Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Motorcycle Maintenance, and Carlos Castaneda and his Teachings of Don Juan. It is to Mr. S. and to Cousin Ricky that I owe my metaphysical awakening.

We hold hands, because there is nothing equivalent to the holding of hands to pass on currents of self- generated electricity and intensify our energy fields. I sense that placid Sam may be a weak link. Pudding, on the other hand, standing between Felix and me, has a charge that could fire up a fleet of cross-Strait hydrofoils.

There is a strong wind sweeping across the tops of the trees; I hear it rather than feel it. More than a whisper, less than a roar. And a smell settling in not unlike that of a cabin that has been closed up for the winter. It emanates from our little group, a reminder that none of us have bathed for almost a week.

“I’m thinking about nachos with the works,” says Dodge, “the kind they have at Tinseltown in that flimsy cardboard dish with the melted cheese product bubbling like lava.” When his eyes are closed it’s easy to imagine Dodge is still a child, filled with wayward charm and bereft of the flinty humour. It is impossible to tell if he is being genuine, but as no one starts giggling we move on.

“I’m thinking about a handheld electronic device,” Felix says, his lisp prominent and endearing, at odds with his preternaturally advanced vocabulary. “Even an old Nintendo DS.”

“That’s the spirit,” I say. I had forbidden anyone to bring a cellphone or nano-to preserve the purity of the retreat, I told them. If the new President of Amerika is forced to survive without her BlackBerry for security purposes, then so can I.

Cinders says, “I’m thinking about Pudding saying her first word. I’m thinking it should be, ‘Howdy, Pardners!’” Cinders has a thing for cowboys, which I’m not sure is age appropriate. She opens her eyes and looks at me, and I give her an encouraging smile and squeeze Pudding’s hand. Technically speaking, my eyes shouldn’t have been open either, but chances are good Cinders will not broadcast my flouting of the rules. “That’s two words,” says Felix.

Even Sam seems game, although typically opaque. “I’m thinking about a dark path easily traversed.” I cannot help but admire her correct usage of traversed. For someone I have never seen poking her button nose into a book, she is very well-spoken.

It’s all going so nicely when The Kevster plops down onto his butt and leans back on his elbows, legs splayed. When did his legs get so long? “I want Dad.” He draws it out so it sounds like Duh- ad.

Do I say, “Was it Dad who stayed up for nights on end rubbing your back in soothing circles as you writhed with night terrors brought on from DVDs you know you shouldn’t have watched at Calvin’s house?” (The mole people! I never could understand what could have been so terrifying about the mole people.) Do I say, “Was it Dad who drove out to every cheap-plastic-off-gassing Walmart in the Lower Mainland in monsoon rains because you had to have a Dark Knight costume?” Do I say, “Do you think Duh- ad gives a shit?”

To my credit I merely drop Pudding’s hand and shake off Felix’s sticky grip and walk off in the direction of the unseen coastline. The ocean is out there. Somewhere beyond this increasingly oppressive foliage and the gnarled trunks, these optimistic nurse logs and fecund mulches, is the edge of Amerika and beyond that the rest of the world. It has been a very long while since I’ve felt anything approaching the sting of tears. Now is not the time to succumb to a pitiful nostalgia. But, unbidden, “Buffalo Springfield Again” ¹² rises from somewhere inside me.

I was once young and I was wild-but refused to let it eat me up.

Winners are not sentimental. Winners look forward, not back. And still, the tears begin to fall.

It rained all night. Rapping against the tarps, weighing them down in deep troughs, the water cascading off like minor Niagaras. The ground surrounding us is now marshland. It’s that squelching kind of weather that is counterproductive to a sense of esprit de corps. But at least the rain has tamped down the effects of the fungal spores and my head feels clear.

I awoke this morning with a strong feeling that Sam has a gun. Why would Sam have a gun? Did I dream it? Did I see it?

Everyone else is still sleeping, so perhaps it is not yet morning. With this greyness it’s difficult to tell when day begins.

Of all the shocks over the past few months, I would have to say that the one that had me reeling was the loss of Viva Sawatsky. Lively little Viva who broke through the gender barrier in our field back when most of us were still busy daring each other to lift pots of green-apple-scented lip gloss from drugstore cosmetics displays.

How old would she have been? Well over seventy, maybe even over eighty. She never did divulge her age. She was found slumped in the green room of NBC’s Alameda Ave. studios minutes before she was to appear on the new new Conan O’Brien to talk about her latest (and now final) book, 87 Ways to Plug into the Power of Whimsy. Her premise, which I am not certain I fully appreciate the brilliance of yet, was that there is an area of the brain that is exclusively wired for whimsy and yet only 0.000000087 percent of the total world population has the preternatural ability to tap into its power. Clothing designer Betsey Johnson is one of these people. Idi Amin was another. ¹³ And, of course, Viva herself.

Since when are Tonight Show guests left unattended? The story is that Viva sent her publicist out for a fish taquito and then choked to death on a misdirected swallow of Ensure. But where were the Conan O’Brien people? Why the absence of other guests in the green room? It bears mentioning that the head of Molecular Biologists Without Borders had been slated to be on that night and had been bumped at the eleventh hour for Viva.

If her, then why not me? That’s what I couldn’t stop asking myself.

It’s all about the cougar now. Its yellow eyes. Its liquid haunches. Its propensity to be there even when it’s not. My platoon is preoccupied with peripheral vision. I appear to have a rebellion on my hands. The rebels are rebelling. They keep the fire going day and night, undeterred by my admonishments that we could be found out. I believe rangers are now patrolling these lands.

The cougar is afraid of fire, they insist. This “fact” is no doubt a vestigial memory from Walt Disney’s Jungle Book or an episode of Kratts’ Creatures. But a mountain lion is not a tiger despite their shared DNA, just as a goat is not a yak no matter how similar their milk may taste (ibid.).

Did The Kevster really see the beast? This would not be the first time he has lied with such conviction.

No, Sam could not have a gun. But neither was it a dream.

We are now camped right outside the TRIUMF facility, obscured by a screen of trees. I would send someone for reconnaissance, but even Dodge refuses to leave the circle around the campfire, not out of fear in his case, I imagine, but out of a sense of fraternal duty. He’s gone commando, one of Sam’s scarves wrapped around his waist like a sarong. You might think this look would compromise his ability to gain the trust of the others, but they have begun to listen to Dodge with a puppy-like intentness. Even The Kevster. My own sense of authority has begun to seep from me like pus from a weeping wound. ¹⁴ We have had no Pronouncements for days, no sense of striving. It is as if they are willing to throw away the chance for future happiness in exchange for a false sense of security in the moment.

The cyclotron is thrumming in the near distance. It’s like the murmuring of a large crowd before the speaker comes on, the swell of anticipation. But is it even possible to hear the sound from so far underneath the earth? Or is it simply vibrating the very ground we occupy? I find I can’t distinguish it from the motor of my own heart.

The fire-walking cannot be put off any longer. The charcoal briquettes I have hauled from campsite to campsite, without complaint, form a narrow path that extends over at least three metres. A little fire starter splashed here and there and a few clicks of my butane BBQ lighter and it will soon be glowing with red-hot embers, the air rippled with the rising heat. Although I have been planning this for a long time, I have never practised. Fire-walking is not a thing to be achieved in private, if it is to be achieved at all.

A small dog darts into our clearing, chases its tail, and barks. Its owner hails it from the distance: “Toto! Toto!” And just as quickly it is gone, but not before Pudding turns from where she is arranging pine cones into categories based on her mysterious aesthetic criteria and extends a hand towards the dog. Pudding extends a hand! It takes me a moment or two to collect myself.

With my boots and socks off and my pants rolled up, I am dismayed by my stubbled white legs and neglected