A car shoots down the street too fast, a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel, tires squealing as he turns the corner onto Victoria, actually burning rubber, as it’s called, and the recovering terrorist drops her watering can. Reeking fish fertilizer slops onto her sneakers.
She has written letters to city hall requesting a traffic circle (a speed retardant, as it’s called, putting her in mind of the large, soft boy with slivered moons of dirt under his fingernails who shuffled around in a slow-moving cloud at the back of her third-grade classroom before being taken away to wherever children like that were taken away to back then). She has circulated a petition that her neighbours have eagerly signed. They all have small children and animals, as does the recovering terrorist. They are teachers and enviropreneurs and directors of small NGOs that help build medical facilities in developing countries. They’ve promised to fill the traffic circle with indigenous flora, promised to guard against graffiti, to ensure it doesn’t become a dumpsite for used condoms, syringes, Twizzler wrappers, and the inevitable orphaned muffler. But the city just keeps putting them off, citing a litany of bureaucratic impediments. The recovering terrorist has telephoned, again and again. She’s been told, red tape red tape red tape red tape. She’s said, “Look, it’s a traffic circle, a speed retardant we’re asking for here, not a water filtration plant.”
The recovering terrorist has a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingénue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names-Squeaky, Patty, Julie-as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough. When she first stood up at group, about three years ago, and said, “My name is – and I am a terrorist,” she felt none of the relief the small ad in the Georgia Straight had assured her she’d be flooded with.
As the others set their coffee cups down between their feet and clapped supportively (one guy, who she later would come to know as Dieter, even whistled through four fingers wolf-style), she felt like a small-town beauty contestant-Miss Chilliwack promising to end global warming, sectarian strife, and escalating movie theatre prices before the end of her reign. Not like someone who had once burned down a house to bring a petty capitalist to his knees. She kept on going to the meetings, though. There was something reassuring about the camaraderie, a single-mindedness of purpose she hadn’t felt since that night almost twenty years ago when her life cleaved in two.
In the local paper this morning there was a letter to the editor from a Port Moody woman whose daughter had been hit by a car right in front of her house on a quiet residential street. The girl was so small she had rolled out the other side and lay curled like a shrimp. Her teeth were embedded in the roof of her mouth, in the pouches of her cheeks, scattered on the road like a handful of Chiclets. The car just kept on going. What kind of person-the mother asked.
The recovering terrorist slips off a glove and squeezes a few black aphids between her thumb and forefinger, their bodies barely yielding before that satisfying pop and squelch. She thinks about issuing a threat, some sort of ultimatum, targeting the mayor’s office. Her heart rate nearly doubles at the thought, and desire, no, need, swells her throat, and she feels as if she’s choking. Something in her veins actually slithers. I’m jonesing for a Fudgsicle, her son said the other day, and how they’d laughed. Jonesing. What does he know about jonesing? She stumbles up the front steps into the house and is blinded by the sudden shift from sunlit yard to windowless front hall. Light blemishes explode across 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 café 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 São 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 Pokémon 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.