Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

How bad could it be, he’d thought, it’s just a sauna, right? A friend of his who’d taken part in one during an Outward Bound course said it helped him relieve his aggression. “I didn’t feel like killing anyone for about a month,” he told Syd.

The only access to the island was by private boat after taking the ferry from the mainland to the Sunshine Coast and driving north, taking yet another ferry, and driving some more. Syd had been told to bring light, comfortable clothing, a gift for the elders (cloth, tobacco), and “no big-city attitude.” This was conveyed to him by a spokesman for the Sliammon People, a guy called Porgie, the same man who arrived to pick up Syd and his assistant at the dock on the reserve. (“Have your people call my People,” Porgie said afterwards, laughing at his own joke and flashing his teeth.)

Kakami was already on the island, ebullient as usual despite his media rep for a studied cool. He waved around something that looked like a gargantuan cigar. “Grossman!” He jogged towards Syd, his location manager, Drew, drifting along behind him. Drew was a thin, bald Eurasian with hypothyroid Bette Davis eyes who disturbed Syd because he couldn’t tell if this Drew person was male or female and was embarrassed to ask anyone, even Patrick.

“These beautiful people, Syd, they’ve already put us to work. Smell this!” Kakami thrust the oversized cigar thing under Syd’s nose. “I made it myself.”

He stood there grinning, like a little kid awaiting praise for a kindergarten project.

“It’s a smudge stick,” Drew told him. “You light it et voila.”

“I know what it is,” said Syd, who had no idea. Was he supposed to smoke it or use it to ream out Kakami for dragging him out to this repository of excessive greenery and spiritual wankery. You want to make a movie about nuns, what’s wrong with Montreal or Boston?

He slapped his hands together to change the subject. “So, let’s get this fucking show on the road.”

His assistant, Helene, the latest in a series of dun-coloured and quietly efficient young women Syd had hired because he found them reassuring, like a school secretary or a crossing guard, pulled him aside. “There’s something you need to know about the site of the sweat lodge. These people? They consider it sacred?”

“You’re asking me or telling me?”

“I’m just saying, maybe, you know, cut down on the language and whatnot?”

Porgie led a small group over to Syd. “Our elder, Charlie Louie,” he said, introducing an old man in a blue plaid shirt and saggy jeans, who had the purest white hair Syd had ever seen. The elder held out his hands, palms up. Syd remembered then that he’d forgotten the gift, what was it? Candles? Canned goods? Helene unwound the scarf from around her neck and dangled it in front of him. Hermès-her family must have money. Note to self , Syd thought with a flush of bonhomie towards Helene, possible investors . He draped the scarf across the elder’s palms. “We come in peace,” Syd said, and beside him he could feel Helene wincing. The old man smiled and tied the scarf around his head babushka-style, eliciting a round of congenial laughter. There was something about rituals in general that gave Syd the heebie-jeebies, and right now he was feeling them down to his pinky toes.

Porgie introduced the others: a woman with sad eyes whom Syd thought would be attractive enough if she did something with her hair and ditched the shapeless button blanket; a young, broad-shouldered man, hair long and glossy, in a tight T-shirt that read There Is No Planet B ; another old man, though not as old as Charlie Louie, who was frighteningly obese. Porgie, with his big smile and his annoying habit of lightly touching others on the arm with feigned intimacy, had something of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins about him. Even his teeth looked optimistic, preternaturally white and large. Southern California teeth. Syd had seen enough sets of these to know.

“Nice offering,” Kakami said.

“What did you bring?”

“A slide box of Cohíba Esplendidos.” Kakami pronounced this in commanding Spanish, practically horking on the h . When had he had time to teach himself that?

As Porgie explained the sweat lodge-how it was made with bent willow branches draped with animal hides; the sacred rock pile outside heated by the elder and then carried inside and placed in a hole dug in the centre-Syd felt as if he were back in grade five Social Studies class. The thing actually looked like a grade five Socials project, a dome shape messily covered with skins and army blankets. Kakami, across from him, looked fascinated, though.

“You will experience a purification,” Charlie Louie told them. “Some of you maybe even what we call a rebirth- through earth, fire, water, and air. You will get very hot. Just breathe evenly, drink lots of water, pay attention to the elements. If you get too hot, ‘Don’t Panic,’ to quote Douglas Adams. Please feel free to leave.” With that, he made his way into the lodge, bending slightly to get through the opening as Porgie held up the flap.

Syd signalled for Helene to go in ahead of him, to case the joint as it were. He was feeling queasy with anxiety. Helene just stood where she was, clutching her day planner to her chest.

“I can’t go in. I’m on my moon,” she told him.

“You’re on what?”

“Her cycle,” Kakami said.

“What?”

“She’s on the rag,” Drew said loudly.

Syd did not want to be listening to this. “How the hell would they know that?”

“They emailed a form and I figured full disclosure was in the spirit of the thing,” Helene said. “Don’t worry, I filled out yours, too,” she added, although this was exactly the kind of thing Syd worried about.

He practically had to crawl into the sweat lodge on his hands and knees, moving from a filtered daylight to deep shade. When the opening flap was lowered, there descended a darkness so intense Syd felt as if he’d dropped ten floors in an elevator. As Charlie Louie muttered what sounded like an incantation or a nursery rhyme, water hit the rocks with a shocking hiss, and the dry, musty, animal-smelling heat became choking wet and tarry.

More steam, and strong smells-body odours and something else, something fecund rising from the earth. Syd was riding a boat along a tributary of the Congo, naked young men poised on the banks with poison arrows. A place Syd had never been, possibly the last place on earth he’d want to go. He even heard the cry of a shrike. He’d had his share of psychotropic experiences, courtesy of his cousin Diggory who’d been the go-to guy in their high-school yeshiva program and was now involved in helpful cosmetic pharmacology, but Syd had never been this inside and outside of himself at the same time.

It felt as if hours had passed, but by his glowing watch dial Syd could see it had been less than fifteen minutes. The sweat in his ear canals trickled, a sensation like blood pooling. Within the scrim of darkness he began to make out forms around him in the lodge, hazy at first and then cohering into solid shapes. He would wonder afterwards if he had been hallucinating, but at the time it all looked so very real. Much later in his life, long after it became clear to him that the things he had witnessed on the island were a kind of twisted gift, he would never completely shake the feeling that somehow the spirits had mistaken him for someone else. Someone more worthy.

He saw a startlingly violet bruise on Drew’s previously flawless neck and a pallor that betrayed low white blood cell counts, her (or his?) already bulging eyes protruded, yellowed in their sockets. Porgie, in a smart suit, was busy thumbing on a BlackBerry, somewhere in bright sunshine. The fat elder’s pant leg was pinned up at the left knee, empty. The young muscular guy sat slumped in a jail cell, glossy hair shaved to his scalp, a scar running from lip to right eye, a railroad of track marks on his inner arms. The almost beautiful sad-eyed woman gave off a glow, she was so hugely pregnant.