The Antagonist (11 page)

So what I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily have the time and concentration I was once able to bring to this little project. Just to let you know in advance.

But guess what. I’ve looked over the last few emails and now I remember exactly where we left off.

Adam!

07/27/09, 10:31 p.m.

KYLE AND WADE ARE THE MOST
popular guys on campus, reason being that both last year and this they have rented (correction: their parents have rented) an entire house just for the two of them. It isn’t a big house, or a particularly nice house, because who is going to rent that kind of house to a couple of twenty-year-old boys? So it is a student house, meaning a dive. But it has a huge yard, a cavernlike living room, and three bedrooms (they call the third the “crash pad” and make it available on a first-come-first-served basis to shitfaced compadres). They have of course named the house. The house has been dubbed, with equal parts reverence and irony, the Temple.

Kyle Jarvis is a magic man, gliding through the echelons of undergraduate society with ease and impunity. He plays rugby, so he might mingle with the jocks. He plays guitar and, god knows, loves himself some weed, so he’s cool with the hippies. He pulls down grades — a boy of his background dare not falter in this regard — which gives him an in with the keeners. Finally, barely out of his teens, Kyle is already an accomplished cocksman. You’d want to kill the bastard if he wasn’t such a decent guy.

Wade Kotch, on the other hand, Kyle’s best friend since Grade 6, enjoys loud music and is mostly majoring in hash. The pair are basically a middle-class echo of Mick Croft and Collie Chaisson — like if some overseeing deity had attacked a portrait of the aforementioned hoodlums with a paint-scraper and chipped away the layers of criminality and skeeze. There goes the smartass smirk in favour of the winning half-smile.
Chip-chip
go the remnants of Chaisson’s freckled spare tire to reveal the concave gut of Wade, swathed in one of those ugly-ass raw-cotton hoodies that was practically a Gen-X uniform in those days.
Chip chip chip
go the ball caps.
Chip
go the homemade knuckle tattoos — all the nastiness flaking away until at last they stand revealed, this wholesome new version of Croft and Chaisson: Jarvis and Kotch. Couple of really good guys.

Getting back to Kyle. The thing about Kyle’s magic is, it makes him a uniter, an axle. He brings the disparate social echelons together in their mutual attraction to himself. He knows this; everybody knows this. So when these diverse campus factions — typically so opposed — are gathered together one raucous evening at the Temple (“gathered in Dionysian worship,” Kyle likes to joke), the venue is understood to constitute a no man’s land, a place of peace. No sectarian conflict will be tolerated.

So say some thug from the hockey team spots some skinny wiener in his kill-me uniform of a cardigan and glasses, decides to dispense with introductions and instead to pick the wiener up, hoist the now squirming wiener over his head, and march over to a nearby open window to the ecstatic cheers of his hockey compadres. Kyle, in such a circumstance, could be relied upon to bound across the room, station himself between the thug and open window, sternly point at the thug with the spout of his beer bottle, and say, like dog trainer to a misbehaving mutt: No. No, Rank. Not here. Not in this house, man. No.

Chastened, knowing he has violated the code of the Temple, the thug reluctantly but gently places the wiener back on solid ground. His hockey buddies pout, jeer briefly, then turn away to look for girls.

The first person to speak is the wiener. “Thank you,” he says, rubbing his body where the thug’s pipelike fingers had dug into him.

Kyle turns a look of scorn onto the thug. “He just fucking
thanked you
, Rank.”

Who in the universe but Kyle could make a normally unrepentant thug feel so very repentant — when all he was doing was acting the way any self-respecting thug was expected and encouraged to act?
Jeez
. The thug in question understands what has to happen next.

He turns and addresses the wiener.

“Sorry, man. Just getting a little exercise.”

The glasses shift toward him, flicker light into the thug’s eyes. “No problem.”

“Now shake hands,” says Kyle.

Rank winces. “Kyle, fuck’s sake man.”

“This is my house. This is the Temple. It is a Temple of friendship, and it is a Temple of love.”

Only Kyle Jarvis can get away with saying this sort of thing.

So the two young men roll eyes and shake hands.

“Come with me,” insists Kyle, and ushers the two new acquaintances over to the kitchen. Together the three of them stand solemnly before the fridge like it is an altar. Kyle opens it with a somehow ceremonial yank, pulls out a couple of beer, and cracks them for each of his guests before handing them over.

“Now,” he instructs. “You two stand here with your beer and get to know each other. Don’t come out of the kitchen until you’re best friends. I’m serious.”

With that, he leaves them.

They regard each other. Rank pushes out his breath, making his lips flap a little. It isn’t an encouraging sound, but the wiener doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make the first appeasing move. Also, he seems to know precisely the right angle to point his glasses in order to make them reflect light into the eyes of the person in front of him. Safe behind his glasses, he gives nothing away. He just waits.

After a moment, Rank speaks.

“Can I say something here, Adam?”

“Certainly, Rank.”

“I know we haven’t known each other long. But, here it is. You are — bar none — the greatest guy I’ve ever met.”

The glasses shift then, pointing downward at the blackened kitchen linoleum. A silent, sombre nod, followed by a slightly choked-up throat-clearing. “That means . . . so much to me Rank. You have no idea.”

Rank begins to choke a bit himself. “And I . . . I just wanna say . . .”

“Just say it, Rank. It’s okay. I’m here.”

“I’d really like to offer you a hand job.”

Adam can’t keep it up and ends up spraying beer across the kitchen.

So the ritual was a success. Chalk up another for the magic man.

07/28/09, 12:03 a.m.

I’m sorry but I just have to stop and remark upon what a total trip down memory lane it is, being here, for me. I didn’t quite realize it until Owen Findlay came by for a beer the other night. He brought over a bunch of copies of those pics from my hockey days that Father Waugh had mentioned on the phone — one set for me and one for Gord. Neither of us had seen them before. It’s weird to see pictures of yourself as a kid that you’ve never seen before — it’s as if there’s a version of you, a double, that you didn’t even know existed, hanging around somewhere in the past.

So doesn’t Gord promptly haul out his own photo album (by which I mean hollers at me to haul it from the top shelf of the bookcase for him), preparing to set sail into Rankin family history.

The moment Gord opens the album, photos cascade from its pages and into his lap because after Sylvie died he couldn’t be bothered to maintain it properly. He likes to take the snapshots out of the book to show people and then just shoves them back in the album without bothering to reaffix any of them. I am pretty sure this is not just because he’s lazy. It’s because he doesn’t know how to do it — he’s never bothered to figure it out. Keeping albums was my mother’s job.

So there’s Gord with a crotchful of photos and he makes poor Owen sit there listening to extended narratives about every last one. Here’s the boy playing street hockey with his friends — already an enforcer, looka the size a the, etc. Here he hulks in his Icy Dream uniform on his first day of work, all of fourteen years old. Here he is with his lame certificate stating that he has graduated from “Hot Fudge High,” which was what Icy Dream Inc. called the weekend training seminar they offered to franchise employees. I remember at the time being pretty excited by the whole thing, because it meant we had to go into the city for the weekend and stay in a hotel, and I was the youngest person in the whole seminar, even though I didn’t look it. Gord introduced me to everyone there as his “new assistant manager” and at the bar afterward someone handed me a pint without a second glance.

Owen accepts every photo my father hands over, gazes at it for however long it takes for Gord to unfurl the fascinating Rank-centric anecdote attached, then politely places the photo in a growing stack on the end table beside him in time for Gord to hand him another. I decide that I will allow this to continue for as long as it takes me to hook up the wireless modem I’ve been fiddling with all day. It might seem a little rude toward Owen, but it’s good to have Gord distracted and nattering at someone else for a while. Besides, the modem has been making me crazy, and I can’t stand to put it aside until I’ve got it hooked up. My computer won’t pick up the signal. I have spoken, after waiting on hold for two successive eternities, to the tech support people representing both the manufacturers of the computer and the modem — neither party being of any help whatsoever — and I refuse to do it again. If I can’t figure it out myself, I am going to throw the computer away and buy another, more expensive one. I don’t give a shit anymore.

So as Gord hands over photographs to Owen, I sit there going back and forth between the modem and my computer, checking for a connection, occasionally giving absent-minded answers to Gord’s inane promptings, e.g.: “Remember that now Gordie?” “Didn’t care for that, much, did he son?” “Guess you showed them, eh, Gordie?”

And I’m muttering, “Yup. Yeah, I remember.
Shit!
This stupid
 . . . Yeah, I know Gord.
Goddamnit!
”

And Owen is saying things like: “He barely fits into that sweater!” and “That’s not the same sign as they have at the ID now is it? When’d you get that sign changed, Gordon?”

And as pissed off as I am at the computer situation I’m secretly very grateful to have something to distract me from the cure for insomnia that’s happening on the other side of the room.

And that’s when I exclaim: “
You complete and total fucker!”
and notice that I have shouted these words into an uncharacteristic sound vacuum. So I glance up at Gord and Owen who are leaning toward each other like school boys sharing a textbook, only they’re not reading, they’re looking at a picture together.

And Gord has stopped talking, so I know it’s a picture of Sylvie.

What’s more, I know what photo it is. I don’t know how but I do. Maybe just because I saw it and handled it so many times in my youth — and saw Gord and Sylvie do the same, because everyone in my family always loved the damn thing, were always passing it around, taking it out of the album to show friends and relatives. It was just one of those photos. In these days of digicams you can take a picture a second and delete whatever looks like crap, so a decent snap of someone — where their eyes aren’t half closed or they don’t look like they have six chins — doesn’t have the same magic of really good old photographs. The uncanny luck of a picture that not only gets across everything good in the moment, but somehow composes itself into a representation of something
more
, something beyond that moment — even better than the moment itself.

It’s almost like a lie, a good photo. An unbearable lie. Like that moment you feel yourself starting to wake up after the best dream of your life. And you hold your eyes shut and you just lie there; you can’t stand it, you’re so disappointed to be waking up.

It’s the photograph of me and Sylvie after my Confirmation — that’s the photo Gord is holding. He took it himself, out in the church parking lot, immediately following the ceremony.

Finally Gord speaks.

“Mother and son.”

“That’s a nice shot,” murmurs Owen. He looks like he would be happy to sit there gazing away at the image of me with my buck teeth and tan corduroy suit for as long as Gord is willing to hold it up in front of him.

Without even thinking about it, I’ve shoved the laptop aside and am on my feet, reaching out to retrieve the snapshot, which Gord is now holding out to me.

Why did I want to see it again? As I turned it over in my fingers, I could see that I hadn’t forgotten a single detail. It was all there, the late morning sunlight, the gleaming cars behind us, the expanse of beige corduroy, purchased in a panic because I’d had the first of my two major growth spurts practically the day before and it was the only thing in the store that fit me. And, oh, it was godawful. And I was godawful. I was a post-growth-spurt mess. My teeth seemed to stick out a mile. My tie, which was Gord’s tie, was about the same distance wide and a glaring kelly green. If I had still looked like a child, this clown suit would have been okay, passable, because kids can get away with anything — kids are meant to look ridiculous — but I looked like a young man. A young man with no idea how to dress. Therefore, an imbecile. To top it all off, I still had my pre-growth spurt haircut — prodigious, everywhere, past my ears. Fine on a child, insane on a man in a corduroy suit. Why hadn’t Sylvie cut it? Like I said, I had grown up in a day, practically. None of us was ready.

In the photo, I am grinning from ear to ear. Sylvie is also grinning from ear to ear. She is peeping out from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my waist and her tiny hands locked together against my abdomen. There’s a slight look of incredulousness on her face, because I remember her exclaiming, as we posed:
I can barely get my arms around him anymore!
And that’s when I started laughing, giving the buck teeth a nice healthy airing, at which Gord started laughing, followed by Sylvie, who was also grunting as she reached around me, to indicate what an incredible effort it took.

And then,
snap
. Shot.

We are like — I don’t know how else to explain it — Sylvie and I are like two suns in this picture. We radiate.

And then Gord ruins it. As Gord has always ruined it. He nudges Owen.

“Young Gordie was always a bit of a mama’s boy, truth be told.”

I remember being this angry only a couple of times. Once was in that room at the courthouse with Sylvie, Gord, and Trisha after Gord insisted my suffering mother should absent herself from my trial and I, in turn, insisted I was going to kill him and Trish, in turn, insisted Gord should go get a drink from the water fountain down the hall.