Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Evidently an army of career activists along with a number of the genuinely dispossessed took over the streets around the city’s historic Woodward’s Building in 2002. And here they still are, seven years later. It’s become a holy site for some, like Benares. Pilgrims come, drawn by ethical tourism and the revolving red W up on high, and are allowed to pitch their tents after making a donation. The country’s poorest postal code now has its own official designation, sort of like the Vatican, a sovereign city state.

  The squatters are sponsored by Roots and equipped with the latest in leather backpacks and Che caps. The Dalai Lama has visited, as well as Richard Branson, who arrived in a Virgin hot-air balloon. Buffy Sainte-Marie even tried to adopt half-native triplets whose mother had OD’d shortly after giving birth, but the children were deemed better off being raised in their own culture. It takes a village and all that jazz. Kakami told him this over beers in some atrocious hole with terry-cloth slipcovers over the tables that the director lauded for its authenticity. Patrick was excited about the movie possibilities, but negotiating with the actual squatters was brutal. Their people had people. Syd’s convinced he could more easily bring the Taliban to heel.

  He turns up Cambie to avoid the festivities but there’s a broken sewer main flooding the street, carrying with it the effluvia of the Downtown Eastside, a flotilla of cigarette butts, bottles, broken high-heeled shoes, syringes, falafel wrappers, a swollen paperback copy of The Kite Runner, and an aluminum crutch. Does he head upriver or turn back and make his way through the crush of demonstrators?

  Syd takes one more look at the chanting throng and bends down to roll his sport slacks above his knees. Then, briefcase held high over his head, he begins the portage.

  Because.

  Because the kernels from the bottom of the popcorn bag at the Ridge had always wedged between his front teeth in a way that felt so good but verged on pain, a pain that he had borne, Patrick thought, rather bravely.

  Because of his mother’s unexpectedly cool fingers on his lips while they watched late-night movies on the basement television in those weeks leading up to his first surgery, telling him she’d always wanted to be a nun—but don’t tell your father. How seriously he’d held that secret to his sickly boy chest, their secret, as if it had really mattered. Had it even been true? The existence of a cosmic jester never entering his mind back then.

  With his pig heart beating time, Patrick Kakami lopes through the island forest that expands around him, sloughing off old skin as if he’s a snake.

  “The things we do to keep on keepin’ on,” the helicopter pilot says to Syd over the juddering of the rotors and engine roar. “Me, I pretend I’m choppering over Nam.”

  “Nam?”

  “Viet. Like in that Kakami movie.” He makes big googly eyes and waggles his tongue to simulate craziness—at least Syd hopes it’s a simulation.

  “You mean Coppola.” Yet the notion of Kakami making a war movie isn’t that far-fetched. He has the earnestness and passion, the requisite sense of moral absolutes that Syd himself lacks. He tightens his seat belt. The blue-green Pacific and rocky island shorelines pierced with towering evergreens are far below. Toy scenery, an art director’s mock-ups. There are no more mysteries, the whole wide world is charted and toe-tagged, but that knowledge does little to lessen Syd’s unease.

  “Ride of the Valkyries” crackles into Syd’s headset.

  “Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning!” whoops the pilot, pulling back hard on the joystick.

  When Syd had arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal by cab a couple of hours earlier, his shoes and socks reeking of sewage, it was mired in chaos. The Queen of Coquitlam had rammed the marina, sinking several pleasure craft and damaging the ferry dock. Sailings were cancelled for at least the remainder of the day. People swarmed the wharf, cellphones pressed to temples or thumbs busily texting their loved ones or their lawyers, while gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Syd bought himself a pair of drugstore sandals and chartered a helicopter to get to the island location.

  While he’d waited by the makeshift landing pad beside the ferry terminal’s parking lot, two ferret-faced guys sprawled on the curb behind him, slurping coffee and muttering together. One of them shredded a paper napkin as if wreaking vengeance on a life-long enemy. “And that guy who plays Voldemort and calls himself Rafe, what’s that about? It’s spelled Ralph.”

  His buddy shrugged.

  “It’s British,” Syd said.

  “Huh?”

  “Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles. If you go in for that kind of thing.”

  “Twinkletoes? Effin’ Brits. That is just so wrong.”

  The other guy eyed Syd suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m a movie producer.”

  They had looked him over: his orange-and-green flip-flops and rolled-up, sewage-splotched pants, his shirt half hanging out over the front of the slacks—and guffawed. “Yeah right.” One of them had proffered him a fat joint.

  In the confines of the helicopter, the cheap sandals exude a warm rubber smell that clogs Syd’s nostrils. And they’re giving his toes wedgies. He’s so uncomfortable he may as well add a butt thong and call it a day. Syd feels naked, almost impotent, stuck in a shuddering tin can half a mile above sea level with a madman, his feet exposed—their pale flesh and untended toenails proclaiming: Here is a man no longer in complete control of the situation. If only he’d stayed wharf-side in his own stinking hand-stitched Italian footwear with Cheech and Chong Jr., fired up the doobie (did people still call them doobies?), and said to hell with Kakami, the production, and the whole freaking business.

  “Island looks bigger,” Syd says on approach, the helicopter still in one piece despite the pilot’s Kilgore impressions.

  “Always does from the air.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.”

  As they circle lower, Syd sees something far below in a clearing moving swiftly. A deer, a bobcat?

  “Someone’s in an awful hurry,” says the pilot.

  A man?

  “Mr. Gross? Mr. Gross!” The first AD, with her truncheon-wielding Afrikaner accent, moves in on Syd as he lurches from the helicopter. She runs hunched over, one hand holding down her frothing mass of hair, the other waving a clipboard, pages fluttering from it crazily in the downdraft. Drew follows, sobbing, and a pissed-off David Mathers, complaining in a loud, over-enunciating voice that he’s due to shoot a guest spot for Little Mosque on the Prairie in two weeks less a day and this better not yada, contract, yada yada, residuals, et cetera. A pale, double-jointed woman in a glittering gymnastics leotard appears at Syd’s elbow, whispering (why whispering?) something about a Cirque de Soleil audition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The nuns, all in swimsuits or yoga gear, swarm over. The Stay Puft–headed DOP brings up the rear, piggybacking a teenaged girl, the Victoria jailbait who plays the baby nun.

  They converge on Syd like a kind of ooze, their hopes and dreams, their messy lives, their schedules thrust at him as if he were Jesus Christ Superstar healing lepers. Syd holds out his hands, palms outward, both steadying himself and fending them off. The helicopter tilts up and away behind him.

  One by one the actresses who play the nuns turn blue-grey and waterlogged. They flop onto their backs or fronts, still and swollen, seemingly floating. The first AD opens her mouth, tongue clawing for air. Out of her left nostril scuttles a small brown crab, followed by another and another. The DOP has a gash in his gut where it’s been impaled by a tree branch. It sticks out the other side, looking for all the world like a cheap illusionist’s trick, save for the all-too-real blood. Minutes pass, or hours, then, as if someone’s pulled focus and upped the volume, they’re all their own clamouring selves again.

  The weather is unseasonably warm for early October; the air on Syd’s toes disconcerting but not entirely unpleasant. “Okay, okay. Can someone tell me exactly what�
�s going on?” Please God, no, not the squawk. He sounds like a seagull. “When was the last time anyone saw Kakami?”

  The ghostly gymnast places a hand on Drew’s chest. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” Syd resists the urge to give the distressed location manager a hug. He’s through with dispensing hugs.

  “One minute he was standing right there.” After another intake and outtake of air, Drew points towards a spot a few feet away. “And the next minute—”

  “I know, poof, gone, without a trace. Not even a whiff of sulphur.”

  Drew crosses his (her?) arms. “You don’t have to believe me. I know what I saw.”

  The first AD is composed but seething; her hair appears to move of its own accord, like a nest of vipers. “I was conferring with Mr. Kakami about the shooting script late-morning but he appeared distracted. He cut the scene in which Mother Superior has the vision of playing soccer with the Shaolin monks. Without any explanation. Miss Gong Li refuses to come out of her yurt.”

  “Let me think,” Syd says. “All of you, go. Frolic, yoga, or whatever it is you do for fun here. Just let me think a minute.”

  A kid, some PA or other in a Rain Dog T-shirt, orange hair shaved to his scalp, round blue eyes like a baby’s, shyly approaches him. “Mr. K. talked to me right before he disappeared. He told me only to tell you. The stuff he told me.”

  “So, tell me.”

  The boy moves closer, taking up a greater portion of Syd’s personal space than he deems kosher. Syd inches back gingerly, like you would from an unpredictable small animal clutching a treasure to its chest, maybe a squirrel with a nut. “He talked about everything. He talked about love. He made me see things aren’t always the way they seemed.” The boy is flushed, his tone reverent, speaking with a kind of dangerous devotion that makes Syd wonder what had been going on on this island these past few weeks. “His voice, it was like he was all voice, you know. I’d never noticed that about him before.”

  “He talked to you about love?”

  “It’s not what you think. It was pretty general, not advice about girls and stuff. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I can’t explain it the way he did. And he told me to tell you, ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ And maybe yours.”

  “Yours?”

  “No, yours.”

  So no magical disappearing act after all—sudden, but not entirely uncalculated.

  Above them, high in Old Gnarly, Gita Chapelle stirs on her platform and calls down through her megaphone, “It’s karma, man!” She sounds as if she’s woken up from a year-long nap.

  “Someone, you”—Syd points to a teamster who’s leaning against a tree working his way through a book of Sudoku puzzles—“get me a ladder.”

  “Union regulations—”

  “Stick your union up your ass!” In Syd’s rage the squawk is transformed into something terrifying, even grand—the ugly duckling now a beautiful but pissed-off swan.

  The PA materializes in front of Syd with an extension ladder under his arm. In the muted, rainforest light he looks like a younger Kakami. The teamster mutters, “Scab,” and goes back to chewing on his pencil.

  “What’s your name? I want to remember it when we’re cutting cheques.”

  “Ivan. Ivan O’Neil. You’re going to find him?”

  “I’m going to find him and then I’m going to wring his fucking neck.”

  There is no time for Syd to process that he’s climbing a tree in bare feet in the middle of nowhere as he struggles onto Gita Chapelle’s platform and grabs her megaphone. “Kakami! Patrick Kakami!!”

  Silence, save for the distant surf and the occasional forced screech from the scattering nuns as the DOP runs about goosing them, a rabid fox in the henhouse.

  “KA-KAAA-MIIIII!”

  Somewhere, far from shore, a glistening chinook salmon twists in a neat double helix through the water. Singing about oceans. Singing about love.

  Because.

  Because here is the movie, all around us. Here is the never-ending story. Patrick shoots and edits simultaneously as he moves through the rainforest, effortlessly synching sound with picture. Here there are no cuts, no retakes, no stopping to powder the immobile brows of Botoxed beauties, to reload film, to change a light gel, to wait around all afternoon for an all-too-brief magic hour in order to score the money shot.

  The layers of sound this deep in the forest are phenomenal. Even the mushrooms sing their song, in dozens of fungal dialects all eager to be heard. The lichen and the tree moss, hanging like Triton’s beard, fizz and whisper. Here filtered light colludes with leaf and fern, evoking a sensation akin to being in the womb. Here is the green force that drives a fuse through every flower—both redeemer and destroyer.

  Patrick begins a tracking shot of this city of trees to rival the fetishized one in I Am Cuba.

  This one’s for dreaming sons and their mothers everywhere—

  And where he stops, nobody knows.

  “You’ll want some real shoes.” Porgie rummages around in his rowboat, the inside of which is a midden of thrift-store castoffs and ropes of varying thickness. He hands Syd a well-worn pair of some kind of high-tech hiking boot. They’re surprisingly comfortable, considering he isn’t wearing socks and the tongues and laces are stiff and crusty with dried seawater.

  After an hour or so of placating cast and crew, enduring the amplified taunts of Gita Chapelle and the biblically infused curses of David Mathers, and trying to reach an uncharacteristically AWOL Helene in Toronto, Syd had called the only person in the vicinity he could trust, and who also had a BlackBerry. His relief on seeing the Sliammon man with his whitening-strip smile and his sardonic brown eyes putter into sight from across the water was embarrassing—like a small child finally spying his misplaced mother across the crowded expanse of a shopping mall and wetting himself, having spent long fretful minutes clutching at women wearing the same familiar sky-blue stretch pants but with shocking, non-mother faces.

  Porgie didn’t let on that there was anything out of the ordinary happening. Or maybe he thought this crisis was par for the course on film shoots. “So you need a guide?” he’d asked. “A real, live, honest Injun?”

  They started out in the direction Ivan O’Neil said Kakami was headed, although Syd thought the running man he’d seen from the helicopter had been going the opposite way. The PA wanted to go with them, but Porgie needed someone to watch his outboard motor. “Anyone touches that Johnson has some seriously bad Coast Salish mojo coming down on them. You tell them that.” Syd feels for the kid, ever consigned to being the messenger. And he probably quit a job as a bike courier to take this gig.

  As they move farther into the rainforest, Syd can’t shake the feeling he’s travelling upriver, even though there is no river and there is no actual up or down either, as far as he can tell. Porgie holds aside low-lying branches that lash back at Syd if he doesn’t move quickly enough. After an hour or so, the island larger even than it had looked from the air, Porgie says, “The last time I went this far across the island was when I was thirteen and we were searching for my auntie. The same thing happened then. The island kept growing around us, helping hide her.”

  So it’s not Syd’s fatigue and rage and disorientation—the forest is alive, or rather, more perversely alive than it has any right be. That he so readily accepts this as a fact is something he’ll spend a lot of time thinking about later in life. “What happened?”

  “She didn’t want to be found.”

  Porgie eventually announces they have to bed down for the night, the darkness is that complete. Syd, who hasn’t slept outdoors since a mismanaged bar mitzvah camp-out in the ravine behind his grandparents’ Rosedale house when he was thirteen—one that involved improperly disposed of smoked-meat remains, a couple of raccoons, and a small family pet with the unfortunate name of Brisket—hears all manner of amplified and unidentifiable sounds in the surrounding night. Flesh-eating plants busily masticating the remains
of rodents; antean beasts lying in wait; the long-lost auntie, now spectral and gone feral, watching, as if watching could be called a sound. Here be monsters. Porgie refused to light a fire, saying it would disturb the balance in the forest.

  Syd forces himself to focus on his guide’s cheerful disembodied voice. “My grandfather Charlie’s not too happy about it but I feel like I’ve put in my time on the reserve. Also, I can bring some new perspective to the biz, right?” Syd drifts off to Porgie confessing his dream: to be a producer/director of broad Hollywood comedies, a First Nations Ivan Reitman (Porgie’s own analogy).

  Syd will have to talk him out of it. Look at me, he’ll say, it’s not all power lunches at Orso and hot-buttered premieres. It’s whiny people wanting a pound of flesh every day. It’s the studios in the States, and the broadcasters and government funding agencies here squeezing your nuts. It’s the Chinese co-producers politely insisting you use the crap-ass stock from FortuneFilm—a subsidiary of DoubleHappinessCo—which Syd suspects is made by blind orphans in a Shenzhen factory that also manufactures Barbie accessories brightened with lead-based paints.

  It’s this: the most talented filmmaker you’ve ever worked with, a man you consider a friend, maybe your best friend, dropping a few gnomic utterances and making for the bush.

  Don’t get Syd wrong. He adores the idea of movies, loves the act of watching them. But movie people? Janus-faced actors and the high-level technicians with their intense Asperger’s-like shoptalk jack up his acid reflux. The unions suck the magic out of moviemaking—teamsters can’t pass gas without consulting their local; IATSE members become apoplectic if someone other than an IATSE Nazi dares touch a light switch. It’s all more Jimmy Hoffa than Norma Rae.

  Screenwriters act all docile but would stick a fork between your eyes if they could get away with it. Directors and DOPs with their childlike ids and grandiose sense of entitlement remind Syd of the destructive, drooling baby in that early Pixar short, the one that terrorized the poor tin soldier. Writerdirectors—auteurs—don’t even get him started.