Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (6 page)

Alex, perched on the examining table in her crackling blue-paper wrapper, had the urge to ID the doctor before she let her slip her child-size hand inside her. She wondered if the girl had even gotten her period yet. Maybe it was bring-your-kidto-work week? Her own GP, a wiry-haired woman she loved who had seen her through a devastating bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, was away on a Doctors Without Borders mission in Haiti.

Alex stared at the girl doctor's hands to avoid looking directly into her face. “The Hippocratic oath,” the doctor said, pulling up her T-shirt to reveal more of the script spiralling across her taut belly. “In the original Greek.” Tugging her shirt back into place, she asked Alex a stream of straightforward questions, then snapped on a pair of green-and-white latex gloves embossed with the Starbucks logo, the mermaid with her tail split at her crotch. “We'll have to run a few tests to make sure, but if I'm going to hazard, like, an educated guess? I would say premature ovarian failure.”

“What?”

“Early menopause.”

Alex heard herself shrieking. The sound of the big ginger tom next door happening upon a raccoon clan in the back alley. Jamie Lee Curtis in
Halloween
. A B-movie screech in Dolby Digital 5.1. On the wall behind the child doctor was a calendar featuring anthropomorphized bacteria engaged in Winter Olympic–style sporting events with an assortment of antibiotic soaps.

“It happens,” she told Alex matter-of-factly. To who— whom? To
whom
does this happen at thirty-six?!

Walking home from the clinic, clutching a referral for a geriatrics specialist and a pamphlet on the pros and cons of estrogen replacement therapy, Alex felt the elasticity in her skin giving way with each step, her uterus a dried gourd inside her, rattling like a maraca. She spotted a guy who looked like Rufus putting up a poster on a telephone pole outside Dream Cycle. Staple gun in hand, he scootered up Commercial from pole to pole. That goofy hat, the orange hoodie. It
was
Rufus.

The poster read:
Shuffering Shuccotash at the Iberian Club, Wed. April 13th
. It had a picture of Sylvester the Cat as St. Sebastian, pierced from cartoon ears to foot-paws with arrows. Tweety Bird fluttered above his head with a shit-eating grin and a bow in his fist. A creepy cupid. A malevolent angel.

It was the year of the Benevolent Municipal Bylaw (section iii, clause 8d) that allowed the homeless to camp out in construction sites as long as they signed a personal-injuries waiver. Developers didn't like it, but since the 2010 Olympics and the overextension of credit and enormous cost overruns, sites sat empty. A waste, the majority Farsighted People councillors decided. The opposition FRF agreed, but had wanted to charge rent.

Across the street from Alex's house, under the rib-like girders and jutting rebar, a troupe of Kamper Kids slept each night in a tangled mound like buttered noodles, the remaining stained-glass window casting a fractured mosaic over them whenever the street light came on and flickered through it. During the day they moved on, forming their silent, almost biblical tableaux outside the off-sales, loonie stores, and coffee bars all along Commercial Drive. At dusk they drifted back, lit a small fire, and sat companionably around it passing containers of takeout back and forth until the flames extinguished themselves. And then they slept again.

From: <
[email protected]
>

To: <
[email protected]
>

Sent: February 10, 2008

Subject: way2go!!

Congratulations on your award!! That's
Mammut
, baby.

You're a green machine, Roof.

Same-same here. Hot, heartbreaking—jaded professionals, desperate people. My fingers feel like molten lead just typing about it. Latest in tomorrow's paper. Maybe already online. Sudan still denying it's backing the rampaging Islamic rebels.

Don't worry so much, the Human Rights Watch boys are good to me and share their tp & tipples.

forever & ever, Lex

Why couldn't anyone else smell the damn carpet?
Alex sat at the front of the classroom pinching the bridge of her nose and ignoring her students. For the past two weeks she'd been letting them do whatever they wanted, waiting to see who would crack first, her or them. There were only nine days left until the end of spring term.

She was playing hangman on the whiteboard with Xmas Singh while the rest of them deployed blue rinse bio bombs and plasma grenades against digital enemies or thumbed away at their PDAs. All jacked into some device, busy and bored. The only truly weird thing about the situation was that most of them still showed up at all, as if attending class was a condition of some kind of day parole. Or maybe they thought this was all there was, maybe they were satisfied that Alex had sunk to their level of expectation. There was no longer any doubt in anyone's mind; she was simply a bad teacher, as opposed to a badass teacher, the kind who could inspire a group of inner-city toughs to excel at calculus or develop a healthy dollop of self-respect. Sidney Poitier's Sir (“I am sick of your foul language, your crude behaviour, and your sluttish manner”—Alex could just imagine the blank stares if she said something like that), Morgan Freeman's “Crazy Joe” Clark, Edward James Olmos's Mr. Escalante. Maybe she
was
too white.

Corinna D. hadn't shown up for almost three weeks. The one call Alex had made to her home had been answered by a tired-sounding woman who said Corinna was out visiting her cousins. The college's privacy rules prevented Alex from mentioning that Corinna had been a no-show for an awfully long time.

Xmas Singh asked: Is there an X?

Alex added a second leg to the stick man dangling from the noose.

Xmas Singh clutched theatrically at his throat and made gurgling noises.

Alex said: Best of three?

Rufus asked: Too settled? Too happy?

“Shuffering Shuccotash?” Alex said, peering at Rufus over the top of her new drugstore reading glasses. They were lying in bed, Rufus shuffling through his latest batch of Pokémon trading cards and Alex squinting at a pamphlet on osteoarthritis.

“My band.”

“
Your
band?”

“Our first gig is on the thirteenth.”

“But you don't even play an instrument. You're tone-deaf.”

“I'm the gear guy.”

Her triceps had sagged like saddlebags in the mirror after her bath, her hands ached, her ovaries were shutting down, and this morning she had plucked forty-three more grey hairs from her head before she stopped counting and swept the offending nest into the toilet. When she flushed, the hairs had swirled into a small, furious animal before disappearing with a gurgle. Alex started to cry.

“You're supposed to be the guy making sharkskin so we can all live in the water when the air gets too hot.” Alex smacked at Rufus, hard and fast with both hands, like an inspired jazz drummer. “You're supposed to be focusing on saving the planet.”

He grabbed her wrists and pulled her towards him, nuzzling her neck. His chest was smoother than when she'd met him, the curve of his penis like a scimitar. He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe.

“I can't do this anymore,” Alex muttered. “It's starting to feel like incest.”

But she closed her eyes and rose to try to meet him halfway.

It was the year the enterprising homeless constructed ad hoc villages of tidy huts from purloined election signs. The colourful little houses lined the cut at both ends of the Terminal Street Bridge. The design world took notice, with the San Francisco– based architectural magazine
Dwell
running a photo essay with text by Toronto's latest public intellectual. “These intelligent spaces represent design that fully integrates the residents' ideals and values with their needs. Like the yurt and the Quonset hut, the ‘signage-home' or ‘Sigho' will no doubt evolve well beyond its origins, co-opted by those with a discerning eye for the frugality and transportality of the design.” He supplied the requisite Walter Benjamin quote from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and ended with some McLuhanesque wordplay.

Engineered so beautifully they could only have been the work of a down-on-his-luck architect or an idiot savant, the small homes were like snowflakes—no two alike, and yet of a whole. The
Vancouver Sun
ran a contest to find the designer (first prize: a weekend at Sooke House B&B), which led to bewildered bottle ladies and Dumpster divers being ambushed by retired couples waving notebooks and bombarding them with questions about Walter Gropius and deconstructivism and offering a home-cooked meal in exchange for blueprints.

A candidate for mayor declared that she would live for a week in a hut made entirely of her own election signs down among “the people.” A newscast ran some unfortunate footage of her crawling out the opening on all fours, tight pigtails pulling her eyes into the coveted pan-Asian look, her breasts visible through her gaping neckline, sagging like sodden pantyhose.

The anchor and weatherman smiled at each other.
Damn fine serve, though
, they reminisced as the sportscaster joined them.

Alex dreamt about a green garbage bag on her front steps. “Happy Birthday, Toots,” Rufus says in the dream. And she
is
a Toots, all dolled up in short shorts, pointy cone-shaped black bra, hair pincurled, her lips thick with cherry-scented gloss. She's selling cartons of cigarettes with pictures of missing children on them, big-eyed, black-velvet, paint-by-numbers kids. The bag evidently contains her gift. Rufus grabs her arm as if he can't wait to show her.

Inside the garbage bag Corinna D. stretches languorously and yawns. There are no teeth in her cavernous mouth. Her eyes gleam.
You do not wanna know
, she says. Alex looks from Rufus to Corinna and then jabs her own thumbs right into her eyes. It doesn't hurt a bit.

Onstage, a DJ dressed like a tennis player mixed Harry Belafonte's “Day-O” with something from Trooper. It was early, and the crowd appeared sparse, spread around the barn-like space at tables that looked as if they belonged in a bingo hall. Posters of flamenco dancers, bullfighters, and beaches lined the wood-panelled walls. Beside the bar, which featured Super Bock on tap, Portuguese bean soup, and calamari, there was a framed photograph of a young man with his fist raised, inscribed, “
Camarada! Trabaja y Lucha por la Revolución!
” Rufus handed Alex a foaming pint and steered her towards a small group near the stage. A wiry old man off to the side shadowboxed with what looked in the dim light like a blackened and enormous ham hanging from the ceiling.

The guys in the band were awfully sweet. They clustered around as Rufus introduced her, telling Alex how awesome it was that she had decided to come. She wondered what Rufus had told them about her—that she had terminal cancer or was agoraphobic? The band was Gideon, Attila, and Suki, who was not a guy, but neither was she a threat. She was bald and so skeletal Alex wondered where she'd left her intravenous drip, and wore a Canada Post uniform, the pant cuffs curling under the heels of her shoes, her yellowed, bulging eyes darting about like a cartoon snail's.

They were joined by a kid with a faux-hawk and wearing an oversized hoodie that made his legs look so short he appeared dwarf-like. He slapped Rufus on the shoulder. “Cool, Roof, you brought your mom!”

Alex was beyond her hot flashes by now and their accompanying hormonal riptides or she would have leapt on him like a pit bull and clamped her jaws onto one of his goofy ears. But she appeared to be the only one who had heard. The others were animatedly debating whether to begin or encore with “Tweety's Lament” and whether it would be too clichéd for Attila to do a drum solo. Alex air-kissed in the kid's direction and then ran the tip of her tongue around her lips. The dwarf-boy quickly fled, her past-its-best-before-date sexuality apparently as effective as a bio bomb.

A candidate for mayor shuffled and bobbed between the now crammed tables, dispensing fist bumps as if they were lollipops. “Dissin' the safe injection site—thas wack!” he yelped, while his handlers followed sheepishly at a distance. He was wearing a do-rag, Alex noted, absent-mindedly patting at her thinning scalp. That he was third-generation Chinese Canadian and had gone to school at St. George's on the west side and then Trinity College, U of T, before coming back to Vancouver to start a Pacific Rim polling firm didn't seem strokes against him in this age of reinvention. A camera crew from MuchMusic was following him around, so now this had become an event. There was some giddy talk between Gideon and Rufus about getting on
disBand
and scouts from EMI, and finally Shuffering Shuccotash took the stage to a bunch of raucous
whoot whoots
and whistles.

A girl with an adorable pixie cut atop an Audrey Hepburn neck eyed Rufus as he jumped onstage at the last minute to retape a cable and adjust Gideon's mike—his shoulder blades jutting like nascent wings through his thin T-shirt, his small butt tight in faded jeans. Alex felt a wave of vertigo and had to lean up against the wall. Dangling beside her, the large ham, which she had taken to be synthetic, glistened and gave off whiffs of smoke and fat. The odour of something not so long ago alive, now decidedly dead.

With Gideon on banjo, Attila at the drum kit, and Suki pummelling away at an accordion, they made a noise both discordant and melodic. They were off-kilter but almost great, Alex thought, and judging by the crowd's response, this wasn't just her opinion. And Rufus, was he an almost-great roadie?
Could
you be an almost-great roadie? Dozens surged onto the dance floor, moving in a way that couldn't really be called dancing but was something nonetheless.

In the middle of the melee, there was Xmas Singh shaking it, his bulk surprisingly graceful, like the milky blobs undulating inside a lava lamp, his trademark good-natured smile elevated to something almost beatific. Alex sidled over to him. He didn't look surprised to see her. “Thanks for the B!” He grinned, executing what could be called a pirouette. “I love these guys! They're my gods!”