Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

doorways and stairwells. Bruises bloomed on our hips and shins like exotic fungi. Jason had a split lip and a black eye, and was summoned to the principal’s office to be quizzed about whom he’d been fighting this time. Bashaar, a.k.a. Bash, a power forward on the school’s basketball team though only in grade nine, found himself warming the bench. (The militant musallah youths took the opportunity to milk this: “In Mecca, true believers are not benched…”) Stephan had a reputation for being clumsy, so no one, not even his parents, thought anything of it when he broke his glasses three times in one week.

And all that effluvia. Sweat, nocturnal emissions, the transit of liquids and solids from one end to the other. The human body, a moody and capricious marvel. It is little wonder St. Francis called his own Brother Ass. (One of Barman’s favourite authors, the late American satyr Henry Miller, wrote, “To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.” A sentiment worthy of a T-shirt, Yabbashael noted after one particularly satisfying visit to the second-floor boys’ room.

The amount of time we spent behind bathroom doors did not go unnoticed. It was the worst for Rachmiel. Years of deprivation had left her host, Jessica’s, digestive system as fragile as Malaysia’s ravaged mangrove forests, her newly robust appetite triggering bouts of gastrointestinal distress and vomiting. And now that she was no longer anorexic, it wasn’t long before she finally began menstruating. This discomfited some of us more than it did Rachmiel.

“The array of feminine hygiene products at the Lynn Valley Centre’s Shoppers Drug Mart is staggering,” Rachmiel told us, eyes as round and darkly glistening as a mouse lemur’s. “An entire aisle.”

To which Yabbashael, a.k.a. The Wad, speaking for the rest of us, said: “TMI, dear sister, TMI.”

How mystifying it is that knowledge and experience are such utterly different beasts-one a contemplative water buffalo, the other a wild mink.

Why Arcadia Court? Why not Jammu, the ancestral home of our black-walnut-loving tempter? Or Barcelona or Manhattan where our taste receptors might have been set abuzz? Why not an outpost in sub-Saharan Africa where we might have been of some use?

The truth is that like a child spinning a globe, eyes closed tight, the compact planet skimming rapidly under his index finger until it slows and then stops (There! The Bonin Islands? Wuhan? Tucurui? The world suddenly seeming larger than large, wanderlust abruptly sated), our choice of destination was rather whimsical. And we did like the name and the way clouds sat low on the mountaintop just above that enclave in North Vancouver. There was, we admit, a waft of something compelling from a small wooded area nearby, beside Hastings Creek. “The smell of destiny,” Rachmiel had called it, rather portentously, considering we could not yet smell anything in the literal sense. At the time, we believed destiny to be one of those weasel words beloved by those with little insight into the workings of the universe.

Our fact-finding mission was to last as long as it took to discover the zenith of each human sense. Barman’s best guess was four years; Elyon thought a week or so should do it. At any rate, time had, for us, never been of consequence. Now we were to be human in all respects, bound to the limitations of the species-no being in two places at once, no interventions, no miracles.

Arcadia Court itself comprised just seven houses arrayed around a horseshoe-shaped road opening off Arcadia Drive, which lay between the steeply graded and winding Mountain Highway and Lynn Valley Road. It had a neat little physicality to it, a sense of order challenged by the surrounding wilderness.

It was during our second week there that we first wandered into the forbidden woods by Hastings Creek. Almost hidden amidst the foliage, in a clearing on the east side of the creek, a soiled blue plastic tarp strung between two hemlocks caught our eyes. And from under it came guttural laughter, voices simultaneously muted and oddly amplified. “Here, mix these two together and now try it,” said one, followed by a sidewinder of a cough, while someone else gagged.

Yabbashael went first, fording the creek without even bothering to take off Jason’s prized Air Jordans. Stumbling over a pile of debris, Yabbashael sent empty bottles and cans clattering in the relative silence of the clearing. Three old men emerged from under the tarp, red faced, two of them with matted greyish-brown beards, all looking as if they were wearing clothing made of sodden cardboard.

“Shit, kid, we’re trying to have a board meeting here,” said the bald, leather-faced one, waving in Yabbashael’s direction a bottle with a cigarette butt (or a fly?) floating in it. A decidedly human pong swirled about the men, a cloud of urine, sweat, and cigarette smoke.

And that is how we met the genius loci of Hastings Creek, the near-mythical shopping-cart racers of Lynn Valley. They were the kind of men the Christ would have consorted with, and who could blame him? They were the lepers, the untouchables, of this place, and so forbidden fruit to us.

Yabbashael and Barman were particularly drawn to the Three Wise Men, as they took to calling their new friends. To this day, Yabbashael swears that a dried pepperoni stick the men shared with them came the closest to what we understand to be the spirit of umami.

“It’s as if they have some deeper understanding of the true pleasures of life,” Yabbashael said after one visit to Hastings Creek, prompting an unheeded warning from Rachmiel: “Nothing good has ever come of romanticizing the downtrodden.”

Towards the end of our first month, Elyon had a particularly bad day at school. When Ms. W. asked Stephan about Hamlet’s indecisiveness, Elyon quoted the famous soliloquy almost in its entirety. Stephan was set upon on the way home by some future captains of industry regurgitating their bastardized brand of poetry. “Slings and arrows of outrageous faggotyness!” “To be a fucking geek or not to be a fucking geek!” and, perhaps the worst, “To sleep, perchance to wet my bed!”

“Ms. W. cut me off at ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all,’” Elyon told us later behind the Wadsworths’ carport as we took turns holding Jason’s gym shirt to Stephan’s nose and forehead to stanch the flow of blood and tears and tried to concoct a story for Stephan to tell his parents. Plain clumsiness wasn’t going to help with this one. Zachriel gently cautioned that no one likes a show-off, while Barman couldn’t resist dispensing some advice: “The cool answer would’ve been: ‘What is existential angst, Alex?” Like his avatar Leo Jr. Barman was a fan of Jeopardy!

Although none of us was having as hard a time as Elyon in the guise of the hapless Stephan, Arcadia Court was not exactly living up to its name. Yes, from the ravine behind our houses we could hear fern song, the endlessly unfurling fronds in the ceaseless rain. But beyond that, the equally ceaseless whine of power tools as farther up the mountainside residents sought to improve the value of their lots. From the Wadsworths’ came a constant muted stench, the distinct whiff of unhappiness, and next door, from the Costellos’, often the smell of scorched fish sticks and Leo Jr.’s mother singing, off-key, something about sistahs doin’ it for themselves.

Barman, as Leo Jr., had adjusted most easily to life as a suburban teenager. Skateboard under one arm, fingers casually pinching a “spliff,” revelling in the role of free spirit. “The Dude abides with me,” Barman liked saying- quoting from a Hollywood movie that had recently achieved cult status- amusing us all with the double entendre. “Nice guy, that Leo Jr.” was what everyone invariably said.

Jason was a nice guy now, too, thanks to Yabbashael, but this only gave people more cause for suspicion. “Why isn’t The Wad acting like a wad?” students asked, and gave him wider berth than usual, while the teachers continued to watch him out of the corners of their eyes.

Jessica’s formerly papery skin shone, and curves appeared in places where before there had been alarming concavity. The boys were paying attention in the cafeteria and around her locker, although some kept their distance on account of her being The Wad’s sister. The girls were a different matter. A tiny curly-haired warlord named Montana puffed out her cheeks and told her posse: “If she doesn’t stop stuffing her face she’ll end up like that blimp in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”

“Well, you know how girls can be,” Zachriel said.

“In fact,” said Rachmiel, uncharacteristically snappy, “I don’t.”

It turned out that Bash, who had a fine tenor and could dance, had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the school’s spring production of Jesus Christ Superstar before we’d appeared on the scene. His role made the rest of us nervous, but Zachriel had begun to admire Tim Rice and Sir Andrew’s sympathetic view of the betrayer. “Besides,” said Zachriel, “he gets all the best songs.”

During the day we did our best to avoid each other as our social hierarchies dictated, but at night we lay in our beds in welcome darkness and communicated again without the boundaries of language. Speaking in tongues