Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (14 page)

She's already back in the dining room refilling her glass when she remembers she didn't flush, unlike early this morning when, after waking up alone on the roof (even the palm tree was gone!) and somehow managing to crawl down into the apartment before being sick, Didi made sure she flushed and then flushed again. Then she'd washed her face, scraping at the flecks of roof pitch with an AirMiles card someone had left in the soap dish, before stepping into the hallway and belting out the theme song from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. One of her hosts appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, wide-eyed, naked, just as she was pretending to toss her hat into the air Mary Richards–style, and closed the door in her face, loudly, but she caught the pretend hat anyway just to prove she didn't need other people around to have fun.

It was only afterwards, when she was standing down on Adelaide, that she realized she didn't have cab fare or even enough for the streetcar and had to walk all the way home while flipping the bird at ignorant would-be johns in rusting Impalas and gleaming Isuzu Rodeos with bicycle racks on the back who couldn't differentiate if their very lives depended on it between her ironically short terry-cloth shorts (that had just been at a party with Rufus Wainwright and his new lover and the latter's understanding and rather empathetic ex-girlfriend) and something a hooker would wear. And after all that she had so looked forward to tonight, to a fun evening in a fourteenth-floor luxury apartment belonging to a semi-famous photographer who specialized in portraits of aging women intellectuals,
so excuse her!

The steaks and those very large, scary baked potatoes have somehow made their way onto the table and she finds herself sitting in front of a plate with a knife and fork in her hands and the photographer is still talking, something about how if he hadn't become a photographer he would've been a short-order cook, an excellent short-order cook, because that's how much he likes a
well-greased grill
(??!!), and how much simpler his life would've been, and Didi wonders why he's telling her these things, wonders if he maybe has her confused with somebody else, with this Deirdre whose name he keeps snapping his jaws down on as if they're a leghold trap, because, well, explosions, if you like that kind of thing, could be considered a turn-on, but a well-greased grill can't be construed as anything other than a well-greased grill.

In between all his words, if she squints, she can see that he's trying to tell her something and that it has nothing to do with innuendo. She knows she should be interested in these things he's talking about, that somehow these things matter, but she isn't. In fact, they make her feel itchy.

What she really, really wants to ask, once and for all, is
What are we doing here?
She tries to will this simple question into being, to thrust it into the air between them like a magician conjuring a dove from the old-fashioned beige clutch purse of the mousy divorcee in the front row, the bird's small breast throbbing against the magician's thumb, the woman feeling off-balance but delighted (
He picked me!
), but when the words refuse to materialize, Didi tugs her blouse off over her head and lets it float to the floor.

The place had looked spotless, but now she sees dust scudding in drifts over the dulled parquet like clouds as the blouse wafts down in slow motion. In these elongated seconds, between her shirt coming off and him looking up from his plate and noticing, Didi has time to think she should be happy because here she is just one degree of separation from Annie Leibovitz and, in effect, only two degrees of separation from John and Yoko, David Byrne, Chris Rock, Nicole, Brad, Ben, Gwyneth, Kate—from
everybody
. This should make her feel elated, but instead she's filled with this prickly, fur-bearing sadness. She is, after all, only one degree of separation from that ugly dog at the edge of that bridge that no longer exists, in a country that no longer exists—so close that she could be that ugly dog, and in fact, if you looked closely enough, she is that ugly dog, and she needs to know if that dog ever jumped into the river to try to get to the other side or if he's still there shivering and whimpering for his owners, for the only people who loved him no matter what and who may or may not exist anymore anywhere on earth.

1
Named Marnie, Teka, and Charlotte, names she's tried to forget for nine years now but which cling to her brainpan like the words
Deirdre fleas
gouged into the lip of a desk with the tip of a red Bic.

SOMEONE IS KILLING THE GREAT MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS OF AMERIKA

I've stopped caring about skeptics, but if they libel or defame me they will end up in court.

—
URI GELLER, PSYCHIC SPOON BENDER

Belief is commonly easier to acquire and maintain than knowledge.

—
BARRETT L. DORKO, P.T.

You try telling that to Dodge.

—
ME

Someone is killing the great motivational speakers of Amerika and I am afraid I may be next. In an effort not to alarm my followers, I have camouflaged my disappearance as a wilderness retreat. The surroundings are more rustic than we are accustomed to and there have been grumblings about the lack of facilities. I tell them their ancestors didn't have backpacks containing rolls of three-ply toilet paper and antibacterial wipes; they had to make do with leaves and corn husks. In more recent times, it's possible they resorted to sections of newspapers that left their backsides inked with the TSE Composite Index or
Blondie
. Soon everyone is enthusiastically gathering foliage, although Dodge, twiddling his small goatee, complains about not having a copy of the latest
Vancouver Sun
editorial page. Dodge, with his almost indiscernible sense of humour, has for a long time now caused me equal measures of joy and grief.

As I watch my crew milling about with purpose—collecting firewood, securing tarps, taking inventory of the granola bars and shrink-wrapped Bavarian rye breads, the nut butters and fruit leathers, giving each other a hand—I can see it has been worth it. Is this not all I ever wanted? Cinders unfolds a foil astronaut blanket and wraps it around my shoulders. Felix has torn up a patch of moss he now cradles in his arms like a kitten. He advises me to stroke it with a pinky finger while keeping my eyes screwed shut tight. Gratitude wells in my breasts for all I have wrought. If this isn't synergy, what is?

Campfire songs are suggested, and I don't see why not. We are too isolated for anyone to hear us. And it is very late. The moon is a high, hard rind through sweating cedars. Hives prickle my neck from all the fungi around. The city is far away, only the occasional magnesium flare through hemlock and Douglas fir. Something in our small fire cracks like a pistol shot.
I'm a bow-legged chicken, I'm a knock-kneed hen
, Felix sings, his lisp almost indistinct, and the rest join in, even The Kevster, who during the past few weeks has taken to lurking on the perimeters with a sneer perma-pressed onto his face.
Never bin so happy since I don't know when
. Except for Pudding, who stares at the sky, as always, as if waiting for a signal.

Pudding is the only one I've never been able to get through to.

My troubles began almost a year ago, with the publication of an obscure scientific document, a paper rife with antiquated language and reactionary ideas (the lingua franca of
fear
). Science is on thin ground these days and particle physicists were up in arms: “[We're] damned if we're going to stand by and let a handful of rogue advocates of quantum quackery overrun quantum mechanics, a field of research that could lead, finally, to a Theory of Everything” (Brisbane Convention Report, 2011, p. iv).

Snake oil
was mentioned. The phrase
half-baked
was deployed.
String theory
was draped around the text like rolls of crepe paper livening up a fiftieth-anniversary party.

You would have been hard pressed to even find a mention of the report online until a Danish newspaper ran an inflammatory series of editorial cartoons on the “debate.” Deepak Chopra shoving a Dr. Seussian Schrödinger's cat into a microwave oven. Anthony Robbins® putting it “doggie style” to physicist Niels Bohr, who knelt on a bed of burning coals. Uri Geller dining on Einstein's entrails à la
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
using a large bent spoon. Esoteric “European” humour at its worst.

But the Internet being what it is, the gist of the argument was soon translated into Amerikan. It was at that point that things took a turn for the worse.

Our belief in human energy fields, in mind-over-matter responses to our increasing health problems, threatened not only the physicists but those in the field of conventional medicine. Powerful alliances were formed.
¹
They unfortunately had,
have
, an erroneous understanding of bioenergetics: “The belief that human consciousness controls reality,” the scientists scoffed.
Control
s is a misnomer.
Manipulates
is closer;
defines
would be more accurate.

Was it altogether too simple-minded of me to ask:
Why can't we just get along?
(“What the Heck?” promotional brochure, March 2012.) Apparently so. Because it was soon afterwards that the death threats began.

Dodge has brought his girlfriend with him. I'm not convinced this was a good idea. Sam is a slippery one, very all-Amerikan in her locution,
yes ma'am, absolutely ma'am
, and with a look on her face some may describe as beatific, but that strikes me as bland. Her energy field is like a clear-cut, with no remaining signs of life, not even a termite.

She sits in a patch of sun filtered through fern and cedar, telling Felix a story, the light glinting off her wedding finger, Dodge hovering around them like some kind of manservant. She wears what is called a “purity ring” and has persuaded Dodge to wear one as well. To put it bluntly, the rings are a symbol of sexual abstinence, although Sam didn't put it that way. She just held it up in front of my face and said, “True love waits.” Then she patiently told me, as if I were a small child, that it was a reminder of the commitment she had made to God to remain pure until marriage. I should be relieved, but somehow I find this offensive. Isn't Dodge good enough for her? Is this what constitutes sex education in Amerika today?

So much hard work over the years, so many appearances made while hopped up on antihistamines or fighting rogue waves of menstrual cramps, scalp itchy with excess sebum, wondering when I last had the opportunity to take a shower. Did I ever let on that I was suffering? You succeed through
terrorizing the negative impulse
(
My Emotional Fatwa
, Golden Agouti Press, 2009, p. 64). This is, I contend, because you're never going to stop the rain by whinging.
²

I clap my hands and announce that it's time for our daily Pronouncements. Time to break up this little idyll.

The word
pure
really irks me. “Gets my tits in a knot, Alice,” as my friend Ingrid would say.

We sit cross-legged in a semicircle. A bird demonically shrills somewhere in the forest canopy. “I am striving to overcome the urge to snog Sam until my lips fall off,” pronounces Dodge.
³
The Kevster makes a rude noise, and Sam covers her face with her purity-ring hand.

“That is so
not
a serious Pronouncement,” says Cinders. She is the follower who has taken my teachings most to heart. The Kevster likes to refer to her as Rulebook.

“I am striving to stop eating so many high-fructose, high-glucose snack foods,” says Cinders, who struggles with body image. During Pronouncements we are meant to pledge to overcome something standing in the way of our future happiness.

“I am striving to overcome doubt,” says Sam, somewhat cryptically in my opinion, but I don't ask, “Doubt about what?” You could say that I am striving to be a more tolerant person.

Sam is older than Dodge by about six years. Technically, at nineteen, he is still a teenager, although legally speaking she cannot be accused of robbing the cradle. Still, there is a way I have found her looking at me at times, woman-to-woman you could call it, that is unsettling.

“I am striving to control my bladder at night so I can have a sleepover at Dexter's place when we get home,” says Felix. I grant him an encouraging wink. Felix is reassuringly goal-oriented. That we may not be going home anytime soon would not be useful information to impart to him at this point.

The Kevster remains silent. Pudding as well, but that goes without saying.

The worst accusation from the scientists, on a personal level, was that we were “confusing bioenergetic fields with the ether.”

If our energy fields don't exist—what is this? This luminous face turned skyward, pale irises, the flecks in them wildly kaleidoscopic, her skin, that way of looking. Pudding has such an intense aura. There are times I have witnessed static crackling blue from her scalp, her fine hair rising and quavering like the tentacles of a sea anemone. It is as if she is communing with the unseen particles in the air around us, decoding them into her private language somewhere deep in her hermit kingdom, in her Arkadia.

I have far from given up on what quantum mind theory may be able to do for Pudding. In the TRIUMF cyclotron, the gigantic particle accelerator at the university, various matters and antimatters collide to release pure energy in the form of gamma rays. The subatomic particles travel in the accelerator in a spiral, and a spiral is the primary geometric form in which thought waves travel. If we could get within shouting distance of these gamma rays and direct them to interact with Pudding's already overactive energy field, perhaps they could unlock her from inside her private realm.
⁴
The radiation issue remains unresolved. But it is a risk I'm willing to take.