Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (15 page)

Our location in this particular arboreal area, then, in the vicinity of the university's research facility, is not entirely without foresight. Somewhere farther from the city would have been safer, but
if you're convinced the tortoise will lose to the hare, then what is the point of the race?
⁵
(
Five Fables for the Future
, Golden Agouti Press, 2011, p. 109.)

Infiltrating the TRIUMF cyclotron has become my number one priority. For far too long has Pudding remained on the periphery—a cipher, a “changeling,” as people like her were called in the past. It is my duty to bring Pudding fully into the fold. I have that can-do feeling surging through me, despite the furtive whisperings between Dodge and his virgin concubine and The Kevster's surly and penetrating silence.

It is time to admit what we have become. A rebel unit. No longer on the run, but proactive. To think that I almost succumbed to despair when I first perceived that my life was in danger. My followers give me strength even in their own moments of weakness. My platoon. I like the sound of that.
Ten-hut!

I must find a way to polish my boots.

Tony Robbins was the first of us to disappear. Initially, a publicity stunt was suspected, but for a man of his voracious public appetite to voluntarily remain out of the limelight for so long seemed unfathomable. His financial holdings and current and former wives and associates were investigated, his accounts frozen. It has been eight months now and a body has yet to be recovered. A few months after his disappearance, Zachariah Madoff and Bernie “Hola!” Rodriguez were found dead within days of each other. The cause of death in both cases was eventually attributed to natural causes. (Who but scientists,
international
scientists, I ask, could cover their tracks like that, mimicking a coronary embolus and a subarachnoid hemorrhage so effectively as to dupe two coroners at the top of their game?) Werner Washington died more publicly, shot by a sniper at a shareholders' meeting in the Houston Astrodome. (The laughable lone-gunman theory has been widely debunked but continues to be the FBI's official line.)

Deepak now travels Kevlar-coated, with two armed guards, in an electric vehicle reminiscent of the Popemobile. He remains mum about whether he's received death threats, but the security at his residences and events rivals that of the phalanx of sharpshooters and the bulletproof glass dome at Amerikan President Obama's second inauguration.
⁶

I was closer to Tony than most people would care to acknowledge.
⁷
I have had night visions in which his baseball-glove-sized hands are cradling my head and his teeth are lighting a path through the darkness. In truth, darkness is something I have never feared. I have the eyes of a cat. I have little use for Tony's glowing teeth, but could use some of his advice right about now. I simply try not to even think about his hands.

We have managed to move closer to the TRIUMF facility, undetected but for the occasional raccoon and the unseen birds that twitter and caw their way across the forest canopy. After studying the diagrams of the site I obtained from the Internet, it has become obvious to me that breaching the inner sanctum will be trickier than I thought: the cyclotron is situated three storeys beneath the ground and is shielded by triplicate layers of 100-tonne concrete blocks, each 4.5 metres thick.

There is, of course, the recourse to a public tour
⁸
to gain entry and then staging a distraction while I spirit Pudding nearer the chamber. I can practically hear my friend Ingrid, who is an excellent slam poet, spit, “Permission is for losers.”
⁹
Besides, I am a wanted woman.

The security, though, is not what I had assumed. The sprawling and tastefully landscaped site comprises several buildings without, if the diagrams are to be believed, fibre optic security or even electrified fencing around the perimeter. An invitation to a reckoning.

This mission gives me a feeling of liberation I have not felt in a long time. The big question now is:
Do I share the details of my plan? Or do we proceed on a need-to-know basis?
My attempts at a military style of discipline have been met with a degree of resistance. After so many years of establishing my authority, I perceive a growing slackness among my followers that bespeaks, if not quite insurrection, then some form of unconscious revolt.

Sam sits astride a cedar log massaging Dodge's shaved scalp as if it's a crystal ball and she's divining the future. What does she see? Herself and Dodge surrounded by the emaciated children of an orphanage in Chad or Pune, or by bald little babies of their own in a stucco fourplex in East Vancouver? Is that a path to happiness for either of them?

“Velcro. There's an example,” Dodge says. “Think of burrs sticking to a dog's belly fur. Think of the entire planet as a humungous R&D lab. There are sustainable air-conditioned buildings inspired by the study of termite mounds, wind turbines based on the humpback whale's fin.” Dodge, it seems, intends to study biomimicry. This is not something we have had time to discuss. Much like the Sam liaison.

“Would God approve?” Sam wonders out loud. She doesn't appear to require an answer from Dodge, who just closes his eyes and sighs with pleasure against the circling pressure of her fingers. What about me? What if I don't approve of his misplaced faith in science?

Why does no one think to offer me a massage?

Cinders wants to know what I'm going to do about the cougar The Kevster has spotted. They never used to question, especially Cinders. I would say jump and Cinders would ask, “Horizontal or vertical?” (
You're O.K.—I'm K2
, Golden Agouti Press, 2010, p. 156.) Now it's become all why, what, when? Perhaps the anomie that has been creeping through the general population has gone viral, infiltrating the spores of the various fungi that proliferate here and compromising the morale of my troops.

Need I say, look it in the eye and show it who is boss? Need I say, winners are not eaten? Winners bite, chew, and disgorge what they don't need. I learned this lesson from a boy cousin what seems like an eternity ago now. We had been arguing about who was the real creative genius, Elton John or Bernie Taupin.
¹⁰
He tore my cherished poster of “The Desiderata,” designed to evoke an illuminated manuscript, from my bedroom wall and crammed it into his mouth piece by piece, gnashing ferociously. When he was done, only a gummy strip with the words
Go placidly amid the noise and has—
hung from one of his incisors. Above my desk the
Hang in There, Baby!
poster curled upward from the wall, masking tape in petrified clumps, a Siamese cat clinging to a telephone wire with a frenzied look on its face. “Eat or be eaten,” my cousin growled. “Kill or be killed.”

Ricky had what you would call charisma. But he didn't enjoy what you'd call a successful adulthood.

Cinders has wet herself rather than dare venture outside of our little enclave. I think we're long past due for a visualization circle.

There was a time, back in high school, when I would have described myself as a Christian Existentialist. A believer in God, albeit one who believed not in personal destiny, but rather in personal responsibility. I was a somewhat gloomy girl who wept during the singing of “Kumbaya” at school assemblies.
¹¹
Our Catholic school was remarkably progressive, thanks to Vatican II. It was through a lanky, good-natured religion teacher that I discovered
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, and Carlos Castaneda and his
Teachings of Don Juan
. It is to Mr. S. and to Cousin Ricky that I owe my metaphysical awakening.

We hold hands, because there is nothing equivalent to the holding of hands to pass on currents of self-generated electricity and intensify our energy fields. I sense that placid Sam may be a weak link. Pudding, on the other hand, standing between Felix and me, has a charge that could fire up a fleet of cross-Strait hydrofoils.

There is a strong wind sweeping across the tops of the trees; I hear it rather than feel it. More than a whisper, less than a roar. And a smell settling in not unlike that of a cabin that has been closed up for the winter. It emanates from our little group, a reminder that none of us have bathed for almost a week.

“I'm thinking about nachos with the works,” says Dodge, “the kind they have at Tinseltown in that flimsy cardboard dish with the melted cheese product bubbling like lava.” When his eyes are closed it's easy to imagine Dodge is still a child, filled with wayward charm and bereft of the flinty humour. It is impossible to tell if he is being genuine, but as no one starts giggling we move on.

“I'm thinking about a handheld electronic device,” Felix says, his lisp prominent and endearing, at odds with his preternaturally advanced vocabulary. “Even an old Nintendo DS.”

“That's the spirit,” I say. I had forbidden anyone to bring a cellphone or nano—to preserve the purity of the retreat, I told them. If the new President of Amerika is forced to survive without her BlackBerry for security purposes, then so can I.

Cinders says, “I'm thinking about Pudding saying her first word. I'm thinking it should be, ‘Howdy, Pardners!'” Cinders has a thing for cowboys, which I'm not sure is age appropriate. She opens her eyes and looks at me, and I give her an encouraging smile and squeeze Pudding's hand. Technically speaking, my eyes shouldn't have been open either, but chances are good Cinders will not broadcast my flouting of the rules. “That's two words,” says Felix.

Even Sam seems game, although typically opaque. “I'm thinking about a dark path easily traversed.” I cannot help but admire her correct usage of
traversed
. For someone I have never seen poking her button nose into a book, she is very well-spoken.

It's all going so nicely when The Kevster plops down onto his butt and leans back on his elbows, legs splayed. When did his legs get so long? “I want Dad.” He draws it out so it sounds like
Duh-ad
.

Do I say, “Was it Dad who stayed up for nights on end rubbing your back in soothing circles as you writhed with night terrors brought on from DVDs you know you shouldn't have watched at Calvin's house?” (The
mole people
! I never could understand what could have been so terrifying about the mole people.) Do I say, “Was it Dad who drove out to every cheap-plastic-off-gassing Walmart in the Lower Mainland in monsoon rains because you had to have a Dark Knight costume?” Do I say, “Do you think
Duh-ad
gives a shit?”

To my credit I merely drop Pudding's hand and shake off Felix's sticky grip and walk off in the direction of the unseen coastline. The ocean is out there. Somewhere beyond this increasingly oppressive foliage and the gnarled trunks, these optimistic nurse logs and fecund mulches, is the edge of Amerika and beyond that the rest of the world. It has been a very long while since I've felt anything approaching the sting of tears. Now is not the time to succumb to a pitiful nostalgia. But, unbidden, “Buffalo Springfield Again”
¹²
rises from somewhere inside me.

I was once young and I was wild—but refused to let it eat me up.

Winners are not sentimental. Winners look forward, not back. And still, the tears begin to fall.

It rained all night. Rapping against the tarps, weighing them down in deep troughs, the water cascading off like minor Niagaras. The ground surrounding us is now marshland. It's that squelching kind of weather that is counterproductive to a sense of esprit de corps. But at least the rain has tamped down the effects of the fungal spores and my head feels clear.

I awoke this morning with a strong feeling that Sam has a gun. Why would Sam have a gun? Did I dream it? Did I see it?

Everyone else is still sleeping, so perhaps it is not yet morning. With this greyness it's difficult to tell when day begins.

Of all the shocks over the past few months, I would have to say that the one that had me reeling was the loss of Viva Sawatsky. Lively little Viva who broke through the gender barrier in our field back when most of us were still busy daring each other to lift pots of green-apple-scented lip gloss from drugstore cosmetics displays.

How old would she have been? Well over seventy, maybe even over eighty. She never did divulge her age. She was found slumped in the green room of NBC's Alameda Ave. studios minutes before she was to appear on the
new
new Conan O'Brien to talk about her latest (and now final) book,
87 Ways to Plug into the Power of Whimsy
. Her premise, which I am not certain I fully appreciate the brilliance of yet, was that there is an area of the brain that is exclusively wired for whimsy and yet only 0.000000087 percent of the total world population has the preternatural ability to tap into its power. Clothing designer Betsey Johnson is one of these people. Idi Amin was another.
¹³
And, of course, Viva herself.

Since when are
Tonight Show
guests left unattended? The story is that Viva sent her publicist out for a fish taquito and then choked to death on a misdirected swallow of Ensure. But where were the Conan O'Brien people? Why the absence of other guests in the green room? It bears mentioning that the head of Molecular Biologists Without Borders had been slated to be on that night and had been bumped at the eleventh hour for Viva.

If her, then why not me? That's what I couldn't stop asking myself.

It's all about the cougar now. Its yellow eyes. Its liquid haunches. Its propensity to be there even when it's not. My platoon is preoccupied with peripheral vision. I appear to have a rebellion on my hands. The rebels are rebelling. They keep the fire going day and night, undeterred by my admonishments that we could be found out. I believe rangers are now patrolling these lands.

The cougar is afraid of fire, they insist. This “fact” is no doubt a vestigial memory from Walt Disney's
Jungle Book
or an episode of
Kratts' Creatures
. But a mountain lion is not a tiger despite their shared DNA, just as
a goat is not a yak no matter how similar their milk may taste
(ibid.).