Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Was Rufus being deliberately mean or—worse—had he forgotten?

  It was the year of the endless civic election. Campaign signage was everywhere, but this was indicative less of the spirit of democracy than of a sense of desperation. A new municipal bylaw allowed citizens to accept payment to display signs and billboards. You could tell when someone was really hard up when ads for Farsighted People and the Fiscally Responsible Folks and Greener than You, plus various independents, all jostled for space on the same patchy scrap of front lawn. The lawns of the kind of people who donated sperm to fertility clinics at $50 a pop and dreamt of selling a kidney on eBay. It was hard to pass judgment; these weren’t easy times.

  Sustainability Is for Suckers, an FRF slogan read. The Tim Hortons on Kingsway had it printed on their coffee-cup sleeves. The Kamper Kids wore the discards as armbands. After all, everyone had a right to an opinion.

  Alex told her students to write up Corinna’s incident on No. 5 Road in inverted-pyramid style for the following week.

  She said: You can interview Corinna—she’s a primary source. She’s a witness.

  She said: Remember to write it with the most important information near the top so that an editor can cut from the bottom up.

  She said: Bottoms up, get it?

  Xmas Singh said: Hahaha.

  She said (to herself): Bonus points for using actual facts.

  Not so long ago Rufus used to talk to Alex, really talk, about just about everything, as he sat on the toilet, bathroom door ajar so they could hear each other, peeing for what seemed to her an inordinately long time. A feeble trickle like early-spring melt off a mountain stream. She’d urged him to get his aging prostate checked, fearing the small chestnut gland would start ballooning with tumours bagpipe-like throughout his groin.

  Mostly Rufus had talked about his designs. He’d launched a small company with a friend a decade ago that specialized in sustainable designs rooted in the natural world. “Bionical creative engineering,” Rufus called it. He’d won a Suzuki Foundation Award for developing a non-toxic fabric finish inspired by water-repellent lotus leaves. More recently he’d been obsessively studying the mako shark and its hydrodynamic proportions, its enviable zero-friction drag. A superhero shark. Nature’s Genius—Human/e Technology (the name had been Alex’s idea) was in negotiations with a Miami-based underwater-exploration outfit to underwrite the clean technology Rufus was developing.

  Alex lowered the newspaper after rereading the same sentence about the doomed Inga Falls hydroelectric project on the Congo River at least five times. (Kimberly Lum never could write a lead.) “So what does Ernesto Jr. say about your latest mako calculations?” The millionaire Cuban American had started lowballing Rufus on materials almost from the word go.

  Rufus, hunched over his laptop at the coffee table, the can of Red Bull at his elbow replacing his usual green tea, glanced at her briefly and shrugged. “It’s complicated.” He turned back to World of Warcraft: Final Blood. This guy who hadn’t even heard of Tetris when she met him had somehow, while she wasn’t looking, morphed into a gamer. He belonged to a dejected, renegade race of draenei, the Broken. Alex leaned over his shoulders and tried to make sense of the mayhem on his monitor. “So, your guys, are they good guys or bad guys?”

  Rufus just rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  Was it a trick of the light, or was that peach fuzz on his cheeks?

  Alex missed her bionical man, as she used to call him, poking a finger into his softening gut. She missed their toilet conversations, the intimacy and vulnerability of a peeing man seated and talking earnestly about his aspirations.

  Now, he often stood, aiming from the bathroom doorway in a jet stream. Singing off-key as he whizzed. He seemed happy.

  Two of these things were facts. One was just her opinion.

  NIGHT ON TOWN TRASHED

  By Xmas Singh

  Corinna D. and her cousins were just trying to have a good time.

  They gone to see dj Jaspa at Viva.

  “It was happening,” Miss D. said. She was wearing her new lickwid tights.

  But some jerk left a pile of garbage in the middle of the road that allegedly turned out to be a dead body.

  ^allegedly

  “Cousin Kevin was pissed,” said Miss D. “He just washed that car.”

  The vehicle was a 2011 Mahindra Scorpio, “a kind of sick green,” according to a source.

  None of the passengers was injured during the incident.

  Richmond police were totally rude when asked for an interview.

  Alex’s other students gave no indication that they thought Corinna’s story was news.

  Her neighbourhood was changing so rapidly that if Alex stood without moving on the corner of East 1st and Commercial Drive, she would find herself at the still centre of a kaleidoscopic time-lapse movie. This is what her neighbourhood had become, a tone poem set to a Philip Glass soundtrack, punctuated with sirens, and drumbeats, and guttural shouts as the local unmedicated or overmedicated argued with themselves and each other while they ranged back and forth across the Drive, dodging cars, bikes, and elderly Italian and Portuguese Canadian jaywalkers.

  After a period of intense gentrification, a mini baby boom, and the opening of three overpriced florists and a string of restaurants with daily fresh sheets listing boutique beers, there was a sense of emptying out. Her friends who feared the Kamper Kids, the garbage-bag rumours, and commercial rezoning that allowed a methadone-dispensing pharmacy to open within two blocks of the community centre/pool/rink/library fled to the suburbs where they had sworn they’d never go. “I’d rather have an infected needle jabbed deep into my right eye,” Alex’s neighbour Sasha had told her fiercely on more than one occasion. Now Sasha, her pierced labia, wife Marcia, and fouryear-old, Destiny, lived in a semi-gated townhouse complex in Port Coquitlam.

  Others were going on spiritual pilgrimages to Varanasi or Amankora or joining the circus. In fact, all around the city children were abandoned to aging relatives or the newly minted private kiddie kennels by their thrill-seeking parents. The older children banded together, moving nomad-like from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, performing odd pantomimes for spare change. How can we have children? We are children! the parents laughed as they formed their human pyramids or checked their supply of water-purification tablets needed to survive their third-world spirit quests.

  Mainly, though, there was a lot of talk about moving off-grid. The grid, that matrix of power and telecommunications, heat and light on command, was something Alex could understand. She had a healthy respect for the grid. Like IKEA, like steel-cut Scottish oats and cargo pants, the grid represented common sense. She would cling to the grid with bloody, tattered fingers if anyone attempted to dislodge her. Alex overheard a couple in JJ Bean loudly debating the pros and cons of a $25,000 residential wind turbine or a bicycle-powered generator. The woman seemed particularly concerned about not losing access to Netflix. “If you want to get off the grid,” Alex found herself saying, as if offering advice on the daily blend, “try sub-Saharan Africa.” The woman called her an earth-raping, racist, Trotskyite bitch. The guy just winked and tongued the foam on his coffee.

  Steel girders formed the roof of the heritage building across the street—an abandoned Free Methodist church turned award-winning performance space—replacing the rotting wood beams of the original. Piece by piece, what was meant to be a renovation had been slowly turning into a replica, like those museum reproductions of Bastet cat goddesses and busts of Pericles you could use for bookends. Now it stood neglected, the skeleton of some great beast washed ashore on a remote island and bleached to a pewter gleam by the sun.

  And there was Alex with her free-floating sense of hollowness in her own rib cage. Her period hadn’t shown up for over six weeks, and her first thought was stress, then malignant carpet fibres. A single polymer thread clinging to her uterus, gathering her blood and tissue to it, a teething fibrous leech. She waited another
week before even contemplating the alternative.

  A child? It seemed she already had a child. A playmate for Rufus? There was an idea! Alex found she wasn’t as horrified at the thought as she thought she’d be. It could be Duktig!

  But the stick stayed white. No thin blue line.

  Rufus asked: Do you ever wonder if we’re too straight? Too fluoridated? Too hydrated?

  From:

  To:

  Sent: February 10, 2008

  Subject: ??

  Hey Roof? You know the Janjaweed? They call them demons on horseback. There’s a guy here, ostensibly with Human Rights Watch, but he has some kind of “deep intelligence” (read: he has something they want). The word is that the Sudanese govt. is backing this raging Arab militia. It’s genocide plain and simple. So I get this interview with a demon “general”—this alleged war criminal who arrives at the rendezvous somewhere near his garrison on a camel. And the thing he wants to talk about is dental hygiene. He got his teeth fixed by a recruit who was a dentist in Dubai. Now he religiously uses whitening strips. “Like Hollywood,” he tells me. He’s supposed to hate the infidels, right? So I stand there dumb as a moth in my chador (de rigueur due to his Muslim sensitivities) while he asks about my dental plan and whether I prefer Crest or Colgate.

  This is so hysterically not what I expected that my questions, all the anger that I’ve been stoking since I got here, go AWOL. And all this time he’s leaning in close, flashing these teeth like he’s a game-show host, and then he asks to see mine.

  It’s just him, his camel, and me—and a circle of his men on their horses eyeing us from a distance. My “translator” has wandered off to take a piss. I lift my shroud flap up over my eyes and he makes this sound in his throat, almost like poor old Knob-Goblin’s purr used to sound when we snurffled her belly, and puts his finger, which smells like smoke and blood and goat, right into my mouth. He runs it back and forth and back and forth, from molar to molar, while muttering something I take to be, “Nice, nice.” I think, I do actually think this, I could bite his finger right off right now, bite down as hard as I can, trapping his filthy child-raping finger and then spitting it out at his feet.

  He just keeps running his finger back and forth and so help me god I start to get hot and almost come right there standing in the dry wind stink of him.

  What does this make me?? And this whole time I’m in my chador like some black ghost. How can I even tell you this? How can I not?

  These are the things we do when we’re no longer ourselves. When the self disappears. The self—dear Knob-Goblin, I’d almost forgotten about her.

 

  The clinic doctor walked in, tapping a pen against her teeth. She looked about twelve. There was a polished bone (quail? ferret? human fetus?) protruding through both sides of her nostrils, and starting at the top of her hands and scrolling up under the sleeves of her lab coat, some tattooed script, “μνυμι πóλλωνα ητρ ν, κα σκληπι ν, κα γείαν, κα Πανάκειαν, κα θεο ς πάντας τε κα πάσας …”

  Alex, perched on the examining table in her crackling blue-paper wrapper, had the urge to ID the doctor before she let her slip her child-size hand inside her. She wondered if the girl had even gotten her period yet. Maybe it was bring-your-kidto-work week? Her own GP, a wiry-haired woman she loved who had seen her through a devastating bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, was away on a Doctors Without Borders mission in Haiti.

  Alex stared at the girl doctor’s hands to avoid looking directly into her face. “The Hippocratic oath,” the doctor said, pulling up her T-shirt to reveal more of the script spiralling across her taut belly. “In the original Greek.” Tugging her shirt back into place, she asked Alex a stream of straightforward questions, then snapped on a pair of green-and-white latex gloves embossed with the Starbucks logo, the mermaid with her tail split at her crotch. “We’ll have to run a few tests to make sure, but if I’m going to hazard, like, an educated guess? I would say premature ovarian failure.”

  “What?”

  “Early menopause.”

  Alex heard herself shrieking. The sound of the big ginger tom next door happening upon a raccoon clan in the back alley. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. A B-movie screech in Dolby Digital 5.1. On the wall behind the child doctor was a calendar featuring anthropomorphized bacteria engaged in Winter Olympic–style sporting events with an assortment of antibiotic soaps.

  “It happens,” she told Alex matter-of-factly. To who— whom? To whom does this happen at thirty-six?!

  Walking home from the clinic, clutching a referral for a geriatrics specialist and a pamphlet on the pros and cons of estrogen replacement therapy, Alex felt the elasticity in her skin giving way with each step, her uterus a dried gourd inside her, rattling like a maraca. She spotted a guy who looked like Rufus putting up a poster on a telephone pole outside Dream Cycle. Staple gun in hand, he scootered up Commercial from pole to pole. That goofy hat, the orange hoodie. It was Rufus.

  The poster read: Shuffering Shuccotash at the Iberian Club, Wed. April 13th. It had a picture of Sylvester the Cat as St. Sebastian, pierced from cartoon ears to foot-paws with arrows. Tweety Bird fluttered above his head with a shit-eating grin and a bow in his fist. A creepy cupid. A malevolent angel.

  It was the year of the Benevolent Municipal Bylaw (section iii, clause 8d) that allowed the homeless to camp out in construction sites as long as they signed a personal-injuries waiver. Developers didn’t like it, but since the 2010 Olympics and the overextension of credit and enormous cost overruns, sites sat empty. A waste, the majority Farsighted People councillors decided. The opposition FRF agreed, but had wanted to charge rent.

  Across the street from Alex’s house, under the rib-like girders and jutting rebar, a troupe of Kamper Kids slept each night in a tangled mound like buttered noodles, the remaining stained-glass window casting a fractured mosaic over them whenever the street light came on and flickered through it. During the day they moved on, forming their silent, almost biblical tableaux outside the off-sales, loonie stores, and coffee bars all along Commercial Drive. At dusk they drifted back, lit a small fire, and sat companionably around it passing containers of takeout back and forth until the flames extinguished themselves. And then they slept again.

  From:

  To:

  Sent: February 10, 2008

  Subject: way2go!!

  Congratulations on your award!! That’s Mammut, baby.

  You’re a green machine, Roof.

  Same-same here. Hot, heartbreaking—jaded professionals, desperate people. My fingers feel like molten lead just typing about it. Latest in tomorrow’s paper. Maybe already online. Sudan still denying it’s backing the rampaging Islamic rebels.

  Don’t worry so much, the Human Rights Watch boys are good to me and share their tp & tipples.

  forever & ever, Lex

  Why couldn’t anyone else smell the damn carpet? Alex sat at the front of the classroom pinching the bridge of her nose and ignoring her students. For the past two weeks she’d been letting them do whatever they wanted, waiting to see who would crack first, her or them. There were only nine days left until the end of spring term.

  She was playing hangman on the whiteboard with Xmas Singh while the rest of them deployed blue rinse bio bombs and plasma grenades against digital enemies or thumbed away at their PDAs. All jacked into some device, busy and bored. The only truly weird thing about the situation was that most of them still showed up at all, as if attending class was a condition of some kind of day parole. Or maybe they thought this was all there was, maybe they were satisfied that Alex had sunk to their level of expectation. There was no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind; she was simply a bad teacher, as opposed to a badass teacher, the kind who could inspire a group of inner-city toughs to excel at calculus or develop a healthy dollop of self-respect. Sidney Poitier’s Sir (“I am sick o
f your foul language, your crude behaviour, and your sluttish manner”—Alex could just imagine the blank stares if she said something like that), Morgan Freeman’s “Crazy Joe” Clark, Edward James Olmos’s Mr. Escalante. Maybe she was too white.

  Corinna D. hadn’t shown up for almost three weeks. The one call Alex had made to her home had been answered by a tired-sounding woman who said Corinna was out visiting her cousins. The college’s privacy rules prevented Alex from mentioning that Corinna had been a no-show for an awfully long time.

  Xmas Singh asked: Is there an X?

  Alex added a second leg to the stick man dangling from the noose.

  Xmas Singh clutched theatrically at his throat and made gurgling noises.

  Alex said: Best of three?

  Rufus asked: Too settled? Too happy?

  “Shuffering Shuccotash?” Alex said, peering at Rufus over the top of her new drugstore reading glasses. They were lying in bed, Rufus shuffling through his latest batch of Pokémon trading cards and Alex squinting at a pamphlet on osteoarthritis.

  “My band.”

  “Your band?”

  “Our first gig is on the thirteenth.”

  “But you don’t even play an instrument. You’re tone-deaf.”

  “I’m the gear guy.”

  Her triceps had sagged like saddlebags in the mirror after her bath, her hands ached, her ovaries were shutting down, and this morning she had plucked forty-three more grey hairs from her head before she stopped counting and swept the offending nest into the toilet. When she flushed, the hairs had swirled into a small, furious animal before disappearing with a gurgle. Alex started to cry.

  “You’re supposed to be the guy making sharkskin so we can all live in the water when the air gets too hot.” Alex smacked at Rufus, hard and fast with both hands, like an inspired jazz drummer. “You’re supposed to be focusing on saving the planet.”

  He grabbed her wrists and pulled her towards him, nuzzling her neck. His chest was smoother than when she’d met him, the curve of his penis like a scimitar. He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe.