Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (25 page)

Whatever this is called, it's not a dream.

Her co-conspirators were furious that she'd gone to the funeral. “Are you insane?” hissed Damien—a man, no, a beautiful boy really, whose cock only six days earlier she had held in her mouth—before disappearing from her life forever. She heard that he was in Dawson City or Kathmandu—like Elvis there were sightings for years and then nothing. One by one the others disappeared as well. Dissolving, so it seemed, into mist, but resurfacing south of the border and eventually apprehended for other crimes, bigger, more glamorous ones, yet not nearly so terrible. She was the only one with collateral damage to her credit. And yet here she is,
hiding in plain sight
, as it's called.

Poor, virginal Leonard, with his sense of aggrievement— Capt. Elmer Fudd, they called him, because of his stutter— became a prison poet, the most productive time of his life, he told
Rolling Stone
. Since he got out, nothing, but he still saw himself “as a fundamentally good person.” Carmen posed for Annie Leibovitz, pregnant, naked, and holding a Pancor Jackhammer across her breasts and fruited belly, a daisy sprouting from the gun's muzzle. This was before making the FBI's most-wanted list a second time. Regan and Gerry, always the clowns, had tried to get a mock reality show called
Urban Guerrilla
off the ground. That's what happened, you did your time and you moved on. It must be a colossal relief, she thinks, something that doesn't compute in her cosmology.

Every so often in the early years, there were rumours of a “sixth member.” But her name had never come up.

The early-summer heat wave is getting to everyone at group. That and the
woof
of decaying fish from the back-alley bin of the Indonesian restaurant next door to their meeting space. Oppressing everyone, that is, except Lucy, who's energized as she confesses her imagined assault on City Hall. How she envisions it: like the ending of a movie running on under the credits rather then dissolving to black, fantastical slo-mo destruction to a hypnotic soundtrack, something by Philip Glass or Arvo Pärt. And her right there, facing the statue of Captain Vancouver as debris falls like cleansing rain. Her blood is singing. She almost has to lick her lips, the scene is just that tasty. She tells them about how she's gone to the Vancouver Archives and looked up the blueprints, how locating the most vulnerable points of the building was like tracing the veins of a lover's arms.

There's a kind of silence for a moment, the scratching at soaked pits, the slurping of coffee, looks exchanged. Of all of them, Lucy has the strongest urges, has to work the hardest to quell that insatiable need to act or threaten to act in order to have her demands met, to inflict order. Maybe they were all just dissatisfied children who had never grown up. Angelina puts down her cup and applauds Lucy's confession, and the rest join in, but tepidly. The point is to offer support, not pass judgment, but Lucy can see that she's making them tired. Especially Dieter, who so wants to move on, to forget all this, get married to a nice man,
be normal
, as it's called. He wants what he thinks she has.

“Um, so power to the people, right on.” Lucy pumps her fist in the air, trying to lighten the mood, fettered as it is by heat and stench and her own neediness. “Free Leonard Pelletier!”

“Excuse me, but that's so not funny,” says Hamish-Two-Fins, the born-again native. After discovering six years ago that his great-great grandmother had been one-eighth Kitlope, of the Killer Whale clan, it's been one warrior cry after another, and a short hop from there to wannabe terrorist.

Does she know any of these people at all? These members of her “book club,” as she's described her Wednesday-night outings to Bruno. Does knowing their deepest desires mean anything, does having glimpsed the rusty drip pan under their hearts entitle her to their trust? Do they really have anything in common at all? There's an elderly woman who calls herself The Wife. There's Sterling, the tree-spiker. Tim, whose well-connected daddy somehow got him back from Brazil before he even ran short of changes of pressed boxers. Molly, who'd waged a campaign of terror against her West End neighbourhood's johns. Wing-Soo, whose story was an epic saga involving container ships, human snakes, payola, nasty landlords, and lost children. And Hamish, who's been banned from Kitamaat Village by the hereditary chief, presumably, Lucy thinks, for being annoying. Angelina is the only one among them who'd done time. She shrugged it off whenever they asked. “It was the sixties. Everyone did something.”

Then there is Dieter, dear Dieter. A charter member of ACT UP, he'd taken part in a direct-action campaign in which a syringe purportedly tainted with the AIDS virus was planted tip up in the seat of a movie theatre. It was one of a chain owned by the family of the wife of the Canadian CEO of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoBioProgress. (Besides, Dieter told her he'd reasoned, they were showing
Gigli
with Ben Affleck, and anyone who would go to see that …) But the screening that day had been the sneak preview of a children's movie. Dieter panicked and called the cops and swore off direct action for life. Among his former inner circle he's now a pariah, or The Turned Wurm, as he calls himself when he's feeling cheerful.

“What, no exegesis on Tim's latest outfit?” Lucy asks as they walk towards Waterfront station after group, Dieter uncharacteristically quiet. “I thought it was cute in a golf-daddy kind of way. No sweatshop labour involved. How do I know this? Because he confides in me.”

“Do you have any idea how many die-ins I've been in with people who are now actually dead?” Dieter says. “I'm sick of going to funerals and visiting people in prison. People I love.”

“If you're proposing to me, you'll have to go down on one knee.”

“You want to know what I think?” Under the flashing sign of a donair shop Dieter's face blinks in and out of view. “I think you're looking for an excuse to blow something up. I think you want to be caught.” The pressed meat on its rod turns slowly in the window, glistening, slick with a fatty sheen.

“Maybe I need a new sponsor,” Lucy says.

“Maybe. I don't think I'm helping your spiritual growth.”

Lucy can't help cracking a smile, but it feels crumbly, as if her face is a plaster mask.

“Seriously, I'm afraid I won't be able to stop you.”

Up north, someone is sabotaging the natural-gas pipeline. The bomber sends almost illegible handwritten notes to the company, calling them terrorists. Lucy envies him his sense of mission. And his patience. He's given them five years to dismantle the $1.8-billion project, three months to commit. Who has five years? Who has three months? Who has the guts to be
the pot calling the kettle black
, in shoddy penmanship to boot?

DRILL PECK

The recovering terrorist deadheads bee balm in her front garden, the red-tufted joker heads strewn at her feet like carnage from the suicide bombing of a medieval fairground. Her son spins up and down the sidewalk on his unicycle trying to juggle three oranges. His dad's idea and, of course, he loves it.
Carfool.
Now he's talking about learning to juggle fire.

A car streaks by, its boom-box bass competing with the squeal of tires as it tears onto Victoria and she can't help herself, she runs after it, waving her secateurs at the dissipating exhaust. “I'll clip your skinny little balls next time!” The boy leaps from his unicycle and rolls around on the grass, screaming, “Balls! Balls!” Houndoom commences her unearthly yowling. Her husband opens the front door, still in his SpongeBob boxers. “Hey!”

“Mom said ‘balls'!” Her son can hardly speak, he's laughing so hard. “That's like nuts, right? Like your
dick
!” His mother, always the comedian. But the recovering terrorist is sitting on the sidewalk crying,
alligator tears
, as they're called, big fat drops that literally splat when they hit the pavement. I'm crying cats 'n' dogs, she thinks, and would laugh about the absurdity of it if she weren't so furious.

Then her husband is there rubbing her back, saying something soothing. She forces herself to bring his voice into focus and it's like surfing deep, dark water into sun-warmed light. “Foster's careful, he's a good kid, he knows better than to go on the road.” Did she marry this man because of this delightful lack of ability to fret about the future or chew on the bones of the past? It's as if he's been genetically altered, the worry seed AWOL from his twist of DNA. It's all
hakuna matata
with him, her own Bobby McFerrin and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful. This man who knows nothing of her dark heart, of the mercury semi-dormant in her veins, who deems what he thinks of as her “neurosis” charming at the best of times, and simply irritating at high tide.

Would her husband be willing to die for their son? Why didn't they talk about such things?

The boy, on the other hand, the boy is complicated. Complicates things. Raichu, evolved from Pichu and Pikachu, can store up to 100,000 electric volts in its cheeks and release them through its tail. Information she can use.

She's clipped the webbing between her left thumb and index finger with the secateurs. The blood is
pooling
, as it's called, but only she can see this. Her husband is gearing up for a joke, she can tell by how absent-minded his back strokes are getting. Her son dances around in front of them, an orange pressed to either side of his groin. “It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's Super Vitamin C Balls!”

It's always the mother's fault.
As they say.

Kurt from Vancouver: “I have this friend who seems determined to wreck this beautiful garden she's carefully built up over the years. I'm not the only one concerned. This self-destructive impulse threatens everything she holds dear.”

The Gardening Dame: “And is there a word for this in the German,
Kurt
?”

Kurt from Vancouver: “Lucy, if you'd just—”

The Gardening Dame: “My advice, sir, is MYOB. Good fences make good neighbours, as they say. Next caller?”

GUNK SHOT

The man with the robotic voice has left a message. Tomorrow's appointment with the assistant manager of traffic calming measures has been cancelled due to the impending garbage and recycling strike. “We are seconding all senior municipal personnel in this time of crisis,” he droned.
Bla-blah, bla-blah, bla-blah.
A bureaucrat's call to arms.

The recovering terrorist walks Houndoom along Victoria, where film trucks and trailers are lined up for blocks and McSpadden Park has been tricked out as a tent city for an episode of
Reaper
. A woman with what looks like an enormous tongue runs through the dilapidated tennis court, followed by a guy wielding a machete. He leaps the sagging net and there's a
boom!
and a feeble spray of black smoke. Houndoom yowls as if she wants to raise the dead. A man in a ball cap yells at a guy with pigtails, something like
one more premature blast and
—while about two dozen people holding coffee mugs and clipboards stand around doing nothing. The guy who plays Sock is covered in soot, mugging at onlookers in blackface, playing the machete like an air guitar.

She's reminded of the old “debates” they had back in their Chinatown squat about homemade explosives. Or “kitchen improvised munitions,” as Leonard, a.k.a. Capt. Fudd, used to call them. This gave them a homey vibe, as if they were cooking up something for a potluck. Regan and Gerry treated it like a party game. “For $200. The seminal ingredient in urea nitrate.” “What is semen?” Beep! “Oh sorry, Alex, I meant, ‘What is urine?'” They were in love with the idea of using their own piss to blow things up.

“Metaphorically,” said Damien, “it would be apt.” Their target was the owner of a company that exported chlorine-filled diapers that had caused testicular cancer in third-world baby boys. The diapers were banned in Canada.

Plastic explosives? A Tampax cocktail? (They had experimented with that one—a tampon soaked in lighter fluid stuffed in a soy sauce bottle—and Regan had singed off his shaggy bangs. Leonard suggested the tampon be a used one for added symbolism. “We're not trying to make a
feminist
statement,” Damien sneered.)

Eventually Carmen told them all to shut up. She was pouting. She had wanted them to chain themselves to a railway crossing in Poco, blocking a chlorine shipment from Sarnia, but Damien insisted Greenpeace had cornered the market on that tactic and that Carmen just wanted her tits splashed across the front page. It never occurred to the recovering terrorist at the time that this was most likely true.

But homemade plastic explosives today, the possibilities are endless. What did people do before the Internet, she wonders, offering up a prayer of thanks to Google. Add a glass jar of napalm—petrol and generic soap shards—for extra kick, one site advises. “Put it in a mason jar next to the explosive device for maximizing damage to the target.”

The process of extracting potassium chlorate from household bleach is time-consuming and maddeningly multi-step, but her science degree at least taught her a modicum of patience with process, if not with life. Fractional crystallization, it's called. Science could be so poetic. “Craft project,” she tells her husband when he asks about the smell coming from her workroom. “A surprise for everyone at Christmas—I think they're getting tired of updated copies of my
Grafting Perennials
classic.”

She considers calling in her ultimatum from the phone booth at the corner of Hastings and Penticton, one of the few left in the entire city that hasn't been gutted or entirely disappeared overnight as if it had never existed. But they already have a record of her name, her request,
her particulars
, as they're called.

They issued an ultimatum way back then as well. Of course they did. Written on one of the company's own diapers filled with dog shit and deposited on the front steps of the captain of industry's Scarborough mansion. It never made the news, though. That should've been a warning to them. But. Maybe a maid removed it before anyone else could find it.