Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

There’s a kind of silence for a moment, the scratching at soaked pits, the slurping of coffee, looks exchanged. Of all of them, Lucy has the strongest urges, has to work the hardest to quell that insatiable need to act or threaten to act in order to have her demands met, to inflict order. Maybe they were all just dissatisfied children who had never grown up. Angelina puts down her cup and applauds Lucy’s confession, and the rest join in, but tepidly. The point is to offer support, not pass judgment, but Lucy can see that she’s making them tired. Especially Dieter, who so wants to move on, to forget all this, get married to a nice man, be normal , as it’s called. He wants what he thinks she has.

“Um, so power to the people, right on.” Lucy pumps her fist in the air, trying to lighten the mood, fettered as it is by heat and stench and her own neediness. “Free Leonard Pelletier!”

“Excuse me, but that’s so not funny,” says Hamish-Two-Fins, the born-again native. After discovering six years ago that his great-great grandmother had been one-eighth Kitlope, of the Killer Whale clan, it’s been one warrior cry after another, and a short hop from there to wannabe terrorist.

Does she know any of these people at all? These members of her “book club,” as she’s described her Wednesday-night outings to Bruno. Does knowing their deepest desires mean anything, does having glimpsed the rusty drip pan under their hearts entitle her to their trust? Do they really have anything in common at all? There’s an elderly woman who calls herself The Wife. There’s Sterling, the tree-spiker. Tim, whose well-connected daddy somehow got him back from Brazil before he even ran short of changes of pressed boxers. Molly, who’d waged a campaign of terror against her West End neighbourhood’s johns. Wing-Soo, whose story was an epic saga involving container ships, human snakes, payola, nasty landlords, and lost children. And Hamish, who’s been banned from Kitamaat Village by the hereditary chief, presumably, Lucy thinks, for being annoying. Angelina is the only one among them who’d done time. She shrugged it off whenever they asked. “It was the sixties. Everyone did something.”

Then there is Dieter, dear Dieter. A charter member of ACT UP, he’d taken part in a direct-action campaign in which a syringe purportedly tainted with the AIDS virus was planted tip up in the seat of a movie theatre. It was one of a chain owned by the family of the wife of the Canadian CEO of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoBioProgress. (Besides, Dieter told her he’d reasoned, they were showing Gigli with Ben Affleck, and anyone who would go to see that…) But the screening that day had been the sneak preview of a children’s movie. Dieter panicked and called the cops and swore off direct action for life. Among his former inner circle he’s now a pariah, or The Turned Wurm, as he calls himself when he’s feeling cheerful.

“What, no exegesis on Tim’s latest outfit?” Lucy asks as they walk towards Waterfront station after group, Dieter uncharacteristically quiet. “I thought it was cute in a golf-daddy kind of way. No sweatshop labour involved. How do I know this? Because he confides in me.”

“Do you have any idea how many die-ins I’ve been in with people who are now actually dead?” Dieter says. “I’m sick of going to funerals and visiting people in prison. People I love.”

“If you’re proposing to me, you’ll have to go down on one knee.”

“You want to know what I think?” Under the flashing sign of a donair shop Dieter’s face blinks in and out of view. “I think you’re looking for an excuse to blow something up. I think you want to be caught.” The pressed meat on its rod turns slowly in the window, glistening, slick with a fatty sheen.

“Maybe I need a new sponsor,” Lucy says.

“Maybe. I don’t think I’m helping your spiritual growth.”

Lucy can’t help cracking a smile, but it feels crumbly, as if her face is a plaster mask.

“Seriously, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop you.”

Up north, someone is sabotaging the natural-gas pipeline. The bomber sends almost illegible handwritten notes to the company, calling them terrorists. Lucy envies him his sense of mission. And his patience. He’s given them five years to dismantle the $1.8-billion project, three months to commit. Who has five years? Who has three months? Who has the guts to be the pot calling the kettle black , in shoddy penmanship to boot?

DRILL PECK

The recovering terrorist deadheads bee balm in her front garden, the red-tufted joker heads strewn at her feet like carnage from the suicide bombing of a medieval fairground. Her son spins up and down the sidewalk on his unicycle trying to juggle three oranges. His dad’s idea and, of course, he loves it. Carfool. Now he’s talking about learning to juggle fire.

A car streaks by, its boom-box bass competing with the squeal of tires as it tears onto Victoria and she can’t help herself, she runs after it, waving her secateurs at the dissipating exhaust. “I’ll clip your skinny little balls next time!” The boy leaps from his unicycle and rolls around on the grass, screaming, “Balls! Balls!” Houndoom commences her unearthly yowling. Her husband opens the front door, still in his SpongeBob boxers. “Hey!”

“Mom said ‘balls’!” Her son can hardly speak, he’s laughing so hard. “That’s like nuts, right? Like your dick !” His mother, always the comedian. But the recovering terrorist is sitting on the sidewalk crying, alligator tears , as they’re called, big fat drops that literally splat when they hit the pavement. I’m crying cats ’n’ dogs, she thinks, and would laugh about the absurdity of it if she weren’t so furious.

Then her husband is there rubbing her back, saying something soothing. She forces herself to bring his voice into focus and it’s like surfing deep, dark water into sun-warmed light. “Foster’s careful, he’s a good kid, he knows better than to go on the road.” Did she marry this man because of this delightful lack of ability to fret about the future or chew on the bones of the past? It’s as if he’s been genetically altered, the worry seed AWOL from his twist of DNA. It’s all hakuna matata with him, her own Bobby McFerrin and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful. This man who knows nothing of her dark heart, of the mercury semi-dormant in her veins, who deems what he thinks of as her “neurosis” charming at the best of times, and simply irritating at high tide.

Would her husband be willing to die for their son? Why didn’t they talk about such things?

The boy, on the other hand, the boy is complicated. Complicates things. Raichu, evolved from Pichu and Pikachu, can store up to 100,000 electric volts in its cheeks and release them through its tail. Information she can use.

She’s clipped the webbing between her left thumb and index finger with the secateurs. The blood is pooling , as it’s called, but only she can see this. Her husband is gearing up for a joke, she can tell by how absent-minded his back strokes are getting. Her son dances around in front of them, an orange pressed to either side of his groin. “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s Super Vitamin C Balls!”

It’s always the mother’s fault. As they say.

Kurt from Vancouver: “I have this friend who seems determined to wreck this beautiful garden she’s carefully built up over the years. I’m not the only one concerned. This self-destructive impulse threatens everything she holds dear.”

The Gardening Dame: “And is there a word for this in the German, Kurt ?”

Kurt from Vancouver: “Lucy, if you’d just-”

The Gardening Dame: “My advice, sir, is MYOB. Good fences make good neighbours, as they say. Next caller?”