GUNK SHOT
The man with the robotic voice has left a message. Tomorrow’s appointment with the assistant manager of traffic calming measures has been cancelled due to the impending garbage and recycling strike. “We are seconding all senior municipal personnel in this time of crisis,” he droned. Bla-blah, bla-blah, bla-blah. A bureaucrat’s call to arms.
The recovering terrorist walks Houndoom along Victoria, where film trucks and trailers are lined up for blocks and McSpadden Park has been tricked out as a tent city for an episode of Reaper . A woman with what looks like an enormous tongue runs through the dilapidated tennis court, followed by a guy wielding a machete. He leaps the sagging net and there’s a boom! and a feeble spray of black smoke. Houndoom yowls as if she wants to raise the dead. A man in a ball cap yells at a guy with pigtails, something like one more premature blast and -while about two dozen people holding coffee mugs and clipboards stand around doing nothing. The guy who plays Sock is covered in soot, mugging at onlookers in blackface, playing the machete like an air guitar.
She’s reminded of the old “debates” they had back in their Chinatown squat about homemade explosives. Or “kitchen improvised munitions,” as Leonard, a.k.a. Capt. Fudd, used to call them. This gave them a homey vibe, as if they were cooking up something for a potluck. Regan and Gerry treated it like a party game. “For $200. The seminal ingredient in urea nitrate.” “What is semen?” Beep! “Oh sorry, Alex, I meant, ‘What is urine?’” They were in love with the idea of using their own piss to blow things up.
“Metaphorically,” said Damien, “it would be apt.” Their target was the owner of a company that exported chlorine-filled diapers that had caused testicular cancer in third-world baby boys. The diapers were banned in Canada.
Plastic explosives? A Tampax cocktail? (They had experimented with that one-a tampon soaked in lighter fluid stuffed in a soy sauce bottle-and Regan had singed off his shaggy bangs. Leonard suggested the tampon be a used one for added symbolism. “We’re not trying to make a feminist statement,” Damien sneered.)
Eventually Carmen told them all to shut up. She was pouting. She had wanted them to chain themselves to a railway crossing in Poco, blocking a chlorine shipment from Sarnia, but Damien insisted Greenpeace had cornered the market on that tactic and that Carmen just wanted her tits splashed across the front page. It never occurred to the recovering terrorist at the time that this was most likely true.
But homemade plastic explosives today, the possibilities are endless. What did people do before the Internet, she wonders, offering up a prayer of thanks to Google. Add a glass jar of napalm-petrol and generic soap shards-for extra kick, one site advises. “Put it in a mason jar next to the explosive device for maximizing damage to the target.”
The process of extracting potassium chlorate from household bleach is time-consuming and maddeningly multi-step, but her science degree at least taught her a modicum of patience with process, if not with life. Fractional crystallization, it’s called. Science could be so poetic. “Craft project,” she tells her husband when he asks about the smell coming from her workroom. “A surprise for everyone at Christmas-I think they’re getting tired of updated copies of my Grafting Perennials classic.”
She considers calling in her ultimatum from the phone booth at the corner of Hastings and Penticton, one of the few left in the entire city that hasn’t been gutted or entirely disappeared overnight as if it had never existed. But they already have a record of her name, her request, her particulars , as they’re called.
They issued an ultimatum way back then as well. Of course they did. Written on one of the company’s own diapers filled with dog shit and deposited on the front steps of the captain of industry’s Scarborough mansion. It never made the news, though. That should’ve been a warning to them. But. Maybe a maid removed it before anyone else could find it.
The family was supposed to be away that night at an out-oftown function, intelligence had it. Intelligence being Regan and Gerry. That should’ve been a warning as well. The daughter at a friend’s. The “help”-god, she hated, still hates, that term- had the night off.
She had volunteered to do it-no, insisted . This was about children, the future. All the things she believed in. Damien gave her a big, soul-sucking kiss before she headed out. Carmen glared. Leonard saluted. Somewhere, making its way to the press, was their manifesto. She remembers how her legs were wobbling, almost comically, as if she were a drunken Olive Oyl. But she managed to move forward, a spastic walk before she started to run, shaky baby steps towards a better world.
The car will ignite as its wheels crossed the line . That much she knows.
If the driver has a passenger, well, that’s collateral damage. And there is still the possibility the City will choose to see it her way. Hope, the thing with feathers.
Khan from Surrey: “My tomato plants have bites on them. Very little teeth. You think a big bug with a large mouth or a mice with a small mouth?”
The Gardening Dame: “Tell me, Khan, are you the kind of man who might tie his wife to a chair with gardening twine and set her on fire?”
MEAN LOOK
It feels great, this violent disgorging from the earth, the recovering terrorist thinks as she tears up blood grass by the roots with her bare hands. Her husband and son are off somewhere with The Hound. Next door there’s the conscientious whirring click of a push mower. Across the street kids screech in someone’s backyard as they get hosed down-yelling No! when they mean Yes! In the distance a train groaning through the cut, sirens, an ice-cream truck, crows. Summer in the city.
“We all missed you at group on Wednesday.” Dieter squats beside her, his face so close she can see that his glasses are steaming up from the heat.
If this were a movie her next line would be: What the %ˆ*%$ are you doing here!? But she just shakily stands as the chasm separating her two lives buckles, a cave-in of the Grand Canyon, burros with scratchy blankets on their backs scrambling for their lives, tourists wailing before clods of red earth pack mouths, ears, nostrils-sensory deprivation before oblivion.
“This has gone too far,” Dieter says. No, it hasn’t, Lucy thinks, not far enough. She could strike out with both hands, fury swipe, poison jab. “You don’t even know who I am,” she says instead.
“You are a bitch. You know that, right?” His eyes brim behind those distorting lenses. What did children call him at school? Four-eyes? Froggy? Fag? Did anyone recover from the nastiness of schoolyard taunts? Did he ever think about blowing up his tormentors? No, Dieter was a purist. He believed in causes, not himself. He believed in people .
Then there’s Houndoom launching herself at Dieter, Foster straining at the other end of the leash. She introduces Dieter as a member of her book club. “Just checkin’ out the ’hood,” he tells Bruno, his eyes skittering like tropical fish.
Afterwards, Bruno says, “‘Just checkin’ out the ’hood?’”
“He’s usually more articulate,” Lucy tells him. “His German heritage, you know. All those million-dollar words.”
“If he wasn’t so obviously gay, I’d say that looked liked a lover’s quarrel.”
Foster squeezes between them, panic in his voice: “Hey, Mom! I just noticed Houndoom doesn’t have any balls !”
If Hope is the thing with feathers (a sentiment that always puts Lucy in mind of the white feather floating through the treacle Forrest of that Tom Hanks movie), then what is Faith? Surely a thing with nasty thorns. Those who clutch at it remain bloodied but unbowed. Unlike so many in her circle-if you could call it a circle -she doesn’t mock the faithful. Not after seeing what faith could do.
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