Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2011

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright Zsuzsi Gartner, 2011

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

Please see page vi for an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Gartner, Zsuzsi Better living through plastic explosives / Zsuzsi Gartner. Short stories. ISBN 978-0-670-06518-9 I. Title. PS8563.A6747B48 2011 C813.54 C2011-900102-0

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

for John and Dexter

PLANET B

Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in the following publications: Summer of the Flesh Eater in The Walrus ; Floating Like a Goat in Grain ; Investment Results May Vary in Vancouver Review ; The Adopted Chinese Daughters Rebellion as The I-Ching of Kris Kringle in The Georgia Straight ; What are we doing here? in Toronto Life ; and Better Living Through Plastic Explosives in The New Quarterly .

Excerpt from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, copyright 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Barrett L. Dorko, P.T., quotation reprinted by permission of Barrett L. Dorko, P.T., a clinician, writer, and teacher living in Ohio: barrettdorko.com .

Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
Words and Music by David Stewart and Annie Lennox. Copyright 1983 by Universal Music Publishing MGB Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered by Universal Music MGB Songs. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Take Me To The River
Words and Music by Al Green and Mabon Hodges. Copyright 1974 IRVING MUSIC, INC. and AL GREEN MUSIC, INC. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Controlled and Administered by IRVING MUSIC, INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Excerpt from THE AGONY OF FLIES: NOTES & NOTATIONS Bilingual Edition by Elias Canetti, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann. Translation copyright 1994 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

CONTENTS

SUMMER OF THE FLESH EATER

Field Notes on the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type

AFTER ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

Understand that pity is not what were looking for. We are men, we remind each other as often as we can, and we must bear that burden. Forgetting was what got us into trouble in the first place. Its a weak word, trouble . But thats what came to mind when someone finally bought the Wong-Campeau place at the south end of the cul-de-sac. Stefan Brandeis took one look at the silver Camaro Z28 in the driveway and said, Vroom, vroom. Here comes trouble. He was kidding, of course. Who could have believed that a barbarian was at the gates?

Their agent had priced the property before the market started to clench, but with their Ritalin-infused twins at Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, an International Baccalaureate school we knew doubled as a rehab centre, the Wong-Campeaus couldnt afford to come down. That kind of corked-up familial stress inevitably manifests as fault lines. In other words, 2781 Chatham Close was, as Trevor Masahara succinctly put it, looking like crap. Marcus van der Houte had offered to fluff their place at a generous discount, but the W-Cs declined. ( Fluff is not a term Marcus himself would use. His business card reads Art Direction for Real Estate .)

I shouldve done it gratis, Marcus later said, more than once, more times than might have been necessary, while draining the last of another shaker of his signature fig-infused vodka martinis. A couple of orange PVC Rashid pieces out frontone of us, possibly Karlheinz Jacobsen, observed that the designers cordless Dirt Devil was an isomorphic miracleand the door in Shade-Grown Espresso with a Spa-Blue casing to make the brown really pop All we could do was reassure him that he could hardly be held responsible for all that had happened. Or caveat emptor , as Patel Seth, our Latin scholar, put it.

Damn his carnivorous soul to hell! Kim Fischer had yelled from atop his carport towards the end, brandishing his fists like an Old Testament patriarch or modern-day mullah. Its perhaps not fair to speak of Kim, who with his unisex name and dubious tenor no doubt had more to contend with than the rest of us. His resilience was something to marvel at, though. We like to think hes running a raw-food retreat somewhere in the West Kootenays, or way out east, the Gatineaus maybe, remarried to a woman who appreciates his way with a paring knife, who understands that taking a pumice stone to the rough skin of your heels does not necessarily make you any less of a man.

But this isnt about Kim. You could say this is about evolution. You could say weve developed a deep personal appreciation for Darwin, the man and the theoristhis dyspeptic stomach, his human frailties, his ability to cling to contradictory desires. Weve weighed anchor aboard the Beagle , if only in our dreams, charted our own Galapagos of the soul and found it wanting.

He moved in on the Canada Day long weekend. As the children circled the cul-de-sac on their Razors and Big Wheels, like planes stacked in a holding pattern, he arrived with a U-Haul hitched to the Camaro and started unloading. No moving company, just him. He wore whats commonly referred to as a muscle shirt but what some would call a wife beater. Stefan Brandeis noted that he hadnt seen a grown man in cut-offs that tight since Expo 86. (We later had a spirited debate about whether his was in fact a conventional mullet or ersatz hockey hair.) The first thing wheeled out of the U-Haul was a hulking, jerry-built barbecue. He seemed friendly enough. He flashed what Trevor Masahara called a big, shit-eating grin at those of us whod gone over to welcome him with a pitcher of iced Matcha tea spiked with Kentucky Gentleman.

Next page