Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Here in Room 017, Block C, in the bowels of one of those community colleges proliferating bunny-like on the outskirts of the metropolis, cheek-to-rump with industrial pig farms, ginseng plantations, and warehouse outlets, sarcasm might as well have been an advanced form of skin disease. She used to be so good with words. Now, more often than not, Alex found herself at a loss. There was a time when she had been fluent in more than one language. Alex and Rufus used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Dromma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda! It was lingonberry of another tongue-tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.

While the rest of the class fiddled with their iPods and iPhones, Corinna D. drifted towards a workstation as if walking the red carpet, plopped down, and swivelled her chair around, thumbs already busy texting one of her cousins.

It was the year provincial health insurance had started covering Botox injections and teeth-whitening technology for the disenfranchised. Thirty-three-year-old female heroin addicts who had appeared sixty now looked like ageless Fireball XL5 puppet people. They jittered around expressionless, eyes wide, their remaining teeth gleaming like Chiclets between pillowy Jolie Lips™.

Buildings were crumbling; major developments sat abandoned, skeletal. Steel girders pointed skyward with nothing cloaking them, but the people who squatted amongst them looked defiantly better. This was the new harm reduction. The Atlanta-based Journal for the Society of Aesthetic Medicine published a study confirming that positive self-image was the first step towards recovery and self-reliance.

It wasn’t only the prematurely aged homeless who were looking younger. A candidate for mayor was shown on the news playing beach volleyball. Her face was drum-tight, and saucy pigtails sprouted from the sides of her head, but her cellulite-buckled butt cheeks, split by a thong, looked like navel oranges in a sling.

She had a good serve, though, the anchor and the weatherman agreed, a damn fine serve.

Alex, who used to report on insurgents in Chad and Sudan, was perched at her breakfast bar, two weeks’ worth of newspapers and flyers towering at her elbows, spying on a student after hours. She was surprised to find the name of the lawyer Corinna D. had said Cousin Kevin had called-even before he called the police about the body- right there in the phone book, between Wells Fargo Financial and Wells, Jocelyn, aromatherapy. Her chest felt unaccountably bound as she pressed the numbers, as if she were lying abandoned in a play dungeon in second-hand fetish gear. She who had interviewed a leader of the Janjaweed in Darfur and not broken a sweat. She had felt not so much fear then, but anger. And bewilderment.

“I know the party in question,” the lawyer informed Alex, but wouldn’t-couldn’t-disclose anything more.

She told him: “You have to understand; I’m just doing my job.”

It sounded feeble, even to her. What was she now, some low-level SS officer?

The stink from the classroom carpet was still lodged in her nostrils. That, and the smell of something altogether worse, thumbprinted in memory from a distance of some years and many miles.

Alex and Rufus were combing through the takeout pad thai for the remaining shrimp bits when she told him she wanted to quit the college. It didn’t pay that well, anyway. The commute, from Broadway station to Terry Fox, was like spending time in medium security. The industrial carpets were rendering her cataleptic. And there was a moral malaise spreading fungus-like among the students that she feared might be contagious.

“Fungal strife.” Rufus laughed. “The jock itch of the soul.”

“It’s not even that they’re hard.” She wanted him to take this seriously. “Hard is at least some kind of position. It’s more like they’re-squishy.” She didn’t mention the body in the garbage bag and her call to the lawyer.

Rufus pointed his chopsticks at her. “Lex, do you think maybe you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a kid?” She was thirty-six; he was six years older but was intent on pretending he hadn’t yet turned forty. He’d recently taken to scootering to work on a collapsible Razor that he could sling across his back in its own little carrying case. He wore a Tyrolean felt hat that had belonged to his Austrian grandfather, but it might as well have been a little striped beanie with a plastic propeller on top. It served her right, she thought, for marrying a man named for a beloved family pet.

They had been together for seven years, and had been living in the duplex on Venables for five now, married. Rufus’s dry wit used to be like kindling stacked around her heart. It was in the giddy days of moving in together that IKEA talk had been born. As he flopped onto the new mattress, Rufus had beckoned, “Join me in Sultan Blunda, a cloud forest of cheap vodka, Astrid Lindgren characters, and common sense.” Now when Alex lay down on the bed, sometimes in the middle of the day, it no longer felt like Sultan Blunda; it felt like a mattress that had gone flat and lumpy. A sad blunder.

When had they stopped talking IKEA? When she inherited that Ethan Allen-style credenza from her mother last summer, her first real piece of furniture, while Rufus had slapped together shelves made of plastic milk crates and two-by-fours in the basement to hold his growing new/old collection of vinyl from stores like Zulu and Red Cat? Places where middle-aged men in black concert T-shirts shot the shit with concave-chested kids who had rogue chin hairs and opinions about everything from whether Muse frontman Matt Bellamy was really the late Jeff Buckley with plastic surgery to the latest conspiracy theory about the government monitoring all Internet use in collusion with an online ad conglomerate. Or was it before that, when she came back from Africa for the last time and tried to convince herself that those who could no longer do could teach?

Rufus was looking at her too intently, his chopsticks noodling in the air as if painting a devil’s Vandyke on her face.

“What?” she said, flicking at the corners of her mouth with her fingers, thinking maybe a bean sprout slick with peanut oil was hanging there maggot-like. “What?”

“Do you ever get the feeling we’re too white?”

His new code word for too old. Did he mean she was too white?

“Smila Blomma,” Alex said, aiming for playfulness, hoping for some esprit de corps. “Fira, Slabang.”

The words floated in the air like cat dander for what seemed like several very long dead seconds. Rufus finally smiled indulgently. “SKARPT!”

Skarpt like a knife. Skarpt like a machete.

Was Rufus being deliberately mean or-worse-had he forgotten?

It was the year of the endless civic election. Campaign signage was everywhere, but this was indicative less of the spirit of democracy than of a sense of desperation. A new municipal bylaw allowed citizens to accept payment to display signs and billboards. You could tell when someone was really hard up when ads for Farsighted People and the Fiscally Responsible Folks and Greener than You, plus various independents, all jostled for space on the same patchy scrap of front lawn. The lawns of the kind of people who donated sperm to fertility clinics at $50 a pop and dreamt of selling a kidney on eBay. It was hard to pass judgment; these weren’t easy times.

Sustainability Is for Suckers, an FRF slogan read. The Tim Hortons on Kingsway had it printed on their coffee-cup sleeves. The Kamper Kids wore the discards as armbands. After all, everyone had a right to an opinion.

Alex told her students to write up Corinna’s incident on No. 5 Road in inverted-pyramid style for the following week.

She said: You can interview Corinna-she’s a primary source. She’s a witness.

She said: Remember to write it with the most important information near the top so that an editor can cut from the bottom up.

She said: Bottoms up, get it?

Xmas Singh said: Hahaha.

She said (to herself): Bonus points for using actual facts.

Not so long ago Rufus used to talk to Alex, really talk, about just about everything, as he sat on the toilet, bathroom door ajar so they could hear each other, peeing for what seemed to her an inordinately long time. A feeble trickle like early-spring melt off a mountain stream. She’d urged him to get his aging prostate checked, fearing the small chestnut gland would start ballooning with tumours bagpipe-like throughout his groin.

Mostly Rufus had talked about his designs. He’d launched a small company with a friend a decade ago that specialized in sustainable designs rooted in the natural world. “Bionical creative engineering,” Rufus called it. He’d