Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  She has written letters to city hall requesting a traffic circle (a speed retardant, as it’s called, putting her in mind of the large, soft boy with slivered moons of dirt under his fingernails who shuffled around in a slow-moving cloud at the back of her third-grade classroom before being taken away to wherever children like that were taken away to back then). She has circulated a petition that her neighbours have eagerly signed. They all have small children and animals, as does the recovering terrorist. They are teachers and enviropreneurs and directors of small NGOs that help build medical facilities in developing countries. They’ve promised to fill the traffic circle with indigenous flora, promised to guard against graffiti, to ensure it doesn’t become a dumpsite for used condoms, syringes, Twizzler wrappers, and the inevitable orphaned muffler. But the city just keeps putting them off, citing a litany of bureaucratic impediments. The recovering terrorist has telephoned, again and again. She’s been told, red tape red tape red tape red tape. She’s said, “Look, it’s a traffic circle, a speed retardant we’re asking for here, not a water filtration plant.”

  The recovering terrorist has a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingénue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names—Squeaky, Patty, Julie—as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough. When she first stood up at group, about three years ago, and said, “My name is —— and I am a terrorist,” she felt none of the relief the small ad in the Georgia Straight had assured her she’d be flooded with.

  As the others set their coffee cups down between their feet and clapped supportively (one guy, who she later would come to know as Dieter, even whistled through four fingers wolf-style), she felt like a small-town beauty contestant—Miss Chilliwack promising to end global warming, sectarian strife, and escalating movie theatre prices before the end of her reign. Not like someone who had once burned down a house to bring a petty capitalist to his knees. She kept on going to the meetings, though. There was something reassuring about the camaraderie, a single-mindedness of purpose she hadn’t felt since that night almost twenty years ago when her life cleaved in two.

  In the local paper this morning there was a letter to the editor from a Port Moody woman whose daughter had been hit by a car right in front of her house on a quiet residential street. The girl was so small she had rolled out the other side and lay curled like a shrimp. Her teeth were embedded in the roof of her mouth, in the pouches of her cheeks, scattered on the road like a handful of Chiclets. The car just kept on going. What kind of person—the mother asked.

  The recovering terrorist slips off a glove and squeezes a few black aphids between her thumb and forefinger, their bodies barely yielding before that satisfying pop and squelch. She thinks about issuing a threat, some sort of ultimatum, targeting the mayor’s office. Her heart rate nearly doubles at the thought, and desire, no, need, swells her throat, and she feels as if she’s choking. Something in her veins actually slithers. I’m jonesing for a Fudgsicle, her son said the other day, and how they’d laughed. Jonesing. What does he know about jonesing? She stumbles up the front steps into the house and is blinded by the sudden shift from sunlit yard to windowless front hall. Light blemishes explode across her retinas. When she reaches the telephone she punches the speed-dial, hoping Dieter will answer.

  Dieter is trying to picture Tim with an AK-47. Lucy is trying to picture Tim and Dieter on a date. She listens to Dieter splutter loudly in disbelief as a woman at the next café table makes a show of dragging her chair away from them.

  “He’s so verklemmt, I can’t stand it,” Dieter says. Every time Lucy and Dieter meet, Dieter obsesses about how much he hates Tim, to the point where Lucy has begun to suspect Dieter is actually attracted to Tim but can’t admit it. Because Dieter likes men with moral fibre and a supple sense of humour, and Tim, from the evidence they’ve seen, gets what little fibre he has from a cereal box, and his idea of funny begins and ends with a knock-knock joke. (Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!)

  “You know,” Dieter says, putting his hands around his throat and gagging like a cat processing an enormous hairball.

  The waiter comes by and tells them the coffee of the day is a Brazilian Go-go Carnival, but organic, fair-trade, shade-grown Brazilian, not rainforest-stripping, parrot-habitat-destroying, barefoot-peasant-exploiting Brazilian, therefore explaining its $5.95-a-cup price tag. This sets Dieter off again.

  “And a Brazilian businessman. Who the fuck cares?”

  This is the real sticking point, the one Lucy agrees with. Think globally, act locally. It’s just too easy to hie off to mainland China with your Gap khakis rolled around a Free Tibet!! banner in your backpack, while crack-addicted babies gnaw on french fries and stare listlessly from strollers parked outside the Money Mart (“Real People. Real Cash.”) right here on Commercial Drive. For Lucy it always comes down to the babies, and soon she’s holding back Lollapalooza-sized tears that threaten to start smashing guitars all over the stage of her face.

  If Tim had been trying to save babies, wide-faced, velvet-lashed Brazilian babies, she might even admire him a little. But she somehow can’t imagine Tim—fine-boned, twitchy, verklemmt Tim—toting a semi-automatic and taking his turn guarding the cellar of a house in the suburbs just outside of São Paulo, peeing into an Orangina bottle, eating without a knife and fork, letting a balaclava mess with his ginger hair, for the sake of babies.

  “It’s good for me to vent like this,” Dieter says. “It keeps me under control. It scratches the itch. You”—he takes Lucy’s hand, the one not playing catapult with her spoon—“you need a diversion.”

  “I have Bruno and Foster, you jerk. And The Hound.” She launches her spoon at him and he ducks to one side. “I have my work, my garden-bitch show.” She knows what he’s thinking. That if she had a real diversion she wouldn’t phone him with such frequency, such urgency; she wouldn’t continually be so close to slipping. If she had a diversion, she wouldn’t be so focused on what might happen to Foster.

  But her fear is her diversion. It keeps her in check. Her fear is state-of-the-art titanium crampons on the frozen icefall that has for so long been her life.

  SUCKER PUNCH

  The recovering terrorist sits on her front steps watching her husband assemble their son’s new unicycle. The boy is so excited he starts clutching at himself as if he has to go to the bathroom. “Do you have to go the bathroom?” she calls out, but he ignores her. And her heart does a funny thing. It flops over in her chest like a fish gasping on a dock.

  The boy, at age seven, has decided to master every form of wheeled transport known to mankind. His skateboard and scooter and bike are covered with Pokémon stickers, and the boy never tires of explaining how the fierce little creatures evolve and what weapons they have (wake-up slap, mean look, skull blast, hyper voice, Zen headbutt, poison jab, sucker punch, fury attack, gunk shot, aurora beam, worry seed, tail whip, drill peck, lava plume, stun spore—the list of moves is seemingly without end) and the number of “health points” lost with each assault. The one he likes best has blazing fur and can immolate everything in its path. Their dog is named after Houndoom, a fire-breathing horned beast with an eerie howl. The only thing their aging dachshund shares with her namesake is her weird yowling bark.

  The unicycle is upright and there goes the boy, swaying from side to side but somehow staying aloft. Her husband runs alongside and turns his head to grin back at her and almost trips over an abandoned Safeway shopping cart that’s angled across the sidewalk, tipping into the gutter. The boy keeps on going, Houndoom at his heels, yelling something that sounds like “Sludge bomb!” before pulling a wet and blobby thing from his pocket and hurling it into the street while her husband clutches his shin and yells, “Fuck!”

  “Be careful!” she calls after her son. There’s a hitch in her throat and it comes out sounding like carfool. Be careful. Her lame mantra, her new default middle name.

  “Gardening is like warfare and it’s time for you to call in the troops,” T
he Gardening Dame tells her caller, Sue from Ladner. “Fly parasites, green lacewing, convergent lady beetles—that’s teenaged ladybugs, they’re hot for aphids—and parasitic nematodes, basically little worms that burrow into grubs and weevils Alien-like, stopping them in their tracks before they can take down your tomatoes and basil.”

  Sue from Ladner: “I’ve heard Chinese praying mantis is a good predator.”

  The Gardening Dame: “Well, they’re amusing to watch, but a little show-offy relative to their effectiveness. Think Owen Wilson versus Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights.”

  You weren’t a true terrorist unless you were willing to risk hurting the innocent to achieve your goals. This is the kind of thing they debated at group as they stood around eating Peek Freans and drinking instant coffee during the break, the coffee whitener’s oily sheen creating little rainbows in their cups.

  One guy at group had talked about money all the time. Only he called it “moolah.” He had also reminisced about “fivefinger discounts” and boasted that he’d never—ever—paid for a meal or rent. “That’s what girlfriends are for,” he’d said, elbowing Dieter in the ribs. “Oops, you wouldn’t know.” They changed locations twice on the sly before they managed to shake him. Dieter admitted he’d gotten a charge out of that bit of clandestine business, at which Tim rolled his eyes. “What?” Dieter said, his own eyes uncanny behind his industrial-strength lenses. “I like secrets. Is that all of a sudden a crime?” The facilitator, Angelina, told them they were lucky they weren’t in her first group, where there’d been a pro-lifer who kept quoting Horton Hears a Who! in a squeaky little voice: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

  Now they have a saying, “It’s not about the moolah.” The one thing they are not is mercenary.

  What Lucy’s been thinking lately: Was there really any difference between financial reward and the services of seventy virgins (give or take a few) spread-eagled on a cloud awaiting a martyr in paradise? None that she could see.

  When Angelina gave them all T-shirts at Christmas that read It’s not about the moolah, every single one of them went silent and then mushy, hugging one other, some crying, Dieter, glasses on floor, so hard that tears leaked from between his fingers, something Lucy had only ever seen before in cartoons.

  ZEN HEADBUTT

  The recovering terrorist stands at a counter on the second floor of City Hall waiting to speak with a man who has to press his left thumb against a hole in his throat in order to talk, as if he’s pushing a button on an intercom. His voice comes out filtered, almost electronic sounding, like the Pixar people’s concept of a robotic voice. The boy has been watching from a chair in the open waiting area with too much interest. He jams a thumb against his throat and mouths something she can’t make out. Beam me up, Scotty, she thinks, and laughs, which is a mistake because her son notices, so she tries to look stern.

  She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to die for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.

  In a nearby cubicle, voices are engaged in a heated negotiation involving explosive black powder, the volume and quantity of semi-automatic gunshots, and squib hits. Plenty of squib hits. “Opening a fire hydrant costs how much?” a male voice whimpers. “But this is a Canadian film.” The bureaucrat’s response is sotto voce. In addition to road, sewage, and garbage issues, the Engineering Department handles filming permits, the city’s big cash cow.

  “I will not submit my request by phone, because I’ve already done that. I’ve been calling your department for weeks,” the recovering terrorist says, speaking louder than she should, as if the man in front of her is missing his eardrums rather than his larynx. She’s arguing with a guy who has no voice box, albeit a guy using his disability as an excuse to be an asshole. He finally concedes to set up a meeting with the administrator in charge of traffic calming measures. The recovering terrorist glances at the appointment slip he hands her. “July 18! That’s more than a month away. By then—” By then what? Will she be able to hold out that long without slipping through a crack?

  The man presses his thumb to his throat and looks past her. “Next.”

  Outside, on the City Hall tower, the four faces of the neon clock all show an entirely different time. It’s been this way for years. This is a city on the edge, as it’s called, a city on the edge of an idea. Maybe the idea that time is relative?

  “So was that guy a cyborg or what?” her son asks as they make their way down the worn marble stairs to the lobby, and she realizes from his expression that he’s serious. The recovering terrorist takes the opportunity to launch into a lecture about the dangers of smoking. She’s segueing rather nicely from tobacco to crack when her son stops and drops her hand. “But what if someone just stabbed a stick into his throat? Like a maniac? What if it’s not his fault!?” He looks furious. “What if someone did that to you?!” In his face she thinks she can see the man he’ll become. But where will his inchoate sense of injustice lead him?

  It’s 4:00, it’s 6:18, it’s 1:45, it’s almost midnight. It’s getting late.

  When he was younger the boy was always wanting to know what something was called, like all fledgling humans, from Adam and Enkidu to Kaspar Hauser on down. Manhole covers, squirrels, body parts, graffiti, discarded condoms, black-eyed Susans, facial deformities on fellow passengers riding the No. 20 bus. That got name? That got name? Easy enough until he pointed to something unnameable. That got name? My face? Eyes? No, he howled, that! almost poking her eye out. Eyelashes? Iris? Pupil? But he became inconsolable, a cartoon parody of toddler rage.

  It was only later, lying in bed that night, that she began to wonder. Had he meant her soul?

  Now his hunger for naming is satiated with his trading cards, hundreds upon hundreds of names and attributes. Vulpix, Nidorino, Pikachu, Torterra, Weezing, Lickitung, Steelix, Uxie, Dusknoir, Deoxys, Gligar, Slugma, the latter’s body made of lava so it can’t stop moving or it will cool and harden. A favourite of the boy’s. Somewhere in Toyko’s Nihonbashi district there is a name factory, no doubt, where adult men and women with orange hair, wearing T-shirts with impossibly cute slogans, brainstorm all day for characters’ names while sipping bubble tea through straws and smoking thin brown Indian cigarettes.

  The other day a card was lying face up on the side of the bathtub, Houndoom’s teeth marks on it. Typhlosion, a creature with a collar of flame that looks like a cross between Godzilla and a skunk. Special moves: Flamethrower, Lava Plume, Eruption. “Typhlosion ignites fire blasts by rubbing its hairs against one another. It uses the resulting heat haze to hide itself. Anything touching it while it is aroused will be up in flames instantly.” This is the most evolved Pokémon of its kind.

  “Diatomaceous earth is pretty effective,” The Gardening Dame tells her caller. “Millions of years ago little marine creatures died out just so we could use their skeletons to kill slugs. Crawling over the stuff is like crawling through ground glass.”

  Brian from Quesnel: “Isn’t that unnecessarily barbaric?”

  The Gardening Dame: “You could do what I do and go out in the night with a miner’s light strapped to your head and track them down one by one, pour salt on them, and watch them sizzle and hiss.”

  Brian from Quesnel: “That’s sick.”

  The Gardening Dame: “An eye for an eye, as they say, a tooth for a tooth.”

  WAKE-UP SLAP

  Every night at a certain hour the recovering terrorist can feel her fear rising like a reeking tidal backwash, and here it comes now, lugging kelp and dead crabs onto the shore. At night she is never alone. These particles that move through the air, the ones that appear as large and small spots in front of your eyes, these must be the constituents of hell.

  T
here is the girl in her open coffin, not like it was at the funeral. But that’s the only difference. There is the pastor, disconcertingly cheerful, and the family. The church is like a big A-frame cabin. Pale wood beams arch gently up, joining at the point where the ceiling pierces the sky. The heavens, as it’s called.

  The pastor turns his palms upward as if checking for rain. “Anna has been transported from a scene of pain and sorrow to a land that knows no pain. God said, ‘Well done, Anna, you passed the test, come home.’” The young voices in the choir, schoolchildren, sing of the Lord coming to gather his jewels.

  Behind the recovering terrorist a woman is whispering loudly, “Anna was fascinated with Heaven and could not, could not, wait for the Second Coming. She said, ‘Mommy, I want to go home to be with Jesus.’ And her mother said, ‘Don’t you want to stay here with Mommy and Daddy?’” Teary sighs of understanding from the surrounding pews. The pastor says, “We pray for the person, or persons, responsible for this act.”

  Whatever this is called, it’s not a dream.

  Her co-conspirators were furious that she’d gone to the funeral. “Are you insane?” hissed Damien—a man, no, a beautiful boy really, whose cock only six days earlier she had held in her mouth—before disappearing from her life forever. She heard that he was in Dawson City or Kathmandu—like Elvis there were sightings for years and then nothing. One by one the others disappeared as well. Dissolving, so it seemed, into mist, but resurfacing south of the border and eventually apprehended for other crimes, bigger, more glamorous ones, yet not nearly so terrible. She was the only one with collateral damage to her credit. And yet here she is, hiding in plain sight, as it’s called.

  Poor, virginal Leonard, with his sense of aggrievement— Capt. Elmer Fudd, they called him, because of his stutter— became a prison poet, the most productive time of his life, he told Rolling Stone. Since he got out, nothing, but he still saw himself “as a fundamentally good person.” Carmen posed for Annie Leibovitz, pregnant, naked, and holding a Pancor Jackhammer across her breasts and fruited belly, a daisy sprouting from the gun’s muzzle. This was before making the FBI’s most-wanted list a second time. Regan and Gerry, always the clowns, had tried to get a mock reality show called Urban Guerrilla off the ground. That’s what happened, you did your time and you moved on. It must be a colossal relief, she thinks, something that doesn’t compute in her cosmology.