Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

toenails. Surprised as well, as if these sad specimens belong to some other woman. Sam glances at me in that way she has of looking without seeming to look. Well, feast away, young lady. Someday all this will be yours!

There are those who would choose to tell you that our skin is a poor conductor of heat, as are coals covered with ash, and that therefore walking across them is no different from quickly pressing your fingers to a loaf of banana bread baking in the oven in order to test for doneness. ¹⁵ I prefer to undertake this, my first fire-walk ever, with the same spirit of humility that motivates the young girls on the island of Bali to traverse fire unaided but for their belief in benevolent gods. ¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

All these years of talking like a winner. At last I will be a winner.

I look over at The Kevster, his face strangled. “Would Duh-ad walk through fire for you?” I point at Sam, who is braiding Cinders’s hair, Cinders between her knees, head lowered, not looking at me, and ask Dodge, “Would she walk through fire for you?”

He doesn’t answer, just sits down in his makeshift sarong and pulls off his sneakers and then his socks, flinging them aside. His feet are long and smooth like his father’s. Jesus feet. There are small tufts of hair on what he used to call his foot knuckles.

Dodge steps towards the smouldering coals, and for a moment I fear I have made a terrible mistake. His arms held out from his sides, like a small boy pretending to fly, he strides quickly. The fringe on the scarf curls against the heat. Sam and the children suck in their breath, all except Pudding, who scans the sky, perhaps reading something in the contrail of the jet that passed overhead minutes ago, forever ago now-bound for Tokyo or Hong Kong or Sydney. Dodge makes it to the end and lurches onto the forest floor as if stepping off a fast-moving escalator. He hasn’t uttered a sound.

“That’s love, Dodge,” I say, clapping my hands in a weak approximation of girlish glee, that’s how giddy I feel. “That’s faith.” Relieved that we have arrived at this. Finally. I almost salute him. In fact, I quell the urge to crush him in my arms in an enormous hug, something I haven’t done for a long time.

“No, mother.” He practically ejects the words as if they’re spent bullets. “That’s science.”

I have no time to process this because Cinders is screaming. Pudding holds a briquette in her hand, no pain on her face, but there is the smell of burning flesh. The Kevster is the one who pries it from her fingers while Sam hurtles to retrieve the firstaid kit. I find myself unable to move, fixated on the scrim of heat rising off the briquettes and wondering if I should still try to walk through fire.

When Dodge was born he had more hair than he does now. What a thing to remember. But I do remember. I can recall each of their births with a startling clarity; the exquisitely searing pain infused with jaw-clenching joy. Now Pudding is keening. The first sound she has ever made.

Pushing Sam and Dodge aside, I reach for my daughter.

I wake to the shrill cry of a bald eagle. How could I have slept so soundly, like a dead woman? The last thing I remember is holding Pudding’s bandaged hand to my breast and closing my eyes while the others either wept or whispered around me. And beneath us the eternal come-hither thrum of the cyclotron.

But even the cyclotron is silent this morning. The campfire doused. Camp broken. Is that how they put it? Or struck? The camp has been struck, that is a fact, as if by a smart bomb. There is no Pudding, no Cinders, no Felix, no Kevster, no Sam.

Dodge has taken them all away. Is this weakness or responsibility?

There are things I could do. I could stride through the forest in a shambolic rage, uprooting hemlocks and sharpening my teeth on towering cedars, bearing down on small animals. I could stalk that cougar, mount it and ride it back into the city, gather my followers and march on the towers of the faithless, with burning coals in the pouches of my cheeks, spitting fire.

But who am I without my platoon, without my flesh and blood?

The punchline of a joke?

A woman walking across burning coals to get to the other side.

1 I hesitate to indict pharmaceutical concerns, as prescriptions for citalopram, my birth control pill, Alesse, as well as my Ventolin inhaler have kept me afloat for more years than I care to tally. I have always held that the existence (and acceptance) of “grey areas” makes us more human, although this is a point of view that is best kept to yourself if you are going to succeed as a motivational speaker in Amerika.

2 To paraphrase the great Amerikan songwriter Hal David.

3 Dodge adopted this Briticism after reading the Harry Potter series several years back (the characters he identified most closely with were Fred and George Weasley). Whether this is an affectation versus a general affection for the term is impossible to say. This is Dodge, after all.

4 There is also an application called positron emission tomography. (I prefer the more anthropomorphic PET, as, apparently, do the researchers themselves.) PET allows for a true scan of a living human brain at work. A scientific euphemism for “mind reading”?

5 I am not averse to a little borrowing here and there from the classics of literature. Browning is a particular favourite. As for Aesop, what is there not to love?

6 It is an ugly world out there for the truth-seekers and soothsayers among us. For those with the instinct for conciliation, punishment comes swift and hard, as we have so sadly witnessed.

7 Including his third wife.

8 Wednesdays and Fridays at 1 p.m. Prior booking recommended.

9 I plan to include this line in my next book, with permission, of course.

10 You may ask, whatever happened to Bernie Taupin? In 2006 he won a Golden Globe for his song “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” for the film Brokeback Mountain. In early 2012 he collaborated once again with Elton John to write the song commemorating HRH Prince Charles’s long overdue ascension to the British throne, “Midnight in the Kingdom.” Bernie Taupin has been married four times and is the proud owner of a bucking bull used in professional competition in Amerika. If pressed, I will admit to still carrying a small flame for him.

11 My arduous journey from pessimist to optimist is described in detail in My Emotional Fatwa.

12 I greatly admire the great Amerikan singer-songwriter Neil Young but have often wondered whether it would hurt him to try doing something with his hair.

13 According to Viva, whimsy itself is neutral. The user is the determinant of whether it has a “creative” or “destructive” charge.

14 It is not that I seek to liken myself to Christ on the cross but at times the looks I get from Dodge are as piercing as the point of St. Longinus’s lance.

15 Other scientific detractors cite the Leidenfrost effect (as musical as it sounds, it’s a dispiriting explanation of the phenomenon of fire-walking). In effect, just as drops of water dance about on a hot skillet because of the protective layer of vapour formed by evaporation, a fire-walker’s inevitably sweaty feet help create a similar protective layer.

16 In 2002, twenty Australian Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet managers had to be treated for burns caused by fire-walking. I ask you, is the Leidenfrost effect substantially different Down Under, or is it that they were insufficiently motivated in mind and spirit?

17 My colleague Tolly Burkan has called fire-walking a metaphor and contends that if you can master it, you can also muster the courage to demand a raise. With all due respect, this diminishes all of us, does it not?

18 Some useful advice from Tony Robbins: Visualize walking the coals while chanting, “Cool moss, cool moss, cool moss.”