Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Dodge has brought his girlfriend with him. I’m not convinced this was a good idea. Sam is a slippery one, very all-Amerikan in her locution, yes ma’am, absolutely ma’am , and with a look on her face some may describe as beatific, but that strikes me as bland. Her energy field is like a clear-cut, with no remaining signs of life, not even a termite.

She sits in a patch of sun filtered through fern and cedar, telling Felix a story, the light glinting off her wedding finger, Dodge hovering around them like some kind of manservant. She wears what is called a “purity ring” and has persuaded Dodge to wear one as well. To put it bluntly, the rings are a symbol of sexual abstinence, although Sam didn’t put it that way. She just held it up in front of my face and said, “True love waits.” Then she patiently told me, as if I were a small child, that it was a reminder of the commitment she had made to God to remain pure until marriage. I should be relieved, but somehow I find this offensive. Isn’t Dodge good enough for her? Is this what constitutes sex education in Amerika today?

So much hard work over the years, so many appearances made while hopped up on antihistamines or fighting rogue waves of menstrual cramps, scalp itchy with excess sebum, wondering when I last had the opportunity to take a shower. Did I ever let on that I was suffering? You succeed through terrorizing the negative impulse ( My Emotional Fatwa , Golden Agouti Press, 2009, p. 64). This is, I contend, because you’re never going to stop the rain by whinging. 2

I clap my hands and announce that it’s time for our daily Pronouncements. Time to break up this little idyll.

The word pure really irks me. “Gets my tits in a knot, Alice,” as my friend Ingrid would say.

We sit cross-legged in a semicircle. A bird demonically shrills somewhere in the forest canopy. “I am striving to overcome the urge to snog Sam until my lips fall off,” pronounces Dodge. 3 The Kevster makes a rude noise, and Sam covers her face with her purity-ring hand.

“That is so not a serious Pronouncement,” says Cinders. She is the follower who has taken my teachings most to heart. The Kevster likes to refer to her as Rulebook.

“I am striving to stop eating so many high-fructose, high-glucose snack foods,” says Cinders, who struggles with body image. During Pronouncements we are meant to pledge to overcome something standing in the way of our future happiness.

“I am striving to overcome doubt,” says Sam, somewhat cryptically in my opinion, but I don’t ask, “Doubt about what?” You could say that I am striving to be a more tolerant person.

Sam is older than Dodge by about six years. Technically, at nineteen, he is still a teenager, although legally speaking she cannot be accused of robbing the cradle. Still, there is a way I have found her looking at me at times, woman-to-woman you could call it, that is unsettling.

“I am striving to control my bladder at night so I can have a sleepover at Dexter’s place when we get home,” says Felix. I grant him an encouraging wink. Felix is reassuringly goal-oriented. That we may not be going home anytime soon would not be useful information to impart to him at this point.

The Kevster remains silent. Pudding as well, but that goes without saying.

The worst accusation from the scientists, on a personal level, was that we were “confusing bioenergetic fields with the ether.”

If our energy fields don’t exist-what is this? This luminous face turned skyward, pale irises, the flecks in them wildly kaleidoscopic, her skin, that way of looking. Pudding has such an intense aura. There are times I have witnessed static crackling blue from her scalp, her fine hair rising and quavering like the tentacles of a sea anemone. It is as if she is communing with the unseen particles in the air around us, decoding them into her private language somewhere deep in her hermit kingdom, in her Arkadia.

I have far from given up on what quantum mind theory may be able to do for Pudding. In the TRIUMF cyclotron, the gigantic particle accelerator at the university, various matters and antimatters collide to release pure energy in the form of gamma rays. The subatomic particles travel in the accelerator in a spiral, and a spiral is the primary geometric form in which thought waves travel. If we could get within shouting distance of these gamma rays and direct them to interact with Pudding’s already overactive energy field, perhaps they could unlock her from inside her private realm. 4 The radiation issue remains unresolved. But it is a risk I’m willing to take.

Our location in this particular arboreal area, then, in the vicinity of the university’s research facility, is not entirely without foresight. Somewhere farther from the city would have been safer, but if you’re convinced the tortoise will lose to the hare, then what is the point of the race? 5 ( Five Fables for the Future , Golden Agouti Press, 2011, p. 109.)

Infiltrating the TRIUMF cyclotron has become my number one priority. For far too long has Pudding remained on the periphery-a cipher, a “changeling,” as people like her were called in the past. It is my duty to bring Pudding fully into the fold. I have that can-do feeling surging through me, despite the furtive whisperings between Dodge and his virgin concubine and The Kevster’s surly and penetrating silence.

It is time to admit what we have become. A rebel unit. No longer on the run, but proactive. To think that I almost succumbed to despair when I first perceived that my life was in danger. My followers give me strength even in their own moments of weakness. My platoon. I like the sound of that. Ten-hut!

I must find a way to polish my boots.

Tony Robbins was the first of us to disappear. Initially, a publicity stunt was suspected, but for a man of his voracious public appetite to voluntarily remain out of the limelight for so long seemed unfathomable. His financial holdings and current and former wives and associates were investigated, his accounts frozen. It has been eight months now and a body has yet to be recovered. A few months after his disappearance, Zachariah Madoff and Bernie “Hola!” Rodriguez were found dead within days of each other. The cause of death in both cases was eventually attributed to natural causes. (Who but scientists, international scientists, I ask, could cover their tracks like that, mimicking a coronary embolus and a subarachnoid hemorrhage so effectively as to dupe two coroners at the top of their game?) Werner Washington died more publicly, shot by a sniper at a shareholders’ meeting in the Houston Astrodome. (The laughable lone-gunman theory has been widely debunked but continues to be the FBI’s official line.)

Deepak now travels Kevlar-coated, with two armed guards, in an electric vehicle reminiscent of the Popemobile. He remains mum about whether he’s received death threats, but the security at his residences and events rivals that of the phalanx of sharpshooters and the bulletproof glass dome at Amerikan President Obama’s second inauguration. 6

I was closer to Tony than most people would care to acknowledge. 7 I have had night visions in which his baseball-glove-sized hands are cradling my head and his teeth are lighting a path through the darkness. In truth, darkness is something I have never feared. I have the eyes of a cat. I have little use for Tony’s glowing teeth, but could use some of his advice right about now. I simply try not to even think about his hands.

We have managed to move closer to the TRIUMF facility, undetected but for the occasional raccoon and the unseen birds that twitter and caw their way across the forest canopy. After studying the diagrams of the site I obtained from the Internet, it has become obvious to me that breaching the inner sanctum will be trickier than I thought: the cyclotron is situated three storeys beneath the ground and is shielded by triplicate layers of 100-tonne concrete blocks, each 4.5 metres thick.