Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (19 page)

“Island looks bigger,” Syd says on approach, the helicopter still in one piece despite the pilot's Kilgore impressions.

“Always does from the air.”

“I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.”

As they circle lower, Syd sees something far below in a clearing moving swiftly. A deer, a bobcat?

“Someone's in an awful hurry,” says the pilot.

A man?

“Mr. Gross? Mr. Gross!” The first AD, with her truncheon-wielding Afrikaner accent, moves in on Syd as he lurches from the helicopter. She runs hunched over, one hand holding down her frothing mass of hair, the other waving a clipboard, pages fluttering from it crazily in the downdraft. Drew follows, sobbing, and a pissed-off David Mathers, complaining in a loud, over-enunciating voice that he's due to shoot a guest spot for
Little Mosque on the Prairie
in two weeks less a day and this better not yada, contract, yada yada, residuals, et cetera. A pale, double-jointed woman in a glittering gymnastics leotard appears at Syd's elbow, whispering (
why whispering?
) something about a Cirque de Soleil audition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The nuns, all in swimsuits or yoga gear, swarm over. The Stay Puft–headed DOP brings up the rear, piggybacking a teenaged girl, the Victoria jailbait who plays the baby nun.

They converge on Syd like a kind of ooze, their hopes and dreams, their messy lives, their
schedules
thrust at him as if he were Jesus Christ Superstar healing lepers. Syd holds out his hands, palms outward, both steadying himself and fending them off. The helicopter tilts up and away behind him.

One by one the actresses who play the nuns turn blue-grey and waterlogged. They flop onto their backs or fronts, still and swollen, seemingly floating. The first AD opens her mouth, tongue clawing for air. Out of her left nostril scuttles a small brown crab, followed by another and another. The DOP has a gash in his gut where it's been impaled by a tree branch. It sticks out the other side, looking for all the world like a cheap illusionist's trick, save for the all-too-real blood. Minutes pass, or hours, then, as if someone's pulled focus and upped the volume, they're all their own clamouring selves again.

The weather is unseasonably warm for early October; the air on Syd's toes disconcerting but not entirely unpleasant. “Okay, okay. Can someone tell me exactly what's going on?” Please God, no, not the squawk. He sounds like a seagull. “When was the last time anyone saw Kakami?”

The ghostly gymnast places a hand on Drew's chest. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” Syd resists the urge to give the distressed location manager a hug. He's through with dispensing hugs.

“One minute he was standing right there.” After another intake and outtake of air, Drew points towards a spot a few feet away. “And the next minute—”

“I know,
poof
, gone, without a trace. Not even a whiff of sulphur.”

Drew crosses his (her?) arms. “You don't have to believe me. I know what I saw.”

The first AD is composed but seething; her hair appears to move of its own accord, like a nest of vipers. “I was conferring with Mr. Kakami about the shooting script late-morning but he appeared distracted. He cut the scene in which Mother Superior has the vision of playing soccer with the Shaolin monks. Without any explanation. Miss Gong Li refuses to come out of her yurt.”

“Let me think,” Syd says. “All of you, go. Frolic, yoga, or whatever it is you do for fun here. Just let me think a minute.”

A kid, some PA or other in a
Rain Dog
T-shirt, orange hair shaved to his scalp, round blue eyes like a baby's, shyly approaches him. “Mr. K. talked to me right before he disappeared. He told me only to tell you. The stuff he told me.”

“So, tell me.”

The boy moves closer, taking up a greater portion of Syd's personal space than he deems kosher. Syd inches back gingerly, like you would from an unpredictable small animal clutching a treasure to its chest, maybe a squirrel with a nut. “He talked about everything. He talked about love. He made me see things aren't always the way they seemed.” The boy is flushed, his tone reverent, speaking with a kind of dangerous devotion that makes Syd wonder what had been going on on this island these past few weeks. “His voice, it was like he was all voice, you know. I'd never noticed that about him before.”

“He talked to you about love?”

“It's not what you think. It was pretty general, not advice about girls and stuff. I know that doesn't make sense, but I can't explain it the way he did. And he told me to tell you, ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.' And maybe yours.”

“Yours?”

“No,
yours
.”

So no magical disappearing act after all—sudden, but not entirely uncalculated.

Above them, high in Old Gnarly, Gita Chapelle stirs on her platform and calls down through her megaphone, “It's karma, man!” She sounds as if she's woken up from a year-long nap.

“Someone, you”—Syd points to a teamster who's leaning against a tree working his way through a book of Sudoku puzzles—“get me a ladder.”

“Union regulations—”

“Stick your union up your ass!” In Syd's rage the squawk is transformed into something terrifying, even grand—the ugly duckling now a beautiful but pissed-off swan.

The PA materializes in front of Syd with an extension ladder under his arm. In the muted, rainforest light he looks like a younger Kakami. The teamster mutters, “Scab,” and goes back to chewing on his pencil.

“What's your name? I want to remember it when we're cutting cheques.”

“Ivan. Ivan O'Neil. You're going to find him?”

“I'm going to find him and then I'm going to wring his fucking neck.”

There is no time for Syd to process that he's climbing a tree in bare feet in the middle of nowhere as he struggles onto Gita Chapelle's platform and grabs her megaphone. “Kakami! Patrick Kakami!!”

Silence, save for the distant surf and the occasional forced screech from the scattering nuns as the DOP runs about goosing them, a rabid fox in the henhouse.

“KA-KAAA-MIIIII!”

Somewhere, far from shore, a glistening chinook salmon twists in a neat double helix through the water. Singing about oceans. Singing about love.

Because.

Because here is the movie, all around us. Here is the never-ending story. Patrick shoots and edits simultaneously as he moves through the rainforest, effortlessly synching sound with picture. Here there are no cuts, no retakes, no stopping to powder the immobile brows of Botoxed beauties, to reload film, to change a light gel, to wait around all afternoon for an all-too-brief magic hour in order to score the money shot.

The layers of sound this deep in the forest are phenomenal. Even the mushrooms sing their song, in dozens of fungal dialects all eager to be heard. The lichen and the tree moss, hanging like Triton's beard, fizz and whisper. Here filtered light colludes with leaf and fern, evoking a sensation akin to being in the womb. Here is the green force that drives a fuse through every flower—both redeemer and destroyer.

Patrick begins a tracking shot of this city of trees to rival the fetishized one in
I Am Cuba
.

This one's for dreaming sons and their mothers everywhere—

And where he stops, nobody knows.

“You'll want some real shoes.” Porgie rummages around in his rowboat, the inside of which is a midden of thrift-store castoffs and ropes of varying thickness. He hands Syd a well-worn pair of some kind of high-tech hiking boot. They're surprisingly comfortable, considering he isn't wearing socks and the tongues and laces are stiff and crusty with dried seawater.

After an hour or so of placating cast and crew, enduring the amplified taunts of Gita Chapelle and the biblically infused curses of David Mathers, and trying to reach an uncharacteristically AWOL Helene in Toronto, Syd had called the only person in the vicinity he could trust, and who also had a BlackBerry. His relief on seeing the Sliammon man with his whitening-strip smile and his sardonic brown eyes putter into sight from across the water was embarrassing—like a small child finally spying his misplaced mother across the crowded expanse of a shopping mall and wetting himself, having spent long fretful minutes clutching at women wearing the same familiar sky-blue stretch pants but with shocking, non-mother faces.

Porgie didn't let on that there was anything out of the ordinary happening. Or maybe he thought this crisis was par for the course on film shoots. “So you need a guide?” he'd asked. “A real, live, honest Injun?”

They started out in the direction Ivan O'Neil said Kakami was headed, although Syd thought the running man he'd seen from the helicopter had been going the opposite way. The PA wanted to go with them, but Porgie needed someone to watch his outboard motor. “Anyone touches that Johnson has some seriously bad Coast Salish mojo coming down on them. You tell them that.” Syd feels for the kid, ever consigned to being the messenger. And he probably quit a job as a bike courier to take this gig.

As they move farther into the rainforest, Syd can't shake the feeling he's travelling upriver, even though there is no river and there is no actual up or down either, as far as he can tell. Porgie holds aside low-lying branches that lash back at Syd if he doesn't move quickly enough. After an hour or so, the island larger even than it had looked from the air, Porgie says, “The last time I went this far across the island was when I was thirteen and we were searching for my auntie. The same thing happened then. The island kept growing around us, helping hide her.”

So it's not Syd's fatigue and rage and disorientation—the forest is alive, or rather, more perversely alive than it has any right be. That he so readily accepts this as a fact is something he'll spend a lot of time thinking about later in life. “What happened?”

“She didn't want to be found.”

Porgie eventually announces they have to bed down for the night, the darkness is that complete. Syd, who hasn't slept outdoors since a mismanaged bar mitzvah camp-out in the ravine behind his grandparents' Rosedale house when he was thirteen—one that involved improperly disposed of smoked-meat remains, a couple of raccoons, and a small family pet with the unfortunate name of Brisket—hears all manner of amplified and unidentifiable sounds in the surrounding night. Flesh-eating plants busily masticating the remains of rodents; antean beasts lying in wait; the long-lost auntie, now spectral and gone feral, watching, as if watching could be called a sound.
Here be monsters
. Porgie refused to light a fire, saying it would disturb the balance in the forest.

Syd forces himself to focus on his guide's cheerful disembodied voice. “My grandfather Charlie's not too happy about it but I feel like I've put in my time on the reserve. Also, I can bring some new perspective to the biz, right?” Syd drifts off to Porgie confessing his dream: to be a producer/director of broad Hollywood comedies, a First Nations Ivan Reitman (Porgie's own analogy).

Syd will have to talk him out of it. Look at me, he'll say, it's not all power lunches at Orso and hot-buttered premieres. It's whiny people wanting a pound of flesh every day. It's the studios in the States, and the broadcasters and government funding agencies here squeezing your nuts. It's the Chinese co-producers politely insisting you use the crap-ass stock from FortuneFilm—a subsidiary of DoubleHappinessCo—which Syd suspects is made by blind orphans in a Shenzhen factory that also manufactures Barbie accessories brightened with lead-based paints.

It's this: the most talented filmmaker you've ever worked with, a man you consider a friend, maybe your best friend, dropping a few gnomic utterances and making for the bush.

Don't get Syd wrong. He adores the idea of movies, loves the act of watching them. But movie people? Janus-faced actors and the high-level technicians with their intense Asperger's-like shoptalk jack up his acid reflux. The unions suck the magic out of moviemaking—teamsters can't pass gas without consulting their local; IATSE members become apoplectic if someone other than an IATSE Nazi dares touch a light switch. It's all more Jimmy Hoffa than Norma Rae.

Screenwriters act all docile but would stick a fork between your eyes if they could get away with it. Directors and DOPs with their childlike ids and grandiose sense of entitlement remind Syd of the destructive, drooling baby in that early Pixar short, the one that terrorized the poor tin soldier. Writerdirectors—
auteurs—
don't even get him started.

Patrick Kakami had been different—
is
different. Why is he thinking about him in the past tense? Surely he isn't dead? What was it Kakami had said in the sweat lodge? Maybe he should've listened? Syd can still hear the voice but not the words as he floats along in his sleep.

Naked young men holding poison blow darts line the dark river, waiting for Syd to make a wrong move, while Porgie continues to parse the overlooked
mise en scène
of
Kindergarten Cop
long into the porous night.

Syd's watch has stopped and his BlackBerry's not working. According to Porgie, who purports to have some facility with reading the sun, they've been trailing Kakami for about forty-two hours. Which isn't possible as the island is only twelve kilometres total in circumference, give or take, and so narrow they should be able to hear the tide moving in and out, the cannibal shrieks of gulls. In a movie this would be the point where one of them spots remnants of their old campfire and loudly exclaims that they've been travelling in circles, upon which the two wanderers commence squabbling about what an idiot the other guy is and smack each other around and either make up or storm off in opposite directions only to meet up again later to dispatch a common enemy. But there are, of course, no campfire remains here, no
here
here, and all the trees look the goddamn same to Syd, so they may or may not have been going in circles. His bowels are so tight; he's eaten enough salmon jerky to embalm his colon. The loud silence of the rainforest, when Porgie isn't talking, triggers his tinnitus, so that there's a one-man klezmer band going on inside his head.