The Antagonist (12 page)

The other time — you remember. You were there. And Kyle was there. And Kyle stood his ground pretty impressively, it seems to me now.

And I think something must happen to my face at that point, because Owen jumps to his feet.

I am talking. In a very low drawl, like a slowed-down recording, I hear myself say: “You know what Gord?”

But Owen won’t let me tell him what. His body is suddenly against mine and he is kind of fox-trotting me into the kitchen and out the front door, calling something to my father about us taking a walk out back to see the creek. I can hear myself talking over him the whole time, still in that low-slow tone but getting louder the farther away Owen manages to get me from my father. Have I mentioned Owen is only around 5 ' 11 "? So I don’t know how he accomplishes this exactly. Years of experience wrangling teenage gland-cases on the ice I suppose.

So we stand on the lawn in front of the house, and I notice I am still yelling, and as I slow down enough to take actual notice of what I am saying and maybe nuance it a little I also notice that my father’s own fulsome shouts are — as always — sounding in vigorous counterpoint to mine from somewhere inside the house. I even hear him bash the crutch against the wall a couple of times by way of emphatic punctuation. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the two of us sound like a couple of raging, incoherent twats. I take a breath and glance over at Owen. His eyebrows are up, his hands in the pockets of his cords.

“Ready?” he inquires.

We take a walk.

07/29/09, 9:14 p.m.

So, you’d think it would be strange hanging out with Owen Findlay after all these years, but in fact it feels as comfortable and familiar as my old bedroom at the back of the house. But when I say “
as
comfortable,” you shouldn’t mistake that to mean “comfortable,” exactly. We head up through the back field and I can’t help but be reminded of the walks we used to take together when I was in the Youth Centre. I know I haven’t spoken much about the Youth Centre, but that’s not because it was such a bad place. The tough-on-crime crowd won’t like to hear this, but I was sort of happy there. It was quiet, for one thing — something I never got a lot of, growing up in the house that Gord built — and my days were totally routinized. People told me when to get up and when to eat and when to shower and when to study and when to exercise and when to go to bed. If Owen’s social work colleagues ever wanted to develop some kind of ideal mental-health retreat geared toward a sixteen-year-old boy who had accidentally nearly killed somebody and whose mother had just died and who couldn’t stand the sight of his father, they would very likely end up with something resembling the Youth Centre. I needed the routine and the quiet but I also needed that overarching sense of being punished — that every morning when I woke up I could be sure I would go through my day enacting a punishment. Every breath of air, every step taken, every morsel of food ingested — everything punitive.

It was Owen’s job to interview me once a week and find out what I thought and how I was doing, but he never wanted to do this in one of the centre’s concrete-coloured interview rooms, adorned as they were with industrial seventies-era office furniture, uniformly orange for some reason, and further bleakened by fluorescent lighting. Instead, Owen always insisted we “take a walk” around the grounds, which wasn’t bad because the grounds overlooked the ocean. And I know I’m starting to make this place sound like more of a resort than a penal institute, but keep in mind that this was on the coast, so pretty much everything overlooked the ocean — pubs, grocery stores, and Youth Centres alike.

The funny thing is, I remember very little about the talks I had with Owen. Mostly I just remember the sound of our feet in the dirt — the dual rhythm of our footsteps. Being lulled by our shared, repetitive trudge. And maybe that’s why, trudging along beside Owen Findlay again after all these years, I can’t help but mention this memory to him — or this lack of memory, maybe. The memory of being lulled and not thinking or talking about much of anything, even though we must have.

“That was the idea,” says Owen. “That was the idea then and now.”

I look over when he says “now,” and he’s smiling at the oncoming woods in the distance.

“Oh, this is great,” I say. “You’re using the same therapeutic techniques on me that you used when I was sixteen years old. I thought I’d come so far.”

“It wasn’t so much a technique as it was just — you know — ‘let’s go for a walk,’ ” says Owen.

I remember this from the old days. Owen says or does exactly the right thing and when you point that out, he shrugs it off as common sense — as the obvious move. It took me a while to figure out that this was one of his techniques as well.

“Horseshit, Owen,” I say.

He smiles again at the approaching trees. Owen still wears the same round, wire-frame John Lennon glasses I remember from when I was a kid, back when his hair was black with flecks of white instead of the other way around. “I worked pretty intuitively in those days,” he tells me. “I thought kids needed to be out and moving around — you in particular. That’s why I started coaching hockey. But it makes sense, right? You get upset, you go for a walk. You walk it off. People do it on instinct.”

“Yeah,” I say, feeling a little bored but also content — again, exactly what I remember from the Youth Centre days. “Gets you out of your head I guess.”

“But it’s meditative too,” says Owen. “It sort of gets you
into
your head at the same time.”

And I think he must be right, if only because my memories of being sixteen and incarcerated are so visceral right now. It’s as if the steady rhythm of our footsteps has put me in a hypnotic state and shot me back in time twenty-four years. A helpless, pleasant vagueness has come over me too — the same state of mind, I realize, that I inhabited the entire year following Sylvie’s death. A sort of contented imbecility. I couldn’t focus on anything, had no concentration, yet certain moments could be unbelievably vivid, and a lot of the time those moments took place on my walks with Owen. I remember the thick, living smell of mud thawing in the early spring. That yellow moment of blindness when the afternoon sun hits you square in the face. A black smear of crow cackling at you from a fencepost.

“I just remembered how you used to take us on all those stupid weekend hikes too,” I tell Owen. “Like in
November
, even.”

“Those were nice! They were good hikes. You would have rather stayed inside playing Atari, I suppose.”

“I would have, yeah. I didn’t have an Atari at home.”

And yes, we talk about other stuff at this point, Owen and I, but it’s stuff I haven’t bothered filling you in on thus far and I’m not going to start now — life stuff: work, family — none of it pertinent to this project you and I are currently engaged with. (By the way, did you think you were getting the whole story all this time, Adam? A complete picture? Were you even arrogant enough to suppose you could detect psychological subcurrents, underlying motivations that perhaps I’m not even aware of myself? Has it occurred to you that I could be making this entire thing up for reasons of my own — maybe just to fuck with you? Well, let me assure you, I’m not, but let me assure you also that my dealings with you in the past have led me to be very careful with the information I give out. Have you noticed, for example, there are basically no women in this story? Except for Sylvie — but you’ve already had your way with her. And Kirsten — but really, I’ve given you nothing about Kirsten except for a name. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson. Her name is all you’re ever going to get.)

We reach the woods and get on the path to the creek and I can see the splintered ruins of the mini Tarzan playland Gord set up for me back here when I was a kid. Wooden platforms nailed high up in the branches of the best climbing trees, strategic ropes hanging here and there — ancient now, a couple of them snapped off where other kids must’ve tried to swing from them — hopefully not from one of the tree-top platforms, otherwise Owen and I might be coming across a half-pint skeleton at some point. No tree house — Gord was never much of a carpenter — but a vestigial “fort” sits in the distance. More boards nailed to a circle of trees to form a rough enclosure. I remember feeling invulnerable behind that half-assed barricade, gleefully whiffing one crabapple after another at countless invading enemies.

Finally Owen and I arrive at the creek and we stand there and we look at it piddling away.

“It’s shrunk,” I remark to Owen.

I think he’s going to say something about how I’ve grown and it just looks that way, but he says, instead, “Not a lot of rain this summer.”

I crouch down and let the water piddle across my hand just for something to do. I remember doing the same thing as a kid — just hanging out, bored, by the creek, and reaching out to touch it every once in a while as though it were a friend or a pet.

“Well, this is scintillating,” I say, straightening up after another moment or two. “Should we head back?”

“All right,” says Owen. “Admit it, though. You feel better after the walk.”

“Well I don’t feel like I wanna tear Gord’s head off anymore, not right this minute anyway, no.”

“See?” says Owen. “You doubted.”

“I wasn’t saying walking is a bad thing, Owen, I didn’t mean to criticize you back there, I’m just saying those were some frigging long walks you made us go on. You had us walking all day sometimes. Was that supposed to be part of our punishment? Like did the province order we had to walk a certain number of miles every week?”

We turn and head back in the direction from which we came, and Owen shakes his head.

“Your ‘punishment’! You’re happy as a pig in shit locked in a room with a television set but the moment someone takes you out for exercise and fresh air it’s — Oh my god! What did I do to deserve this?”

“I’m just saying,” I say as we crunch our way past my old fort again. “Those were some long walks.”

“You know, there are still Catholic pilgrims who’ll walk for over a month to reach the holy sites.”

“Yes but Catholics are insane,” I point out. “They worship martyrs. People who were burned at the stake and eaten by lions and tortured to death. The more you suffer, the more gold stars you get. So of course they’re gonna walk for a month straight, that’s as good as it gets, that’s right up there with self-flagellation. Look at me! My feet are mangled stumps! Look how pious I am!”

Owen, who I happen to know is carrying a set of rosary beads on him at this very moment, laughs his head off at this.

“And besides,” I say. “At least the pilgrims have some kind of destination at the end of it. They’re not just out there walking around for the hell of it. They’re trying to get to Lourdes or wherever.”

“I don’t know if that’s true, now,” says Owen, reaching behind his John Lennon glasses to finger a laugh tear out of the inner corner of his eye. “I mean you don’t
have
to do all that walking to get to Lourdes or the Shrine of Saint James in Spain, say. You can take a plane, or a bus. The walk is optional. People choose to do that walk for a reason.”

“So they can suffer,” I explain.

“No,” says Owen. “For penance.”

“That’s what I mean. To punish themselves.”

“I don’t believe it’s the same thing.”

“Yeah well walk for a month straight to the Shrine of Saint James or wherever and then tell me you don’t feel like you’ve been punished, Owen,” I say.

“Ah dear,” says Owen, craning his head back and smiling up at the sky now that we’re out of the woods and trudging back across the field. “Whatever happened to that god-fearing young man in his confirmation photo?”

I feel a bit aggravated with Owen now, like it’s not very good social worker strategy to bring up the very thing that made me so pissed off I had to leave the house in the first place. Besides, Owen knows as well as anyone what happened to that pious young man.

“He got old,” I say.

“Penance,” continues Owen, pretending not to notice I’m annoyed. “Is a very deliberate process. It’s thoughtful. You engage in it because on some level you need to. It isn’t something that’s inflicted on you from the outside. You go willingly.”

I decide in that instance to get in an argument with Owen.

“Then why,” I say, “is it always so repetitive — so, like, mind-numbingly repetitious? It’s not about being thoughtful — it’s about
rote
, like having to recite the times tables in school — it’s about drilling stuff into your brain, precisely so that you don’t have to think about it anymore. Or anything. You know what my mother used to do, when she was worried about something? If Gord was off on a tear or something? She’d haul out her fucking rosary and babble Our Fathers and Hail Marys until she was blue in the face.”

“Well, maybe that helped her,” says Owen.

“It did help her,” I say. “It helped her not to think. It helped her to stay put and let herself get walked all over. It helped her to tolerate suffering, like a good Catholic lady, instead of saying,
Fuck this noise!
and putting an end to it. It was a huge help to my mother, her Catholic faith.”

Owen doesn’t say anything. You have to know Owen as well as I do to understand that Owen not saying anything when it is manifestly his turn to do so is one of the ways Owen goes about “saying” something — usually something really irritating once you settle down to decoding it.

But I refuse to decode. I just let the silence be silence, ignoring whatever it is that Owen is psychically attempting to beam into my brain.

And after he’s finished this silent transmission, he follows it up — as he always has — with a seemingly simple, seemingly innocent question.

“What could she have done differently, do you suppose?”

I guess I should have been ready for it, but I glance over at Owen with my mouth hanging open. The question is so outrageous, and so
Owen
in that shrugging, fake-naive manner I remember from when I was a kid — I can barely even start to form a word.

“I just
told
you,” I say after a moment. “Jesus Christ, I just told you what she could’ve done differently, Owen.”