Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (23 page)

Why, they appeared to genuinely want to know, would Bashaar waste his time with these infidel females when seventy-two virgins awaited him in paradise?

“I wanted to disabuse them of their ill-conceived notions of martyrdom right then and there,” Zachriel would later claim, almost five years to the day we left Arcadia Court, when a defaced For Sale sign went up on the Khan family's front lawn and the street was a jumble of yellow police tape, “but I just couldn't stop thinking about those Marys. Their lips. Their tongues.”

By then we knew the body inevitably betrayed the mind.

Are we good? The question is often asked. We transcend the notion of good or bad as understood in the human sense. We simply
are
. An idea difficult to grasp, like the workings of the Hadron Collider or why the caged bird sings. The novelist Philip Pullman came closest to understanding the complexity of our kind with Balthamos and Baruch in his
Amber Spyglass
. (“Ironic that it took an atheist to get it right,” Barman said. Barman had, by then, nailed the concept.)

The afternoon Leo Jr. died and was reborn and our days at Arcadia Court became numbered was a fine Saturday in late May. Gary and Lubbock had convinced Sweeney that Jason and Leo Jr. were spiritually primed to undertake their first shopping-cart race. A picture of what happened that day has been pieced together from Yabbashael, Barman, and Rachmiel's separate accounts.

In the parking lot of Save-On Foods (“Highest percentage of carts without wonky wheels, bar none,” said Gary), Sweeney instructed the boys to approach the carts as if they were wild stallions and try to sense which ones spoke to them. Lubbock said, “Forget that farting around, just grab one and let's get going.” An argument broke out but was quickly resolved when Leo Jr. grabbed a cart and threw himself across the parking lot, “popping a wheelie,” and landed hard on his backside while the men laughed and coughed and forgot what they'd been raging about moments before.

They hefted hunks of concrete into their shopping carts at a nearby demolition site, and, all five carts balanced, wheels true, they rattled towards Mountain Highway. After some last-minute adjustments and a reminder to use the inside left foot as a brake, the men and boys howled down the winding road, motorized vehicles honking and veering around them. “The eighteen seconds or so before I blacked out were the most thrilling of my human life,” Barman told us later.

According to Yabbashael, Barman (that is, Leo Jr.) went screaming out ahead, perhaps emboldened by his skateboarding expertise, misjudged the first curve, and flew several metres into the scrub off the side of the road. Gary administered mouth-tomouth even though Leo Jr. had no pulse. Barman later told us a tunnel of white light beckoned to Leo Jr., but something (the yeasty taste of stale beer mixed with damp tobacco strands?) pulled him back.

Heady with stirred-up testosterone, Jason and Leo Jr. made for Hastings Creek after they bid the cart racers goodbye and promised to make another run the next day. What met them was a sight Barman described as “something out of the Apocalypse of John the Divine.”

Amidst crushed ferns a two-headed beast writhed, while the sound of trumpets sundered the welkin. On the blast of the seventh, they perceived “a woman clothed with the sun, the moon, and the stars, and Satan cast down to earth.”

Barman insists to this day that it was a trick of filtered light and shadow created by the trees that led to the visual confusion, and that the sound of trumpets was thunder preceding a storm. To Barman's embarrassment they'd stumbled onto a private scene of two young people in the thrall of carnal exuberance. (Some of us believe what occurred there by the creek was a result of Yabbashael's taking the protector role of Jason as “big” brother too seriously.)

Jason heaved up a large, muddy stone from the side of the creek while Leo Jr. stood by as if in a trance. He brought the stone down on the back of the beast, at which point a scream cleared the air. Jessica lay under a seemingly lifeless Cullen as blood ran into his ponytail from a fissure in his neck. Her eyes, Barman recalls, were terrible, like the maw of a deep-sea dweller. When she spoke, it was in the inner voice of Rachmiel, who said, as if it cost everything Rachmiel had to give, “May the God forgive you.” The sky thundered again as the deluge started and Jessica struggled back into her clothes.

The rest happened quickly. An ambulance was fetched, a tale concocted. Lubbock, Gary, and Sweeney, swearing their innocence, indignant spittle flying, were arrested by the end of the day. Leo Jr. took the extra keys to the Costellos' Ford Escape, and—with only eighteen months of payments remaining— totalled the front end driving into the side of a Dairy Queen. Jason went into his bedroom and refused to come out for three days, almost as comatose as Cullen himself. (Yabbashael planned to remain in self-exile for forty days and forty nights until Barman pointed out that Yabbashael was not the Christ.)

Amidst all this drama, Bashaar had his star turn in the school musical, which, according to the local weeklies, was a hit, and Stephan was suspended and threatened with repeating grade eight.

“So what.” Elyon shrugged. “He's never had this much fun in his life.” The Choo house visibly sagged in on itself as his parents shuffled downcast from room to room. Stephan's grandmother no longer gathered offerings but sat in front of the basement television set watching Fox News.

Leo Jr.'s neck brace stayed on for almost three weeks, and to this day his right hand is not as mobile as his left due to the manner in which the broken bones fused.

Even now, so many years on, we take pains to remind each other of what Augustine once said: “
Angelus est nomen offici
,” which Barman suggests translating as, “‘Angel' is the name of the office.”

In other words, it's our
job
, not who we
are
. We mention this as a fact, not as a kind of apologia.

Jessica skipped school regularly to visit the hospitalized Cullen, who was hooked up to all manner of medical equipment in Lions Gate Hospital's ICU, and unresponsive. She held his hand for hours every day. (Once, when he blinked and appeared to part his lips, his mother said, “She's an angel of mercy!” before leaving the room, crying. Rachmiel admitted praying for intervention from St. Jude. But did Rachmiel ask for a miracle? We think not.)

In mid-June, Bashaar was at the Shoppers Drug Mart buying condoms when he spotted Jessica pulling a pregnancy kit from a shelf. Bash slid up behind her and whispered, “You weren't going to tell us, were you?” She was so startled she dropped the Very-Berry Slurpee she was carrying in her other hand, splashing them both with what looked like clotted blood.

After everything that had happened, at last a true crisis was upon us, one that we could not simply turn the other cheek on and hope for the best.

Even Elyon joined us as we debated late into the night whether to destroy the child or both mother and child—deep within us stirred and rumbled the fear of waking the slumbering Nephilim. Rachmiel argued, in the end effectively, that the warlike giants of old were the spawn of rogue angels and mortal women, not of angels and mortal men, so we agreed to stay our hands.

No one used the word
smite
. Not once. Not even Elyon.

The summons that came from Gabriel that night was firm and unequivocal. We were recalled from earth with no time to say our goodbyes.

We took our shameful leave as day dawned on Arcadia Court, all but Rachmiel, who made a choice one of our kind has seldom made, and not without enormous sacrifice. Jessica's small, moon-white face was pressed to the Wadsworths' bay window as if there were something to see besides a blue, cloudless sky. Zachriel wrote a message across the firmament in white wisps:
Errare humanum est. Perseverare diabolicum
. He meant it kindly.

Our mission aborted, we took sensory experiences with us as if we were junior entomologists pinning to a corkboard butterfly specimens snuffed out with ethyl acetate. But what we left behind is what we remember most vividly. One thing we all agree on: the much-vaunted human heart is just a wayward muscle.

Not long after we left, young Stephan Choo was found face down in Hastings Creek near the place where Cullen had sustained his injury. His suicide note remains hidden, to this day, in a jade Fortune Vase in his parents' pantry. Six months later, on the adoption papers Jessica Wadsworth signed, her premature daughter bore the name Stephanie in complicated and guilty tribute. Cullen emerged from his coma with no further interest in either Rilke or Jessica and her predicament. We could have told her so.

It took a while, years in fact, but Bashaar eventually succumbed to the enticements of his patient recruiters. The Khan family's garage became a repository of Kemira GrowHow fertilizer and pallets of nail-polish remover. Local authorities were tipped off. The rest was all dutifully reported in the media, including Bashaar's bewildered parents claiming they believed the supplies were for their son's year-end biochemistry project at SFU, their dark eyes a haunting. YouTube footage of the much younger and still beardless “home-grown terrorist” dancing on the stage of Elysium Heights Secondary's gymnasium singing “Strange Thing Mystifying” went viral.

The Wad carried on being a wad.

As for Leo Jr., he turned out fine. Like his father he became a forensic accountant. He auditioned for
Jeopardy!
once while on a business trip to Atlanta, but after the eighteen-month waiting period lapsed, simply forgot about it. We try not to judge, but we had imagined a life of more freedom for him, perhaps as a first AD for local film productions or a tennis coach. In another era he could have joined a travelling circus. But he abides.

And us? We have a special dispensation to watch over Jessica's child, even though we know she is more than capable of taking care of herself.

On our phantom tongues the taste of humanity lingers. But something else as well. The fifth taste?

That thing that eludes us still.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.

—
ELIAS CANETTI,
THE AGONY OF FLIES

SKULLBLAST

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living-room window. The recovering terrorist—holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew—moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

A car shoots down the street too fast, a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel, tires squealing as he turns the corner onto Victoria, actually
burning rubber
, as it's called, and the recovering terrorist drops her watering can. Reeking fish fertilizer slops onto her sneakers.

She has written letters to city hall requesting a traffic circle (
a speed retardant
, as it's called, putting her in mind of the large, soft boy with slivered moons of dirt under his fingernails who shuffled around in a slow-moving cloud at the back of her third-grade classroom before being taken away to wherever children like that were taken away to back then). She has circulated a petition that her neighbours have eagerly signed. They all have small children and animals, as does the recovering terrorist. They are teachers and enviropreneurs and directors of small NGOs that help build medical facilities in developing countries. They've promised to fill the traffic circle with indigenous flora, promised to guard against graffiti, to ensure it doesn't become a dumpsite for used condoms, syringes, Twizzler wrappers, and the inevitable orphaned muffler. But the city just keeps putting them off, citing a litany of bureaucratic impediments. The recovering terrorist has telephoned, again and again. She's been told,
red tape red tape red tape red tape
. She's said, “Look, it's a traffic circle,
a speed retardant
we're asking for here, not a water filtration plant.”

The recovering terrorist has a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingénue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names—Squeaky, Patty, Julie—as if they can't quite take themselves seriously enough. When she first stood up at group, about three years ago, and said, “My name is —— and I am a terrorist,” she felt none of the relief the small ad in the
Georgia Straight
had assured her she'd be flooded with.

As the others set their coffee cups down between their feet and clapped supportively (one guy, who she later would come to know as Dieter, even whistled through four fingers wolf-style), she felt like a small-town beauty contestant—Miss Chilliwack promising to end global warming, sectarian strife, and escalating movie theatre prices before the end of her reign. Not like someone who had once burned down a house to bring a petty capitalist to his knees. She kept on going to the meetings, though. There was something reassuring about the camaraderie, a single-mindedness of purpose she hadn't felt since that night almost twenty years ago when her life cleaved in two.

In the local paper this morning there was a letter to the editor from a Port Moody woman whose daughter had been hit by a car right in front of her house on a quiet residential street. The girl was so small she had rolled out the other side and lay curled like a shrimp. Her teeth were embedded in the roof of her mouth, in the pouches of her cheeks, scattered on the road like a handful of Chiclets. The car just kept on going.
What kind of person—
the mother asked.

The recovering terrorist slips off a glove and squeezes a few black aphids between her thumb and forefinger, their bodies barely yielding before that satisfying pop and squelch. She thinks about issuing a threat, some sort of ultimatum, targeting the mayor's office. Her heart rate nearly doubles at the thought, and desire, no,
need
, swells her throat, and she feels as if she's choking. Something in her veins actually slithers.
I'm jonesing for a Fudgsicle
, her son said the other day, and how they'd laughed.
Jonesing
. What does he know about jonesing? She stumbles up the front steps into the house and is blinded by the sudden shift from sunlit yard to windowless front hall. Light blemishes explode across her retinas. When she reaches the telephone she punches the speed-dial, hoping Dieter will answer.