Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (26 page)

The family was supposed to be away that night at an out-oftown function,
intelligence
had it. Intelligence being Regan and Gerry. That should've been a warning as well. The daughter at a friend's. The “help”—god, she hated, still hates, that term— had the night off.

She had volunteered to do it—no,
insisted
. This was about children, the future. All the things she believed in. Damien gave her a big, soul-sucking kiss before she headed out. Carmen glared. Leonard saluted. Somewhere, making its way to the press, was their manifesto. She remembers how her legs were wobbling, almost comically, as if she were a drunken Olive Oyl. But she managed to move forward, a spastic walk before she started to run, shaky baby steps towards a better world.

The car will ignite as its wheels
crossed the line
. That much she knows.

If the driver has a passenger, well, that's collateral damage. And there is still the possibility the City will choose to see it her way. Hope, the thing with feathers.

Khan from Surrey: “My tomato plants have bites on them. Very little teeth. You think a big bug with a large mouth or a mice with a small mouth?”

The Gardening Dame: “Tell me, Khan, are you the kind of man who might tie his wife to a chair with gardening twine and set her on fire?”

MEAN LOOK

It feels great, this violent disgorging from the earth, the recovering terrorist thinks as she tears up blood grass by the roots with her bare hands. Her husband and son are off somewhere with The Hound. Next door there's the conscientious whirring click of a push mower. Across the street kids screech in someone's backyard as they get hosed down—yelling No! when they mean Yes! In the distance a train groaning through the cut, sirens, an ice-cream truck, crows. Summer in the city.

“We all missed you at group on Wednesday.” Dieter squats beside her, his face so close she can see that his glasses are steaming up from the heat.

If this were a movie her next line would be:
What the %ˆ*%$ are you doing here!?
But she just shakily stands as the chasm separating her two lives buckles, a cave-in of the Grand Canyon, burros with scratchy blankets on their backs scrambling for their lives, tourists wailing before clods of red earth pack mouths, ears, nostrils—sensory deprivation before oblivion.

“This has gone too far,” Dieter says. No, it hasn't, Lucy thinks, not far enough. She could strike out with both hands, fury swipe, poison jab. “You don't even know who I am,” she says instead.

“You are a bitch. You know that, right?” His eyes brim behind those distorting lenses. What did children call him at school? Four-eyes? Froggy? Fag? Did anyone recover from the nastiness of schoolyard taunts? Did he ever think about blowing up his tormentors? No, Dieter was a purist. He believed in causes, not himself. He believed in
people
.

Then there's Houndoom launching herself at Dieter, Foster straining at the other end of the leash. She introduces Dieter as a member of her book club. “Just checkin' out the 'hood,” he tells Bruno, his eyes skittering like tropical fish.

Afterwards, Bruno says, “‘Just checkin' out the 'hood?'”

“He's usually more articulate,” Lucy tells him. “His German heritage, you know. All those million-dollar words.”

“If he wasn't so obviously gay, I'd say that looked liked a lover's quarrel.”

Foster squeezes between them, panic in his voice: “Hey, Mom! I just noticed Houndoom doesn't have any
balls
!”

If Hope is the thing with feathers (a sentiment that always puts Lucy in mind of the white feather floating through the treacle Forrest of that Tom Hanks movie), then what is Faith? Surely a thing with nasty thorns. Those who clutch at it remain bloodied but unbowed. Unlike so many in her circle—if you could call it a
circle
—she doesn't mock the faithful. Not after seeing what faith could do.

Lucy visited the dead girl's parents while she was pregnant. It was close to eleven years since that night. The girl would've been—what? Married and teaching Sunday school and awaiting her first child? A junior missionary in Honduras? A party girl downing tequila shots in her university dorm? A fledgling Olympic hurdler?

The house didn't have the look of a tomb or a shrine, as she'd imagined. It was cheerful in a perfectly ordinary way. On the mantel was the girl's picture, along with wedding photos of adult children and a grandchild holding up a lacrosse trophy. Lucy had pretended to be soliciting for a downtown mission for runaways and they actually invited her in off the doorstep and offered her tea. “Bless you,” she said. “All other doors have been shut in my face.” The odd locution she had borrowed from one of the nuns in
Lilies of the Field
.

Lucy had just wanted to witness how,
if
, someone could survive the death of a child. She looked at the photos and commented on the handsome family. “Two grandchildren?” she asked. No, their daughter, Anna, she was told. “She died when she was eight,” the father said. “She was at her first sleepover. Nice people. There was a fire.” They offered nothing more and she didn't ask.

Until that day she had thought of almost nothing for weeks but aborting the fetus, leaving Bruno, disappearing like Damien had, as if he'd never even been. What would that be like, to have never been?

“May I?” the mother asked. Not even showing at four months. It was as if the mother had a sixth sense. When the woman put her hand on her belly, that's when Lucy almost cracked. As she walked towards the door, only a kick from her baby to her navel, its first, kept her from turning around and, palms outward, dropping to her knees and begging, “Crucify me.” But they would probably have forgiven her, which would have been even worse.

LAVA PLUME

In the distance, at the far end of the block, Lucy hears the car before she sees it. The tragically amplified bass, the pointless revving of the engine. She pictures the weasel-faced driver with his sparse chin hairs and Tasmanian Devil tattoo, a plump, scantily clad girl riding shotgun, egging him on. Lucy is all steady nerve and muscle, magma coursing through the chambers of her heart, churning through arterial walls.

But there's something else as well, something zooming by faster than it should. Faster than possible.

A cry of pure joy splits the air. A spinning wheel, spokes a whirl of silver glinting in the sun, fire tumbling overhead in an arc. Typhlosion, the flame-thrower Pokémon, its collar of fire a terrible beauty. The most evolved Pokémon of its kind. Anything touching it while it's aroused goes up in flames instantly.

The explosion is more intense than she thought it would be. Long minutes pass. The boy and his dog soon to emerge from a cloud of drifting ash like the survivors of 9/11. Ghostly grey, but upright, moving slowly as if reborn. Bloodied but unbowed. But no.

The boy a constellation. The Dog Star. The boy endless sky now.

The boy bread. The boy salt. The boy completed his final evolution.

And her?

Think about that old comic where the guy turns his wallet inside out and a few moths flutter out.

Think inside out. Think permanent flutter.

Or not. Try not to think about it too much.

That got name?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people I'm grateful to (and
for
) who lit a path for these stories—foremost among them Caroline “Kitten-witha-Whip” Adderson and Charlotte Gill, fellow traveller, without whom this book might have remained a silent scream.

I owe oceans of thanks to Jackie Kaiser, agent extraordinaire and a great dame, for making everything easier; to Nicole Winstanley, my editor and publisher, who fizzes with vitality, grace, and intelligence, for her caring, intuitive editing; to the scarily smart and kind Nick Garrison, a redoubtable troubleshooter who saved me from some of my indulgences; to laser-eyed Shaun Oakey; and to the patient Sandra Tooze and rest of the crack team at the big flightless bird's Canadian headquarters.

Patty Jones, Lee Henderson, Neil Smith, Sarah Selecky, and Matthew J. Trafford provided jetpacks of psychic fuel. Timothy Taylor generously bequeathed me the name and DNA of Patrick Kakami.

Huge thanks are due to Gudrun Will, of
Vancouver Review
; Denise Ryan, of
The Vancouver Sun
; and John Burns, formerly of
The Georgia Straight
, three modern-day Medicis, and to the other editors, Sarah Fulford (
Toronto Life
), Jared Bland (
The Walrus
), Kim Jernigan (
The New Quarterly
), and Sylvia Legris (
Grain
), who so enthusiastically published some of these stories in earlier incarnations.

My astonishing students at UBC gave inspiration, while Capt. Andrew Gray maintained the lifeboats.

The words of so many writers inspire my fiction, but I'm particularly indebted here to the writings of Charles Darwin (for “Summer of the Flesh Eater”) and to Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
(for “Mister Kakami”).

Thank you to the Canada Council and the B.C. Arts Council for monies I'm sure they thought I'd squandered a million years ago.

And, as always, I am grateful to my friend Patrick Crean for enduring faith, and to my great loves John and Dexter Dippong for absolutely everything.