Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

“Another white man?” the hunter asks, even though she’s white herself. Disconcertingly Scandinavian-looking, almost as pale as the sequinned gymnast back at the Rain Dog shoot.

“You saw him? Was he all right?”

“He didn’t look robust, if that’s what you’re asking, but men of the spirit seldom are. How that man could talk, though!”

“Did he talk to you about love?”

“Love? Nothing so base and fleeting. Your friend has a larger sense of purpose. To love is too binding, too temporal. To seek is what makes us uniquely human. An animal may love, but can it seek?”

Syd seeks. Does this make him special, too, somehow enlightened? What he is, is enlightened to the unavoidable fact that the doe is rotting. Syd wonders how long the hunter has been heaving it around the endless forest. From her way of talking, he’s guessing about a hundred years.

As she continues her prolix speech, Syd sees her not as she is, but cleaned up, in a white bed, in a room with institutional green walls, her head bound with gauze, her wild eyes no longer roaming their sockets. She drones on about Kakami’s conviction and beliefs, and it takes some force of will for Syd to not drift off as tired as he is and as potently soporific as the strange hunter is turning out to be. The thing to do would be to bury the sorry little armadillo with its anteater snout and be on his way.

“Which way did he go?”

“Directions? What are directions, really? Human constructs! He simply left when the time came to depart.”

“And when was this?”

“A fortnight ago, I believe.” She sits examining her gun, perched on the deer’s liquefying carcass, the insects of the rainforest threading their way through the body, an army bent on fortification, nothing more.

A fortnight? What the hell was that? Four days? A week? The memory of a recent award-winning HBO mini-series, adapted from a forgotten Victorian novel, something involving a highwayman and a woman with royal complications in her blood, works its way towards him, like a man crawling on his belly across the desert.

A fortnight as in two bloody weeks?

The next morning, or the one after that, as the trees thin out before him, there is the shoreline in the distance, the edge of the island, a geographic entity Syd has despaired of seeing again. He considers dropping to his hands and knees Pope-like and kissing the ground.

But it’s too soon to rejoice. Rising against the lighted shore is a monstrous apparition. A glistening black figure, dripping with seaweed, misshapen, with a hunched back and a single tusk protruding from its deformed head. The warrior spirit that stalks the island, meting out justice to those who trespass on the sacred burial grounds. It strides slowly up the beach in Syd’s direction, and his heart, which until now has pretty damn gamely withstood the various shocks and indignities of this island, begins to bleat weakly, like a lost lamb.

The creature stops and appears to be removing its own head, complete with the tusk!

And Syd is thinking not now the picture will never be finished , or I’ll never see Kakami again , but that he will never hear him. Because the kid was right: Kakami is a voice- ebullient, believing, his vision persuasive. It has led Sydney Gross this far, to an ending befitting the hero of a quest. A death in Technicolor, by the sea, by the hand of a mythical creature.

He shades his eyes. A woman stands on the beach, scuba mask in hand, shrugging off the straps of her oxygen tank and lowering the apparatus to the ground. She peels off her wetsuit. Even from this distance Syd can tell she’s gorgeous, and almost instantly his fear is transformed into an incredible horniness, his cock pressing anxiously against his stiff and journey-stained underwear. If he had a choice between her and Kakami he knows exactly who he would choose. If he had a choice.

Divested of her gear, she beckons to someone on a small yacht in the distance and settles herself upon the sand.

Outside the cave where Syd Gross finds Patrick Kakami, there are no heads on stakes, shrunken and blackened by the sun. No preserved lips revealing thin white lines of teeth, smiling in eternal slumber. Not that Syd expected to see anything like that, but still.

The two men sit side by side in the cave, images flickering against the walls from a small fire. “The perfect moving picture,” Kakami says.

“Kind of puts both of us out of a job.”

They sit some more in silence. Finally, Syd asks, “So you were really pissed at me?”

“About what?”

“That scene we cut. For the CBC presale.”

“Oh, that .” Kakami rolls his eyes. “You know I have this pig heart, right?”

“It’s just a bit of tissue.”

“A pig died so I could live, Grossman. What do you think about that?”

“I’m not an observant Jew. Pigs have died so I could live. I eat bacon. I eat bacon with dairy. Prosciutto wrapped around washed-rind cheeses.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’ve been thinking about things. Like, am I now more than one species? Will my child be part pig?”

“What child?”

“Hypothetically, Syd.”

“I think about stuff, too.”

“Not really.”

“Okay, I didn’t used to.”

“Meaning?”

“Now? I see things.”

“Dead people?” Kakami laughs. This acerbic quality is new. Or new- ish .

“You could put it that way.”

Scenes from Indonesian shadow plays, O. Selznick’s burning of Atlanta, the telephone call from Paris, Texas, Walt’s hippos in tutus, Lillian Gish in silent anguish, Harry and Sally in a clinch are reflected on the cave walls. A never-ending story.

“A man can change,” Kakami says.

Was all this supposed to change him? Was that the point? If this were a movie, Syd would emerge from the cave to marry the glowing Coast Salish woman and become an honorary tribal member, maybe even an elder, the Oracle of Sliammon. Patrick would be best man in absentia. That floating fern could be his child. He would catch it as it drifted through the air like dandelion fluff and hold it gently to his chest. Porgie would go on to produce FUBAR: Haida Gwaii , with a cameo by Bill Murray, and bring in the biggest Canadian English-language box office ever.

But Syd likes himself the way he is.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asks Kakami, almost in a whisper.

“Perfectly.”

Far across the Pacific, where the Sliammon and the Haisla and the Mayans and the Mesopotamians and the naysayers of Pythagoras and all the rest of us once thought there was a ledge where things simply surrendered to gravity and tipped off into a void, an endless waterfall carrying with it the detritus of civilizations that ventured too far, there’s a tremor the seismograph on nearby Texada Island registers as 8.7 on the Richter scale.

Hours later, water will rise and darken the horizon, rushing towards the flickering point of light in the cave like a berserk colossus on a surfboard. Before this, though, Syd will have spent hours saying all the right things, trying to persuade Kakami to leave the cave. The options for Syd Gross will dwindle down to three: (a) bodily wrestle Kakami out into the light and drag him back across the island, (b) stay here for as long as forever lasts, watching the end credits roll, or (c) go, quickly, and warn the rest about the things he has seen.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

The Children of Arcadia Court

Bashaar Khan (14, athlete & dancer)

inhabited by Zachriel (an empathetic angel)

Stephan Choo (12, good student)

inhabited by Elyon (a practical & vengeful angel)

Leo Costello Jr. (14, nice dude)