Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

If our energy fields don’t exist-what is this? This luminous face turned skyward, pale irises, the flecks in them wildly kaleidoscopic, her skin, that way of looking. Pudding has such an intense aura. There are times I have witnessed static crackling blue from her scalp, her fine hair rising and quavering like the tentacles of a sea anemone. It is as if she is communing with the unseen particles in the air around us, decoding them into her private language somewhere deep in her hermit kingdom, in her Arkadia.

I have far from given up on what quantum mind theory may be able to do for Pudding. In the TRIUMF cyclotron, the gigantic particle accelerator at the university, various matters and antimatters collide to release pure energy in the form of gamma rays. The subatomic particles travel in the accelerator in a spiral, and a spiral is the primary geometric form in which thought waves travel. If we could get within shouting distance of these gamma rays and direct them to interact with Pudding’s already overactive energy field, perhaps they could unlock her from inside her private realm. ⁴ The radiation issue remains unresolved. But it is a risk I’m willing to take.

Our location in this particular arboreal area, then, in the vicinity of the university’s research facility, is not entirely without foresight. Somewhere farther from the city would have been safer, but if you’re convinced the tortoise will lose to the hare, then what is the point of the race? ⁵ (Five Fables for the Future, Golden Agouti Press, 2011, p. 109.)

Infiltrating the TRIUMF cyclotron has become my number one priority. For far too long has Pudding remained on the periphery-a cipher, a “changeling,” as people like her were called in the past. It is my duty to bring Pudding fully into the fold. I have that can-do feeling surging through me, despite the furtive whisperings between Dodge and his virgin concubine and The Kevster’s surly and penetrating silence.

It is time to admit what we have become. A rebel unit. No longer on the run, but proactive. To think that I almost succumbed to despair when I first perceived that my life was in danger. My followers give me strength even in their own moments of weakness. My platoon. I like the sound of that. Ten-hut!

I must find a way to polish my boots.

Tony Robbins was the first of us to disappear. Initially, a publicity stunt was suspected, but for a man of his voracious public appetite to voluntarily remain out of the limelight for so long seemed unfathomable. His financial holdings and current and former wives and associates were investigated, his accounts frozen. It has been eight months now and a body has yet to be recovered. A few months after his disappearance, Zachariah Madoff and Bernie “Hola!” Rodriguez were found dead within days of each other. The cause of death in both cases was eventually attributed to natural causes. (Who but scientists, international scientists, I ask, could cover their tracks like that, mimicking a coronary embolus and a subarachnoid hemorrhage so effectively as to dupe two coroners at the top of their game?) Werner Washington died more publicly, shot by a sniper at a shareholders’ meeting in the Houston Astrodome. (The laughable lone-gunman theory has been widely debunked but continues to be the FBI’s official line.)

Deepak now travels Kevlar-coated, with two armed guards, in an electric vehicle reminiscent of the Popemobile. He remains mum about whether he’s received death threats, but the security at his residences and events rivals that of the phalanx of sharpshooters and the bulletproof glass dome at Amerikan President Obama’s second inauguration. ⁶

I was closer to Tony than most people would care to acknowledge. ⁷ I have had night visions in which his baseball-glove-sized hands are cradling my head and his teeth are lighting a path through the darkness. In truth, darkness is something I have never feared. I have the eyes of a cat. I have little use for Tony’s glowing teeth, but could use some of his advice right about now. I simply try not to even think about his hands.

We have managed to move closer to the TRIUMF facility, undetected but for the occasional raccoon and the unseen birds that twitter and caw their way across the forest canopy. After studying the diagrams of the site I obtained from the Internet, it has become obvious to me that breaching the inner sanctum will be trickier than I thought: the cyclotron is situated three storeys beneath the ground and is shielded by triplicate layers of 100-tonne concrete blocks, each 4.5 metres thick.

There is, of course, the recourse to a public tour ⁸ to gain entry and then staging a distraction while I spirit Pudding nearer the chamber. I can practically hear my friend Ingrid, who is an excellent slam poet, spit, “Permission is for losers.” ⁹ Besides, I am a wanted woman.

The security, though, is not what I had assumed. The sprawling and tastefully landscaped site comprises several buildings without, if the diagrams are to be believed, fibre optic security or even electrified fencing around the perimeter. An invitation to a reckoning.

This mission gives me a feeling of liberation I have not felt in a long time. The big question now is: Do I share the details of my plan? Or do we proceed on a need-to-know basis? My attempts at a military style of discipline have been met with a degree of resistance. After so many years of establishing my authority, I perceive a growing slackness among my followers that bespeaks, if not quite insurrection, then some form of unconscious revolt.

Sam sits astride a cedar log massaging Dodge’s shaved scalp as if it’s a crystal ball and she’s divining the future. What does she see? Herself and Dodge surrounded by the emaciated children of an orphanage in Chad or Pune, or by bald little babies of their own in a stucco fourplex in East Vancouver? Is that a path to happiness for either of them?

“Velcro. There’s an example,” Dodge says. “Think of burrs sticking to a dog’s belly fur. Think of the entire planet as a humungous R &D lab. There are sustainable air-conditioned buildings inspired by the study of termite mounds, wind turbines based on the humpback whale’s fin.” Dodge, it seems, intends to study biomimicry. This is not something we have had time to discuss. Much like the Sam liaison.

“Would God approve?” Sam wonders out loud. She doesn’t appear to require an answer from Dodge, who just closes his eyes and sighs with pleasure against the circling pressure of her fingers. What about me? What if I don’t approve of his misplaced faith in science?

Why does no one think to offer me a massage?

Cinders wants to know what I’m going to do about the cougar The Kevster has spotted. They never used to question, especially Cinders. I would say jump and Cinders would ask, “Horizontal or vertical?” (You’re O.K.-I’m K2, Golden Agouti Press, 2010, p. 156.) Now it’s become all why, what, when? Perhaps the anomie that has been creeping through the general population has gone viral, infiltrating the spores of the various fungi that proliferate here and compromising the morale of my troops.

Need I say, look it in the eye and show it who is boss? Need I say, winners are not eaten? Winners bite, chew, and disgorge what they don’t need. I learned this lesson from a boy cousin what seems like an eternity ago now. We had been arguing about who was the real creative genius, Elton John or Bernie Taupin. ¹⁰ He tore my cherished poster of “The Desiderata,” designed to evoke an illuminated manuscript, from my bedroom wall and crammed it into his mouth piece by piece, gnashing ferociously. When he was done, only a gummy strip with the words Go placidly amid the noise and has- hung from one of his incisors. Above my desk the Hang in There, Baby! poster curled upward from the wall, masking tape in petrified clumps, a Siamese cat clinging to a telephone wire with a frenzied look on its face. “Eat or be eaten,” my cousin growled. “Kill or be killed.”

Ricky had what you would call charisma. But he didn’t enjoy what you’d call a successful adulthood.

Cinders has wet herself rather than dare venture outside of our little enclave. I think we’re long past due for a visualization circle.

There was a time, back in high school, when I would have described myself as a Christian Existentialist. A believer in God, albeit one who believed not in personal destiny, but rather in personal responsibility. I was a somewhat gloomy girl who wept during the singing of “Kumbaya” at school assemblies. ¹¹ Our Catholic school was remarkably progressive, thanks to Vatican II. It was through a lanky, good-natured religion teacher that I discovered Zen and the Art of