Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Even the billboard at the entrance to Granville Island, just the other day advertising the delights of the Vancouver Aquarium and its imprisoned beluga population, now shows the couple, toothy smiles set on stun, in their kitchen, an assault of stainless-steel surfaces and grey-blue slate. Patricia is poised to slice a fennel bulb. The knife in her hand glints under halogen light while Dan leans across the cooking island as if whispering something naughty in her ear. Here’s the really weird thing. They look less like Dan and Patricia than the real Dan and Patricia Nina saw last week on the wharf outside the market.

It’s only much later, when she’s trying to get back to sleep around four A.M.-the time she often wakes and can’t remember which side of her chest houses her heart, even though it’s thrumming so violently she fears the landlady will start pounding on the floor above her bed, yelling, “I thought I told you to keep it down!”-that it dawns on Nina: the real Dan and Patricia O’Donnell were not Caucasian like the actors in the ad, but Chinese. Tall for Chinese, but unmistakably Chinese. Odd that she hadn’t noticed at the time.

Never make the mistake of showing how much you really want something. That’s Honey’s philosophy. She reels in uncommitted buyers by appealing to their unclothed desires. If you want four competing bids above list price on your aging ranch-style on Eagle Harbour Road, go ahead and give Honey Fortunata a call. Because Honey knows what to watch for and Honey doesn’t talk too much.

That childless couple in their mid-thirties, the wife who hovers a little too long in the doorway of a second bedroom? That fifty-eight-year-old civil engineer who seems disproportionately interested in the empty carriage house out back and mentions having gone to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design a lifetime ago? Honey knows just what to do. She calls them to come and take a second look; the sellers are very motivated (real estate code for getting a divorce).

The couple returns, and when the wife looks into the bedroom again she sees a pine crib with an Anne Geddes photograph above it of a baby dressed like a bumblebee. The room smells of talcum powder and a limitless future. Bewildered, she turns to Honey and says, “I didn’t notice a baby’s room before!” Honey smiles. “You went through so quickly last time.” The workaholic engineer returns to find the carriage house partially transformed into a painting studio, stretched canvases and splotches everywhere. “Excuse the mess,” Honey says, shrugging, “but the owner has this little hobby.”

But even Honey makes mistakes. That day two months ago when she finally tracked down Charity-her sister walking along Blood Alley with the herky-jerky marionette steps of an addict, small, untethered breasts straining against her Happy Planet T-shirt, while Honey negotiated with her pimp and dealer. He told her Charity had ripped off some very scary people and was alive only because of his personal munificence (although he called it something less poetic), and Honey had said, “Name your price.”

Nina holds a pair of ski poles awkwardly in her lumpy paws and pretends to slalom in slow motion through the Granville Island crowd watching Byron-from-England, a flame-haired, flame-juggling comedian who specializes in homophobic jibes. People step back to clear Nina a path and smile good-naturedly; children point and yell: “A bear!” (The marmot is actually a rodent, but no one on the Olympic Committee wanted kids pointing and yelling, “A rat!” so they’ve erred on the side of the ursine. After all, who, except for those trying to save the doomed Vancouver Island marmot, has actually ever seen one?) But there’s this one guy, a large man eating fries from a paper cone, who doesn’t budge. Just gives her a look Nina knows all too well because she’s seen it staring back at her in pale, aggrieved reflection from SkyTrain and shop windows and her own bathroom mirror.

The noise in her head is like one of those fireworks kids launch all through the night at Halloween, a high- pitched squealer that ends, not quite with a bang, but with a loud pop. Greetings, fellow misanthrope, now get the hell out of my way!

She heads straight for the French Fry Guy as if he’s the finish line, ski poles flailing to the left, to the right, to the left. A woman yells, “Curtis!” and yanks a Jack Russell on an extendable leash out of Nina’s way. Poles high in the air now, well over her head, sweat coursing from her armpits like ill-fated bison streaming over the last rise at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. With a warrior cry, Nina slams into the man and bounces backwards off him as if she’s a character in a Saturday-morning cartoon. You can practically hear the requisite Boing!

“Mascot busts a move!” someone announces, DJ-style. Nina’s head should be cracked open, her durian fruit of a brain fouling the sea-spiked air, but the marmot suit has cushioned the fall. She staggers to her feet to scattered applause, woo-hoos!, and the insistent, machine-gun laughter of someone going off his meds. The salmon eaters think it was all part of her act.

As she straightens, Nina sees the same little boy in the private-school uniform from last week standing in front of her, like a miniature security guard in his blazer with its cheesy golden crest. The light behind his head is dazzling, reminding her that it hasn’t rained for several weeks; the reservoirs are unusually low, and residents have been asked to share baths and take short showers. Dan and Patricia no doubt still fill their Jacuzzi tub to the brim, hot water tumbling unchecked from the gilded modernist faucet. Nina pictures Dan sliding in behind Patricia, kneading the knots in the small of her back as she releases a tight little sigh, reluctantly, as if she’d never willingly let go of anything.

The sun fires the tips of the boy’s hair into a spiky penumbra, a hazy crown of thorns. He gazes up at Nina with something approximating concern in his eyes and reaches out.

A little hand in hers. It would be so easy.

Of course, there are those who say, “The mountain is angry.” The disappearances of the North Shore houses now number in the high hundreds, and as downtown hotels fill up with the moneyed homeless, letters to the local papers speak of Gaia’s revenge or God’s displeasure. To voice these kinds of beliefs in the wake of the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina would have invited instant censure. But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they’re being either cosmically punished or held up as “a warning to us all?” (Vancouver Sun editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces.

And that slurry of twittering that can be heard around every corner? That’d be the sound of schadenfreude.

Unlike those who act as if they’re on speed-dial to the Earth goddess-those men on recumbent bikes and those women who rub baking soda into their fuzzy armpits and think fetal-monitoring machines are the work of the devil- rationalists who’ve always harboured a secret penchant for Greek mythology know full well that Gaia is in fact the daughter of Chaos.

Still, there is talk of healing. The chief of the Squamish Nation is invited to say a few words over the deep hole where a house had stood, a place that was once tribal land. The event evolves into something rather ecumenical, with smudge sticks, button blankets, trickster stories, and didgeridoos. As a dog howls forlornly, the elder quotes from Chief Seattle’s famous 1854 speech. “It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will come, for even the White Man… We may be brothers after all. We will see.”

And the mountain in answer? Not so much as a burp.

“I didn’t know marmots could drive!” The boy twists and turns in the passenger seat of Nina’s car, punctuating each breathless pronouncement with body language. He has proved to have an insatiable appetite for all things marmot and an endless arsenal of exclamation marks. It’s as if he’s cornered the market on enthusiasm and is doling it out without regard for the niceties of supply and demand.

Nina envisions the look on Patricia’s face as she turns from applauding Byron-from-England’s Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket and padlocked chain to find her Cracker Jack prize of a son gone, and feels a rare frisson of self-satisfaction.

She is finding it hard to keep her paws on the steering wheel, and shoulder-checking is impossible with the mascot head still on. She doesn’t usually drive if she can help it and her mid-’70s Toyota Corolla is practically in its death throes, but this morning she was running late after a savage bout of insomnia, and trying to make her shift by bus was not an option. The walk back to her car, parked on a side street just outside Granville Island, felt impossibly long, with the boy chittering away at her side as he trotted to match her pace. But there were remarkably few people about and she’s fairly certain no one saw them get in the car and pull away.

It seems he’s only in kindergarten-what kind of people would put a five-year-old in a uniform, complete with blazer?- and that his teacher, whose name sounds something like Miss Peach (the boy talks so fast Nina can’t make out everything he’s saying), has made the Vancouver Island marmot the official class animal. “There’s only about a hundred of you left in existence!”

Nina nods. She tells him she’s come to the city as an ambassador for her fellow marmots, to make people