Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

her retinas. When she reaches the telephone she punches the speed-dial, hoping Dieter will answer.

Dieter is trying to picture Tim with an AK-47. Lucy is trying to picture Tim and Dieter on a date. She listens to Dieter splutter loudly in disbelief as a woman at the next cafe table makes a show of dragging her chair away from them.

“He’s so verklemmt, I can’t stand it,” Dieter says. Every time Lucy and Dieter meet, Dieter obsesses about how much he hates Tim, to the point where Lucy has begun to suspect Dieter is actually attracted to Tim but can’t admit it. Because Dieter likes men with moral fibre and a supple sense of humour, and Tim, from the evidence they’ve seen, gets what little fibre he has from a cereal box, and his idea of funny begins and ends with a knock-knock joke. (Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!)

“You know,” Dieter says, putting his hands around his throat and gagging like a cat processing an enormous hairball.

The waiter comes by and tells them the coffee of the day is a Brazilian Go-go Carnival, but organic, fair-trade, shade-grown Brazilian, not rainforest-stripping, parrot-habitat-destroying, barefoot-peasant-exploiting Brazilian, therefore explaining its $5.95-a-cup price tag. This sets Dieter off again.

“And a Brazilian businessman. Who the fuck cares?”

This is the real sticking point, the one Lucy agrees with. Think globally, act locally. It’s just too easy to hie off to mainland China with your Gap khakis rolled around a Free Tibet!! banner in your backpack, while crack-addicted babies gnaw on french fries and stare listlessly from strollers parked outside the Money Mart (“Real People. Real Cash.”) right here on Commercial Drive. For Lucy it always comes down to the babies, and soon she’s holding back Lollapalooza-sized tears that threaten to start smashing guitars all over the stage of her face.

If Tim had been trying to save babies, wide-faced, velvet-lashed Brazilian babies, she might even admire him a little. But she somehow can’t imagine Tim-fine-boned, twitchy, verklemmt Tim-toting a semi-automatic and taking his turn guarding the cellar of a house in the suburbs just outside of Sao Paulo, peeing into an Orangina bottle, eating without a knife and fork, letting a balaclava mess with his ginger hair, for the sake of babies.

“It’s good for me to vent like this,” Dieter says. “It keeps me under control. It scratches the itch. You”-he takes Lucy’s hand, the one not playing catapult with her spoon-“you need a diversion.”

“I have Bruno and Foster, you jerk. And The Hound.” She launches her spoon at him and he ducks to one side. “I have my work, my garden-bitch show.” She knows what he’s thinking. That if she had a real diversion she wouldn’t phone him with such frequency, such urgency; she wouldn’t continually be so close to slipping. If she had a diversion, she wouldn’t be so focused on what might happen to Foster.

But her fear is her diversion. It keeps her in check. Her fear is state-of-the-art titanium crampons on the frozen icefall that has for so long been her life.

SUCKER PUNCH

The recovering terrorist sits on her front steps watching her husband assemble their son’s new unicycle. The boy is so excited he starts clutching at himself as if he has to go to the bathroom. “Do you have to go the bathroom?” she calls out, but he ignores her. And her heart does a funny thing. It flops over in her chest like a fish gasping on a dock.

The boy, at age seven, has decided to master every form of wheeled transport known to mankind. His skateboard and scooter and bike are covered with Pokemon stickers, and the boy never tires of explaining how the fierce little creatures evolve and what weapons they have (wake-up slap, mean look, skull blast, hyper voice, Zen headbutt, poison jab, sucker punch, fury attack, gunk shot, aurora beam, worry seed, tail whip, drill peck, lava plume, stun spore-the list of moves is seemingly without end) and the number of “health points” lost with each assault. The one he likes best has blazing fur and can immolate everything in its path. Their dog is named after Houndoom, a fire-breathing horned beast with an eerie howl. The only thing their aging dachshund shares with her namesake is her weird yowling bark.

The unicycle is upright and there goes the boy, swaying from side to side but somehow staying aloft. Her husband runs alongside and turns his head to grin back at her and almost trips over an abandoned Safeway shopping cart that’s angled across the sidewalk, tipping into the gutter. The boy keeps on going, Houndoom at his heels, yelling something that sounds like “Sludge bomb!” before pulling a wet and blobby thing from his pocket and hurling it into the street while her husband clutches his shin and yells, “Fuck!”

“Be careful!” she calls after her son. There’s a hitch in her throat and it comes out sounding like carfool. Be careful. Her lame mantra, her new default middle name.

“Gardening is like warfare and it’s time for you to call in the troops,” The Gardening Dame tells her caller, Sue from Ladner. “Fly parasites, green lacewing, convergent lady beetles-that’s teenaged ladybugs, they’re hot for aphids-and parasitic nematodes, basically little worms that burrow into grubs and weevils Alien-like, stopping them in their tracks before they can take down your tomatoes and basil.”

Sue from Ladner: “I’ve heard Chinese praying mantis is a good predator.”

The Gardening Dame: “Well, they’re amusing to watch, but a little show-offy relative to their effectiveness. Think Owen Wilson versus Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights.”

You weren’t a true terrorist unless you were willing to risk hurting the innocent to achieve your goals. This is the kind of thing they debated at group as they stood around eating Peek Freans and drinking instant coffee during the break, the coffee whitener’s oily sheen creating little rainbows in their cups.

One guy at group had talked about money all the time. Only he called it “moolah.” He had also reminisced about “fivefinger discounts” and boasted that he’d never-ever-paid for a meal or rent. “That’s what girlfriends are for,” he’d said, elbowing Dieter in the ribs. “Oops, you wouldn’t know.” They changed locations twice on the sly before they managed to shake him. Dieter admitted he’d gotten a charge out of that bit of clandestine business, at which Tim rolled his eyes. “What?” Dieter said, his own eyes uncanny behind his industrial-strength lenses. “I like secrets. Is that all of a sudden a crime?” The facilitator, Angelina, told them they were lucky they weren’t in her first group, where there’d been a pro-lifer who kept quoting Horton Hears a Who! in a squeaky little voice: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Now they have a saying, “It’s not about the moolah.” The one thing they are not is mercenary.

What Lucy’s been thinking lately: Was there really any difference between financial reward and the services of seventy virgins (give or take a few) spread-eagled on a cloud awaiting a martyr in paradise? None that she could see.

When Angelina gave them all T-shirts at Christmas that read It’s not about the moolah, every single one of them went silent and then mushy, hugging one other, some crying, Dieter, glasses on floor, so hard that tears leaked from between his fingers, something Lucy had only ever seen before in cartoons.

ZEN HEADBUTT

The recovering terrorist stands at a counter on the second floor of City Hall waiting to speak with a man who has to press his left thumb against a hole in his throat in order to talk, as if he’s pushing a button on an intercom. His voice comes out filtered, almost electronic sounding, like the Pixar people’s concept of a robotic voice. The boy has been watching from a chair in the open waiting area with too much interest. He jams a thumb against his throat and mouths something she can’t make out. Beam me up, Scotty, she thinks, and laughs, which is a mistake because her son notices, so she tries to look stern.

She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to die for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.

In a nearby cubicle, voices are engaged in a heated negotiation involving explosive black powder, the volume and quantity of semi-automatic gunshots, and squib hits. Plenty of squib hits. “Opening a fire hydrant costs