Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Her older friend Judit’s father was one of the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction, Judit fresh in the womb, her mother maddened by the loss. Judit dreams every so often of falling men, she’s told Honey, men falling from the sky like bad rain , like laundry .

Dear Judit, who still works at the Subway franchise where they met, despite her advanced cake-decorating certificate from the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts and her uncanny ability to retain statistical information. She doesn’t have Honey’s drive (as Judit’s admitted more than once, with admiration but not envy), which is of the old-fashioned sort, almost Presbyterian in its austerity. Honey has never taken a vacation, doesn’t have time to devote to dating, and still lives in the salmon-coloured stucco townhouse under the SkyTrain line near Nanaimo Station she’d shared with her late mother and Charity, the trains juddering overhead at intervals as reassuringly regular as her paycheques. But Honey is nothing if not aspirational. And when she launches her home-decor shop after this Decourcy Court sale closes, she’ll have jobs for Judit and her sister. Jobs that allow you to lift your chin sky high, you can bet your sweet bippy , as Judit liked to say.

Far above Honey, the lights strung along the Lions Gate’s suspension cables, Gracie’s pearls , haven’t winked on yet. When night comes they’ll resume their siren call to distressed souls.

Just last week, another suicidal person jumped from the bridge to the absolution of the frigid waters below. Honey believes in fortitude, but fortitude is sometimes not enough. This is why the Blessed Virgin filled with holy water stands on her state-of-the-art dash. Honey likes to cover all her bases. You can bet your sweet bippy.

“Is this where you live?” the boy asks as they round the side of the house to the entrance that leads to Nina’s basement suite. She tries to see it through his over-privileged little eyes. The back fence, chicken wire, sags low with the weight of accumulated morning glory, now dying, revealing a rutted back alley strewn with KFC carcasses the raccoons have freed from garbage bags. There’s more than one abandoned upholstered chair, the stuffing festively mounding out like popcorn.

Next door, her neighbour, a well-muscled, mulleted thirtysomething on permanent disability from complications involving a cuckolded husband and an illegal firearm, practises his nanchukas. He’s part of a subterranean tribe of basement dwellers that emerge blinking into the mid-afternoon light from their illegal suites like small nocturnal animals long after those with more conventional circadian rhythms have scattered for the day.

“Cool,” the boy says.

The man looks over and grins, wiggling his Fu Manchu moustache. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The guy has a paperback of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan spread-eagled on a vinyl lawn chair beside an ashtray, a roach clip holding the still-smouldering twist of a joint perched on its rim. He tokes for medicinal purposes, he’s confided to Nina more than once, as if she gives a shit. As if every second house on the street wasn’t a grow-op. Nina is tempted to tell him she’s the one who blew the whistle on the operation the Grow Busters pot squad raided two blocks over last year, the one that turned out to be a federally licensed medical-marijuana site-even though this isn’t true. She just wants to knock the co-conspirator look off his face, the one he always gives her when they happen to come up out of their suites at the same time.

He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Nina is dressed like an oversized rodent, but he’s very interested in the sharp kirpan fastened to the boy’s belt. There’s also a cloth covering the small bun on the boy’s head. A patka , a sort of pre-turban turban for Sikh youths, the boy explained to Nina in the car, as she madly tried to recollect if his parents had looked even remotely South Asian. When had she stopped looking at people, really looking rather than simply noticing the things about them that drove her crazy?

“Little man, they let you wear that to school?” the neighbour asks. The boy pulls free the dagger and starts citing some B.C. Supreme Court case. “So, when you have a culturally diverse society,” he concludes, “rights and obligations sometimes conflict!”

He doesn’t realize she’s not a real marmot, but he can sum up a legal argument as if reciting a nursery rhyme. Nina wonders, not for the first time, whether the child is some kind of idiot savant.

The guy shows the boy how to wield the nanchukas, holding one wooden stick firmly in his fist while deftly manipulating the one on the other end of the connecting chain. The boy makes a feeble pass at twirling the weapon, while the guy carves the air with the kirpan.

“Careful,” he says. “I’ve kunked myself more than once and my head’s probably a lot thicker than yours.”

Dwayne, Darrin, Dork? Nina has lived beside him for eight years and still can never remember his name.

It should be mentioned that the mountain has not swallowed a single sentient being. The disappearances never occur when anyone is at home. The mountain has an uncanny sense of timing. The nanny will have just rounded the corner with the twins when she remembers she should have packed the rain cover for the stroller. She turns back. I was only gone for a minute, she’ll say later, looking heavenward, crossing herself over and over as if she has a nervous tic.

Cockatiels, cats, dogs, hamsters, boa constrictors, and, once, a miniature goat-all manner of bewildered pets have been recovered at the scenes of the disappearances. The only human witness, a girl of four who had been left to play in the sandbox while her older sister took care of business with the boy next door, has been rendered mute. When asked to explain what happened, she forms a cup with her hands and smiles beatifically. The experts say post-traumatic stress disorder, while her mother insists her ADHD has been cured.

Does anyone remember that aggrieved musician of Hamelin Town? Can anyone besides this enraptured girl hear his cunning tune?

Honey Fortunata is turning onto the Caulfeild exit off the Upper Levels when her cellphone rings-no “La Macarena,” no Beethoven’s Fifth, for Honey is not a person who indulges in whimsy. As she listens to the voice at the other end, Honey’s lip begins to tremble so hard she has to press two fingers to her mouth to still it. The house on Decourcy, the one she was just about to close on, has joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Honey snaps shut her cell and pulls over. She takes increasingly shallow breaths and watches as her commission on $7.4 million does this funny thing. It sprouts wings, white, downy ones like a Catholic schoolgirl’s version of an angel, and flits up and out of the Hummer, right through the windshield as if the glass were permeable, then hovers for a moment above the gleaming hood before tumbling up into the unnaturally clear sky, along with Honey’s chances of buying back her sister’s life.

A clear, operatic soprano sings out, startling the silence. Honey fumbles with the stereo, but the music is not coming from the speakers. For the first time in her life a thing very much like the chokehold of fear closes around her throat. The aria is coming from the Virgin Mary on the dashboard-her voice like a young Jessye Norman singing “Ave Maria.” What look to be real tears trickle from the icon’s painted blue eyes and Honey finds that she, too, is crying.

Nina wakes from what must have been a catnap; there’s still some light coming through the ground-level windows. Her head is muzzy, the inside of the mascot suit a moist cave, no doubt incubating new single-cell life forms by now. The TV is on, The Simpsons in perpetual rerun just ending-Lisa has saved Springfield again and wears yet another medal bestowed by the mayor. As the boy sits static in front of the set, the evening news leads with a missing-child story.