Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  On an early April morning Stephan’s parents slowly chewed and swallowed their shame dumplings and visited the school counsellor, shuffling along the main hall of Elysium Heights Secondary, past the glass-fronted trophy case filled with testaments to young male and female physical prowess, their son strutting behind them.

  Stephan’s ancient grandmother, who lived in the basement suite of the family home, had been making twice-daily offerings to Kwan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion, on her small Buddhist shrine. Zachriel saw her that day walking along the edge of the ravine behind Arcadia Court, bending painfully to tug up freshly blooming false Solomon’s seal and collect choice pine cones. The moist-earth aroma, Zachriel said, was almost indecent. Nearby, on a dying Douglas fir, a pileated woodpecker let loose with a maniacal laugh and went back to his drumming. Stephan’s grandmother raised her tortoise face and (Zachriel swore on Bashaar’s JC Superstar script, rolled up in his back pocket) echoed that lunatic laughter right back at the bird.

  What karmic justice, she might have been thinking, had led her to be a ninety-six-year-old woman traipsing through the rainforest at the edge of the world, mother to an aging son whose own child had lost all sense of filial piety?

  We couldn’t help but wonder how was it that we could be drawn to an object, that a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire, the rubber curling back from the heels, could break our hearts, yet we felt so little for the suffering of these parents?

  That same day, Jessica’s mother steered her to the couch when she came home in a shirt two sizes smaller than the one she’d left the house wearing and tried to engage her in a heartto-heart about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and dressing like a harlot—although the word she used was “slut.” We found it both interesting and disturbing that people’s attitudes towards women and their bodies had changed so little since the days of Nebuchadnezzar II. (“The Madonna/whore dichotomy is so tired,” sighed Barman.)

  This was Jessica’s opportunity to tell her mother she loved her and that she was looking forward to being guided through womanhood by her sagacity. Instead, she turned her head, looked pointedly at her own chipped nail polish, and sighed dramatically.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” Rachmiel told us afterwards. “I wanted to put my arms around her, tell her that human life is too short, too precious to spend it endlessly worrying about things we cannot change, and that I could take care of myself, but she was just so—”

  “Irritating?” asked Yabbashael.

  We couldn’t help nodding in compadreship; we all had mothers now. Maryam, Um Isa, Our Lady of Sorrows, Panayia, Kali, forgive us.

  For a few weeks that spring, mounds of debris floating in the lower waterways of the North Shore spontaneously exploded—fiery islets of discarded tires tangled with fast-food clamshells and wrappers, plastic bottles, beer cans, undergarments, and the occasional lone sneaker drifted along the mountain creeks. The sight, at least at night, was disconcertingly lovely.

  Several freight cars had jumped the tracks in the CN rail yard, the derailment spilling 41,000 litres of corrosive sodium hydroxide. Someone, it was reported, had tampered with a manual switch. (The same cast of individual, Elyon noted with disdain, who a week earlier had beaten three peacocks dead with a tire iron in Stanley Park.)

  The contamination gave the parents of Arcadia Court another reason to forbid their children to go near Hastings Creek or its tributaries. The few Dolly Varden and steelhead still left in the creeks floated by, ulcerated bellies up. Some construction workers near Baird Road found a young bobcat, its whiskers and facial fur eaten away, mewling blindly beside its dead mother under a semi-completed kitchen extension. Domesticated animals were kept inside or tethered in yards. Someone, somewhere, was investigating.

  The news media said this caustic substance smelled like absolutely nothing—a chemical that is impossible to detect with human senses.

  Towards late April, Jessica began consorting with an older boy, a certain Cullen, who rode a coveted make of British motorcycle. Sullen Cullen, Barman nicknamed him, after his propensity for moping about, leaning against his bike with his head in a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when Jessica wasn’t with him.

  And so Rachmiel stopped talking to the rest of us in public while Jessica was busy romancing Cullen, but still joined our nocturnal debriefings. Unlike Elyon. Stephan was by then making “good coin” cracking codices for his classmates, and Elyon didn’t want to be privy to our “sanctimonious brand of negativity.” Stephan took to wearing bulky jewellery and talking in rhyme with his escort of swaggering boys whose ears were stopped up with neon buds at all times.

  Yabbashael and Barman were by then enjoying themselves as Jason and Leo Jr. and spent much of their free time visiting the Three Wise Men of Hastings Creek: Gary, Lubbock, and Sweeney. None of them were as old as they’d initially appeared. They’d been prematurely aged by an adult life spent living rough and not always by choice. Yabbashael was certain— following an afternoon of warm beer and discussions about the philosophy of shopping-cart racing—they were zeroing in on the ne plus ultra of human experience.

  Our carnal senses had also fully awakened by then. Jason was “spanking the monkey” so often that Yabbashael complained Jason’s foreskin looked—and felt—like tenderized minute steak. Leo gave and got his first hickey, although Barman was oddly bashful when asked with whom. Jessica and Cullen were spotted, more than once, coming out of the Wadsworths’ laundry room, sheets of fabric softener clinging to their dishevelled hair. Rachmiel seemed to have taken a vow of silence about the affair and shared nothing with the rest of us during our after-hours conversations.

  Bashaar was busy with the school’s rock opera preparations at that point. Each evening after rehearsal, in the encroaching darkness outside the gymnasium, the two grade ten girls who played Mary and Mary, and a grade eleven girl from the chorus, would take turns administering oral sex to Bash with lipstick-thickened, smoky mouths. (“Rainbow party,” Zachriel told us, and in a tone of reverence up to then reserved for Psalm 19, New International Version, tried to describe the sensation. One of the Marys evidently swallowed, but Zachriel couldn’t recall which.)

  It was after one particularly long rehearsal that they were interrupted by a couple of the radicalized Islamic youth. As the girls scrambled to their feet and vanished into the night, Bash zipped himself up unhurriedly and said, “Ma sha’ Allah,” attempting to be polite.

  One of the young men fingered his sparse beard and asked, equally politely, whether Bash had decided to drop the blasphemous line from the song “Superstar.” (The one questioning whether Mohammed could move a mountain, or whether he simply had a good publicist.) The way Bash’s interlocutor put it, it sounded more like a threat than an entreaty, especially since his silent colleague kept smacking his fist into his palm to punctuate the request. We wonder now, after everything, what would have happened if Bash had revealed he was inhabited by a messenger sent by the same Jibrail who had delivered the Qur’an to their prophet. Would they have believed him, laughed, or condemned him on the spot for blasphemy?

  Why, they appeared to genuinely want to know, would Bashaar waste his time with these infidel females when seventy-two virgins awaited him in paradise?

  “I wanted to disabuse them of their ill-conceived notions of martyrdom right then and there,” Zachriel would later claim, almost five years to the day we left Arcadia Court, when a defaced For Sale sign went up on the Khan family’s front lawn and the street was a jumble of yellow police tape, “but I just couldn’t stop thinking about those Marys. Their lips. Their tongues.”

  By then we knew the body inevitably betrayed the mind.

  Are we good? The question is often asked. We transcend the notion of good or bad as understood in the human sense. We simply are. An idea difficult to grasp, like the workings of the Hadron Collider or why the caged bird sings. The novelist Philip Pullman came closest to understanding the complexity of our kind
with Balthamos and Baruch in his Amber Spyglass. (“Ironic that it took an atheist to get it right,” Barman said. Barman had, by then, nailed the concept.)

  The afternoon Leo Jr. died and was reborn and our days at Arcadia Court became numbered was a fine Saturday in late May. Gary and Lubbock had convinced Sweeney that Jason and Leo Jr. were spiritually primed to undertake their first shopping-cart race. A picture of what happened that day has been pieced together from Yabbashael, Barman, and Rachmiel’s separate accounts.

  In the parking lot of Save-On Foods (“Highest percentage of carts without wonky wheels, bar none,” said Gary), Sweeney instructed the boys to approach the carts as if they were wild stallions and try to sense which ones spoke to them. Lubbock said, “Forget that farting around, just grab one and let’s get going.” An argument broke out but was quickly resolved when Leo Jr. grabbed a cart and threw himself across the parking lot, “popping a wheelie,” and landed hard on his backside while the men laughed and coughed and forgot what they’d been raging about moments before.

  They hefted hunks of concrete into their shopping carts at a nearby demolition site, and, all five carts balanced, wheels true, they rattled towards Mountain Highway. After some last-minute adjustments and a reminder to use the inside left foot as a brake, the men and boys howled down the winding road, motorized vehicles honking and veering around them. “The eighteen seconds or so before I blacked out were the most thrilling of my human life,” Barman told us later.

  According to Yabbashael, Barman (that is, Leo Jr.) went screaming out ahead, perhaps emboldened by his skateboarding expertise, misjudged the first curve, and flew several metres into the scrub off the side of the road. Gary administered mouth-tomouth even though Leo Jr. had no pulse. Barman later told us a tunnel of white light beckoned to Leo Jr., but something (the yeasty taste of stale beer mixed with damp tobacco strands?) pulled him back.

  Heady with stirred-up testosterone, Jason and Leo Jr. made for Hastings Creek after they bid the cart racers goodbye and promised to make another run the next day. What met them was a sight Barman described as “something out of the Apocalypse of John the Divine.”

  Amidst crushed ferns a two-headed beast writhed, while the sound of trumpets sundered the welkin. On the blast of the seventh, they perceived “a woman clothed with the sun, the moon, and the stars, and Satan cast down to earth.”

  Barman insists to this day that it was a trick of filtered light and shadow created by the trees that led to the visual confusion, and that the sound of trumpets was thunder preceding a storm. To Barman’s embarrassment they’d stumbled onto a private scene of two young people in the thrall of carnal exuberance. (Some of us believe what occurred there by the creek was a result of Yabbashael’s taking the protector role of Jason as “big” brother too seriously.)

  Jason heaved up a large, muddy stone from the side of the creek while Leo Jr. stood by as if in a trance. He brought the stone down on the back of the beast, at which point a scream cleared the air. Jessica lay under a seemingly lifeless Cullen as blood ran into his ponytail from a fissure in his neck. Her eyes, Barman recalls, were terrible, like the maw of a deep-sea dweller. When she spoke, it was in the inner voice of Rachmiel, who said, as if it cost everything Rachmiel had to give, “May the God forgive you.” The sky thundered again as the deluge started and Jessica struggled back into her clothes.

  The rest happened quickly. An ambulance was fetched, a tale concocted. Lubbock, Gary, and Sweeney, swearing their innocence, indignant spittle flying, were arrested by the end of the day. Leo Jr. took the extra keys to the Costellos’ Ford Escape, and—with only eighteen months of payments remaining— totalled the front end driving into the side of a Dairy Queen. Jason went into his bedroom and refused to come out for three days, almost as comatose as Cullen himself. (Yabbashael planned to remain in self-exile for forty days and forty nights until Barman pointed out that Yabbashael was not the Christ.)

  Amidst all this drama, Bashaar had his star turn in the school musical, which, according to the local weeklies, was a hit, and Stephan was suspended and threatened with repeating grade eight.

  “So what.” Elyon shrugged. “He’s never had this much fun in his life.” The Choo house visibly sagged in on itself as his parents shuffled downcast from room to room. Stephan’s grandmother no longer gathered offerings but sat in front of the basement television set watching Fox News.

  Leo Jr.’s neck brace stayed on for almost three weeks, and to this day his right hand is not as mobile as his left due to the manner in which the broken bones fused.

  Even now, so many years on, we take pains to remind each other of what Augustine once said: “Angelus est nomen offici,” which Barman suggests translating as, “‘Angel’ is the name of the office.”

  In other words, it’s our job, not who we are. We mention this as a fact, not as a kind of apologia.

  Jessica skipped school regularly to visit the hospitalized Cullen, who was hooked up to all manner of medical equipment in Lions Gate Hospital’s ICU, and unresponsive. She held his hand for hours every day. (Once, when he blinked and appeared to part his lips, his mother said, “She’s an angel of mercy!” before leaving the room, crying. Rachmiel admitted praying for intervention from St. Jude. But did Rachmiel ask for a miracle? We think not.)

  In mid-June, Bashaar was at the Shoppers Drug Mart buying condoms when he spotted Jessica pulling a pregnancy kit from a shelf. Bash slid up behind her and whispered, “You weren’t going to tell us, were you?” She was so startled she dropped the Very-Berry Slurpee she was carrying in her other hand, splashing them both with what looked like clotted blood.

  After everything that had happened, at last a true crisis was upon us, one that we could not simply turn the other cheek on and hope for the best.

  Even Elyon joined us as we debated late into the night whether to destroy the child or both mother and child—deep within us stirred and rumbled the fear of waking the slumbering Nephilim. Rachmiel argued, in the end effectively, that the warlike giants of old were the spawn of rogue angels and mortal women, not of angels and mortal men, so we agreed to stay our hands.

  No one used the word smite. Not once. Not even Elyon.

  The summons that came from Gabriel that night was firm and unequivocal. We were recalled from earth with no time to say our goodbyes.

  We took our shameful leave as day dawned on Arcadia Court, all but Rachmiel, who made a choice one of our kind has seldom made, and not without enormous sacrifice. Jessica’s small, moon-white face was pressed to the Wadsworths’ bay window as if there were something to see besides a blue, cloudless sky. Zachriel wrote a message across the firmament in white wisps: Errare humanum est. Perseverare diabolicum. He meant it kindly.

  Our mission aborted, we took sensory experiences with us as if we were junior entomologists pinning to a corkboard butterfly specimens snuffed out with ethyl acetate. But what we left behind is what we remember most vividly. One thing we all agree on: the much-vaunted human heart is just a wayward muscle.

  Not long after we left, young Stephan Choo was found face down in Hastings Creek near the place where Cullen had sustained his injury. His suicide note remains hidden, to this day, in a jade Fortune Vase in his parents’ pantry. Six months later, on the adoption papers Jessica Wadsworth signed, her premature daughter bore the name Stephanie in complicated and guilty tribute. Cullen emerged from his coma with no further interest in either Rilke or Jessica and her predicament. We could have told her so.

  It took a while, years in fact, but Bashaar eventually succumbed to the enticements of his patient recruiters. The Khan family’s garage became a repository of Kemira GrowHow fertilizer and pallets of nail-polish remover. Local authorities were tipped off. The rest was all dutifully reported in the media, including Bashaar’s bewildered parents claiming they believed the supplies were for their son’s year-end biochemistry project at SFU, their dark eyes a haunting. YouTube footage of the much younger and still beardless “home-grown terrorist�
� dancing on the stage of Elysium Heights Secondary’s gymnasium singing “Strange Thing Mystifying” went viral.

  The Wad carried on being a wad.

  As for Leo Jr., he turned out fine. Like his father he became a forensic accountant. He auditioned for Jeopardy! once while on a business trip to Atlanta, but after the eighteen-month waiting period lapsed, simply forgot about it. We try not to judge, but we had imagined a life of more freedom for him, perhaps as a first AD for local film productions or a tennis coach. In another era he could have joined a travelling circus. But he abides.

  And us? We have a special dispensation to watch over Jessica’s child, even though we know she is more than capable of taking care of herself.

  On our phantom tongues the taste of humanity lingers. But something else as well. The fifth taste?

  That thing that eludes us still.

  BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

  The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.

  —ELIAS CANETTI, THE AGONY OF FLIES

  SKULLBLAST

  Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia’s pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living-room window. The recovering terrorist—holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew—moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

  A car shoots down the street too fast, a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel, tires squealing as he turns the corner onto Victoria, actually burning rubber, as it’s called, and the recovering terrorist drops her watering can. Reeking fish fertilizer slops onto her sneakers.