Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Every so often in the early years, there were rumours of a “sixth member.” But her name had never come up.

  The early-summer heat wave is getting to everyone at group. That and the woof of decaying fish from the back-alley bin of the Indonesian restaurant next door to their meeting space. Oppressing everyone, that is, except Lucy, who’s energized as she confesses her imagined assault on City Hall. How she envisions it: like the ending of a movie running on under the credits rather then dissolving to black, fantastical slo-mo destruction to a hypnotic soundtrack, something by Philip Glass or Arvo Pärt. And her right there, facing the statue of Captain Vancouver as debris falls like cleansing rain. Her blood is singing. She almost has to lick her lips, the scene is just that tasty. She tells them about how she’s gone to the Vancouver Archives and looked up the blueprints, how locating the most vulnerable points of the building was like tracing the veins of a lover’s arms.

  There’s a kind of silence for a moment, the scratching at soaked pits, the slurping of coffee, looks exchanged. Of all of them, Lucy has the strongest urges, has to work the hardest to quell that insatiable need to act or threaten to act in order to have her demands met, to inflict order. Maybe they were all just dissatisfied children who had never grown up. Angelina puts down her cup and applauds Lucy’s confession, and the rest join in, but tepidly. The point is to offer support, not pass judgment, but Lucy can see that she’s making them tired. Especially Dieter, who so wants to move on, to forget all this, get married to a nice man, be normal, as it’s called. He wants what he thinks she has.

  “Um, so power to the people, right on.” Lucy pumps her fist in the air, trying to lighten the mood, fettered as it is by heat and stench and her own neediness. “Free Leonard Pelletier!”

  “Excuse me, but that’s so not funny,” says Hamish-Two-Fins, the born-again native. After discovering six years ago that his great-great grandmother had been one-eighth Kitlope, of the Killer Whale clan, it’s been one warrior cry after another, and a short hop from there to wannabe terrorist.

  Does she know any of these people at all? These members of her “book club,” as she’s described her Wednesday-night outings to Bruno. Does knowing their deepest desires mean anything, does having glimpsed the rusty drip pan under their hearts entitle her to their trust? Do they really have anything in common at all? There’s an elderly woman who calls herself The Wife. There’s Sterling, the tree-spiker. Tim, whose well-connected daddy somehow got him back from Brazil before he even ran short of changes of pressed boxers. Molly, who’d waged a campaign of terror against her West End neighbourhood’s johns. Wing-Soo, whose story was an epic saga involving container ships, human snakes, payola, nasty landlords, and lost children. And Hamish, who’s been banned from Kitamaat Village by the hereditary chief, presumably, Lucy thinks, for being annoying. Angelina is the only one among them who’d done time. She shrugged it off whenever they asked. “It was the sixties. Everyone did something.”

  Then there is Dieter, dear Dieter. A charter member of ACT UP, he’d taken part in a direct-action campaign in which a syringe purportedly tainted with the AIDS virus was planted tip up in the seat of a movie theatre. It was one of a chain owned by the family of the wife of the Canadian CEO of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoBioProgress. (Besides, Dieter told her he’d reasoned, they were showing Gigli with Ben Affleck, and anyone who would go to see that …) But the screening that day had been the sneak preview of a children’s movie. Dieter panicked and called the cops and swore off direct action for life. Among his former inner circle he’s now a pariah, or The Turned Wurm, as he calls himself when he’s feeling cheerful.

  “What, no exegesis on Tim’s latest outfit?” Lucy asks as they walk towards Waterfront station after group, Dieter uncharacteristically quiet. “I thought it was cute in a golf-daddy kind of way. No sweatshop labour involved. How do I know this? Because he confides in me.”

  “Do you have any idea how many die-ins I’ve been in with people who are now actually dead?” Dieter says. “I’m sick of going to funerals and visiting people in prison. People I love.”

  “If you’re proposing to me, you’ll have to go down on one knee.”

  “You want to know what I think?” Under the flashing sign of a donair shop Dieter’s face blinks in and out of view. “I think you’re looking for an excuse to blow something up. I think you want to be caught.” The pressed meat on its rod turns slowly in the window, glistening, slick with a fatty sheen.

  “Maybe I need a new sponsor,” Lucy says.

  “Maybe. I don’t think I’m helping your spiritual growth.”

  Lucy can’t help cracking a smile, but it feels crumbly, as if her face is a plaster mask.

  “Seriously, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop you.”

  Up north, someone is sabotaging the natural-gas pipeline. The bomber sends almost illegible handwritten notes to the company, calling them terrorists. Lucy envies him his sense of mission. And his patience. He’s given them five years to dismantle the $1.8-billion project, three months to commit. Who has five years? Who has three months? Who has the guts to be the pot calling the kettle black, in shoddy penmanship to boot?

  DRILL PECK

  The recovering terrorist deadheads bee balm in her front garden, the red-tufted joker heads strewn at her feet like carnage from the suicide bombing of a medieval fairground. Her son spins up and down the sidewalk on his unicycle trying to juggle three oranges. His dad’s idea and, of course, he loves it. Carfool. Now he’s talking about learning to juggle fire.

  A car streaks by, its boom-box bass competing with the squeal of tires as it tears onto Victoria and she can’t help herself, she runs after it, waving her secateurs at the dissipating exhaust. “I’ll clip your skinny little balls next time!” The boy leaps from his unicycle and rolls around on the grass, screaming, “Balls! Balls!” Houndoom commences her unearthly yowling. Her husband opens the front door, still in his SpongeBob boxers. “Hey!”

  “Mom said ‘balls’!” Her son can hardly speak, he’s laughing so hard. “That’s like nuts, right? Like your dick!” His mother, always the comedian. But the recovering terrorist is sitting on the sidewalk crying, alligator tears, as they’re called, big fat drops that literally splat when they hit the pavement. I’m crying cats ’n’ dogs, she thinks, and would laugh about the absurdity of it if she weren’t so furious.

  Then her husband is there rubbing her back, saying something soothing. She forces herself to bring his voice into focus and it’s like surfing deep, dark water into sun-warmed light. “Foster’s careful, he’s a good kid, he knows better than to go on the road.” Did she marry this man because of this delightful lack of ability to fret about the future or chew on the bones of the past? It’s as if he’s been genetically altered, the worry seed AWOL from his twist of DNA. It’s all hakuna matata with him, her own Bobby McFerrin and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful. This man who knows nothing of her dark heart, of the mercury semi-dormant in her veins, who deems what he thinks of as her “neurosis” charming at the best of times, and simply irritating at high tide.

  Would her husband be willing to die for their son? Why didn’t they talk about such things?

  The boy, on the other hand, the boy is complicated. Complicates things. Raichu, evolved from Pichu and Pikachu, can store up to 100,000 electric volts in its cheeks and release them through its tail. Information she can use.

  She’s clipped the webbing between her left thumb and index finger with the secateurs. The blood is pooling, as it’s called, but only she can see this. Her husband is gearing up for a joke, she can tell by how absent-minded his back strokes are getting. Her son dances around in front of them, an orange pressed to either side of his groin. “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s Super Vitamin C Balls!”

  It’s always the mother’s fault. As they say.

  Kurt from Vancouver: “I have this friend who seems determined to wreck this beautiful garden she’s carefully built up over the years. I’m not
the only one concerned. This self-destructive impulse threatens everything she holds dear.”

  The Gardening Dame: “And is there a word for this in the German, Kurt?”

  Kurt from Vancouver: “Lucy, if you’d just—”

  The Gardening Dame: “My advice, sir, is MYOB. Good fences make good neighbours, as they say. Next caller?”

  GUNK SHOT

  The man with the robotic voice has left a message. Tomorrow’s appointment with the assistant manager of traffic calming measures has been cancelled due to the impending garbage and recycling strike. “We are seconding all senior municipal personnel in this time of crisis,” he droned. Bla-blah, bla-blah, bla-blah. A bureaucrat’s call to arms.

  The recovering terrorist walks Houndoom along Victoria, where film trucks and trailers are lined up for blocks and McSpadden Park has been tricked out as a tent city for an episode of Reaper. A woman with what looks like an enormous tongue runs through the dilapidated tennis court, followed by a guy wielding a machete. He leaps the sagging net and there’s a boom! and a feeble spray of black smoke. Houndoom yowls as if she wants to raise the dead. A man in a ball cap yells at a guy with pigtails, something like one more premature blast and—while about two dozen people holding coffee mugs and clipboards stand around doing nothing. The guy who plays Sock is covered in soot, mugging at onlookers in blackface, playing the machete like an air guitar.

  She’s reminded of the old “debates” they had back in their Chinatown squat about homemade explosives. Or “kitchen improvised munitions,” as Leonard, a.k.a. Capt. Fudd, used to call them. This gave them a homey vibe, as if they were cooking up something for a potluck. Regan and Gerry treated it like a party game. “For $200. The seminal ingredient in urea nitrate.” “What is semen?” Beep! “Oh sorry, Alex, I meant, ‘What is urine?’” They were in love with the idea of using their own piss to blow things up.

  “Metaphorically,” said Damien, “it would be apt.” Their target was the owner of a company that exported chlorine-filled diapers that had caused testicular cancer in third-world baby boys. The diapers were banned in Canada.

  Plastic explosives? A Tampax cocktail? (They had experimented with that one—a tampon soaked in lighter fluid stuffed in a soy sauce bottle—and Regan had singed off his shaggy bangs. Leonard suggested the tampon be a used one for added symbolism. “We’re not trying to make a feminist statement,” Damien sneered.)

  Eventually Carmen told them all to shut up. She was pouting. She had wanted them to chain themselves to a railway crossing in Poco, blocking a chlorine shipment from Sarnia, but Damien insisted Greenpeace had cornered the market on that tactic and that Carmen just wanted her tits splashed across the front page. It never occurred to the recovering terrorist at the time that this was most likely true.

  But homemade plastic explosives today, the possibilities are endless. What did people do before the Internet, she wonders, offering up a prayer of thanks to Google. Add a glass jar of napalm—petrol and generic soap shards—for extra kick, one site advises. “Put it in a mason jar next to the explosive device for maximizing damage to the target.”

  The process of extracting potassium chlorate from household bleach is time-consuming and maddeningly multi-step, but her science degree at least taught her a modicum of patience with process, if not with life. Fractional crystallization, it’s called. Science could be so poetic. “Craft project,” she tells her husband when he asks about the smell coming from her workroom. “A surprise for everyone at Christmas—I think they’re getting tired of updated copies of my Grafting Perennials classic.”

  She considers calling in her ultimatum from the phone booth at the corner of Hastings and Penticton, one of the few left in the entire city that hasn’t been gutted or entirely disappeared overnight as if it had never existed. But they already have a record of her name, her request, her particulars, as they’re called.

  They issued an ultimatum way back then as well. Of course they did. Written on one of the company’s own diapers filled with dog shit and deposited on the front steps of the captain of industry’s Scarborough mansion. It never made the news, though. That should’ve been a warning to them. But. Maybe a maid removed it before anyone else could find it.

  The family was supposed to be away that night at an out-oftown function, intelligence had it. Intelligence being Regan and Gerry. That should’ve been a warning as well. The daughter at a friend’s. The “help”—god, she hated, still hates, that term— had the night off.

  She had volunteered to do it—no, insisted. This was about children, the future. All the things she believed in. Damien gave her a big, soul-sucking kiss before she headed out. Carmen glared. Leonard saluted. Somewhere, making its way to the press, was their manifesto. She remembers how her legs were wobbling, almost comically, as if she were a drunken Olive Oyl. But she managed to move forward, a spastic walk before she started to run, shaky baby steps towards a better world.

  The car will ignite as its wheels crossed the line. That much she knows.

  If the driver has a passenger, well, that’s collateral damage. And there is still the possibility the City will choose to see it her way. Hope, the thing with feathers.

  Khan from Surrey: “My tomato plants have bites on them. Very little teeth. You think a big bug with a large mouth or a mice with a small mouth?”

  The Gardening Dame: “Tell me, Khan, are you the kind of man who might tie his wife to a chair with gardening twine and set her on fire?”

  MEAN LOOK

  It feels great, this violent disgorging from the earth, the recovering terrorist thinks as she tears up blood grass by the roots with her bare hands. Her husband and son are off somewhere with The Hound. Next door there’s the conscientious whirring click of a push mower. Across the street kids screech in someone’s backyard as they get hosed down—yelling No! when they mean Yes! In the distance a train groaning through the cut, sirens, an ice-cream truck, crows. Summer in the city.

  “We all missed you at group on Wednesday.” Dieter squats beside her, his face so close she can see that his glasses are steaming up from the heat.

  If this were a movie her next line would be: What the %ˆ*%$ are you doing here!? But she just shakily stands as the chasm separating her two lives buckles, a cave-in of the Grand Canyon, burros with scratchy blankets on their backs scrambling for their lives, tourists wailing before clods of red earth pack mouths, ears, nostrils—sensory deprivation before oblivion.

  “This has gone too far,” Dieter says. No, it hasn’t, Lucy thinks, not far enough. She could strike out with both hands, fury swipe, poison jab. “You don’t even know who I am,” she says instead.

  “You are a bitch. You know that, right?” His eyes brim behind those distorting lenses. What did children call him at school? Four-eyes? Froggy? Fag? Did anyone recover from the nastiness of schoolyard taunts? Did he ever think about blowing up his tormentors? No, Dieter was a purist. He believed in causes, not himself. He believed in people.

  Then there’s Houndoom launching herself at Dieter, Foster straining at the other end of the leash. She introduces Dieter as a member of her book club. “Just checkin’ out the ’hood,” he tells Bruno, his eyes skittering like tropical fish.

  Afterwards, Bruno says, “‘Just checkin’ out the ’hood?’”

  “He’s usually more articulate,” Lucy tells him. “His German heritage, you know. All those million-dollar words.”

  “If he wasn’t so obviously gay, I’d say that looked liked a lover’s quarrel.”

  Foster squeezes between them, panic in his voice: “Hey, Mom! I just noticed Houndoom doesn’t have any balls!”

  If Hope is the thing with feathers (a sentiment that always puts Lucy in mind of the white feather floating through the treacle Forrest of that Tom Hanks movie), then what is Faith? Surely a thing with nasty thorns. Those who clutch at it remain bloodied but unbowed. Unlike so many in her circle—if you could call it a circle—she doesn’t mock the faithful. Not after seeing what fai
th could do.

  Lucy visited the dead girl’s parents while she was pregnant. It was close to eleven years since that night. The girl would’ve been—what? Married and teaching Sunday school and awaiting her first child? A junior missionary in Honduras? A party girl downing tequila shots in her university dorm? A fledgling Olympic hurdler?

  The house didn’t have the look of a tomb or a shrine, as she’d imagined. It was cheerful in a perfectly ordinary way. On the mantel was the girl’s picture, along with wedding photos of adult children and a grandchild holding up a lacrosse trophy. Lucy had pretended to be soliciting for a downtown mission for runaways and they actually invited her in off the doorstep and offered her tea. “Bless you,” she said. “All other doors have been shut in my face.” The odd locution she had borrowed from one of the nuns in Lilies of the Field.

  Lucy had just wanted to witness how, if, someone could survive the death of a child. She looked at the photos and commented on the handsome family. “Two grandchildren?” she asked. No, their daughter, Anna, she was told. “She died when she was eight,” the father said. “She was at her first sleepover. Nice people. There was a fire.” They offered nothing more and she didn’t ask.

  Until that day she had thought of almost nothing for weeks but aborting the fetus, leaving Bruno, disappearing like Damien had, as if he’d never even been. What would that be like, to have never been?