Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (7 page)

“But it's just their first gig,” Alex yelled above the din. “Isn't it?”

Gideon screamed into his mike: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!”

The crowd screamed back: “You did, you did, you did taw a puddy tat!”

Isn't it?

Rufus asked: Too
something?

It was the year a candidate for mayor disappeared from her designer homeless dwelling
into thin air
. Or so it seemed. The double-decker tour buses with the beluga ads on their sides stopped driving by the election-sign shantytown along the Terminal Street Bridge; schools cancelled field trips. Wasn't it only the already invisible or criminally suspect who disappeared
without a trace
? A massive ground search by combined metro police forces and the RCMP came up with zero. Some speculated that the pressure for the mayoralty had become too much and she was recovering on a wind-powered organic vineyard in the Similkameen Valley, pruning vines and smoking weed. Off-grid, so to speak.

When the garbage bags and their grisly contents finally made the news—front-page news, top-of-the-hour news, breaking Internet news—on the local evening TV newscast the anchor and weatherman couldn't meet each other's eyes.

If her students had asked, had they been the least bit curious, Alex could have offered them this fact: In 2009 she saw a machete hack a man's arm right off. Saw this. Someone flashed his white teeth at her and without wiping the blade, strode on. Her own weapons of choice, a spiral notebook and a rollerball pen, useless in her hands.

“Hey, you live 'round here?”

Alex was walking up Commercial towards Santa Barbara Market, nerves frail as old lace from the club the night before, as if singed by an electrical fire. She couldn't tear her eyes from the totem pole tattoos on the bulging calves of a man who was ambling along ahead of her, skateboard tucked under his arm. The double sets of Raven and Bear eyes had followed her whether she moved left or right. When he stopped to greet someone, Alex recognized the face, framed by long, grey hair, of a native elder she'd interviewed years back at that standoff in Clayoquot Sound. He should have looked ancient, he should've been
dead
by now, he'd been so old at the time (though defiant, lying in front of a John Deere Harvester, passively resisting as the RCMP carried him off), but his face was now smooth and burnished like new copper against his steel locks.

“This your 'hood?” came the voice again. It was Corinna D. But not the Corinna of a month ago. This Corinna, leading two small boys by the hand, was a stout, middle-aged woman, though still regal in bearing. The word
matriarch
sprang to mind, embroidered in cross-stitching, giving off a comforting vibe. The boys were fighting loudly over a Nintendo DS. Corinna wrenched it from them and dangled it above her head while the boys paddled at the air ineffectually.

“This is Cousin Kevin and this is Cousin Tristan,” she said, plopping the gaming console into an enormous handbag, and then holding each boy up by a wrist as if offering them for sale. “Boys, say hello to my teacher Ms. Alex Dinesen.” Alex was surprised Corinna actually knew her name. Her eyes looked warmer, even welcoming, the lids no longer on sentry duty. Or was that just the difference between seeing someone in daylight versus under fluorescent lights?

“You stopped coming to class,” Alex said, not sure what she expected from Corinna at this point. An apology? Absolution? The class, like so much of her life, was now mere historical fact, receding into a mist of could-haves and should-haves. She stroked her crepe-paper neck, a new habit, as she waited for Corinna to reply.

“I can give you some lotion for that,” Corinna said, digging around in her bag. She pulled out a small amber-coloured bottle. “You have to shake it real good and then massage it in before bed. It works so well you'd swear it was voodoo.” She laughed with her mouth open, teeth all there, shiny and white.

A candidate for mayor strode past, swinging a gold-tipped cane, his white spats gleaming, and tipped his bowler to Corinna. “The Widow D., looking mighty fine. Don't forget to exercise your franchise.” Corinna waved him off with a “Shush now.” The cousins simultaneously whined, “We're missing
Prank Patrol
/I have to pee!”

A group of Kamper Kids drifted by wearing nubbly oatmeal-shaded robes, like the deeply hooded monks in
A Canticle for Leibowitz
. You could no longer tell the girls from the boys. They stopped a few feet away and began to perform a pantomime. One of them bent low and put a hand to his (or her?) back, while another stood tall and raised arms above her (or his?) head as if wielding a mighty axe. Several knelt in prayer and a couple of others held out hands, palm over palm, beseechingly towards passersby. They froze in tableaux as a siren sliced across East 1st and someone yelled out of an overhead window, “
Armand, do not, I said— Armand!!
”

“I have been young, and
now
am old,” Corinna said quietly, “yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. Psalms, 37:25.”

From the Kamper Kids came a low murmuring that cohered into a chant: “
Nun puer fui siquidem senui et non vidi iustum derelictum neque semen eius quaerens panem
.”

Or vice versa, thought Alex. But that was just her opinion.

For your final exam

Write an editorial piece on the following: Why did the reporter ask for the African assignment? Are witnessed atrocities more real than unwitnessed? (See: “If a tree falls in the forest …” Bishop George Berkeley, philosopher of immaterialism—or the metaphysics of “subjective idealism.”) How near the flames can you stand and not get burnt? Take your time before handing in your final draft. Take a lifetime.

N.B. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

There's a grinding sound, like the approach of a Howitzer tank, and that's how Alex hears her husband before she sees him. As she teeters down the front steps, hauling herself painfully along by the railing, she sees Rufus, pants hanging below the rubberized waistband of his SpongeBob underwear, small bony hips like the horns of a kid goat, rocketing down the street on a skateboard, his feet huge, with their two sideways baby toes that had always made them seem so vulnerable despite their size, inside ratty sneakers, laces flapping.

“I knew a girl in Africa,” Rufus once said, back when they still lolled about in
Sultan Blunda
, “and she was the bravest girl in the world.”

Well, that was a fact.

I used to love you, she could shout. We used to be happy! Once, we were Swedes!

But even without the green plastic buds in his ears all he would hear was the clacking of her new dentures, large and loose in her mouth.

She could be saying,
Kaxig! Minnen Fackla!

She could be saying, Tie your shoes,
Besta!

FLOATING LIKE A GOAT

Or, What we talk about when we talk about art

Don't let that horse

                             
eat that violin

           
cried Chagall's mother

                                         
But he

                  
kept right on

                                 
painting

And became famous

—
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI,

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

Dear Miss Subramanium,

It may strike you as ridiculous (as it did my husband) that I could lose several nights' sleep over the fact that Georgia is “not yet meeting expectations” in art. It's
only
art, my husband told me. She's
only
in grade one. But lose sleep I did, and in fact I am now in such a deeply caffeinated fugue state that I fear my letter to you will come across as intemperate. That is not my intent.

Please note that I am not suggesting Georgia is some kind of artistic genius or that she even has any particular talent. This is a defence of artistic expression, not of my daughter's abilities. Or rather, a defence of art itself.

Your penchant for feathered dreamcatcher earrings and tight, sequined T-shirts bearing the names of various headbanger acts has not gone unnoticed among the parents (my husband in particular seems more inclined to pick up our daughter this year than when she was in Mrs. Tam's kindergarten class—where, FYI, Georgia did manage to “fully meet expectations” in art). I take it you may think this gives you a somewhat “free-spirited” or “bohemian” air. But bohemian resides not merely in the costume, Miss Subramanium.

There was a time when I would gladly have sold my soul to curry favour with a particular curatorial demagogue, but I can tell you with certain authority that even back then I would never have stooped to impose strictures on others. A free-spirited woman does not make girls and boys form separate lines before they can enter the classroom, she does not restrict conversation during snack time, and she most certainly does not insist that when six-year-old children draw people or animals their feet MUST be touching the ground.

When my daughter informed me of this “rule,” despite the tears of frustration puckering her drawing of our late cat, O'Keeffe, I couldn't suppress a snort. (Not an attractive habit, I admit, and one I'm attempting to rein in after a particularly ill-timed one at the head table of my husband's annual Conservative Party fundraiser—I blamed the dill sprig on the poached salmon.) “I guess she's never heard of Chagall,” I said to Georgia, trying to sound offhand, as I'm well aware that it's considered verboten to undermine a teacher's authority. Georgia, ever curious, wanted to know more, so I hauled out my dusty Gardner's
Art Through the Ages
, only to find that the small black-and-white photograph of
The Crucifixion
did little to convey the intensity of vision and colour and the infectious joie de vivre of Chagall's work. The Internet proved a more satisfying resource, as it frequently does these days.

Georgia was most taken with the goats—floating, soaring, violin-playing goats. “I wish I could fly,” she said, more pensively than her tender age warrants. Well, who doesn't? (Do you suppose we could purchase posters of
La baie des Anges
for only $56.01 plus shipping or a boxed set of eight Chagall greeting cards online today if daydreamy little Marc Chagall had been in
your
grade one class, Miss Subramanium? Just a thought.)

I am an actuary by trade. My job involves evaluating risk. This has been ranked the number one low-stress occupation in the country, according to recent media reports, and I can attest to their veracity (which is why my dentist finds it so surprising that I grind my teeth in the night—bruxism, it's called. That sounds like the name of an art movement, does it not? Something darkly male, something tantalizingly
unkempt
. My No. 14 and No. 19 molars have evidently suffered such irreparable damage that it threatens to alter the appearance of my jawline. I'm currently awaiting delivery of my custom-fitted mouthguard, my own
nocturnal bite plate
. This is the kind of excitement I have to look forward to these days, Miss Subramanium).

As both a professional and a parent, it is my job to calculate risks, not take them. Taking risks—that is the artist's, and the child's, job.

Your feet-on-the-ground dictum, or “rool,” as Georgia put it in her journal, is just the starting point. There is also your oft-stated desire that the children make their crayon strokes in one direction and one direction only, putting cross-hatching on the same criminal level as giving a classmate a wedgie. And snipping the erasers off the ends of their pencils so that they're forced to confront their “mistakes”—I won't even go there right now. What I would like to focus on is your insistence that a drawing is not complete until the child has filled in the background.