Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

The steaks and those very large, scary baked potatoes have somehow made their way onto the table and she finds herself sitting in front of a plate with a knife and fork in her hands and the photographer is still talking, something about how if he hadn’t become a photographer he would’ve been a short-order cook, an excellent short-order cook, because that’s how much he likes a well-greased grill (??!!), and how much simpler his life would’ve been, and Didi wonders why he’s telling her these things, wonders if he maybe has her confused with somebody else, with this Deirdre whose name he keeps snapping his jaws down on as if they’re a leghold trap, because, well, explosions, if you like that kind of thing, could be considered a turn-on, but a well-greased grill can’t be construed as anything other than a well-greased grill.

In between all his words, if she squints, she can see that he’s trying to tell her something and that it has nothing to do with innuendo. She knows she should be interested in these things he’s talking about, that somehow these things matter, but she isn’t. In fact, they make her feel itchy.

What she really, really wants to ask, once and for all, is What are we doing here? She tries to will this simple question into being, to thrust it into the air between them like a magician conjuring a dove from the old-fashioned beige clutch purse of the mousy divorcee in the front row, the bird’s small breast throbbing against the magician’s thumb, the woman feeling off-balance but delighted ( He picked me! ), but when the words refuse to materialize, Didi tugs her blouse off over her head and lets it float to the floor.

The place had looked spotless, but now she sees dust scudding in drifts over the dulled parquet like clouds as the blouse wafts down in slow motion. In these elongated seconds, between her shirt coming off and him looking up from his plate and noticing, Didi has time to think she should be happy because here she is just one degree of separation from Annie Leibovitz and, in effect, only two degrees of separation from John and Yoko, David Byrne, Chris Rock, Nicole, Brad, Ben, Gwyneth, Kate-from everybody . This should make her feel elated, but instead she’s filled with this prickly, fur-bearing sadness. She is, after all, only one degree of separation from that ugly dog at the edge of that bridge that no longer exists, in a country that no longer exists-so close that she could be that ugly dog, and in fact, if you looked closely enough, she is that ugly dog, and she needs to know if that dog ever jumped into the river to try to get to the other side or if he’s still there shivering and whimpering for his owners, for the only people who loved him no matter what and who may or may not exist anymore anywhere on earth.

1Named Marnie, Teka, and Charlotte, names she’s tried to forget for nine years now but which cling to her brainpan like the words Deirdre fleas gouged into the lip of a desk with the tip of a red Bic.

Someone is killing the great motivational speakers of Amerika and I am afraid I may be next. In an effort not to alarm my followers, I have camouflaged my disappearance as a wilderness retreat. The surroundings are more rustic than we are accustomed to and there have been grumblings about the lack of facilities. I tell them their ancestors didn’t have backpacks containing rolls of three-ply toilet paper and antibacterial wipes; they had to make do with leaves and corn husks. In more recent times, it’s possible they resorted to sections of newspapers that left their backsides inked with the TSE Composite Index or Blondie . Soon everyone is enthusiastically gathering foliage, although Dodge, twiddling his small goatee, complains about not having a copy of the latest Vancouver Sun editorial page. Dodge, with his almost indiscernible sense of humour, has for a long time now caused me equal measures of joy and grief.

As I watch my crew milling about with purpose-collecting firewood, securing tarps, taking inventory of the granola bars and shrink-wrapped Bavarian rye breads, the nut butters and fruit leathers, giving each other a hand-I can see it has been worth it. Is this not all I ever wanted? Cinders unfolds a foil astronaut blanket and wraps it around my shoulders. Felix has torn up a patch of moss he now cradles in his arms like a kitten. He advises me to stroke it with a pinky finger while keeping my eyes screwed shut tight. Gratitude wells in my breasts for all I have wrought. If this isn’t synergy, what is?

Campfire songs are suggested, and I don’t see why not. We are too isolated for anyone to hear us. And it is very late. The moon is a high, hard rind through sweating cedars. Hives prickle my neck from all the fungi around. The city is far away, only the occasional magnesium flare through hemlock and Douglas fir. Something in our small fire cracks like a pistol shot. I’m a bow-legged chicken, I’m a knock-kneed hen , Felix sings, his lisp almost indistinct, and the rest join in, even The Kevster, who during the past few weeks has taken to lurking on the perimeters with a sneer perma-pressed onto his face. Never bin so happy since I don’t know when . Except for Pudding, who stares at the sky, as always, as if waiting for a signal.

Pudding is the only one I’ve never been able to get through to.

My troubles began almost a year ago, with the publication of an obscure scientific document, a paper rife with antiquated language and reactionary ideas (the lingua franca of fear ). Science is on thin ground these days and particle physicists were up in arms: “[We’re] damned if we’re going to stand by and let a handful of rogue advocates of quantum quackery overrun quantum mechanics, a field of research that could lead, finally, to a Theory of Everything” (Brisbane Convention Report, 2011, p. iv).

Snake oil was mentioned. The phrase half-baked was deployed. String theory was draped around the text like rolls of crepe paper livening up a fiftieth-anniversary party.

You would have been hard pressed to even find a mention of the report online until a Danish newspaper ran an inflammatory series of editorial cartoons on the “debate.” Deepak Chopra shoving a Dr. Seussian Schrödinger’s cat into a microwave oven. Anthony Robbins® putting it “doggie style” to physicist Niels Bohr, who knelt on a bed of burning coals. Uri Geller dining on Einstein’s entrails à la The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover using a large bent spoon. Esoteric “European” humour at its worst.

But the Internet being what it is, the gist of the argument was soon translated into Amerikan. It was at that point that things took a turn for the worse.

Our belief in human energy fields, in mind-over-matter responses to our increasing health problems, threatened not only the physicists but those in the field of conventional medicine. Powerful alliances were formed. 1 They unfortunately had, have , an erroneous understanding of bioenergetics: “The belief that human consciousness controls reality,” the scientists scoffed. Control s is a misnomer. Manipulates is closer; defines would be more accurate.

Was it altogether too simple-minded of me to ask: Why can’t we just get along? (“What the Heck?” promotional brochure, March 2012.) Apparently so. Because it was soon afterwards that the death threats began.