Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Rachmiel admitted praying for intervention from St. Jude. But did Rachmiel ask for a miracle? We think not.)

In mid-June, Bashaar was at the Shoppers Drug Mart buying condoms when he spotted Jessica pulling a pregnancy kit from a shelf. Bash slid up behind her and whispered, “You weren’t going to tell us, were you?” She was so startled she dropped the Very-Berry Slurpee she was carrying in her other hand, splashing them both with what looked like clotted blood.

After everything that had happened, at last a true crisis was upon us, one that we could not simply turn the other cheek on and hope for the best.

Even Elyon joined us as we debated late into the night whether to destroy the child or both mother and child- deep within us stirred and rumbled the fear of waking the slumbering Nephilim. Rachmiel argued, in the end effectively, that the warlike giants of old were the spawn of rogue angels and mortal women, not of angels and mortal men, so we agreed to stay our hands.

No one used the word smite. Not once. Not even Elyon.

The summons that came from Gabriel that night was firm and unequivocal. We were recalled from earth with no time to say our goodbyes.

We took our shameful leave as day dawned on Arcadia Court, all but Rachmiel, who made a choice one of our kind has seldom made, and not without enormous sacrifice. Jessica’s small, moon-white face was pressed to the Wadsworths’ bay window as if there were something to see besides a blue, cloudless sky. Zachriel wrote a message across the firmament in white wisps: Errare humanum est. Perseverare diabolicum. He meant it kindly.

Our mission aborted, we took sensory experiences with us as if we were junior entomologists pinning to a corkboard butterfly specimens snuffed out with ethyl acetate. But what we left behind is what we remember most vividly. One thing we all agree on: the much-vaunted human heart is just a wayward muscle.

Not long after we left, young Stephan Choo was found face down in Hastings Creek near the place where Cullen had sustained his injury. His suicide note remains hidden, to this day, in a jade Fortune Vase in his parents’ pantry. Six months later, on the adoption papers Jessica Wadsworth signed, her premature daughter bore the name Stephanie in complicated and guilty tribute. Cullen emerged from his coma with no further interest in either Rilke or Jessica and her predicament. We could have told her so.

It took a while, years in fact, but Bashaar eventually succumbed to the enticements of his patient recruiters. The Khan family’s garage became a repository of Kemira GrowHow fertilizer and pallets of nail-polish remover. Local authorities were tipped off. The rest was all dutifully reported in the media, including Bashaar’s bewildered parents claiming they believed the supplies were for their son’s year-end biochemistry project at SFU, their dark eyes a haunting. YouTube footage of the much younger and still beardless “home-grown terrorist” dancing on the stage of Elysium Heights Secondary’s gymnasium singing “Strange Thing Mystifying” went viral.

The Wad carried on being a wad.

As for Leo Jr., he turned out fine. Like his father he became a forensic accountant. He auditioned for Jeopardy! once while on a business trip to Atlanta, but after the eighteen-month waiting period lapsed, simply forgot about it. We try not to judge, but we had imagined a life of more freedom for him, perhaps as a first AD for local film productions or a tennis coach. In another era he could have joined a travelling circus. But he abides.

And us? We have a special dispensation to watch over Jessica’s child, even though we know she is more than capable of taking care of herself.

On our phantom tongues the taste of humanity lingers. But something else as well. The fifth taste?

That thing that eludes us still.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.

– ELIAS CANETTI, THE AGONY OF FLIES

SKULLBLAST

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia’s pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living-room window. The recovering terrorist-holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew-moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

A car shoots down the street too fast, a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel, tires squealing as he turns the corner onto Victoria, actually burning rubber, as it’s called, and the recovering terrorist drops her watering can. Reeking fish fertilizer slops onto her sneakers.

She has written letters to city hall requesting a traffic circle (a speed retardant, as it’s called, putting her in mind of the large, soft boy with slivered moons of dirt under his fingernails who shuffled around in a slow-moving cloud at the back of her third-grade classroom before being taken away to wherever children like that were taken away to back then). She has circulated a petition that her neighbours have eagerly signed. They all have small children and animals, as does the recovering terrorist. They are teachers and enviropreneurs and directors of small NGOs that help build medical facilities in developing countries. They’ve promised to fill the traffic circle with indigenous flora, promised to guard against graffiti, to ensure it doesn’t become a dumpsite for used condoms, syringes, Twizzler wrappers, and the inevitable orphaned muffler. But the city just keeps putting them off, citing a litany of bureaucratic impediments. The recovering terrorist has telephoned, again and again. She’s been told, red tape red tape red tape red tape. She’s said, “Look, it’s a traffic circle, a speed retardant we’re asking for here, not a water filtration plant.”

The recovering terrorist has a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingenue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names-Squeaky, Patty, Julie-as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough. When she first stood up at group, about three years ago, and said, “My name is – and I am a terrorist,” she felt none of the relief the small ad in the Georgia Straight had assured her she’d be flooded with.

As the others set their coffee cups down between their feet and clapped supportively (one guy, who she later would come to know as Dieter, even whistled through four fingers wolf-style), she felt like a small-town beauty contestant-Miss Chilliwack promising to end global warming, sectarian strife, and escalating movie theatre prices before the end of her reign. Not like someone who had once burned down a house to bring a petty capitalist to his knees. She kept on going to the meetings, though. There was something reassuring about the camaraderie, a single-mindedness of purpose she hadn’t felt since that night almost twenty years ago when her life cleaved in two.

In the local paper this morning there was a letter to the editor from a Port Moody woman whose daughter had been hit by a car right in front of her house on a quiet residential street. The girl was so small she had rolled out the other side and lay curled like a shrimp. Her teeth were embedded in the roof of her mouth, in the pouches of her cheeks, scattered on the road like a handful of Chiclets. The car just kept on going. What kind of person-the mother asked.

The recovering terrorist slips off a glove and squeezes a few black aphids between her thumb and forefinger, their bodies barely yielding before that satisfying pop and squelch. She thinks about issuing a threat, some sort of ultimatum, targeting the mayor’s office. Her heart rate nearly doubles at the thought, and desire, no, need, swells her throat, and she feels as if she’s choking. Something in her veins actually slithers. I’m jonesing for a Fudgsicle, her son said the other day, and how they’d laughed. Jonesing. What does he know about jonesing? She stumbles up the front steps into the house and is blinded by the sudden shift from sunlit yard to windowless front hall. Light blemishes explode across