Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

how much?” a male voice whimpers. “But this is a Canadian film.” The bureaucrat’s response is sotto voce. In addition to road, sewage, and garbage issues, the Engineering Department handles filming permits, the city’s big cash cow.

“I will not submit my request by phone, because I’ve already done that. I’ve been calling your department for weeks,” the recovering terrorist says, speaking louder than she should, as if the man in front of her is missing his eardrums rather than his larynx. She’s arguing with a guy who has no voice box, albeit a guy using his disability as an excuse to be an asshole. He finally concedes to set up a meeting with the administrator in charge of traffic calming measures. The recovering terrorist glances at the appointment slip he hands her. “July 18! That’s more than a month away. By then-” By then what? Will she be able to hold out that long without slipping through a crack?

The man presses his thumb to his throat and looks past her. “Next.”

Outside, on the City Hall tower, the four faces of the neon clock all show an entirely different time. It’s been this way for years. This is a city on the edge, as it’s called, a city on the edge of an idea. Maybe the idea that time is relative?

“So was that guy a cyborg or what?” her son asks as they make their way down the worn marble stairs to the lobby, and she realizes from his expression that he’s serious. The recovering terrorist takes the opportunity to launch into a lecture about the dangers of smoking. She’s segueing rather nicely from tobacco to crack when her son stops and drops her hand. “But what if someone just stabbed a stick into his throat? Like a maniac? What if it’s not his fault!?” He looks furious. “What if someone did that to you?!” In his face she thinks she can see the man he’ll become. But where will his inchoate sense of injustice lead him?

It’s 4:00, it’s 6:18, it’s 1:45, it’s almost midnight. It’s getting late.

When he was younger the boy was always wanting to know what something was called, like all fledgling humans, from Adam and Enkidu to Kaspar Hauser on down. Manhole covers, squirrels, body parts, graffiti, discarded condoms, black-eyed Susans, facial deformities on fellow passengers riding the No. 20 bus. That got name? That got name? Easy enough until he pointed to something unnameable. That got name? My face? Eyes? No, he howled, that! almost poking her eye out. Eyelashes? Iris? Pupil? But he became inconsolable, a cartoon parody of toddler rage.

It was only later, lying in bed that night, that she began to wonder. Had he meant her soul?

Now his hunger for naming is satiated with his trading cards, hundreds upon hundreds of names and attributes. Vulpix, Nidorino, Pikachu, Torterra, Weezing, Lickitung, Steelix, Uxie, Dusknoir, Deoxys, Gligar, Slugma, the latter’s body made of lava so it can’t stop moving or it will cool and harden. A favourite of the boy’s. Somewhere in Toyko’s Nihonbashi district there is a name factory, no doubt, where adult men and women with orange hair, wearing T- shirts with impossibly cute slogans, brainstorm all day for characters’ names while sipping bubble tea through straws and smoking thin brown Indian cigarettes.

The other day a card was lying face up on the side of the bathtub, Houndoom’s teeth marks on it. Typhlosion, a creature with a collar of flame that looks like a cross between Godzilla and a skunk. Special moves: Flamethrower, Lava Plume, Eruption. “Typhlosion ignites fire blasts by rubbing its hairs against one another. It uses the resulting heat haze to hide itself. Anything touching it while it is aroused will be up in flames instantly.” This is the most evolved Pokemon of its kind.

“Diatomaceous earth is pretty effective,” The Gardening Dame tells her caller. “Millions of years ago little marine creatures died out just so we could use their skeletons to kill slugs. Crawling over the stuff is like crawling through ground glass.”

Brian from Quesnel: “Isn’t that unnecessarily barbaric?”

The Gardening Dame: “You could do what I do and go out in the night with a miner’s light strapped to your head and track them down one by one, pour salt on them, and watch them sizzle and hiss.”

Brian from Quesnel: “That’s sick.”

The Gardening Dame: “An eye for an eye, as they say, a tooth for a tooth.”

WAKE-UP SLAP

Every night at a certain hour the recovering terrorist can feel her fear rising like a reeking tidal backwash, and here it comes now, lugging kelp and dead crabs onto the shore. At night she is never alone. These particles that move through the air, the ones that appear as large and small spots in front of your eyes, these must be the constituents of hell.

There is the girl in her open coffin, not like it was at the funeral. But that’s the only difference. There is the pastor, disconcertingly cheerful, and the family. The church is like a big A-frame cabin. Pale wood beams arch gently up, joining at the point where the ceiling pierces the sky. The heavens, as it’s called.

The pastor turns his palms upward as if checking for rain. “Anna has been transported from a scene of pain and sorrow to a land that knows no pain. God said, ‘Well done, Anna, you passed the test, come home.’” The young voices in the choir, schoolchildren, sing of the Lord coming to gather his jewels.

Behind the recovering terrorist a woman is whispering loudly, “Anna was fascinated with Heaven and could not, could not, wait for the Second Coming. She said, ‘Mommy, I want to go home to be with Jesus.’ And her mother said, ‘Don’t you want to stay here with Mommy and Daddy?’” Teary sighs of understanding from the surrounding pews. The pastor says, “We pray for the person, or persons, responsible for this act.”

Whatever this is called, it’s not a dream.

Her co-conspirators were furious that she’d gone to the funeral. “Are you insane?” hissed Damien-a man, no, a beautiful boy really, whose cock only six days earlier she had held in her mouth-before disappearing from her life forever. She heard that he was in Dawson City or Kathmandu-like Elvis there were sightings for years and then nothing. One by one the others disappeared as well. Dissolving, so it seemed, into mist, but resurfacing south of the border and eventually apprehended for other crimes, bigger, more glamorous ones, yet not nearly so terrible. She was the only one with collateral damage to her credit. And yet here she is, hiding in plain sight, as it’s called.

Poor, virginal Leonard, with his sense of aggrievement- Capt. Elmer Fudd, they called him, because of his stutter- became a prison poet, the most productive time of his life, he told Rolling Stone. Since he got out, nothing, but he still saw himself “as a fundamentally good person.” Carmen posed for Annie Leibovitz, pregnant, naked, and holding a Pancor Jackhammer across her breasts and fruited belly, a daisy sprouting from the gun’s muzzle. This was before making the FBI’s most-wanted list a second time. Regan and Gerry, always the clowns, had tried to get a mock reality show called Urban Guerrilla off the ground. That’s what happened, you did your time and you moved on. It must be a colossal relief, she thinks, something that doesn’t compute in her cosmology.

Every so often in the early years, there were rumours of a “sixth member.” But her name had never come up.

The early-summer heat wave is getting to everyone at group. That and the woof of decaying fish from the back-alley bin of the Indonesian restaurant next door to their meeting space. Oppressing everyone, that is, except Lucy, who’s energized as she confesses her imagined assault on City Hall. How she envisions it: like the ending of a movie running on under the credits rather then dissolving to black, fantastical slo- mo destruction to a hypnotic soundtrack, something by Philip Glass or Arvo Part. And her right there, facing the statue of Captain Vancouver as debris falls like cleansing rain. Her blood is singing. She almost has to lick her lips, the scene is just that tasty. She tells them about how she’s gone to the Vancouver Archives and looked up the blueprints, how locating the most vulnerable points of the building was like tracing the veins of a lover’s arms.

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!”