Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

allowed to pitch their tents after making a donation. The country’s poorest postal code now has its own official designation, sort of like the Vatican, a sovereign city state.

The squatters are sponsored by Roots and equipped with the latest in leather backpacks and Che caps. The Dalai Lama has visited, as well as Richard Branson, who arrived in a Virgin hot-air balloon. Buffy Sainte-Marie even tried to adopt half-native triplets whose mother had OD’d shortly after giving birth, but the children were deemed better off being raised in their own culture. It takes a village and all that jazz. Kakami told him this over beers in some atrocious hole with terry-cloth slipcovers over the tables that the director lauded for its authenticity. Patrick was excited about the movie possibilities, but negotiating with the actual squatters was brutal. Their people had people. Syd’s convinced he could more easily bring the Taliban to heel.

He turns up Cambie to avoid the festivities but there’s a broken sewer main flooding the street, carrying with it the effluvia of the Downtown Eastside, a flotilla of cigarette butts, bottles, broken high-heeled shoes, syringes, falafel wrappers, a swollen paperback copy of The Kite Runner, and an aluminum crutch. Does he head upriver or turn back and make his way through the crush of demonstrators?

Syd takes one more look at the chanting throng and bends down to roll his sport slacks above his knees. Then, briefcase held high over his head, he begins the portage.

Because.

Because the kernels from the bottom of the popcorn bag at the Ridge had always wedged between his front teeth in a way that felt so good but verged on pain, a pain that he had borne, Patrick thought, rather bravely.

Because of his mother’s unexpectedly cool fingers on his lips while they watched late-night movies on the basement television in those weeks leading up to his first surgery, telling him she’d always wanted to be a nun- but don’t tell your father. How seriously he’d held that secret to his sickly boy chest, their secret, as if it had really mattered. Had it even been true? The existence of a cosmic jester never entering his mind back then.

With his pig heart beating time, Patrick Kakami lopes through the island forest that expands around him, sloughing off old skin as if he’s a snake.

“The things we do to keep on keepin’ on,” the helicopter pilot says to Syd over the juddering of the rotors and engine roar. “Me, I pretend I’m choppering over Nam.”

“Nam?”

“Viet. Like in that Kakami movie.” He makes big googly eyes and waggles his tongue to simulate craziness-at least Syd hopes it’s a simulation.

“You mean Coppola.” Yet the notion of Kakami making a war movie isn’t that far-fetched. He has the earnestness and passion, the requisite sense of moral absolutes that Syd himself lacks. He tightens his seat belt. The blue-green Pacific and rocky island shorelines pierced with towering evergreens are far below. Toy scenery, an art director’s mock-ups. There are no more mysteries, the whole wide world is charted and toe-tagged, but that knowledge does little to lessen Syd’s unease.

“Ride of the Valkyries” crackles into Syd’s headset.

“Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning!” whoops the pilot, pulling back hard on the joystick.

When Syd had arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal by cab a couple of hours earlier, his shoes and socks reeking of sewage, it was mired in chaos. The Queen of Coquitlam had rammed the marina, sinking several pleasure craft and damaging the ferry dock. Sailings were cancelled for at least the remainder of the day. People swarmed the wharf, cellphones pressed to temples or thumbs busily texting their loved ones or their lawyers, while gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Syd bought himself a pair of drugstore sandals and chartered a helicopter to get to the island location.

While he’d waited by the makeshift landing pad beside the ferry terminal’s parking lot, two ferret-faced guys sprawled on the curb behind him, slurping coffee and muttering together. One of them shredded a paper napkin as if wreaking vengeance on a life-long enemy. “And that guy who plays Voldemort and calls himself Rafe, what’s that about? It’s spelled Ralph.”

His buddy shrugged.

“It’s British,” Syd said.

“Huh?”

“Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles. If you go in for that kind of thing.”

“Twinkletoes? Effin’ Brits. That is just so wrong.”

The other guy eyed Syd suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

“I’m a movie producer.”

They had looked him over: his orange-and-green flip-flops and rolled-up, sewage-splotched pants, his shirt half hanging out over the front of the slacks-and guffawed. “Yeah right.” One of them had proffered him a fat joint.

In the confines of the helicopter, the cheap sandals exude a warm rubber smell that clogs Syd’s nostrils. And they’re giving his toes wedgies. He’s so uncomfortable he may as well add a butt thong and call it a day. Syd feels naked, almost impotent, stuck in a shuddering tin can half a mile above sea level with a madman, his feet exposed- their pale flesh and untended toenails proclaiming: Here is a man no longer in complete control of the situation. If only he’d stayed wharf-side in his own stinking hand-stitched Italian footwear with Cheech and Chong Jr., fired up the doobie (did people still call them doobies?), and said to hell with Kakami, the production, and the whole freaking business.

“Island looks bigger,” Syd says on approach, the helicopter still in one piece despite the pilot’s Kilgore impressions.

“Always does from the air.”

“I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.”

As they circle lower, Syd sees something far below in a clearing moving swiftly. A deer, a bobcat?

“Someone’s in an awful hurry,” says the pilot.

A man?

“Mr. Gross? Mr. Gross!” The first AD, with her truncheon-wielding Afrikaner accent, moves in on Syd as he lurches from the helicopter. She runs hunched over, one hand holding down her frothing mass of hair, the other waving a clipboard, pages fluttering from it crazily in the downdraft. Drew follows, sobbing, and a pissed-off David Mathers, complaining in a loud, over-enunciating voice that he’s due to shoot a guest spot for Little Mosque on the Prairie in two weeks less a day and this better not yada, contract, yada yada, residuals, et cetera. A pale, double-jointed woman in a glittering gymnastics leotard appears at Syd’s elbow, whispering (why whispering?) something about a Cirque de Soleil audition, a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity. The nuns, all in swimsuits or yoga gear, swarm over. The Stay Puft-headed DOP brings up the rear, piggybacking a teenaged girl, the Victoria jailbait who plays the baby nun.

They converge on Syd like a kind of ooze, their hopes and dreams, their messy lives, their schedules thrust at him as if he were Jesus Christ Superstar healing lepers. Syd holds out his hands, palms outward, both steadying himself and fending them off. The helicopter tilts up and away behind him.

One by one the actresses who play the nuns turn blue-grey and waterlogged. They flop onto their backs or fronts, still and swollen, seemingly floating. The first AD opens her mouth, tongue clawing for air. Out of her left nostril scuttles a small brown crab, followed by another and another. The DOP has a gash in his gut where it’s been impaled by a tree branch. It sticks out the other side, looking for all the world like a cheap illusionist’s trick, save for the all-too-real blood. Minutes pass, or hours, then, as if someone’s pulled focus and upped the volume, they’re all their own clamouring selves again.

The weather is unseasonably warm for early October; the air on Syd’s toes disconcerting but not entirely unpleasant. “Okay, okay. Can someone tell me exactly what’s going on?” Please God, no, not the squawk. He sounds like a seagull. “When was the last time anyone saw Kakami?”

The ghostly gymnast places a hand on Drew’s chest. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” Syd resists the urge to give the distressed location manager a hug. He’s through with dispensing hugs.

“One minute he was standing right there.” After another intake and outtake of air, Drew points towards a spot a few feet away. “And the next minute-”

“I know, poof, gone, without a trace. Not even a whiff of sulphur.”

Drew crosses his (her?) arms. “You don’t have to believe me. I know what I saw.”