Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (5 page)

Rufus pointed his chopsticks at her. “Lex, do you think maybe you've forgotten what it's like to be a kid?” She was thirty-six; he was six years older but was intent on pretending he hadn't yet turned forty. He'd recently taken to scootering to work on a collapsible Razor that he could sling across his back in its own little carrying case. He wore a Tyrolean felt hat that had belonged to his Austrian grandfather, but it might as well have been a little striped beanie with a plastic propeller on top. It served her right, she thought, for marrying a man named for a beloved family pet.

They had been together for seven years, and had been living in the duplex on Venables for five now, married. Rufus's dry wit used to be like kindling stacked around her heart. It was in the giddy days of moving in together that IKEA talk had been born. As he flopped onto the new mattress, Rufus had beckoned, “Join me in
Sultan Blunda
, a cloud forest of cheap vodka, Astrid Lindgren characters, and common sense.” Now when Alex lay down on the bed, sometimes in the middle of the day, it no longer felt like
Sultan Blunda
; it felt like a mattress that had gone flat and lumpy. A sad blunder.

When had they stopped talking IKEA? When she inherited that Ethan Allen–style credenza from her mother last summer, her first
real
piece of furniture, while Rufus had slapped together shelves made of plastic milk crates and two-by-fours in the basement to hold his growing new/old collection of vinyl from stores like Zulu and Red Cat? Places where middle-aged men in black concert T-shirts shot the shit with concave-chested kids who had rogue chin hairs and opinions about everything from whether Muse frontman Matt Bellamy was really the late Jeff Buckley with plastic surgery to the latest conspiracy theory about the government monitoring all Internet use in collusion with an online ad conglomerate. Or was it before that, when she came back from Africa for the last time and tried to convince herself that those who could no longer
do
could teach?

Rufus was looking at her too intently, his chopsticks noodling in the air as if painting a devil's Vandyke on her face.

“What?” she said, flicking at the corners of her mouth with her fingers, thinking maybe a bean sprout slick with peanut oil was hanging there maggot-like. “What?”

“Do you ever get the feeling we're too white?”

His new code word for too old. Did he mean
she
was too white?

“
Smila Blomma
,” Alex said, aiming for playfulness, hoping for some esprit de corps. “
Fira
,
Slabang
.”

The words floated in the air like cat dander for what seemed like several very long dead seconds. Rufus finally smiled indulgently. “
SKÄRPT!
”

Skärpt
like a knife.
Skärpt
like a machete.

Was Rufus being deliberately mean or—worse—had he forgotten?

It was the year of the endless civic election. Campaign signage was everywhere, but this was indicative less of the spirit of democracy than of a sense of desperation. A new municipal bylaw allowed citizens to accept payment to display signs and billboards. You could tell when someone was really hard up when ads for Farsighted People and the Fiscally Responsible Folks and Greener than You, plus various independents, all jostled for space on the same patchy scrap of front lawn. The lawns of the kind of people who donated sperm to fertility clinics at $50 a pop and dreamt of selling a kidney on eBay. It was hard to pass judgment; these weren't easy times.

Sustainability Is for Suckers
, an FRF slogan read. The Tim Hortons on Kingsway had it printed on their coffee-cup sleeves. The Kamper Kids wore the discards as armbands. After all, everyone had a right to an opinion.

Alex told her students to write up Corinna's incident on No. 5 Road in inverted-pyramid style for the following week.

She said: You can interview Corinna—she's a
primary source
. She's a
witness
.

She said: Remember to write it with the most important information near the top so that an editor can cut from the bottom up.

She said: Bottoms up, get it?

Xmas Singh said: Hahaha.

She said (to herself): Bonus points for using actual facts.

Not so long ago Rufus used to talk to Alex, really talk, about just about everything, as he sat on the toilet, bathroom door ajar so they could hear each other, peeing for what seemed to her an inordinately long time. A feeble trickle like early-spring melt off a mountain stream. She'd urged him to get his aging prostate checked, fearing the small chestnut gland would start ballooning with tumours bagpipe-like throughout his groin.

Mostly Rufus had talked about his designs. He'd launched a small company with a friend a decade ago that specialized in sustainable designs rooted in the natural world. “Bionical creative engineering,” Rufus called it. He'd won a Suzuki Foundation Award for developing a non-toxic fabric finish inspired by water-repellent lotus leaves. More recently he'd been obsessively studying the mako shark and its
hydrodynamic proportions
, its enviable
zero-friction drag
. A superhero shark. Nature's Genius—Human/e Technology (the name had been Alex's idea) was in negotiations with a Miami-based underwater-exploration outfit to underwrite the clean technology Rufus was developing.

Alex lowered the newspaper after rereading the same sentence about the doomed Inga Falls hydroelectric project on the Congo River at least five times. (Kimberly Lum never could write a lead.) “So what does Ernesto Jr. say about your latest mako calculations?” The millionaire Cuban American had started lowballing Rufus on materials almost from the word go.

Rufus, hunched over his laptop at the coffee table, the can of Red Bull at his elbow replacing his usual green tea, glanced at her briefly and shrugged. “It's complicated.” He turned back to
World of Warcraft: Final Blood
. This guy who hadn't even heard of
Tetris
when she met him had somehow, while she wasn't looking, morphed into a gamer. He belonged to a dejected, renegade race of
draenei
, the Broken. Alex leaned over his shoulders and tried to make sense of the mayhem on his monitor. “So, your guys, are they good guys or bad guys?”

Rufus just rolled his eyes. “It doesn't work like that.”

Was it a trick of the light, or was that peach fuzz on his cheeks?

Alex missed her bionical man, as she used to call him, poking a finger into his softening gut. She missed their toilet conversations, the intimacy and vulnerability of a peeing man seated and talking earnestly about his aspirations.

Now, he often stood, aiming from the bathroom doorway in a jet stream. Singing off-key as he whizzed. He seemed happy.

Two of these things were facts. One was just her opinion.

Alex's other students gave no indication that they thought Corinna's story was news.

Her neighbourhood was changing so rapidly that if Alex stood without moving on the corner of East 1st and Commercial Drive, she would find herself at the still centre of a kaleidoscopic time-lapse movie. This is what her neighbourhood had become, a tone poem set to a Philip Glass soundtrack, punctuated with sirens, and drumbeats, and guttural shouts as the local unmedicated or overmedicated argued with themselves and each other while they ranged back and forth across the Drive, dodging cars, bikes, and elderly Italian and Portuguese Canadian jaywalkers.

After a period of intense gentrification, a mini baby boom, and the opening of three overpriced florists and a string of restaurants with daily fresh sheets listing boutique beers, there was a sense of emptying out. Her friends who feared the Kamper Kids, the garbage-bag rumours, and commercial rezoning that allowed a methadone-dispensing pharmacy to open within two blocks of the community centre/pool/rink/library fled to the suburbs where they had sworn they'd never go. “I'd rather have an infected needle jabbed deep into my right eye,” Alex's neighbour Sasha had told her fiercely on more than one occasion. Now Sasha, her pierced labia, wife Marcia, and fouryear-old, Destiny, lived in a semi-gated townhouse complex in Port Coquitlam.

Others were going on spiritual pilgrimages to Varanasi or Amankora or joining the circus. In fact, all around the city children were abandoned to aging relatives or the newly minted private kiddie kennels by their thrill-seeking parents. The older children banded together, moving nomad-like from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, performing odd pantomimes for spare change.
How can we have children? We are children!
the parents laughed as they formed their human pyramids or checked their supply of water-purification tablets needed to survive their third-world spirit quests.

Mainly, though, there was a lot of talk about moving off-grid. The grid, that matrix of power and telecommunications, heat and light on command, was something Alex could understand. She had a healthy respect for the grid. Like IKEA, like steel-cut Scottish oats and cargo pants, the grid represented common sense. She would cling to the grid with bloody, tattered fingers if anyone attempted to dislodge her. Alex overheard a couple in JJ Bean loudly debating the pros and cons of a $25,000 residential wind turbine or a bicycle-powered generator. The woman seemed particularly concerned about not losing access to Netflix. “If you want to get off the grid,” Alex found herself saying, as if offering advice on the daily blend, “try sub-Saharan Africa.” The woman called her an earth-raping, racist, Trotskyite bitch. The guy just winked and tongued the foam on his coffee.

Steel girders formed the roof of the heritage building across the street—an abandoned Free Methodist church turned award-winning performance space—replacing the rotting wood beams of the original. Piece by piece, what was meant to be a renovation had been slowly turning into a replica, like those museum reproductions of Bastet cat goddesses and busts of Pericles you could use for bookends. Now it stood neglected, the skeleton of some great beast washed ashore on a remote island and bleached to a pewter gleam by the sun.

And there was Alex with her free-floating sense of hollowness in her own rib cage. Her period hadn't shown up for over six weeks, and her first thought was stress, then malignant carpet fibres. A single polymer thread clinging to her uterus, gathering her blood and tissue to it, a teething fibrous leech. She waited another week before even contemplating the alternative.

A child? It seemed she already had a child. A playmate for Rufus? There was an idea! Alex found she wasn't as horrified at the thought as she thought she'd be. It could be
Duktig
!

But the stick stayed white. No thin blue line.

Rufus asked: Do you ever wonder if we're too straight? Too fluoridated? Too hydrated?

From: <
[email protected]
>

To: <
[email protected]
>

Sent: February 10, 2008

Subject: ??

Hey Roof? You know the Janjaweed? They call them demons on horseback. There's a guy here, ostensibly with Human Rights Watch, but he has some kind of “deep intelligence” (read: he has something they want). The word is that the Sudanese govt. is backing this raging Arab militia. It's genocide plain and simple. So I get this interview with a demon “general”—this alleged war criminal who arrives at the rendezvous somewhere near his garrison on a camel. And the thing he wants to talk about is dental hygiene. He got his teeth fixed by a recruit who was a dentist in Dubai. Now he religiously uses whitening strips. “Like Hollywood,” he tells me. He's supposed to hate the infidels, right? So I stand there dumb as a moth in my chador (de rigueur due to his Muslim sensitivities) while he asks about my dental plan and whether I prefer Crest or Colgate.

This is so hysterically not what I expected that my questions, all the anger that I've been stoking since I got here, go AWOL. And all this time he's leaning in close, flashing these teeth like he's a game-show host, and then he asks to see mine.

It's just him, his camel, and me—and a circle of his men on their horses eyeing us from a distance. My “translator” has wandered off to take a piss. I lift my shroud flap up over my eyes and he makes this sound in his throat, almost like poor old Knob-Goblin's purr used to sound when we snurffled her belly, and puts his finger, which smells like smoke and blood and goat, right into my mouth. He runs it back and forth and back and forth, from molar to molar, while muttering something I take to be, “Nice, nice.” I think, I do actually think this, I could bite his finger right off right now, bite down as hard as I can, trapping his filthy child-raping finger and then spitting it out at his feet.

He just keeps running his finger back and forth and so help me god I start to get hot and almost come right there standing in the dry wind stink of him.

What does this make me?? And this whole time I'm in my chador like some black ghost. How can I even tell you this? How can I not?

These are the things we do when we're no longer ourselves. When the self disappears. The self—dear Knob-Goblin, I'd almost forgotten about her.

The clinic doctor walked in, tapping a pen against her teeth. She looked about twelve. There was a polished bone (quail? ferret? human fetus?) protruding through both sides of her nostrils, and starting at the top of her hands and scrolling up under the sleeves of her lab coat, some tattooed script, “
μνυμι πóλλωνα ητρ ν, κα σκληπι ν, κα γείαν, κα Πανάκειαν, κα θεο ς πάντας τε κα πάσας …”