloth, tobacco), and “no big-city attitude.” This was conveyed to him by a spokesman for the Sliammon People, a guy called Porgie, the same man who arrived to pick up Syd and his assistant at the dock on the reserve. (“Have your people call my People,” Porgie said afterwards, laughing at his own joke and flashing his teeth.)

  Kakami was already on the island, ebullient as usual despite his media rep for a studied cool. He waved around something that looked like a gargantuan cigar. “Grossman!” He jogged towards Syd, his location manager, Drew, drifting along behind him. Drew was a thin, bald Eurasian with hypothyroid Bette Davis eyes who disturbed Syd because he couldn’t tell if this Drew person was male or female and was embarrassed to ask anyone, even Patrick.

  “These beautiful people, Syd, they’ve already put us to work. Smell this!” Kakami thrust the oversized cigar thing under Syd’s nose. “I made it myself.”

  He stood there grinning, like a little kid awaiting praise for a kindergarten project.

  “It’s a smudge stick,” Drew told him. “You light it et voila.”

  “I know what it is,” said Syd, who had no idea. Was he supposed to smoke it or use it to ream out Kakami for dragging him out to this repository of excessive greenery and spiritual wankery. You want to make a movie about nuns, what’s wrong with Montreal or Boston?

  He slapped his hands together to change the subject. “So, let’s get this fucking show on the road.”

  His assistant, Helene, the latest in a series of dun-coloured and quietly efficient young women Syd had hired because he found them reassuring, like a school secretary or a crossing guard, pulled him aside. “There’s something you need to know about the site of the sweat lodge. These people? They consider it sacred?”

  “You’re asking me or telling me?”

  “I’m just saying, maybe, you know, cut down on the language and whatnot?”

  Porgie led a small group over to Syd. “Our elder, Charlie Louie,” he said, introducing an old man in a blue plaid shirt and saggy jeans, who had the purest white hair Syd had ever seen. The elder held out his hands, palms up. Syd remembered then that he’d forgotten the gift, what was it? Candles? Canned goods? Helene unwound the scarf from around her neck and dangled it in front of him. Hermès—her family must have money. Note to self, Syd thought with a flush of bonhomie towards Helene, possible investors. He draped the scarf across the elder’s palms. “We come in peace,” Syd said, and beside him he could feel Helene wincing. The old man smiled and tied the scarf around his head babushka-style, eliciting a round of congenial laughter. There was something about rituals in general that gave Syd the heebie-jeebies, and right now he was feeling them down to his pinky toes.

  Porgie introduced the others: a woman with sad eyes whom Syd thought would be attractive enough if she did something with her hair and ditched the shapeless button blanket; a young, broad-shouldered man, hair long and glossy, in a tight T-shirt that read There Is No Planet B; another old man, though not as old as Charlie Louie, who was frighteningly obese. Porgie, with his big smile and his annoying habit of lightly touching others on the arm with feigned intimacy, had something of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins about him. Even his teeth looked optimistic, preternaturally white and large. Southern California teeth. Syd had seen enough sets of these to know.

  “Nice offering,” Kakami said.

  “What did you bring?”

  “A slide box of Cohíba Esplendidos.” Kakami pronounced this in commanding Spanish, practically horking on the h. When had he had time to teach himself that?

  As Porgie explained the sweat lodge—how it was made with bent willow branches draped with animal hides; the sacred rock pile outside heated by the elder and then carried inside and placed in a hole dug in the centre—Syd felt as if he were back in grade five Social Studies class. The thing actually looked like a grade five Soc
ials project, a dome shape messily covered with skins and army blankets. Kakami, across from him, looked fascinated, though.

  “You will experience a purification,” Charlie Louie told them. “Some of you maybe even what we call a rebirth— through earth, fire, water, and air. You will get very hot. Just breathe evenly, drink lots of water, pay attention to the elements. If you get too hot, ‘Don’t Panic,’ to quote Douglas Adams. Please feel free to leave.” With that, he made his way into the lodge, bending slightly to get through the opening as Porgie held up the flap.

  Syd signalled for Helene to go in ahead of him, to case the joint as it were. He was feeling queasy with anxiety. Helene just stood where she was, clutching her day planner to her chest.

  “I can’t go in. I’m on my moon,” she told him.

  “You’re on what?”

  “Her cycle,” Kakami said.

  “What?”

  “She’s on the rag,” Drew said loudly.

  Syd did not want to be listening to this. “How the hell would they know that?”

  “They emailed a form and I figured full disclosure was in the spirit of the thing,” Helene said. “Don’t worry, I filled out yours, too,” she added, although this was exactly the kind of thing Syd worried about.

  He practically had to crawl into the sweat lodge on his hands and knees, moving from a filtered daylight to deep shade. When the opening flap was lowered, there descended a darkness so intense Syd felt as if he’d dropped ten floors in an elevator. As Charlie Louie muttered what sounded like an incantation or a nursery rhyme, water hit the rocks with a shocking hiss, and the dry, musty, animal-smelling heat became choking wet and tarry.

  More steam, and strong smells—body odours and something else, something fecund rising from the earth. Syd was riding a boat along a tributary of the Congo, naked young men poised on the banks with poison arrows. A place Syd had never been, possibly the last place on earth he’d want to go. He even heard the cry of a shrike. He’d had his share of psychotropic experiences, courtesy of his cousin Diggory who’d been the go-to guy in their high-school yeshiva program and was now involved in helpful cosmetic pharmacology, but Syd had never been this inside and outside of himself at the same time.

  It felt as if hours had passed, but by his glowing watch dial Syd could see it had been less than fifteen minutes. The sweat in his ear canals trickled, a sensation like blood pooling. Within the scrim of darkness he began to make out forms around him in the lodge, hazy at first and then cohering into solid shapes. He would wonder afterwards if he had been hallucinating, but at the time it all looked so very real. Much later in his life, long after it became clear to him that the things he had witnessed on the island were a kind of twisted gift, he would never completely shake the feeling that somehow the spirits had mistaken him for someone else. Someone more worthy.

  He saw a startlingly violet bruise on Drew’s previously flawless neck and a pallor that betrayed low white blood cell counts, her (or his?) already bulging eyes protruded, yellowed in their sockets. Porgie, in a smart suit, was busy thumbing on a BlackBerry, somewhere in bright sunshine. The fat elder’s pant leg was pinned up at the left knee, empty. The young muscular guy sat slumped in a jail cell, glossy hair shaved to his scalp, a scar running from lip to right eye, a railroad of track marks on his inner arms. The almost beautiful sad-eyed woman gave off a glow, she was so hugely pregnant.

  But when Syd looked towards Kakami he saw nothing. Only heard him, a loud, disembodied voice, talking nonsense: The darkness represents human ignorance. The sacred site is just one stop along your hero quest towards an authentic life. Why didn’t Porgie or the elder tell him to shut up? Could it be that only he could hear him?

  Syd staggered out of the sweat lodge, Kakami’s eerie voice in his head, every sense stinging against the open air, and walked shakily through scrub, across the barnacle-encrusted rocks to the shoreline, bivalves breathing so loudly he could hear them—sucking in air, blowing it out. Everything breathing too loudly; his own lungs like bellows stoking a blacksmith’s fire. Westward, in the distance, a bald eagle rose, a fat, dripping chum salmon in its grip. Just beyond that, Syd saw a scaly creature lurch from the water, mythic, voracious, a Trump Tower of serrated teeth and shipwrecked breath. It rushed towards the shore, the ocean in its wake rising in a terrifying sheet. Seabirds squawked and wheeled overhead.

  The sad-eyed woman—Syd’s vision of her, as she was in reality still back in the sweat lodge—now stood on a rocky outcropping, hand on her weighted belly; she opened her mouth, but out came not a scream, nothing so operatic, but a tiny person, curled like a fern. She sent it floating towards Syd on a breeze, buoyant and breathing. Syd turned and ran inland as fast as he could, slack muscles clenching, his breath a living thing, an animal spirit scrabbling for purchase, scraping at his throat.

  The others remained in the lodge, sweating, tranquil, and unaware of Syd’s terror.

  “Sacred sites are traditionally inaccessible to the ignorant and insincere, to the cynical and mean-spirited,” Porgie said, flashing those teeth, as he motored them all back across to the reserve’s dock a few hours later, after the seafood feast and traditional dancing.

  Syd was insincere and cynical, and sometimes even mean-spirited (ignorant, he couldn’t credit), so then why him? He wasn’t an “honest pilgrim.” He was an opportunist, and a good one at that.

  All through the celebration he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Drew, the fat man, and the young Planet B stud in their dissipation—although Porgie in the bespoke suit and the glowing, sad-eyed woman who had kept looking at him had been disturbing in their own way. Was it some manifestation of the future he’d seen, Syd wondered, not for the last time, or was he just fucked up?

  Kakami declared he felt cleansed, while Drew attested to a new sense of calm and opened pores. “I don’t think my skin’s ever looked so good!” Porgie just smiled that smile of his, and Helene fussed with her day planner.

  Syd couldn’t head back to Toronto fast enough. He’d gone straight from Pearson International to his box seat at the SkyDome, and afterwards a booth at the Risky Brisket surrounded by women who may or may not have been on their moons, or even on the moon, but at least he didn’t have to hear about it. Sacred sites, indeed, he’d thought, as he raised a glass of his favourite fat, chewy Grenache and toasted civilization.

  And now he has to head back into the mouth of the beast. Fucking Kakami.

  The story that was bothering Patrick, the one he couldn’t shake, he’d overheard on the way over to the Sunshine Coast on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay.

  At first he’d thought the two jittery guys mainlining coffee and White Spot fries were film students brainstorming on a title for their yet-to-be-written first feature. They batted names back and forth like a shuttlecock. Chronic, Genie of the Lamp, White Smurf, Black Bart, Big Buddha Cheese. When they got to Oracle Bud, Patrick finally realized what they were talking about.

  “Finest B.C. Kush—beautiful bag appeal, really resinous— all hauled away in garbage bags,” one of them had said in an aggrieved tone. It turned out that the “doofus” who tended to the grow-op had fallen asleep reading to his son. (“Remember Goodnight Moon, I loved that one. The bowl of porridge and all that shit.” “Bowl of mush.” “I thought it was porridge.” “That was The Three Bears.” “I hated that story.” “Goodnight Moon would be an awesome name for a band.”)

  Evidently, the toddler, with the man he knew as Daddo (a.k.a. Frankie) slumbering beside him, had played around with the man’s cellphone and managed to speed-dial 911. The police arrived to find no emergency, but rather a distinctive and familiar scent emanating from the basement. One of the guys on the ferry said, “Neighbours told the cops they’d always thought something around the house smelled skunky, but they thought it was a skunk.” The other guy snorted. “Skunky!”

  What if this Daddo, this Frankie, was the best father in the world, Patrick had thought, bad career choice notwithstanding?


  And where was the mother? How could she not know?

  Patrick, who had, up until that moment, been a believer in the church of coincidence, wondered, what cosmic jester caused things like this to happen?

  Just then, the ferry captain had announced a pod of orcas portside, and the two guys jumped up, sloshing their coffee, newly animated.

  “‘Baby Beluga,’ remember that one? Ralphie somebody.”

  “Raffi…”

  “That’s a guy’s name?”

  Patrick told all this to the set-dec PA who scrambled along beside him as he strode through dripping fir trees away from the set where the nun extras were gathering for Gong Li’s big monologue as the outgoing Mother Superior who has fallen in love with a B.C. permaculturalist. The part about God opening a door when he closes a window.

  Or was it the other way around?

  “Big Buddha Cheese?” the kid asked.

  “Big Buddha Cheese,” Patrick said. “But that’s beside the point. The point is, will that child, when grown up, ever think: That was the first day of the rest of my life? Think about that.”

  Patrick was by then loping along so quickly the kid couldn’t keep up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You tell Sydney Gross,” he called back to the PA, “that this is the first day of the rest of my life. And maybe his.”

  Because.

  “Does this mean we’re breaking early for lunch?” the kid yelled. But Patrick was gone, swallowed by the trees that remained silent and dripping.

  Syd hustles along Hastings, looking to signal a cab. He managed to disentangle himself from the weeping filmmaker after pocketing the man’s business card in triplicate (“Reel Pictures.” Real original, thinks Syd) and making a number of promises he’s already consigned to his cranial delete file.

  No cabs in sight, and up ahead a mob appears to be moving towards him—placards, banners, cow bells, megaphones, people on stilts dressed as the Grim Reaper and Maggie Thatcher (!?), women juggling fire. Everywhere in this city there always seems to be someone walking on stilts or playing with fire, or both. Jesus Christ, he should’ve known better. He’s walked right into the Occupation.