Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  And, perhaps most significant, Jessica Wadsworth sat down and ate breakfast for the first time in three years. Her brother, Jason—whom we would shortly learn was almost exclusively referred to as The Wad—greeted his parents not with a grunt but with a beatific smile. This inspired his mother to head to his room to ransack it for illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia, while his father turned to Jason’s twin sister, urging Jessica to take another helping of yogurt and muesli.

  “Do we have any walnuts, Father?” Jason asked. “Or baked beans, perchance?”

  “Oh my God,” his mother yelled from the hallway. “It’s the munchies!” There ensued a spirited debate between the two adults about whether crystal methamphetamine caused the munchies or whether that was just pot. (“Just pot? Is that like just one more before hitting the road?”)

  That Thursday was, as Barman, our specialist on world religions, later pointed out, the Catholics’ Feast of Scholastica, patron saint of convulsive children. “Isn’t that ironic?” But when asked in what way, Barman, being new to the concept, just shrugged.

  To err is human, to forgive divine. That old trout. We can tell you now that it’s the other way around; a complex vice versa.

  We hope the records will show that what we did was undertaken not as a lark but in the true spirit of exploration. In other words, like Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, we were sent.

  That first morning the rain and the smell of damp cedar and the ozone-charged air overwhelmed our just-awakened senses. How can we explain it? It was as if magma flowed in our veins, rather than blood.

  And everywhere the taste of the undiscovered was practically vibrating on our tongues.

  Our first heady days went by in a blur of rampaging sensations so intense we thought we could understand how overwhelmed autistic children must feel, or someone newly awakened from a coma who finds himself on the streets of Pamplona during the festival of the bulls. But one particular day does stand out: February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, 2011.

  It was only our third day of school, a Monday. We’d had a relatively quiet weekend after the initial tumult of familiarizing ourselves with the young people whose bodies we now inhabited. Rachmiel and Yabbashael were hosted by the fifteen-year-old twins Jessica and Jason Wadsworth. The former was a small, winter-melon-coloured thing with brittle hair, thinned flesh stretched over pointy bones, veins crosshatched under the surface of her skin. As if they were siblings in a nursery rhyme or biblical parable, her brother, in contrast, was a ruddy young ox, golden hair razed close to the scalp, a boy whose idea of a joke was to stick a tree-trunk leg out from under a cafeteria table, trip up a student carrying a loaded tray, and gaze around in feigned bewilderment.

  Zachriel was now Bashaar Khan, who was handsome in a fourteen-year-old way and knew it. Athletic and talented in the arts, he was a boy destined to make his mark. Some older youths from the North Vancouver musallah had noticed Bashaar’s capabilities as well and had launched a stealth campaign to radicalize him. Fully enamoured of Western excess, Bashaar had so far rebuffed their advances.

  Barman was inhabiting Leo Costello Jr., a shaggy-haired boy of fourteen who was as agile as he was quick-witted, and loved, or at least tolerated, by everyone, it seemed, save his younger brother and sister. We couldn’t help but notice that of all our hosts Barman’s was the most congenial. (“A match made in heaven,” Barman agreed.)

  And Elyon had borrowed the body of Stephan Choo, the only progeny of an aging couple originally from Guangzhou who had given up on having children when unexpectedly blessed with Stephan. An intelligent, much-adored, and coddled boy, he had trouble navigating the shoals of childhood. Although only twelve, Stephan was completing his first year of high school, in the same grade eight class as Leo Jr., due to a well-intentioned school board initiative called “acceleration.”

  Stephan’s only valentine cards that day were from the school librarian and the rest of us. “You got a valentine from The Wad and The Stick Insect?” asked one incredulous backbencher, a boy with a lazy eye and a hairstyle we came to know as a faux-hawk. He plucked from Stephan’s hand the cards he had received from the twins, rather modest declarations of friendship from cartoon characters named SpongeBob and Squidward. It was fortunate he didn’t notice the ones from Bashaar and Leo Jr., one featuring a prancing pony with the words, “I sure get a kick out of you! Be My Valentine!” inside the stylized shape of a heart, and the other a sock-puppet mermaid: “You’re my FISH come true!”

  The heart, we were to learn, is a lonely muscle.

  As soon as school let out that afternoon, Stephan was surrounded by a group of boys making off-colour suggestions about various activities he might get up to with the twins. They tied him to the neglected tetherball post in the far end of the sports field with a skipping rope and subjected him to a vigorous round of three-on-three. By the time Leo Jr. and Bashaar intervened, the boys had fled hooting and there was a puddle on the cracked asphalt around Stephan’s feet.

  It seemed nothing in Herodotus, Sun Tzu, or even Revelation had adequately prepared us for teenaged mores and the indignities of Elysium Heights Secondary.

  Adjusting to our bodies at the beginning was difficult. No longer discarnate, we had to focus on negotiating doorways and stairwells. Bruises bloomed on our hips and shins like exotic fungi. Jason had a split lip and a black eye, and was summoned to the principal’s office to be quizzed about whom he’d been fighting this time. Bashaar, a.k.a. Bash, a power forward on the school’s basketball team though only in grade nine, found himself warming the bench. (The militant musallah youths took the opportunity to milk this: “In Mecca, true believers are not benched …”) Stephan had a reputation for being clumsy, so no one, not even his parents, thought anything of it when he broke his glasses three times in one week.

  And all that effluvia. Sweat, nocturnal emissions, the transit of liquids and solids from one end to the other. The human body, a moody and capricious marvel. It is little wonder St. Francis called his own Brother Ass. (One of Barman’s favourite authors, the late American satyr Henry Miller, wrote, “To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.” A sentiment worthy of a T-shirt, Yabbashael noted after one particularly satisfying visit to the second-floor boys’ room.

  The amount of time we spent behind bathroom doors did not go unnoticed. It was the worst for Rachmiel. Years of deprivation had left her host, Jessica’s, digestive system as fragile as Malaysia’s ravaged mangrove forests, her newly robust appetite triggering bouts of gastrointestinal distress and vomiting. And now that she was no longer anorexic, it wasn’t long before she finally began menstruating. This discomfited some of us more than it did Rachmiel.

  “The array of feminine hygiene products at the Lynn Valley Centre’s Shoppers Drug Mart is staggering,” Rachmiel told us, eyes as round and darkly glistening as a mouse lemur’s. “An entire aisle.”

  To which Yabbashael, a.k.a. The Wad, speaking for the rest of us, said: “TMI, dear sister, TMI.”

  How mystifying it is that knowledge and experience are such utterly different beasts—one a contemplative water buffalo, the other a wild mink.

  Why Arcadia Court? Why not Jammu, the ancestral home of our black-walnut-loving tempter? Or Barcelona or Manhattan where our taste receptors might have been set abuzz? Why not an outpost in sub-Saharan Africa where we might have been of some use?

  The truth is that like a child spinning a globe, eyes closed tight, the compact planet skimming rapidly under his index finger until it slows and then stops (There! The Bonin Islands? Wuhan? Tucuruí? The world suddenly seeming larger than large, wanderlust abruptly sated), our choice of destination was rather whimsical. And we did like the name and the way clouds sat low on the mountaintop just above that enclave in North Vancouver. There was, we admit, a waft of something compelling from a small wooded area nearby, beside Hastings Creek. “The smell of destiny,” Rachmiel had called it, rather portentously, considering we could not yet smell anything in the literal sense. At
the time, we believed destiny to be one of those weasel words beloved by those with little insight into the workings of the universe.

  Our fact-finding mission was to last as long as it took to discover the zenith of each human sense. Barman’s best guess was four years; Elyon thought a week or so should do it. At any rate, time had, for us, never been of consequence. Now we were to be human in all respects, bound to the limitations of the species—no being in two places at once, no interventions, no miracles.

  Arcadia Court itself comprised just seven houses arrayed around a horseshoe-shaped road opening off Arcadia Drive, which lay between the steeply graded and winding Mountain Highway and Lynn Valley Road. It had a neat little physicality to it, a sense of order challenged by the surrounding wilderness.

  It was during our second week there that we first wandered into the forbidden woods by Hastings Creek. Almost hidden amidst the foliage, in a clearing on the east side of the creek, a soiled blue plastic tarp strung between two hemlocks caught our eyes. And from under it came guttural laughter, voices simultaneously muted and oddly amplified. “Here, mix these two together and now try it,” said one, followed by a sidewinder of a cough, while someone else gagged.

  Yabbashael went first, fording the creek without even bothering to take off Jason’s prized Air Jordans. Stumbling over a pile of debris, Yabbashael sent empty bottles and cans clattering in the relative silence of the clearing. Three old men emerged from under the tarp, red faced, two of them with matted greyish-brown beards, all looking as if they were wearing clothing made of sodden cardboard.

  “Shit, kid, we’re trying to have a board meeting here,” said the bald, leather-faced one, waving in Yabbashael’s direction a bottle with a cigarette butt (or a fly?) floating in it. A decidedly human pong swirled about the men, a cloud of urine, sweat, and cigarette smoke.

  And that is how we met the genius loci of Hastings Creek, the near-mythical shopping-cart racers of Lynn Valley. They were the kind of men the Christ would have consorted with, and who could blame him? They were the lepers, the untouchables, of this place, and so forbidden fruit to us.

  Yabbashael and Barman were particularly drawn to the Three Wise Men, as they took to calling their new friends. To this day, Yabbashael swears that a dried pepperoni stick the men shared with them came the closest to what we understand to be the spirit of umami.

  “It’s as if they have some deeper understanding of the true pleasures of life,” Yabbashael said after one visit to Hastings Creek, prompting an unheeded warning from Rachmiel: “Nothing good has ever come of romanticizing the downtrodden.”

  Towards the end of our first month, Elyon had a particularly bad day at school. When Ms. W. asked Stephan about Hamlet’s indecisiveness, Elyon quoted the famous soliloquy almost in its entirety. Stephan was set upon on the way home by some future captains of industry regurgitating their bastardized brand of poetry. “Slings and arrows of outrageous faggotyness!” “To be a fucking geek or not to be a fucking geek!” and, perhaps the worst, “To sleep, perchance to wet my bed!”

  “Ms. W. cut me off at ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all,’” Elyon told us later behind the Wadsworths’ carport as we took turns holding Jason’s gym shirt to Stephan’s nose and forehead to stanch the flow of blood and tears and tried to concoct a story for Stephan to tell his parents. Plain clumsiness wasn’t going to help with this one. Zachriel gently cautioned that no one likes a show-off, while Barman couldn’t resist dispensing some advice: “The cool answer would’ve been: ‘What is existential angst, Alex?” Like his avatar Leo Jr. Barman was a fan of Jeopardy!

  Although none of us was having as hard a time as Elyon in the guise of the hapless Stephan, Arcadia Court was not exactly living up to its name. Yes, from the ravine behind our houses we could hear fern song, the endlessly unfurling fronds in the ceaseless rain. But beyond that, the equally ceaseless whine of power tools as farther up the mountainside residents sought to improve the value of their lots. From the Wadsworths’ came a constant muted stench, the distinct whiff of unhappiness, and next door, from the Costellos’, often the smell of scorched fish sticks and Leo Jr.’s mother singing, off-key, something about sistahs doin’ it for themselves.

  Barman, as Leo Jr., had adjusted most easily to life as a suburban teenager. Skateboard under one arm, fingers casually pinching a “spliff,” revelling in the role of free spirit. “The Dude abides with me,” Barman liked saying—quoting from a Hollywood movie that had recently achieved cult status— amusing us all with the double entendre. “Nice guy, that Leo Jr.” was what everyone invariably said.

  Jason was a nice guy now, too, thanks to Yabbashael, but this only gave people more cause for suspicion. “Why isn’t The Wad acting like a wad?” students asked, and gave him wider berth than usual, while the teachers continued to watch him out of the corners of their eyes.

  Jessica’s formerly papery skin shone, and curves appeared in places where before there had been alarming concavity. The boys were paying attention in the cafeteria and around her locker, although some kept their distance on account of her being The Wad’s sister. The girls were a different matter. A tiny curly-haired warlord named Montana puffed out her cheeks and told her posse: “If she doesn’t stop stuffing her face she’ll end up like that blimp in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”

  “Well, you know how girls can be,” Zachriel said.

  “In fact,” said Rachmiel, uncharacteristically snappy, “I don’t.”

  It turned out that Bash, who had a fine tenor and could dance, had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the school’s spring production of Jesus Christ Superstar before we’d appeared on the scene. His role made the rest of us nervous, but Zachriel had begun to admire Tim Rice and Sir Andrew’s sympathetic view of the betrayer. “Besides,” said Zachriel, “he gets all the best songs.”

  During the day we did our best to avoid each other as our social hierarchies dictated, but at night we lay in our beds in welcome darkness and communicated again without the boundaries of language. Speaking in tongues without need of tongues, bodiless once more.

  On the ceiling of Stephan’s bedroom was a glow-in-the-dark solar system, the North Star peeling away. On the wall of Leo Jr.’s room, posters from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Beside Jason’s pillow, a plush dolphin and an oversized neon-pink hedgehog won at the previous summer’s PNE and hidden away under the bed each morning.

  “How is this really different from texting?” Zachriel asked one night. Zachriel was the only one of us who’d taken to social media.

  “It’s different in spirit,” Barman said, “and, besides, there’s no need for opposable thumbs.”

  For some of us, high school was shaping up to be a regular pit of Acheron. (“The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night,” quoth Elyon, who was finding solace in Shakespeare despite the earlier classroom misadventure.) Only ten more days to go before spring break. We began to think in terms of miracles.

  How much easier it had been for Mohammed and Siddhartha, not to mention the Christ, who did not have to wander the earth incognito. “If only we could smite just a little to blow off some steam,” Elyon said.

  “I love that word, smite,” Yabbashael said.

  “You guys,” Rachmiel told them, “go to sleep.”

  It’s true we could have materialized as ravens or, in the spirit of humility, earthworms. But then how could we have partaken of all that was available to the human senses? In times past our kind have appeared as griffins or lightning or even in the form we’ve been represented in over the ages, luxuriously robed, or nude with dimpled flesh, wings either terrible or elegant— Masaccio’s sword-wielding avenger, Bloch’s pallid ectomorph, Melozzo’s curly-haired candy-box creatures. But there is something too attention-getting about those guises. Something altogether beside the point.

  Soon after we left Arcadia Court a giant sea tortoise, purportedly thousands of years old, appeared several blocks over on another cul-de-sac, carrying
on his back a lost schoolgirl from Japan. A miracle that was quickly covered up, as it seemed it wasn’t miracles these people wanted.

  And while we inhabited their bodies, Bashaar, Stephan, Leo Jr., Jason, and Jessica, the children of Arcadia Court, partook of a heaven-sent dreamless sleep. There were times, we admit, that we envied them.

  Stephan didn’t leave the house the whole week of spring break, and when he finally emerged we almost didn’t recognize him. Gone were the too-short sweatpants and checked shirts and white socks; gone were the duct-taped glasses. In their place, oversized jeans, black hoodie, and red-framed Soulja Boy sunglasses. (Gone too was approximately $500 from the university savings his superstitious parents kept hidden in a jade Fortune Vase in the pantry behind tins of water chestnuts.) When we converged on him, Stephan simply raised a hand and said, “Word.”

  He failed a math test that week, the first of many, and when called on in English or Socials he’d say things like, “Existential angst, man,” ignoring meaningful pokes from Leo Jr. (“Stephan’s so random,” his male classmates said approvingly, so we could only conclude this was a good thing, this doing poorly in school and waxing random.)

  Stephan spent much of this time on multiplayer role-playing games online. By all accounts he was a master at World of Warcraft: Realm of Cocytus, “smiting the enemy,” who consisted of a new kind of Wyrm and Nephilim—a.k.a. “those douche-bags,” according to the faux-hawk kid. (Barman scoffed at how the game developers stole so readily from ur-biblical sources. “Nephilim. They have no idea what they’re dealing with. No wonder Elyon has their number.”)

  We soon heard reports that Stephan was hacking for his classmates. His new admirers were his old adversaries, pimply boys with too much pocket money who took to intoning “S’mite” to each other in greeting.

  Yabbashael and Barman tried to talk sense into Elyon one afternoon in the Choo family’s backyard. “You two should talk,” Elyon said, eyes non-existent behind those disconcerting lenses, avoiding directly addressing Barman. “His guy was already cool, and your guy is an armoured vehicle.” Barman asked if this was all some kind of twisted revenge scenario, but Elyon only said, “By the time we leave, Stephan will be made.”