Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (4 page)

The boys had jostled for proximity to the tortoise, prodding it with sticks despite our entreaties. One of them (Marcus's son?) even poked at the girl. By that point a kind of despair permeated our cul-de-sac. Only our sons seemed oblivious to the smell and the frequent volcanic eruptions that pockmarked our driveways with small craters. We had prided ourselves on raising children with a high emotional IQ, but these little creatures had become alien to us, and we could only watch them from an increasing distance as if from the reverse end of a telescope.

Our wives squatted on their haunches in front of backyard fires they'd built in pits lined with basaltic rock, looking at us with those eyes, waiting for us to do something. Hunt? Gather? Or something else, something beyond our capabilities altogether?

We're aware that by today's standards the retiring Chas himself would have been considered a bit of a barbarian by some. He collected specimens by the thousands and thought nothing of casually slitting open the bellies of creatures to examine the contents of their stomachs. On the Galapagos he made a sport, under the guise of research, of swinging a lizard by the tail and hurling it out over the water as far as he could. He caught the terrified creature as it crept back onto the volcanic shore and catapulted it again and again. This type of lizard could evidently swim but was afraid of water. What the naturalist deemed this contradiction: apparent stupidity.

On Labour Day, Kim's wife left. Patel, not generally a man to talk in clichés, later kept repeating,
Thank God there were no children
, and not one of us even considered scoffing. She had gone not to Lucy's as we'd first suspected, but clear across the bridge to another life that was not to include Kim. This was all in her note. (It has to be said, now that Kim is no longer here, that we were taken aback by her schoolgirlish handwriting and her choice of stationery.) All of us were in agreement about whose fault this really was.

Late that night we were decidedly sombre as we gathered in Kim's kitchen, lit only by the amber glow of LED pot lights. To get through the dense foliage, we would have to take the equivalent of machetes to the vines and the thick-ribbed hogweed stalks. Kim doled out fully forged and polycarbon-tipped chef's knives with military precision. How different those Sabatiers and Wüsthofs were from the stone tools we found scattered around our ancestor's backyard. We buried those as well. (Stefan has confessed to pocketing a Mousterian scraper as a souvenir, although we agree
souvenir
seems the wrong word. Patel suggests
memento mori
.)

Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!
How could he have explained? With that jaw grown so heavy it was now only good for mastication? With that tongue that most of us were certain had nimbly traced figure eights on our wives' breasts and thighs, now thickened and barely contained in the bowl of his mouth? Trevor swears he pleaded. His eyes, buried under that shelf of brow, begged for understanding. Did he plead? Sometimes even the merest suggestion of what may have happened is enough to make you question your own recollections.

As for Gido, what could we do? That dog had an exceptional sense of smell. And halfwit or not, that dog was loyal. Even now we're not ashamed to admit that more than one of us wept. Karlheinz the longest and hardest.

The mail continues to arrive at 2781, the bills get paid, even the mortgage, thanks to Trevor's computer-hacking skills. Come tax time Stefan, a crackerjack accountant, will see to it that the former occupant doesn't fall into arrears. We'll make sure he sends his old mom, the only personal correspondent we could determine, a Christmas card.

We razed the rampant growth on the property. The children have resumed playing in the trucks, and we've accepted that boys will be boys. The little Jesus fish on the Dodge Ram has sprouted rudimentary legs and a tail, clearly one of Stefan's jokes, although he denies it. It's so peaceful here on our cul-desac, at the edge of the ravine, that it's difficult to recall that only two months ago we were engaged in what Patel has described as a Manichean struggle.

The smell is something we've learned to live with, even Trevor. A kind of sufferance we must bear.

Looking out our front windows we can see our wives, curbside, straddling their motorcycles, careful of their gently swelling bellies, revving their engines. The flash of late-October sun on chrome fenders, after all the rain we've had lately, could render a man blind.

ONCE, WE WERE SWEDES

No one cared about the facts anymore. The facts were suspect, mutable as memory, as insubstantial as the off-gassing of the new polymer carpets in the classroom, their molecular composition resistant to the most persistent of stains: mustard, cherry Kool-Aid, blood. (Alex's students had all shrugged when she asked if anyone else could smell the fumes that insinuated their way into her sinus cavities and then slumped there like a belligerent toddler, half-dressed and shrieking.)

As for news, baby, these kids wouldn't notice news if it kicked down their doors in the dull of the night and set their hair on fire.

What they had were opinions. And in their opinion Journalism 100 badly sucked. Where was the
equipment
? Where were the DVCPRO digital camcorders, the Avid XP editing suite, the chroma wall for weather, the skyline backdrop? And why do research for news stories when you could blog or tweet what you already knew? That the two “newsroom” printers were dot matrix was cause for much hilarity. The archetypical steno pad and rollerball pen, iconic to Alex, might as well have been the mandible fragments of an iguanodon.

Who were they, these wounded children of the new diaspora with their burnt offerings of exploding car radiators and near rapes in strip-mall ATM lobbies as excuses? Who was forcing them to be here? One sallow boy with gaping nostrils had shown up last month, assignment incomplete as usual, his right hand swathed in gauze like a badly applied diaper. He held it up as if taking a citizenship oath, claiming second-degree burns. Three days later, Alex caught that same hand, unscathed save for its tattooed knuckles, giving her the finger as she wrote, yet again, on the whiteboard:
Who, What, Where, When, and Why?

What she should have written:
Why bother?

She tried to channel empathy—these were kids whose older brothers were being gunned down gangland-style in the driveways of their parents' suburban strongholds, whose older sisters were engaged to men they'd never met from countries they'd never been to. She saw them gathered around the entrance to the Terry Fox SkyTrain station like rejects from a casting call for a movie set in South Central L.A. The girls were almost beautiful when viewed from a distance and not under simmering compact fluorescents, their hair a startling platinum or copper-green against caramel skin; the one pallid girl's hair a fretful black. Waiting there for whatever it was they felt the world owed them.

Corinna D. had yet to finish an assignment. She stood planted regally in front of Alex, empty-handed, her eggshell eyelids at half-mast. Statuesque, petulant, she spoke with a liquid West Indies accent although born in Ladner, and wrote English as if it were a second, or even third, language. Most of them wrote it this way, but Corinna with particular finesse. (“In my own onion this Teecher have no Peoples skills,” she would write on her class evaluation. And the Teecher would attempt a snort of laughter while reading this alone on her front stoop as she watched the dispossessed drifting through the aborted heritage renovation across the street.)

Corinna tugged out her earbuds. “So, I was clubbing with my cousins.” Every anecdote of Corinna's began with her cousins—whether blood relations or a code word for something else, Alex had never figured out. Corinna's story involved a drive along No. 5 Road, hitting something, Cousin Kevin arguing with Cousin Tristan about whether to stop or not. What looked like blood-smeared blond hairs on one of the tires. Cousin Kendra screaming that she just wants to get the fuck home (“That girl has the mouth in the family”). A lumpy green garbage bag in the middle of the road. More arguing along with the requisite
Fuck you
s between Kevin and Tristan about who was going to look in the bag.

“And I'm all, I'm checking out the bag already.” Corinna sighed heavily and actually looked right at Alex—a first—as if to say,
Men
. She pulled a strand of gum from her mouth, rolled it into a little green ball. “You do
not
wanna know.”

The garbage bags with their grisly contents had started appearing in the fall and had by now become the stuff of urban legend around Vancouver. Everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who knew someone who had stumbled across one, always at night, always somewhere near water, but the authorities were keeping it quiet. No one had even been reported missing.

Alex waved her hand towards the classroom door with what she thought was a coolly comic flourish and said, “Creative Writing, Room 209, Block D.” No one laughed except for the enormous congenial boy at the back of the room whose real name, as far as Alex could discern from class records, was Xmas Singh. She called him X and he pulled in solid Bs and feigned amusement at her jokes. You took what you could get.

Here in Room 017, Block C, in the bowels of one of those community colleges proliferating bunny-like on the outskirts of the metropolis, cheek-to-rump with industrial pig farms, ginseng plantations, and warehouse outlets, sarcasm might as well have been an advanced form of skin disease. She used to be so good with words. Now, more often than not, Alex found herself at a loss. There was a time when she had been fluent in more than one language. Alex and Rufus used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms.
Drömma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda!
It was lingonberry of another tongue—tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.

While the rest of the class fiddled with their iPods and iPhones, Corinna D. drifted towards a workstation as if walking the red carpet, plopped down, and swivelled her chair around, thumbs already busy texting one of her cousins.

It was the year provincial health insurance had started covering Botox injections and teeth-whitening technology for the disenfranchised. Thirty-three-year-old female heroin addicts who had appeared sixty now looked like ageless
Fireball XL5
puppet people. They jittered around expressionless, eyes wide, their remaining teeth gleaming like Chiclets between pillowy Jolie Lips™.

Buildings were crumbling; major developments sat abandoned, skeletal. Steel girders pointed skyward with nothing cloaking them, but the people who squatted amongst them looked defiantly better. This was the new harm reduction. The Atlanta-based
Journal for the Society of Aesthetic Medicine
published a study confirming that positive self-image was the first step towards recovery and self-reliance.

It wasn't only the prematurely aged homeless who were looking younger. A candidate for mayor was shown on the news playing beach volleyball. Her face was drum-tight, and saucy pigtails sprouted from the sides of her head, but her cellulite-buckled butt cheeks, split by a thong, looked like navel oranges in a sling.

She had a good serve, though, the anchor and the weatherman agreed,
a damn fine serve
.

Alex, who used to report on insurgents in Chad and Sudan, was perched at her breakfast bar, two weeks' worth of newspapers and flyers towering at her elbows, spying on a student after hours. She was surprised to find the name of the lawyer Corinna D. had said Cousin Kevin had called—even before he called the police about the body—right there in the phone book, between Wells Fargo Financial and Wells, Jocelyn, aromatherapy. Her chest felt unaccountably bound as she pressed the numbers, as if she were lying abandoned in a play dungeon in second-hand fetish gear. She who had interviewed a leader of the Janjaweed in Darfur and not broken a sweat. She had felt not so much fear then, but anger. And bewilderment.

“I know the party in question,” the lawyer informed Alex, but wouldn't—couldn't—disclose anything more.

She told him: “You have to understand; I'm just doing my job.”

It sounded feeble, even to her. What was she now, some low-level SS officer?

The stink from the classroom carpet was still lodged in her nostrils. That, and the smell of something altogether worse, thumbprinted in memory from a distance of some years and many miles.

Alex and Rufus were combing through the takeout pad thai for the remaining shrimp bits when she told him she wanted to quit the college. It didn't pay that well, anyway. The commute, from Broadway station to Terry Fox, was like spending time in medium security. The industrial carpets were rendering her cataleptic. And there was a moral malaise spreading fungus-like among the students that she feared might be contagious.

“Fungal strife.” Rufus laughed. “The jock itch of the soul.”

“It's not even that they're hard.” She wanted him to take this seriously. “Hard is at least some kind of position. It's more like they're—squishy.” She didn't mention the body in the garbage bag and her call to the lawyer.