Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (17 page)

“Mr. Kakami? Mr. Kakami!” The first AD, a wraithlike woman from South Africa who always used the honorific and looked like a Brontë scholar, floated into Patrick's field of vision. They were four scenes behind and it wasn't even noon. Patrick summoned his trademark look of benign concern and huddled over her rain-pocked copy of the shooting script, randomly scratching out shots that, a few weeks ago, he would've sacrificed his right testicle to keep. She was clearly relieved, yet continued to look at him as if he were a man who kept his first wife in the attic. What he was, in fact, was a man struggling to remember why he was here in this island rainforest, surrounded by all this slurry of activity, in the first place.

Because
. Because the low hum of his parents' voices, whenever he had drifted off to sleep in the back seat of the car on the way home from the movie theatre, was the greatest soundtrack ever made. Because, once upon a time, Jessica Lange's face had been the closest thing to looking straight into the sun and not going blind. Because his mother had always cheered at the end of that scene in
The Sound of Music
where the nuns stole the distributor cap from the Nazis' car. Because, at eight, he'd developed a heart condition (sluggish flow through left ventricle) and his mother, afraid he'd die in his sleep, let him stay awake many nights in the long weeks leading up to the operation (experimental at the time, routine today), his head in her lap as the blue light of late-night movies on the oldies channel flickered over them (how his mother had adored Ernest Borgnine in
Marty
and Sidney Poitier in
Lilies of the Field
—again, those nuns!)
but don't tell your father
, her unexpectedly cool finger to his lips.

Because his own childhood had once seemed endless— something he's thought about a great deal ever since overhearing that story on the ferry, perhaps apocryphal, about the nameless toddler who'd speed-dialed 911 on his father's cellphone, obliviously, and even gleefully, ending his childhood as he knew it.

Because he had once been a child who was unconditionally loved and cherished, Patrick Kakami had been in a hurry to grow up and make what amounted to the world's most perfect movie—the cinematic equivalent of a mother's breath in a son's ear at three-thirty in the morning.

A moving picture so sublime the intended viewer's heart would fold in on itself in an origami of joy.

And now? Now Patrick was
going through the motions
— wind up the little art-house director and watch him make a film! How had he ended up making
films
and not movies, when it was good old-fashioned flicks, middlebrow and sentimental, excluding only those who didn't believe in magic, that he so loved? When had he turned from snub-nosed, red-headed Paddy K. into “artfully stubble-headed auteur Patrick Kakami”? (“Thirty Canadians Under Thirty to Watch!”
Maclean's
, January 9, 2006
—
he'd snuck in under the wire.) And his biggest challenge now was not to let on that he was just going through the motions but to proceed as if it all still did matter.

Look at those kids
. The various PAs and gang grips milled around the craft service table—sodden, chilled, full of themselves and non-medicated bison jerky, mentally jerking off to dreams of making a film-fest splash at Sundance, Slamdance, or even Slamdunk, or hanging around the Croissette, aging French movie actresses clutching them briefly to their Dior-scented cheeks while Atom Egoyan raised two fingers in salute and the buzz on the trade-show floor grew deafening. That was why they wanted to make movies—or rather, films—not for the pleasure of the audience or because they had known love.

“P.K.!” The Steadicam guy and the stunt double, a disconcertingly pale, double-jointed woman who went by the name The Body, were playing hackeysack with a vigour born of pent-up energy (sexual? drug-induced? feigned? Can such a thing be feigned?) that Patrick himself hadn't felt for weeks, even months. They gestured to him.
Stoked
. Always stoked. He put his hands to the small of his back, exaggeratedly wincing, indicating no-can-do, and tapped his watch face with what he hoped was a purposeful look.

Patrick Kakami, who had just turned thirty-three two months ago, the same age as Jesus Christ was when he died (and Alexander the Great and John Belushi, men of untethered ambition all—
stoked?
), felt old, much older than he had any right to. It was as if his recently replaced mitral valve had kick-started an accelerated aging process; this ticker he called his “pig heart” triggering a sped-up degeneration of living tissue. Cell death racing along like actors in a Mack Sennett picture. It was 2009. And time itself was melting, oozing over the edge of his days like Dali's clocks.

Patrick made a deal with himself, right there, right then, feet planted in mud, rain misting his rimless glasses, his compromised heart in his mouth, as small and sour as a dried apricot, to reclaim some essential part of himself before it was too late, before the bastards (they,
them
) did him in.

After all, Syd Gross, whom he trusted, who was his friend, had allowed those eunuchs at CBC, their “broadcast partner,” to talk him into cutting the scene in
Rain Dog
that meant the most to Patrick—the scene he now thinks of in eulogy as the Rosetta Stone of the entire picture. He couldn't even bear to think about the concessions necessitated by the Chinese co-production deal.

All around him, little dramas, micro-movies, were being played out. Gideon-spouting actor David Mathers was engaged in a flirty game of cat's cradle with the thirteen-year-old Victoria girl who played the novitiate, Sister Incarnata. Mathers with his high beams on, the girl's fingers hopelessly tangled, her laughter like a cat choking on cream. Gita Chapelle, rogue actress, was napping high up in Old Gnarly, one dirty bare foot dangling off her protest platform. The Body pumped her legs like pistons, tossing the footbag from one knee to the other as the nun extras gathered around her counting out loud, urging her on with her pointless task.

The light filtering through the canopy of old-growth cedars and Douglas firs made everything look as if it were being shot in stop-motion. As if all these people were puppets or Claymation figures, their movements exaggerated, grotesque.

Patrick's skin tightened against his skull.

And the first AD still standing there, rattling the script in his face as if he hadn't already answered her question.

Months back, before all the real problems with the production began—before the second female lead took to an enormous Douglas fir, nicknamed Old Gnarly, with a megaphone and an endless supply of energy bars and Red Bull to protest against globalization (as far as Syd knew, she was still up there, may she choke on her armpit hairs), before he had to negotiate the crazy deal points for the director of photography, a high-school pal of Kakami's whose head had swelled to the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in
Ghostbusters
after working on
Lethal Weapon 4
as the clapper loader (just recalling the initial deal letter made Syd clutch at a phantom pain somewhere in the vicinity of his heart), before Syd found out that Kakami had gone AWOL (as in vanished
without a trace
,
poof!
as if the man had never existed—described this way to Syd by the hysterical location manager as though Kakami had performed a magic trick)—before all this, before they could secure the permit to shoot on the rainforest island, on native land, Syd Gross had had to attend a sweat lodge ceremony.

How bad could it be, he'd thought, it's just a sauna, right? A friend of his who'd taken part in one during an Outward Bound course said it helped him relieve his aggression. “I didn't feel like killing anyone for about a month,” he told Syd.

The only access to the island was by private boat after taking the ferry from the mainland to the Sunshine Coast and driving north, taking yet another ferry, and driving some more. Syd had been told to bring light, comfortable clothing, a gift for the elders (cloth, tobacco), and “no big-city attitude.” This was conveyed to him by a spokesman for the Sliammon People, a guy called Porgie, the same man who arrived to pick up Syd and his assistant at the dock on the reserve. (“Have your people call my People,” Porgie said afterwards, laughing at his own joke and flashing his teeth.)

Kakami was already on the island, ebullient as usual despite his media rep for a studied cool. He waved around something that looked like a gargantuan cigar. “Grossman!” He jogged towards Syd, his location manager, Drew, drifting along behind him. Drew was a thin, bald Eurasian with hypothyroid Bette Davis eyes who disturbed Syd because he couldn't tell if this Drew person was male or female and was embarrassed to ask anyone, even Patrick.

“These beautiful people, Syd, they've already put us to work. Smell this!” Kakami thrust the oversized cigar thing under Syd's nose. “I made it myself.”

He stood there grinning, like a little kid awaiting praise for a kindergarten project.

“It's a smudge stick,” Drew told him. “You light it et voila.”

“I
know
what it is,” said Syd, who had no idea. Was he supposed to smoke it or use it to ream out Kakami for dragging him out to this repository of excessive greenery and spiritual wankery. You want to make a movie about nuns, what's wrong with Montreal or Boston?

He slapped his hands together to change the subject. “So, let's get this fucking show on the road.”

His assistant, Helene, the latest in a series of dun-coloured and quietly efficient young women Syd had hired because he found them reassuring, like a school secretary or a crossing guard, pulled him aside. “There's something you need to know about the site of the sweat lodge. These people? They consider it sacred?”

“You're asking me or telling me?”

“I'm just saying, maybe, you know, cut down on the
language
and whatnot?”

Porgie led a small group over to Syd. “Our elder, Charlie Louie,” he said, introducing an old man in a blue plaid shirt and saggy jeans, who had the purest white hair Syd had ever seen. The elder held out his hands, palms up. Syd remembered then that he'd forgotten the gift, what was it? Candles? Canned goods? Helene unwound the scarf from around her neck and dangled it in front of him. Hermès—her family must have money.
Note to self
, Syd thought with a flush of bonhomie towards Helene,
possible investors
. He draped the scarf across the elder's palms. “We come in peace,” Syd said, and beside him he could feel Helene wincing. The old man smiled and tied the scarf around his head babushka-style, eliciting a round of congenial laughter. There was something about rituals in general that gave Syd the heebie-jeebies, and right now he was feeling them down to his pinky toes.

Porgie introduced the others: a woman with sad eyes whom Syd thought would be attractive enough if she did something with her hair and ditched the shapeless button blanket; a young, broad-shouldered man, hair long and glossy, in a tight T-shirt that read
There Is No Planet B
; another old man, though not as old as Charlie Louie, who was frighteningly obese. Porgie, with his big smile and his annoying habit of lightly touching others on the arm with feigned intimacy, had something of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins about him. Even his teeth looked optimistic, preternaturally white and large. Southern California teeth. Syd had seen enough sets of these to know.

“Nice offering,” Kakami said.

“What did you bring?”

“A slide box of Cohíba Esplendidos.” Kakami pronounced this in commanding Spanish, practically horking on the
h
. When had he had time to teach himself that?

As Porgie explained the sweat lodge—how it was made with bent willow branches draped with animal hides; the sacred rock pile outside heated by the elder and then carried inside and placed in a hole dug in the centre—Syd felt as if he were back in grade five Social Studies class. The thing actually looked like a grade five Socials project, a dome shape messily covered with skins and army blankets. Kakami, across from him, looked fascinated, though.

“You will experience a purification,” Charlie Louie told them. “Some of you maybe even what we call a rebirth— through earth, fire, water, and air. You will get very hot. Just breathe evenly, drink lots of water, pay attention to the elements. If you get too hot, ‘Don't Panic,' to quote Douglas Adams. Please feel free to leave.” With that, he made his way into the lodge, bending slightly to get through the opening as Porgie held up the flap.

Syd signalled for Helene to go in ahead of him, to case the joint as it were. He was feeling queasy with anxiety. Helene just stood where she was, clutching her day planner to her chest.

“I can't go in. I'm on my moon,” she told him.

“You're on what?”

“Her cycle,” Kakami said.

“What?”

“She's on the rag,” Drew said loudly.

Syd did not want to be listening to this. “How the hell would they know that?”

“They emailed a form and I figured full disclosure was in the spirit of the thing,” Helene said. “Don't worry, I filled out yours, too,” she added, although this was exactly the kind of thing Syd worried about.

He practically had to crawl into the sweat lodge on his hands and knees, moving from a filtered daylight to deep shade. When the opening flap was lowered, there descended a darkness so intense Syd felt as if he'd dropped ten floors in an elevator. As Charlie Louie muttered what sounded like an incantation or a nursery rhyme, water hit the rocks with a shocking hiss, and the dry, musty, animal-smelling heat became choking wet and tarry.

More steam, and strong smells—body odours and something else, something fecund rising from the earth. Syd was riding a boat along a tributary of the Congo, naked young men poised on the banks with poison arrows. A place Syd had never been, possibly the last place on earth he'd want to go. He even heard the cry of a shrike. He'd had his share of psychotropic experiences, courtesy of his cousin Diggory who'd been the go-to guy in their high-school yeshiva program and was now involved in helpful cosmetic pharmacology, but Syd had never been this inside and outside of himself at the same time.