Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Syd forces himself to focus on his guide’s cheerful disembodied voice. “My grandfather Charlie’s not too happy about it but I feel like I’ve put in my time on the reserve. Also, I can bring some new perspective to the biz, right?” Syd drifts off to Porgie confessing his dream: to be a producer/director of broad Hollywood comedies, a First Nations Ivan Reitman (Porgie’s own analogy).

Syd will have to talk him out of it. Look at me, he’ll say, it’s not all power lunches at Orso and hot-buttered premieres. It’s whiny people wanting a pound of flesh every day. It’s the studios in the States, and the broadcasters and government funding agencies here squeezing your nuts. It’s the Chinese co-producers politely insisting you use the crap-ass stock from FortuneFilm-a subsidiary of DoubleHappinessCo-which Syd suspects is made by blind orphans in a Shenzhen factory that also manufactures Barbie accessories brightened with lead-based paints.

It’s this: the most talented filmmaker you’ve ever worked with, a man you consider a friend, maybe your best friend, dropping a few gnomic utterances and making for the bush.

Don’t get Syd wrong. He adores the idea of movies, loves the act of watching them. But movie people? Janus-faced actors and the high-level technicians with their intense Asperger’s-like shoptalk jack up his acid reflux. The unions suck the magic out of moviemaking-teamsters can’t pass gas without consulting their local; IATSE members become apoplectic if someone other than an IATSE Nazi dares touch a light switch. It’s all more Jimmy Hoffa than Norma Rae.

Screenwriters act all docile but would stick a fork between your eyes if they could get away with it. Directors and DOPs with their childlike ids and grandiose sense of entitlement remind Syd of the destructive, drooling baby in that early Pixar short, the one that terrorized the poor tin soldier. Writerdirectors- auteurs- don’t even get him started.

Patrick Kakami had been different- is different. Why is he thinking about him in the past tense? Surely he isn’t dead? What was it Kakami had said in the sweat lodge? Maybe he should’ve listened? Syd can still hear the voice but not the words as he floats along in his sleep.

Naked young men holding poison blow darts line the dark river, waiting for Syd to make a wrong move, while Porgie continues to parse the overlooked mise en scène of Kindergarten Cop long into the porous night.

Syd’s watch has stopped and his BlackBerry’s not working. According to Porgie, who purports to have some facility with reading the sun, they’ve been trailing Kakami for about forty-two hours. Which isn’t possible as the island is only twelve kilometres total in circumference, give or take, and so narrow they should be able to hear the tide moving in and out, the cannibal shrieks of gulls. In a movie this would be the point where one of them spots remnants of their old campfire and loudly exclaims that they’ve been travelling in circles, upon which the two wanderers commence squabbling about what an idiot the other guy is and smack each other around and either make up or storm off in opposite directions only to meet up again later to dispatch a common enemy. But there are, of course, no campfire remains here, no here here, and all the trees look the goddamn same to Syd, so they may or may not have been going in circles. His bowels are so tight; he’s eaten enough salmon jerky to embalm his colon. The loud silence of the rainforest, when Porgie isn’t talking, triggers his tinnitus, so that there’s a one-man klezmer band going on inside his head.

Porgie stops and drops his pack to the ground by an enormous fallen tree bristling with mushrooms growing sideways from the trunk like petrified mouths. The yellowed fungi smirk at Syd, issuing a kind of dare.

“The rest of the journey you’ll have to make on your own,” Porgie says. “There’s the site of an ancient village somewhere west of here, and a warning about not disturbing the souls of the dead. It’s just a story the toothless ones tell. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I grew up with this stuff and it’s hard to shake. Plus I promised Grandfather Charlie.” He flashes a hardcover of Jerry Weintraub’s When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead . “I’ll wait for you here. Catch up on my reading.”

Syd really should just punch Porgie. Clock him. Force him to lead the way at gunpoint. He aims for levity instead. “If I don’t come back, my people will be calling your People.” Funny guy, that Syd. Maybe, just maybe, someone will remember to say that at his memorial service.

“Bear hug.” When Porgie holds out his arms, Syd doesn’t resist. Porgie sends him on his way with a water canteen, more salmon jerky, a flashlight, a foil astronaut blanket, and some advice: “Follow the money.” Those teeth. Must be some sweet dental plan on the reserve.

The rainforest thickens, grows primeval as Syd traverses it solo, the vegetation ever larger and more lurid, as if he’s working his way back to the beginnings of time. The sun can no longer penetrate, even though he knows it’s there above the twisted forest canopy. This is the darkness and dank not of night, but of a daytime basement, with the nearest source of light far away at the top of the stairs. The flashlight is small and doesn’t cut much of a swath; Syd soon gives up on it, shoving it into a pocket. There are shapes and shadows, much like when he was in the sweat lodge, and they eventually coalesce into more solid forms. Snakes, and something that swoops by on wings-bird or bat?

A larger creature takes shape in the near distance, like a daydream nightmare, something resembling a tapir with its saggy snout, but also sporting boar-like tusks and scales. The armoured beast moves purposefully towards him, though Syd can’t exactly call it charging as it’s moving in slow motion, and he thinks, for a moment, that it’s merely a test drive of some proto-4D CGI that will pass harmlessly through him while he continues on his way. The Early Pleistocene creature is soon upon him, its breath carting the reek of the Augean stables. Syd feels for the flashlight. A light in the animal’s eyes might divert it, send it squealing and crashing into the trees. But Syd, as he knows all too well, has simply watched too many movies.

There’s an explosion (Syd’s brain imploding? The life force propelled from his body like so much jetsam? The world itself ending not with a whimper but a bang?) and the tapir-creature lies at his feet, scaly sides heaving. A person in camo pants, a flak vest, and a pith helmet better suited to the long bar at Raffles Hotel circa 1912 jumps upon it and works a knife into its throat.

She-for it is a she, with blond pigtails spronging from under her headgear and a small, tidy frame; the kind of woman who’d ordinarily be deemed girlish, although there’s nothing girlish about the hunter-wipes the bloodied knife across her knee and addresses Syd, who’s curled up on the ground in the requisite fetal position, curled so compactly he feels almost yogic. “You are on a vision quest?”

“No.” Syd sits up, attempting that in-through-the-noseout-through-the-mouth breathing thing to quell the onset of arrhythmia, as his blood pounds in loop-de-loops through his arterial walls.

The tapir-creature looks smaller than it had in life, nothing more than an armadillo with a homelier face. Is this what Syd was terrified of? Just behind the hunter there’s a rifle propped against a dead doe, the animal’s legs bound together and tied to a long, thick branch. Interestingly, congealed blood smells exactly like Syd always imagined it would: a thick, sharp stink, like hot, pissed-upon copper.

“I’m looking for someone. A colleague. A friend.” My antagonist. My albatross. Something in Syd, the incessant rage perhaps, has been displaced, shunted aside, by a kind of poetic sorrow.