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 how much?” a male voice whimpers. “But this is a Canadian film.” The bureaucrat’s response is sotto voce. In addition to road, sewage, and garbage issues, the Engineering Department handles filming permits, the city’s big cash cow.
“I will not submit my request by phone, because I’ve already done that. I’ve been calling your department for weeks,” the recovering terrorist says, speaking louder than she should, as if the man in front of her is missing his eardrums rather than his larynx. She’s arguing with a guy who has no voice box, albeit a guy using his disability as an excuse to be an asshole. He finally concedes to set up a meeting with the administrator in charge of traffic calming measures. The recovering terrorist glances at the appointment slip he hands her. “July 18! That’s more than a month away. By then-” By then what? Will she be able to hold out that long without slipping through a crack?
The man presses his thumb to his throat and looks past her. “Next.”
Outside, on the City Hall tower, the four faces of the neon clock all show an entirely different time. It’s been this way for years. This is a city on the edge, as it’s called, a city on the edge of an idea. Maybe the idea that time is relative?
“So was that guy a cyborg or what?” her son asks as they make their way down the worn marble stairs to the lobby, and she realizes from his expression that he’s serious. The recovering terrorist takes the opportunity to launch into a lecture about the dangers of smoking. She’s segueing rather nicely from tobacco to crack when her son stops and drops her hand. “But what if someone just stabbed a stick into his throat? Like a maniac? What if it’s not his fault!?” He looks furious. “What if someone did that to you?!” In his face she thinks she can see the man he’ll become. But where will his inchoate sense of injustice lead him?
It’s 4:00, it’s 6:18, it’s 1:45, it’s almost midnight. It’s getting late.
When he was younger the boy was always wanting to know what something was called, like all fledgling humans, from Adam and Enkidu to Kaspar Hauser on down. Manhole covers, squirrels, body parts, graffiti, discarded condoms, black-eyed Susans, facial deformities on fellow passengers riding the No. 20 bus. That got name? That got name? Easy enough until he pointed to something unnameable. That got name? My face? Eyes? No, he howled, that! almost poking her eye out. Eyelashes? Iris? Pupil? But he became inconsolable, a cartoon parody of toddler rage.
It was only later, lying in bed that night, that she began to wonder. Had he meant her soul?
Now his hunger for naming is satiated with his trading cards, hundreds upon hundreds of names and attributes. Vulpix, Nidorino, Pikachu, Torterra, Weezing, Lickitung, Steelix, Uxie, Dusknoir, Deoxys, Gligar, Slugma, the latter’s body made of lava so it can’t stop moving or it will cool and harden. A favourite of the boy’s. Somewhere in Toyko’s Nihonbashi district there is a name factory, no doubt, where adult men and women with orange hair, wearing T-shirts with impossibly cute slogans, brainstorm all day for characters’ names while sipping bubble tea through straws and smoking thin brown Indian cigarettes.