Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (18 page)

It felt as if hours had passed, but by his glowing watch dial Syd could see it had been less than fifteen minutes. The sweat in his ear canals trickled, a sensation like blood pooling. Within the scrim of darkness he began to make out forms around him in the lodge, hazy at first and then cohering into solid shapes. He would wonder afterwards if he had been hallucinating, but at the time it all looked so very real. Much later in his life, long after it became clear to him that the things he had witnessed on the island were a kind of twisted gift, he would never completely shake the feeling that somehow the spirits had mistaken him for someone else. Someone more worthy.

He saw a startlingly violet bruise on Drew's previously flawless neck and a pallor that betrayed low white blood cell counts, her (or his?) already bulging eyes protruded, yellowed in their sockets. Porgie, in a smart suit, was busy thumbing on a BlackBerry, somewhere in bright sunshine. The fat elder's pant leg was pinned up at the left knee, empty. The young muscular guy sat slumped in a jail cell, glossy hair shaved to his scalp, a scar running from lip to right eye, a railroad of track marks on his inner arms. The almost beautiful sad-eyed woman gave off a glow, she was so hugely pregnant.

But when Syd looked towards Kakami he saw nothing. Only heard him, a loud, disembodied voice, talking nonsense:
The darkness represents human ignorance. The sacred site is just one stop along your hero quest towards an authentic life.
Why didn't Porgie or the elder tell him to shut up? Could it be that only he could hear him?

Syd staggered out of the sweat lodge, Kakami's eerie voice in his head, every sense stinging against the open air, and walked shakily through scrub, across the barnacle-encrusted rocks to the shoreline, bivalves breathing so loudly he could hear them—sucking in air, blowing it out. Everything breathing too loudly; his own lungs like bellows stoking a blacksmith's fire. Westward, in the distance, a bald eagle rose, a fat, dripping chum salmon in its grip. Just beyond that, Syd saw a scaly creature lurch from the water, mythic, voracious, a Trump Tower of serrated teeth and shipwrecked breath. It rushed towards the shore, the ocean in its wake rising in a terrifying sheet. Seabirds squawked and wheeled overhead.

The sad-eyed woman—Syd's vision of her, as she was in reality still back in the sweat lodge—now stood on a rocky outcropping, hand on her weighted belly; she opened her mouth, but out came not a scream, nothing so operatic, but a tiny person, curled like a fern. She sent it floating towards Syd on a breeze, buoyant and breathing. Syd turned and ran inland as fast as he could, slack muscles clenching, his breath a living thing, an animal spirit scrabbling for purchase, scraping at his throat.

The others remained in the lodge, sweating, tranquil, and unaware of Syd's terror.

“Sacred sites are traditionally inaccessible to the ignorant and insincere, to the cynical and mean-spirited,” Porgie said, flashing those teeth, as he motored them all back across to the reserve's dock a few hours later, after the seafood feast and traditional dancing.

Syd was insincere and cynical, and sometimes even mean-spirited (ignorant, he couldn't credit), so then why him? He wasn't an “honest pilgrim.” He was an opportunist, and a good one at that.

All through the celebration he hadn't been able to stop thinking about Drew, the fat man, and the young
Planet B
stud in their dissipation—although Porgie in the bespoke suit and the glowing, sad-eyed woman who had kept looking at him had been disturbing in their own way. Was it some manifestation of the future he'd seen, Syd wondered, not for the last time, or was he just fucked up?

Kakami declared he felt cleansed, while Drew attested to a new sense of calm and opened pores. “I don't think my skin's ever looked so good!” Porgie just smiled that smile of his, and Helene fussed with her day planner.

Syd couldn't head back to Toronto fast enough. He'd gone straight from Pearson International to his box seat at the SkyDome, and afterwards a booth at the Risky Brisket surrounded by women who may or may not have been on their moons, or even on
the
moon, but at least he didn't have to hear about it.
Sacred sites, indeed
, he'd thought, as he raised a glass of his favourite fat, chewy Grenache and toasted civilization.

And now he has to head back into the mouth of the beast. Fucking Kakami.

The story that was bothering Patrick, the one he couldn't shake, he'd overheard on the way over to the Sunshine Coast on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay.

At first he'd thought the two jittery guys mainlining coffee and White Spot fries were film students brainstorming on a title for their yet-to-be-written first feature. They batted names back and forth like a shuttlecock.
Chronic, Genie of the Lamp, White Smurf, Black Bart, Big Buddha Cheese
. When they got to
Oracle Bud
, Patrick finally realized what they were talking about.

“Finest B.C. Kush—beautiful bag appeal, really resinous— all hauled away in garbage bags,” one of them had said in an aggrieved tone. It turned out that the “doofus” who tended to the grow-op had fallen asleep reading to his son. (“Remember
Goodnight Moon
, I loved that one. The bowl of porridge and all that shit.” “Bowl of mush.” “I thought it was porridge.” “That was
The Three Bears
.” “I hated that story.” “Goodnight Moon would be an awesome name for a band.”)

Evidently, the toddler, with the man he knew as Daddo (a.k.a. Frankie) slumbering beside him, had played around with the man's cellphone and managed to speed-dial 911. The police arrived to find no emergency, but rather a distinctive and familiar scent emanating from the basement. One of the guys on the ferry said, “Neighbours told the cops they'd always thought something around the house smelled skunky, but they thought it was a
skunk
.” The other guy snorted. “Skunky!”

What if this Daddo, this Frankie, was the best father in the world, Patrick had thought, bad career choice notwithstanding?

And where was the mother? How could she not know?

Patrick, who had, up until that moment, been a believer in the church of coincidence, wondered,
what cosmic jester caused things like this to happen?

Just then, the ferry captain had announced a pod of orcas portside, and the two guys jumped up, sloshing their coffee, newly animated.

“‘Baby Beluga,' remember that one? Ralphie somebody.”

“Raffi…”

“That's a guy's name?”

Patrick told all this to the set-dec PA who scrambled along beside him as he strode through dripping fir trees away from the set where the nun extras were gathering for Gong Li's big monologue as the outgoing Mother Superior who has fallen in love with a B.C. permaculturalist. The part about God opening a door when he closes a window.

Or was it the other way around?

“Big Buddha Cheese?” the kid asked.

“Big Buddha Cheese,” Patrick said. “But that's beside the point. The point is, will that child, when grown up, ever think: That was the first day of the rest of my life? Think about that.”

Patrick was by then loping along so quickly the kid couldn't keep up.

“Where are you going?”

“You tell Sydney Gross,” he called back to the PA, “that this is the first day of the rest of my life. And maybe his.”

Because.

“Does this mean we're breaking early for lunch?” the kid yelled. But Patrick was gone, swallowed by the trees that remained silent and dripping.

Syd hustles along Hastings, looking to signal a cab. He managed to disentangle himself from the weeping filmmaker after pocketing the man's business card in triplicate (“Reel Pictures.”
Real original
, thinks Syd) and making a number of promises he's already consigned to his cranial delete file.

No cabs in sight, and up ahead a mob appears to be moving towards him—placards, banners, cow bells, megaphones, people on stilts dressed as the Grim Reaper and Maggie Thatcher (!?), women juggling fire. Everywhere in this city there always seems to be someone walking on stilts or playing with fire, or both. Jesus Christ, he should've known better. He's walked right into the Occupation.

Evidently an army of career activists along with a number of the genuinely dispossessed took over the streets around the city's historic Woodward's Building in 2002. And here they still are, seven years later. It's become a holy site for some, like Benares. Pilgrims come, drawn by ethical tourism and the revolving red W up on high, and are allowed to pitch their tents after making a donation. The country's poorest postal code now has its own official designation, sort of like the Vatican, a sovereign city state.

The squatters are sponsored by Roots and equipped with the latest in leather backpacks and Che caps. The Dalai Lama has visited, as well as Richard Branson, who arrived in a Virgin hot-air balloon. Buffy Sainte-Marie even tried to adopt half-native triplets whose mother had OD'd shortly after giving birth, but the children were deemed better off being raised in their own culture. It takes a village and all that jazz. Kakami told him this over beers in some atrocious hole with terry-cloth slipcovers over the tables that the director lauded for its authenticity. Patrick was excited about the movie possibilities, but negotiating with the actual squatters was brutal. Their people had
people
. Syd's convinced he could more easily bring the Taliban to heel.

He turns up Cambie to avoid the festivities but there's a broken sewer main flooding the street, carrying with it the effluvia of the Downtown Eastside, a flotilla of cigarette butts, bottles, broken high-heeled shoes, syringes, falafel wrappers, a swollen paperback copy of
The Kite Runner
, and an aluminum crutch. Does he head upriver or turn back and make his way through the crush of demonstrators?

Syd takes one more look at the chanting throng and bends down to roll his sport slacks above his knees. Then, briefcase held high over his head, he begins the portage.

Because
.

Because the kernels from the bottom of the popcorn bag at the Ridge had always wedged between his front teeth in a way that felt so good but verged on pain, a pain that he had borne, Patrick thought, rather bravely.

Because of his mother's unexpectedly cool fingers on his lips while they watched late-night movies on the basement television in those weeks leading up to his first surgery, telling him she'd always wanted to be a nun—
but don't tell your father
. How seriously he'd held that secret to his sickly boy chest,
their secret
, as if it had really mattered. Had it even been true? The existence of a cosmic jester never entering his mind back then.

With his pig heart beating time, Patrick Kakami lopes through the island forest that expands around him, sloughing off old skin as if he's a snake.

“The things we do to keep on keepin' on,” the helicopter pilot says to Syd over the juddering of the rotors and engine roar. “Me, I pretend I'm choppering over Nam.”

“Nam?”

“Viet. Like in that Kakami movie.” He makes big googly eyes and waggles his tongue to simulate craziness—at least Syd hopes it's a simulation.

“You mean Coppola.” Yet the notion of Kakami making a war movie isn't that far-fetched. He has the earnestness and passion, the requisite sense of moral absolutes that Syd himself lacks. He tightens his seat belt. The blue-green Pacific and rocky island shorelines pierced with towering evergreens are far below. Toy scenery, an art director's mock-ups. There are no more mysteries, the whole wide world is charted and toe-tagged, but that knowledge does little to lessen Syd's unease.

“Ride of the Valkyries” crackles into Syd's headset.

“Don't you love the smell of napalm in the morning!” whoops the pilot, pulling back hard on the joystick.

When Syd had arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal by cab a couple of hours earlier, his shoes and socks reeking of sewage, it was mired in chaos. The
Queen of Coquitlam
had rammed the marina, sinking several pleasure craft and damaging the ferry dock. Sailings were cancelled for at least the remainder of the day. People swarmed the wharf, cellphones pressed to temples or thumbs busily texting their loved ones or their lawyers, while gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Syd bought himself a pair of drugstore sandals and chartered a helicopter to get to the island location.

While he'd waited by the makeshift landing pad beside the ferry terminal's parking lot, two ferret-faced guys sprawled on the curb behind him, slurping coffee and muttering together. One of them shredded a paper napkin as if wreaking vengeance on a life-long enemy. “And that guy who plays Voldemort and calls himself Rafe, what's that about? It's spelled
Ralph
.”

His buddy shrugged.

“It's British,” Syd said.

“Huh?”

“Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles. If you go in for that kind of thing.”

“Twinkletoes? Effin' Brits. That is just so
wrong
.”

The other guy eyed Syd suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

“I'm a movie producer.”

They had looked him over: his orange-and-green flip-flops and rolled-up, sewage-splotched pants, his shirt half hanging out over the front of the slacks—and guffawed. “Yeah right.” One of them had proffered him a fat joint.

In the confines of the helicopter, the cheap sandals exude a warm rubber smell that clogs Syd's nostrils. And they're giving his toes wedgies. He's so uncomfortable he may as well add a butt thong and call it a day. Syd feels naked, almost impotent, stuck in a shuddering tin can half a mile above sea level with a madman, his feet exposed—their pale flesh and untended toenails proclaiming: Here is a man no longer in complete control of the situation. If only he'd stayed wharf-side in his own stinking hand-stitched Italian footwear with Cheech and Chong Jr., fired up the doobie (
did people still call them doobies?
), and said to hell with Kakami, the production, and the whole freaking business.