Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (20 page)

Porgie stops and drops his pack to the ground by an enormous fallen tree bristling with mushrooms growing sideways from the trunk like petrified mouths. The yellowed fungi smirk at Syd, issuing a kind of dare.

“The rest of the journey you'll have to make on your own,” Porgie says. “There's the site of an ancient village somewhere west of here, and a warning about not disturbing the souls of the dead. It's just a story the toothless ones tell. I'm not a superstitious guy, but I grew up with this stuff and it's hard to shake. Plus I promised Grandfather Charlie.” He flashes a hardcover of Jerry Weintraub's
When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead
. “I'll wait for you here. Catch up on my reading.”

Syd really should just punch Porgie.
Clock him.
Force him to lead the way at gunpoint. He aims for levity instead. “If I don't come back, my people will be calling your People.”
Funny guy, that Syd.
Maybe, just maybe, someone will remember to say that at his memorial service.

“Bear hug.” When Porgie holds out his arms, Syd doesn't resist. Porgie sends him on his way with a water canteen, more salmon jerky, a flashlight, a foil astronaut blanket, and some advice: “Follow the money.” Those teeth. Must be some sweet dental plan on the reserve.

The rainforest thickens, grows primeval as Syd traverses it solo, the vegetation ever larger and more lurid, as if he's working his way back to the beginnings of time. The sun can no longer penetrate, even though he knows it's there above the twisted forest canopy. This is the darkness and dank not of night, but of a daytime basement, with the nearest source of light far away at the top of the stairs. The flashlight is small and doesn't cut much of a swath; Syd soon gives up on it, shoving it into a pocket. There are shapes and shadows, much like when he was in the sweat lodge, and they eventually coalesce into more solid forms. Snakes, and something that swoops by on wings—bird or bat?

A larger creature takes shape in the near distance, like a daydream nightmare, something resembling a tapir with its saggy snout, but also sporting boar-like tusks and scales. The armoured beast moves purposefully towards him, though Syd can't exactly call it
charging
as it's moving in slow motion, and he thinks, for a moment, that it's merely a test drive of some proto-4D CGI that will pass harmlessly through him while he continues on his way. The Early Pleistocene creature is soon upon him, its breath carting the reek of the Augean stables. Syd feels for the flashlight. A light in the animal's eyes might divert it, send it squealing and crashing into the trees. But Syd, as he knows all too well, has simply watched too many movies.

There's an explosion (Syd's brain imploding? The life force propelled from his body like so much jetsam? The world itself ending not with a whimper but a bang?) and the tapir-creature lies at his feet, scaly sides heaving. A person in camo pants, a flak vest, and a pith helmet better suited to the long bar at Raffles Hotel circa 1912 jumps upon it and works a knife into its throat.

She—for it is a she, with blond pigtails spronging from under her headgear and a small, tidy frame; the kind of woman who'd ordinarily be deemed girlish, although there's nothing girlish about the hunter—wipes the bloodied knife across her knee and addresses Syd, who's curled up on the ground in the requisite fetal position, curled so compactly he feels almost yogic. “You are on a vision quest?”

“No.” Syd sits up, attempting that in-through-the-noseout-through-the-mouth breathing thing to quell the onset of arrhythmia, as his blood pounds in loop-de-loops through his arterial walls.

The tapir-creature looks smaller than it had in life, nothing more than an armadillo with a homelier face. Is this what Syd was terrified of? Just behind the hunter there's a rifle propped against a dead doe, the animal's legs bound together and tied to a long, thick branch. Interestingly, congealed blood smells exactly like Syd always imagined it would: a thick, sharp stink, like hot, pissed-upon copper.

“I'm looking for someone. A colleague. A friend.” My antagonist. My albatross. Something in Syd, the incessant rage perhaps, has been displaced, shunted aside, by a kind of poetic sorrow.

“Another white man?” the hunter asks, even though she's white herself. Disconcertingly Scandinavian-looking, almost as pale as the sequinned gymnast back at the
Rain Dog
shoot.

“You saw him? Was he all right?”

“He didn't look robust, if that's what you're asking, but men of the spirit seldom are. How that man could talk, though!”

“Did he talk to you about love?”

“Love? Nothing so base and fleeting. Your friend has a larger sense of purpose. To love is too binding, too temporal. To seek is what makes us uniquely human. An animal may love, but can it seek?”

Syd seeks. Does this make him special, too, somehow enlightened? What he is, is enlightened to the unavoidable fact that the doe is rotting. Syd wonders how long the hunter has been heaving it around the endless forest. From her way of talking, he's guessing about a hundred years.

As she continues her prolix speech, Syd sees her not as she is, but cleaned up, in a white bed, in a room with institutional green walls, her head bound with gauze, her wild eyes no longer roaming their sockets. She drones on about Kakami's conviction and beliefs, and it takes some force of will for Syd to not drift off as tired as he is and as potently soporific as the strange hunter is turning out to be. The thing to do would be to bury the sorry little armadillo with its anteater snout and be on his way.

“Which way did he go?”

“Directions? What are directions, really? Human constructs! He simply left when the time came to depart.”

“And when was this?”

“A fortnight ago, I believe.” She sits examining her gun, perched on the deer's liquefying carcass, the insects of the rainforest threading their way through the body, an army bent on fortification, nothing more.

A fortnight?
What the hell was that? Four days? A week? The memory of a recent award-winning HBO mini-series, adapted from a forgotten Victorian novel, something involving a highwayman and a woman with royal complications in her blood, works its way towards him, like a man crawling on his belly across the desert.

A
fortnight
as in two bloody weeks?

The next morning, or the one after that, as the trees thin out before him, there is the shoreline in the distance, the edge of the island, a geographic entity Syd has despaired of seeing again. He considers dropping to his hands and knees Pope-like and kissing the ground.

But it's too soon to rejoice. Rising against the lighted shore is a monstrous apparition. A glistening black figure, dripping with seaweed, misshapen, with a hunched back and a single tusk protruding from its deformed head. The warrior spirit that stalks the island, meting out justice to those who trespass on the sacred burial grounds. It strides slowly up the beach in Syd's direction, and his heart, which until now has pretty damn gamely withstood the various shocks and indignities of this island, begins to bleat weakly, like a lost lamb.

The creature stops and appears to be removing its own head, complete with the tusk!

And Syd is thinking not
now the picture will never be finished
, or
I'll never see Kakami again
, but that he will never
hear
him. Because the kid was right: Kakami is a voice— ebullient, believing, his vision persuasive. It has led Sydney Gross this far, to an ending befitting the hero of a quest. A death in Technicolor, by the sea, by the hand of a mythical creature.

He shades his eyes. A woman stands on the beach, scuba mask in hand, shrugging off the straps of her oxygen tank and lowering the apparatus to the ground. She peels off her wetsuit. Even from this distance Syd can tell she's gorgeous, and almost instantly his fear is transformed into an incredible horniness, his cock pressing anxiously against his stiff and journey-stained underwear. If he had a choice between her and Kakami he knows exactly who he would choose. If he had a choice.

Divested of her gear, she beckons to someone on a small yacht in the distance and settles herself upon the sand.

Outside the cave where Syd Gross finds Patrick Kakami, there are no heads on stakes, shrunken and blackened by the sun. No preserved lips revealing thin white lines of teeth, smiling in eternal slumber. Not that Syd expected to see anything like that, but still.

The two men sit side by side in the cave, images flickering against the walls from a small fire. “The perfect moving picture,” Kakami says.

“Kind of puts both of us out of a job.”

They sit some more in silence. Finally, Syd asks, “So you were really pissed at me?”

“About what?”

“That scene we cut. For the CBC presale.”

“Oh,
that
.” Kakami rolls his eyes. “You know I have this pig heart, right?”

“It's just a bit of tissue.”

“A pig died so I could live, Grossman. What do you think about that?”

“I'm not an observant Jew. Pigs have died so I could live. I eat bacon. I eat bacon
with
dairy. Prosciutto wrapped around washed-rind cheeses.”

“That's not what I mean. I've been thinking about things. Like, am I now more than one species? Will my child be part pig?”

“What child?”

“Hypothetically, Syd.”

“I think about stuff, too.”

“Not really.”

“Okay, I didn't used to.”

“Meaning?”

“Now? I see things.”

“Dead people?” Kakami laughs. This acerbic quality is new. Or new-
ish
.

“You could put it that way.”

Scenes from Indonesian shadow plays, O. Selznick's burning of Atlanta, the telephone call from Paris, Texas, Walt's hippos in tutus, Lillian Gish in silent anguish, Harry and Sally in a clinch are reflected on the cave walls. A never-ending story.

“A man can change,” Kakami says.

Was all this supposed to change him? Was that the point? If this were a movie, Syd would emerge from the cave to marry the glowing Coast Salish woman and become an honorary tribal member, maybe even an elder, the Oracle of Sliammon. Patrick would be best man in absentia. That floating fern could be his child. He would catch it as it drifted through the air like dandelion fluff and hold it gently to his chest. Porgie would go on to produce
FUBAR: Haida Gwaii
, with a cameo by Bill Murray, and bring in the biggest Canadian English-language box office ever.

But Syd likes himself the way he is.

“Do you know what you're doing?” he asks Kakami, almost in a whisper.

“Perfectly.”

Far across the Pacific, where the Sliammon and the Haisla and the Mayans and the Mesopotamians and the naysayers of Pythagoras and all the rest of us once thought there was a ledge where things simply surrendered to gravity and tipped off into a void, an endless waterfall carrying with it the detritus of civilizations that ventured too far, there's a tremor the seismograph on nearby Texada Island registers as 8.7 on the Richter scale.

Hours later, water will rise and darken the horizon, rushing towards the flickering point of light in the cave like a berserk colossus on a surfboard. Before this, though, Syd will have spent hours saying all the right things, trying to persuade Kakami to leave the cave. The options for Syd Gross will dwindle down to three: (a) bodily wrestle Kakami out into the light and drag him back across the island, (b) stay here for as long as forever lasts, watching the end credits roll, or (c) go, quickly, and warn the rest about the things he has seen.

WE COME IN PEACE

Errare humanum est. Perseverare diabolicum.

—
ZACHRIEL

Unlike Baal and Asmodeus, we were not,
are
not, fallen angels. Not even Rachmiel, who no longer resides among us.

It began with an old man, a man who had spent his life editing moving pictures in early Bollywood, before sound—and afterwards as well, but with less satisfaction. He could not stop thinking about the bitter taste of black walnuts on his tongue. As he worked there had always been a bowl at his elbow, and he cracked the walnuts in his left fist. This was what he missed most about being alive. His yearning was a magnetic storm, a riptide. We were infected with longing as if by a mighty plague. Then there were the others with their baked beans, their goat curries, their steel-cut oats with maple syrup, even the recollected taste of their own blood.

Bitter, sweet, salty, sour. Just when we thought we understood, that we could arrest the contagion, it was rumoured there was a fifth flavour.
Umami
. How was it mortals could conceive of a fifth taste when all of the heavenly host could not?

There we were, in the grip of an intense curiosity about the senses that had been tamped down since time began. Sight and sound we could almost comprehend, but taste and smell, and, most unfathomable of all, touch—how was it these things could conjure ecstasy and revulsion in equal measure? (The Christ, who had suckled at the teat and could have spoken to the matter from experience, is such an ascetic that he remained silent when quizzed about the wine, unleavened bread, and olives, not to mention the fine ointments administered by women's hands. The pain and suffering, on the other hand, these he never minded sharing.)