Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (9 page)

What happens goes something like this: You leave for work in the morning and on your return there is the peeling arbutus, with the tire swing still dangling from the lowest branch, the rope slightly frayed but not so much you've ever noticed. There's the cedar hedge that hid the partially disassembled Triumph Twin in the carport that you will now never ride down the I-5 to the Coast Highway, cruising all the way to Eureka to visit that chowder shack where you first met (so never mind that the clam chowder tasted like it had been stewed in an ashtray, you'll always remember it as ambrosia). There's the empty koi pond—so incompatible with the wandering black bears and the fat, happy raccoons—with ghost fish flickering in the shallows. The upturned blue box is still at the curb. And in the spot where the house once stood is a long, dull pucker, a barely perceptible seam where the earth has hastily knit itself together.

And no insurance policy in the world with a clause to cover what has happened.

Honey Fortunata (her real name) sings “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as she manoeuvres her new lease-to-own Hummer along Georgia towards the Lions Gate Bridge. It's been her anthem, practically a mantra, ever since she heard it on Martha Stewart's
Apprentice
. “Everybody's looking for thomething …” The slightest trace of an accent—people often mistake it for a lisp—creeps into her voice whenever she's feeling emotional.

There are those who would view the Hummer as capitulation, but Honey tends to look on the bright side—that's how she stays afloat. She kept what her favourite British children's
stories called
a stiff upper lip
when her mother left seven-yearold Honey with her grandmother in Davao City and flew fifteen time zones across the Pacific to take care of another woman's children. The lip barely quivered at age fourteen when she didn't even recognize her own mother on the international arrivals level of the Vancouver airport, or the six-year-old girl who, her mother told Honey, was her sister. That same lip, encased in sensible matte-finish Taupe by MAC, stayed the course when her mother died and when her little sister, Charity, decided that sliding her crotch up and down the pole at No. 5 Orange was preferable to attending classes at Van Tech Secondary while Honey worked days sorting processed meats into neat stacks at Subway and studying nights for her real estate licence.

Let the other agents travel in packs like cowardly hyenas or teenaged boys with pants riding the barrens of their non-existent buttocks. Let them retreat in fear, taking jobs in felt-lined cubicles on the nineteenth floor of a securities company. Honey Fortunata, snug in her Kevlar pantsuit, behind the wheel of her bulletproof high-mobility multi-purpose vehicle (civilian version), is on her way to close on the $7-million-plus split-level on Decourcy Court. And no thwarted buyer taking potshots at real estate agents is going to stop her. She even has the RE/MAX logo on the driver's side door—the #1 in
We're #1 in West Van!
forming what could be construed as a perfect bull's eye at her left breast.

From her dashboard, above the combat-grade instrument cluster with its eerily glowing global-positioning device, a hollow plastic Virgin Mary filled with holy water from Cap-dela-Madeleine, hands open at her sides, smiles wryly at Honey as if to say,
Let me tell you about stiff upper lip.

It's difficult to say just how badly Nina is sweating inside her Olympic mascot costume, as even under ideal circumstances she is the Lance Armstrong of perspiration. If there were an Olympic medal for sweating, there she'd be, on the tier of the podium closest to heaven, her Athens-vintage Roots singlet plastered to her body, brandishing gold. She blames her Eastern European heritage, something hirsute and unfavourable embedded in her twist of DNA, combined with a childhood of pork fat, too many root vegetables, and polyester stretch pants. Yet there is something distinctly working class about excess sweat, which is why she's never followed up on her mother's suggestion (may she squirm in eternal unrest) that she have some of her eccrine glands removed. I secrete therefore I am, Nina liked to scoff. And really, is there anything more bourgeois than elective surgery?

This is where a lifelong commitment to battling environmental degradation has led her. She is a thirty-eight-year-old woman lumbering around Granville Island Public Market dressed like a roly-poly Vancouver Island marmot, an animal that in real life is about to tip into the abyss, but who crookedly grins from all the banners spanning the city's bridges, and whose smaller but no less roly-poly Beanie Baby™ version is clutched by American and British and German and Japanese children passing through upgraded security at the Vancouver International Airport, children who (kids will be kids) Olympics organizers are counting on to relentlessly badger their parents to bring them back four years from now for the Games (cue visual of Eternal Flame).

Community service, they call it. Her week-long jail sentence has been commuted to this: a month of waddling through zombie-like crowds anaesthetized by all manner of smoked salmon tidbits. Nina waves in what she's decided is a jaunty
manner, while giving the finger from safely inside a fat, plush paw to anyone who has a sharp crease ironed into her professionally laundered jeans or looks even remotely aware of what a stock option is. Armies of pigeons swoop low overhead at regular intervals in eerily coordinated phalanxes. Toddlers lurch erratically at the birds that land on the wharf outside the market. Gulls screech and dive for rogue french fries with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. In the distance, a guitarist is trying to bring a Roberta Flack tune back from the dead. There are many who call this paradise.

Two teenaged girls stop in front of Nina. It's fall already, but they wear halter tops, nipples on high alert like shark fins patrolling the dangerous fabric, and too much kohl, making their porcine eyes look even smaller and meaner. By now sweat has puddled in Nina's sneakers, moisture squelching between her toes as if she's been traipsing through Burns Bog. She still has over an hour left to go. One of the girls starts poking at Nina's marmot belly. “He's soooo cute! Aren't you cute?” The girl makes her mouth go all round and tight and bends over, feigning a blow job. The other one holds her sides and shrieks in that way only fourteen-year-old girls can.

To hell with this
. Nina wants to whack them, to wreak revenge for tens of thousands of bus passengers and moviegoers who've been held hostage over the years by potty-mouthed, hysterically shrieking adolescent girls, and in fact raises a padded hand to swat at them—already picturing the crowd parting like the Red Sea while some heroic German tourist, a Heinz, a muscled tool-and-die maker from Mönchweiler, drops his smoked salmon kebab or salmon fajita and springs forward to wrestle the crazed Olympic mascot to the ground (Sayonara, community service! Hello, jail!)—when, at the outer edge of her field of vision, which is pretty limited considering the marmot head and the sweat stinging her eyes, she sees Dan and Patricia O'Donnell. Not a couple with a vague resemblance to the pair in the magazine ad, but them. Or a perfect simulacrum.

Patricia is sniffing a fennel bulb. She holds it out to Dan and then laughs as the licorice-scented fronds tickle his nose and he lightly shakes his head. The moment looks scripted (cue tinkling laughter), and Nina can't help but glance over her shoulder for a camera crew and klieg lights. A small boy in a private-school uniform stands between them, reaching for the fennel. As the three walk away, hand in hand, a luminous arc of white light envelops them. A trick of the late-afternoon sun.

No. A vision. But Nina, who's been a determined unbeliever for years, no longer has the vaguest notion of what it means to be confronted by a vision.

How can we measure disbelief? How many cubic tonnes of topsoil and almost impenetrable glacial till and granitic bedrock must be removed without recovering a single wall stud, newel post, or fragment of ceramic tile, how far into the substrata must workers delve without a trace of the chef-quality Amana gas range or the collection of stubby beer bottles (bought at auction), how many heavy-equipment operators must make limp jokes about digging a hole all the way to China and shake their heads at the homeowners' evident derangement as they ask them to excavate just one metre deeper, how many times must their daughter sob, But I don't want a new Costa-Rica-Survivor Barbie™, I want
my
Costa-Rica-Survivor Barbie™, before the bereft owners—who cringe at anything that smacks of the supernatural, pretend to gag at the words
chakra
and
aura
, and roll eyes skyward when anyone speaks of faith— must accept the unfathomable? Their house, all 3,217 square feet of it, and its entire contents have vanished without a trace.

Then there's the dog. A formerly amiable wheaten terrier who circles the perimeter of the yawning pit, endlessly snuffling at the loose earth, snapping at anyone who comes near, possibly mourning in his canine brain a soggy tennis ball left on the mat by the back door, or a beloved chew toy (the peppermint-scented Orbee bone) that felt so good against his aging gums, or simply an ambient memory of a sweet spot in the master bedroom where the late-afternoon September sun edged through the skylight and onto the kilim rug where he wasn't technically allowed but where he whiled away the empty hours in a kind of existential bliss.

Dan and Patricia are everywhere, spreading like toxic mould. On the No. 14 bus on Hastings a few days ago, Patricia looked primly at Nina from the dimly backlit panel ad, eyebrows winched skyward, as Nina glared back. If you're looking for the best of everything, sister, you're on the wrong bus. Dan still had his smirk, but didn't meet her eyes. He looked out past her at a young woman wearing a
Happy Planet
T-shirt that appeared to have been designed for an eight-year-old and shakily crunching Doritos, sallow pad of her stomach overexposed between the well-worn shirt and her low-riders, studded white belt pockmarked with cigarette burns, a rail yard criss-crossing her inner arms. Nina could've sworn Dan had to adjust his pants at the crotch.

Even the billboard at the entrance to Granville Island, just the other day advertising the delights of the Vancouver Aquarium and its imprisoned beluga population, now shows the couple, toothy smiles set on stun, in their kitchen, an assault of stainless-steel surfaces and grey-blue slate. Patricia is poised to slice a fennel bulb. The knife in her hand glints under halogen light while Dan leans across the cooking island as if whispering
something naughty in her ear. Here's the really weird thing. They look less like Dan and Patricia than the real Dan and Patricia Nina saw last week on the wharf outside the market.

It's only much later, when she's trying to get back to sleep around four
A.M
.—the time she often wakes and can't remember which side of her chest houses her heart, even though it's thrumming so violently she fears the landlady will start pounding on the floor above her bed, yelling, “I thought I told you to keep it down!”—that it dawns on Nina: the real Dan and Patricia O'Donnell were not Caucasian like the actors in the ad, but Chinese. Tall for Chinese, but unmistakably Chinese. Odd that she hadn't noticed at the time.

Never make the mistake of showing how much you really want something. That's Honey's philosophy. She reels in uncommitted buyers by appealing to their unclothed desires. If you want four competing bids above list price on your aging ranch-style on Eagle Harbour Road, go ahead and give Honey Fortunata a call. Because Honey knows what to watch for and Honey doesn't talk too much.

That childless couple in their mid-thirties, the wife who hovers a little too long in the doorway of a second bedroom? That fifty-eight-year-old civil engineer who seems disproportionately interested in the empty carriage house out back and mentions having gone to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design a lifetime ago? Honey knows just what to do. She calls them to come and take a second look; the sellers are very motivated (real estate code for getting a divorce).

The couple returns, and when the wife looks into the bedroom again she sees a pine crib with an Anne Geddes photograph above it of a baby dressed like a bumblebee. The room smells of talcum powder and a limitless future. Bewildered, she turns
to Honey and says, “I didn't notice a baby's room before!” Honey smiles. “You went through so quickly last time.” The workaholic engineer returns to find the carriage house partially transformed into a painting studio, stretched canvases and splotches everywhere. “Excuse the mess,” Honey says, shrugging, “but the owner has this little hobby.”

But even Honey makes mistakes. That day two months ago when she finally tracked down Charity—her sister walking along Blood Alley with the herky-jerky marionette steps of an addict, small, untethered breasts straining against her
Happy Planet
T-shirt, while Honey negotiated with her pimp and dealer. He told her Charity had ripped off some very scary people and was alive only because of his personal munificence (although he called it something less poetic), and Honey had said, “Name your price.”

Nina holds a pair of ski poles awkwardly in her lumpy paws and pretends to slalom in slow motion through the Granville Island crowd watching Byron-from-England, a flame-haired, flame-juggling comedian who specializes in homophobic jibes. People step back to clear Nina a path and smile good-naturedly; children point and yell: “A bear!” (The marmot is actually a rodent, but no one on the Olympic Committee wanted kids pointing and yelling, “A rat!” so they've erred on the side of the ursine. After all, who, except for those trying to save the doomed Vancouver Island marmot, has actually ever seen one?) But there's this one guy, a large man eating fries from a paper cone, who doesn't budge. Just gives her a look Nina knows all too well because she's seen it staring back at her in pale, aggrieved reflection from SkyTrain and shop windows and her own bathroom mirror.