Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (22 page)

Although none of us was having as hard a time as Elyon in the guise of the hapless Stephan, Arcadia Court was not exactly living up to its name. Yes, from the ravine behind our houses we could hear fern song, the endlessly unfurling fronds in the ceaseless rain. But beyond that, the equally ceaseless whine of power tools as farther up the mountainside residents sought to improve the value of their lots. From the Wadsworths' came a constant muted stench, the distinct whiff of unhappiness, and next door, from the Costellos', often the smell of scorched fish sticks and Leo Jr.'s mother singing, off-key, something about
sistahs doin' it for themselves
.

Barman, as Leo Jr., had adjusted most easily to life as a suburban teenager. Skateboard under one arm, fingers casually pinching a “spliff,” revelling in the role of free spirit. “The Dude abides with me,” Barman liked saying—quoting from a Hollywood movie that had recently achieved cult status— amusing us all with the double entendre. “Nice guy, that Leo Jr.” was what everyone invariably said.

Jason was a nice guy now, too, thanks to Yabbashael, but this only gave people more cause for suspicion. “Why isn't The Wad acting like a wad?” students asked, and gave him wider berth than usual, while the teachers continued to watch him out of the corners of their eyes.

Jessica's formerly papery skin shone, and curves appeared in places where before there had been alarming concavity. The boys were paying attention in the cafeteria and around her locker, although some kept their distance on account of her being The Wad's sister. The girls were a different matter. A tiny curly-haired warlord named Montana puffed out her cheeks and told her posse: “If she doesn't stop stuffing her face she'll end up like that blimp in
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
.”

“Well, you know how girls can be,” Zachriel said.

“In fact,” said Rachmiel, uncharacteristically snappy, “I don't.”

It turned out that Bash, who had a fine tenor and could dance, had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the school's spring production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
before we'd appeared on the scene. His role made the rest of us nervous, but Zachriel had begun to admire Tim Rice and Sir Andrew's sympathetic view of the betrayer. “Besides,” said Zachriel, “he gets all the best songs.”

During the day we did our best to avoid each other as our social hierarchies dictated, but at night we lay in our beds in welcome darkness and communicated again without the boundaries of language. Speaking in tongues without need of tongues, bodiless once more.

On the ceiling of Stephan's bedroom was a glow-in-the-dark solar system, the North Star peeling away. On the wall of Leo Jr.'s room, posters from
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
. Beside Jason's pillow, a plush dolphin and an oversized neon-pink hedgehog won at the previous summer's PNE and hidden away under the bed each morning.

“How is this really different from texting?” Zachriel asked one night. Zachriel was the only one of us who'd taken to social media.

“It's different in spirit,” Barman said, “and, besides, there's no need for opposable thumbs.”

For some of us, high school was shaping up to be a regular pit of Acheron. (“The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night,” quoth Elyon, who was finding solace in Shakespeare despite the earlier classroom misadventure.) Only ten more days to go before spring break. We began to think in terms of miracles.

How much easier it had been for Mohammed and Siddhartha, not to mention the Christ, who did not have to wander the earth incognito. “If only we could smite just a little to blow off some steam,” Elyon said.

“I love that word,
smite
,” Yabbashael said.

“You
guys
,” Rachmiel told them, “go to sleep.”

It's true we could have materialized as ravens or, in the spirit of humility, earthworms. But then how could we have partaken of all that was available to the human senses? In times past our kind have appeared as griffins or lightning or even in the form we've been represented in over the ages, luxuriously robed, or nude with dimpled flesh, wings either terrible or elegant— Masaccio's sword-wielding avenger, Bloch's pallid ectomorph, Melozzo's curly-haired candy-box creatures. But there is something too attention-getting about those guises. Something altogether beside the point.

Soon after we left Arcadia Court a giant sea tortoise, purportedly thousands of years old, appeared several blocks over on another cul-de-sac, carrying on his back a lost schoolgirl from Japan. A miracle that was quickly covered up, as it seemed it wasn't miracles these people wanted.

And while we inhabited their bodies, Bashaar, Stephan, Leo Jr., Jason, and Jessica, the children of Arcadia Court, partook of a heaven-sent dreamless sleep. There were times, we admit, that we envied them.

Stephan didn't leave the house the whole week of spring break, and when he finally emerged we almost didn't recognize him. Gone were the too-short sweatpants and checked shirts and white socks; gone were the duct-taped glasses. In their place, oversized jeans, black hoodie, and red-framed Soulja Boy sunglasses. (Gone too was approximately $500 from the university savings his superstitious parents kept hidden in a jade Fortune Vase in the pantry behind tins of water chestnuts.) When we converged on him, Stephan simply raised a hand and said, “Word.”

He failed a math test that week, the first of many, and when called on in English or Socials he'd say things like, “Existential angst, man,” ignoring meaningful pokes from Leo Jr. (“Stephan's so
random
,” his male classmates said approvingly, so we could only conclude this was a good thing, this doing poorly in school and waxing random.)

Stephan spent much of this time on multiplayer role-playing games online. By all accounts he was a master at
World of Warcraft: Realm of Cocytus
, “smiting the enemy,” who consisted of a new kind of Wyrm and Nephilim—a.k.a. “those douche-bags,” according to the faux-hawk kid. (Barman scoffed at how the game developers stole so readily from ur-biblical sources. “
Nephilim
. They have no idea what they're dealing with. No wonder Elyon has their number.”)

We soon heard reports that Stephan was hacking for his classmates. His new admirers were his old adversaries, pimply boys with too much pocket money who took to intoning “S'mite” to each other in greeting.

Yabbashael and Barman tried to talk sense into Elyon one afternoon in the Choo family's backyard. “You two should talk,” Elyon said, eyes non-existent behind those disconcerting lenses, avoiding directly addressing Barman. “
His
guy was already cool, and
your
guy is an armoured vehicle.” Barman asked if this was all some kind of twisted revenge scenario, but Elyon only said, “By the time we leave, Stephan will be
made
.”

On an early April morning Stephan's parents slowly chewed and swallowed their shame dumplings and visited the school counsellor, shuffling along the main hall of Elysium Heights Secondary, past the glass-fronted trophy case filled with testaments to young male and female physical prowess, their son strutting behind them.

Stephan's ancient grandmother, who lived in the basement suite of the family home, had been making twice-daily offerings to Kwan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion, on her small Buddhist shrine. Zachriel saw her that day walking along the edge of the ravine behind Arcadia Court, bending painfully to tug up freshly blooming false Solomon's seal and collect choice pine cones. The moist-earth aroma, Zachriel said, was almost indecent. Nearby, on a dying Douglas fir, a pileated woodpecker let loose with a maniacal laugh and went back to his drumming. Stephan's grandmother raised her tortoise face and (Zachriel swore on Bashaar's
JC Superstar
script, rolled up in his back pocket) echoed that lunatic laughter right back at the bird.

What karmic justice, she might have been thinking, had led her to be a ninety-six-year-old woman traipsing through the rainforest at the edge of the world, mother to an aging son whose own child had lost all sense of filial piety?

We couldn't help but wonder how was it that we could be drawn to an object, that a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire, the rubber curling back from the heels, could break our hearts, yet we felt so little for the suffering of these parents?

That same day, Jessica's mother steered her to the couch when she came home in a shirt two sizes smaller than the one she'd left the house wearing and tried to engage her in a heartto-heart about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and dressing like a harlot—although the word she used was “slut.” We found it both interesting and disturbing that people's attitudes towards women and their bodies had changed so little since the days of Nebuchadnezzar II. (“The Madonna/whore dichotomy is so tired,” sighed Barman.)

This was Jessica's opportunity to tell her mother she loved her and that she was looking forward to being guided through womanhood by her sagacity. Instead, she turned her head, looked pointedly at her own chipped nail polish, and sighed dramatically.

“I don't know what got into me,” Rachmiel told us afterwards. “I wanted to put my arms around her, tell her that human life is too short, too precious to spend it endlessly worrying about things we cannot change, and that I could take care of myself, but she was just so—”

“Irritating?” asked Yabbashael.

We couldn't help nodding in compadreship; we all had mothers now. Maryam, Um Isa, Our Lady of Sorrows, Panayia, Kali, forgive us.

For a few weeks that spring, mounds of debris floating in the lower waterways of the North Shore spontaneously exploded—fiery islets of discarded tires tangled with fast-food clamshells and wrappers, plastic bottles, beer cans, undergarments, and the occasional lone sneaker drifted along the mountain creeks. The sight, at least at night, was disconcertingly lovely.

Several freight cars had jumped the tracks in the CN rail yard, the derailment spilling 41,000 litres of corrosive sodium hydroxide. Someone, it was reported, had tampered with a manual switch. (The same cast of individual, Elyon noted with disdain, who a week earlier had beaten three peacocks dead with a tire iron in Stanley Park.)

The contamination gave the parents of Arcadia Court another reason to forbid their children to go near Hastings Creek or its tributaries. The few Dolly Varden and steelhead still left in the creeks floated by, ulcerated bellies up. Some construction workers near Baird Road found a young bobcat, its whiskers and facial fur eaten away, mewling blindly beside its dead mother under a semi-completed kitchen extension. Domesticated animals were kept inside or tethered in yards. Someone, somewhere, was investigating.

The news media said this caustic substance smelled like absolutely nothing—a chemical that is impossible to detect with human senses.

Towards late April, Jessica began consorting with an older boy, a certain Cullen, who rode a coveted make of British motorcycle. Sullen Cullen, Barman nicknamed him, after his propensity for moping about, leaning against his bike with his head in a copy of Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet
when Jessica wasn't with him.

And so Rachmiel stopped talking to the rest of us in public while Jessica was busy romancing Cullen, but still joined our nocturnal debriefings. Unlike Elyon. Stephan was by then making “good coin” cracking codices for his classmates, and Elyon didn't want to be privy to our “sanctimonious brand of negativity.” Stephan took to wearing bulky jewellery and talking in rhyme with his escort of swaggering boys whose ears were stopped up with neon buds at all times.

Yabbashael and Barman were by then enjoying themselves as Jason and Leo Jr. and spent much of their free time visiting the Three Wise Men of Hastings Creek: Gary, Lubbock, and Sweeney. None of them were as old as they'd initially appeared. They'd been prematurely aged by an adult life spent living rough and not always by choice. Yabbashael was certain— following an afternoon of warm beer and discussions about the philosophy of shopping-cart racing—they were zeroing in on the ne plus ultra of human experience.

Our carnal senses had also fully awakened by then. Jason was “spanking the monkey” so often that Yabbashael complained Jason's foreskin looked—and felt—like tenderized minute steak. Leo gave and got his first hickey, although Barman was oddly bashful when asked with whom. Jessica and Cullen were spotted, more than once, coming out of the Wadsworths' laundry room, sheets of fabric softener clinging to their dishevelled hair. Rachmiel seemed to have taken a vow of silence about the affair and shared nothing with the rest of us during our after-hours conversations.

Bashaar was busy with the school's rock opera preparations at that point. Each evening after rehearsal, in the encroaching darkness outside the gymnasium, the two grade ten girls who played Mary and Mary, and a grade eleven girl from the chorus, would take turns administering oral sex to Bash with lipstick-thickened, smoky mouths. (“Rainbow party,” Zachriel told us, and in a tone of reverence up to then reserved for Psalm 19, New International Version, tried to describe the sensation. One of the Marys evidently swallowed, but Zachriel couldn't recall which.)

It was after one particularly long rehearsal that they were interrupted by a couple of the radicalized Islamic youth. As the girls scrambled to their feet and vanished into the night, Bash zipped himself up unhurriedly and said, “Ma sha' Allah,” attempting to be polite.

One of the young men fingered his sparse beard and asked, equally politely, whether Bash had decided to drop the blasphemous line from the song “Superstar.” (The one questioning whether Mohammed could move a mountain, or whether he simply had a good publicist.) The way Bash's interlocutor put it, it sounded more like a threat than an entreaty, especially since his silent colleague kept smacking his fist into his palm to punctuate the request. We wonder now, after everything, what would have happened if Bash had revealed he was inhabited by a messenger sent by the same Jibrail who had delivered the Qur'an to their prophet. Would they have believed him, laughed, or condemned him on the spot for blasphemy?