The Antagonist (13 page)

“‘Fuck this noise,’” quoted Owen.

“That’s right,” I said. “Fuck this noise.”

“And you think saying ‘Fuck this noise’ was a realistic option for someone like your mom?”

“Well it was either that or the other option,” I tell Owen after a moment, trying not to raise my voice over the loud grind of tooth enamel happening inside my head. “And look where that got her.”

Owen’s eyebrows twitch behind his glasses. “Seem a little pissed, there, Rank.”

“Well no kidding, Owen.”

I look away from him, toward the house. Conversation over. Conversation too idiotic to be pursued.

We walk. Our footsteps go out of sync for a moment or two, then gradually fall into pace with one another again. It’s impossible to tell if we have made this happen deliberately or not.

“You know,” says Owen, “there’s still a tradition in Flanders. They release one prisoner a year — this is in Switzerland, now. And they get him to do the walk all the way to the Shrine of Saint James in Spain, carrying a heavy pack. And then when he’s finished, once he’s reached the Shrine, he’s let free.”

I sigh.

“Punishment,” I say.

“I don’t know,” says Owen.

I don’t feel like arguing anymore — especially if that’s the best Owen can do — and we’re almost back at the house in any case.

“Have I mentioned how nice it is to see you again?” Owen asks me out of nowhere.

I’m so angry, all I can do is laugh.

07/30/09, 10:16 p.m.

HERACLITUS IS SAYING THAT
no man can step twice into the same river and Rank is thugging it up for the boys saying, Yes you can. Of course you can. Duh. Out there is the Saint John River and we could go out and walk to it right now and I would step in it, and then step out of it again, and then step in it again and then I would have stepped into it twice. There. So take that ’Clitus. How do you like that, Captain Clit?

Wade is rolling around on the floor laughing. He’s been doing this, at various volumes, for the last hour or so. It is 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon and they are all, of course, stoned brainless. They are doing what they always attempt to do when stoned brainless: talk philosophy. As second-year humanities students, Adam, Kyle and Rank all had to take the pre-Socratics course. Wade is doing a year of sciences in the hope of gaining entrance into the Engineering program at some point, and therefore he gets to refer to the other three as art fags. Rank finds this hilarious — for Wade is the biggest such fag of the bunch of them. Kyle is simply doing whatever he needs to make law school happen. Adam is an all-around grade-maker — a kind of robot who seems to hoover up knowledge and file it away as a matter of protocol, as opposed to deriving any kind of enjoyment or pleasure out of it. And Rank is your average directionless undergrad, hoping one day he’ll arrive at a class and the professor will open his mouth and all of a sudden Rank will know exactly where he is supposed to go and what he is supposed to do. Which is to say, none of them come across as particularly passionate about Arts and Humanities — they are all too busy enacting a private duty.

Which makes Wade the only real zealot in the group. If you mention Led Zeppelin one too many times in his presence, he will veer into ecstasy. He’ll not only deliver a lecture about the timeless, groundbreaking brilliance of Jimmy Page’s guitar — if you let him continue in this vein, he’ll actually start in on their album cover art. He’ll give you a breakdown of the Arthur C. Clarke novel that inspired the cover for
Houses of the Holy
, and even tell you how the guy who took the photo was a member of some British design group who did album covers for all the big art-rock outfits like Genesis and Pink Floyd back in the day. At which point, he’ll be staggering over to his record collection to show you a few pertinent examples, and that’s when you’ll realize you should have changed the subject long ago.

Captain Clit
, wheezes Wade now.

The only time any of them get passionate about what they are learning at school are times like these, stoned brainless and trying to outdo one another.

No, no, no! shouts Kyle over Wade’s rug-muffled hee-haws. Kyle sinks from his armchair onto his knees in order to be closer to Adam and Rank — who are sprawled on the Sally-Ann-tastic couch — when he makes his point. As always, he gestures with the spout of his beer bottle for emphasis.

No, Rank. He’s not talking about the river, like a river with a name — the Nile or the Saint John or the Thames or whatever. You’re thinking about a river as a single, solid object — but he’s talking about, like, a moving body of water. It’s all a gazillion water molecules right? All different.

Rank knows what Kyle is on about but he’s enjoying playing the thick-headed moose to Kyle’s impassioned orator.

Bullshit, man, grunts Rank. We go out there, I stick my foot in the water, it’s fucking wet. It’s wet from the river. I stick my other foot in, it’s not a different river that got my other foot wet. It’s still the Saint John River, and I’m still wet.

You’re getting too caught up in names, man.

What’s in a name, really? asks Wade from the floor. Of all things, this is what starts Adam giggling.

Let’s say we go out there right now, and I push you in the river . . . says Rank, leaning back against the couch, the more comfortably to spin his scenario.

Rank, huffs Kyle, it’s not about getting
wet
.

Yeah it is. That’s what he’s on about. That’s what happens when you step, or for our purposes let’s say get pushed, into a river. You’re wet and it sucks. So let’s say I push you into the river and you flail around and glug for a while but eventually you crawl back out. You’re shivering and you’re soaking wet. I push you in again. Does it feel any different the second time around? How about when you get out? Still freezing and soaking wet. So, for good measure, I push you in a third time . . . 

Rank, you’re just . . . this is just turning into a sick fantasy about pushing me into the river. You’re not taking the argument seriously.

He’s also talking about the man, says Adam, smiling but no longer giggling. Rank and Kyle turn to look at him. You never know when Adam is going to interject. Sometimes he’ll just sit there for hours, listening to the rest of them toss bullshit back and forth, and they almost could forget he’s there.

Who, says Rank. Me?

No. Heraclitus. Captain Clit. It’s not just the river he’s talking about; it’s the man.

What man?

The man with the wet foot, says Adam. It’s never the same man, either.

This stops even Kyle for a moment. The spout of his beer bottle hovers, directionless. Rank can feel his eyebrows begin to pinch together as a half-assed comprehension descends, but before he can call bullshit, a question wanders up from Wade, still flat on his back on the floor.

Is it the same foot?

Ever since Wade became a dealer, they have had far too much access to hash and pot and acid and mushrooms than is strictly advisable for college-aged men.
Particularly if one of those men has a juvenile criminal past
, some all-seeing narrator might observe at this point. But it’s hard to turn away from such largesse — they are students, after all. These are supposedly the best years of their lives. They are built to party, just like Wade’s T-shirt says, they are kids in a candy store, which means they are helpless not to indulge. This is what happens when your best friend is a drug dealer, Rank thinks in his more lucid moments. This is what happened to Collie Chaisson, I bet. At some point, your brain just falls out your ass.

But they are the popular boys this year as a result — the campus-god charisma of Rank and Kyle in combination with their stewardship of the Temple’s weekend excesses, added to Wade’s superlative music collection and stereo system, with Adam providing just enough bookish gravitas to keep them from looking like your typical fratboy gang-rape-in-waiting — this, plus an on-site drug connection? They may as well be dipped in gold.

Wade made the connection back in first year. He’d been the only one of them without any kind of scholarship, meaning he had to get a job to see him through. He brooded on this problem as he partied his way through frosh week, when in the middle of a pub crawl it came to him: he could bartend. It so happened that when this occurred to him he was sitting in one of the sketchiest bars in town, a former disco, presently a dive, that nonetheless had retained its Studio-54-era moniker: Goldfinger’s. Wade stood up and staggered over to the bar, tended by a woman wearing a kind of corset-tank top who he’d been looking for an excuse to talk to anyway and asked her, “Where can I apply?”

“Apply for what?” she hollered over the music.

Wade could see from her already-wincing expression that she was expecting a sleazy come-on. He tried for a moment to come up with one:
To be your man, beautiful lady.

“To tend bar. You guys need any help?”

“Right now?” she asked.

“No, not right now, I’m hammered right now.”

“That aint stopping
me
,” she told him, and winked before downing a shot she’d been keeping under the counter.

Wade shivered with pleasure. Not at the shot, or even the wink. It was his first year away from home and he’d never met a woman who said
aint
without any kind of ironic inflection before.

So Wade tended bar at Goldfinger’s his entire first semester at university and quickly discovered that a) it was disgusting work and he hated it and the woman who said aint looked so serious all the time because she was trying not to smile — she had brown teeth — and b) he didn’t have it in him to spend three nights a week dodging both punches and vomit ’til one in the morning (followed by another grisly hour of clean-up) while maintaining any kind of GPA to speak of.

The upside? There were drugs at Goldfinger’s. But that led to yet another downside of the job — the fact that most of his hard-won tips were going into the baggies he took home with him at the end of every shift.

It took a while for the obvious solution to sink in. In typical Wade fashion, there was no real eureka moment — he simply noticed one day that a great many of his friends — and mere acquaintances even — had come to rely on him for hash and other illicit sundries. His connection at Goldfinger’s, a middle-aged paranoiac coke-addict named Ivor who acted as bouncer in addition to his other, more underground activities, mentioned one evening that if Wade “had any kind of brain on ya,” he might think about charging his friends a percentage.

And the moment he did was the moment he realized he was crazy to keep tending bar three nights a week.

By second year, Wade was in business.

07/31/09, 10:23 p.m.

And so they party that year, our boys. God love the little fellas, how they party. They bond intensely during those pothead philosophy rap sessions — Cheech & Chong meets Plato’s
Symposium
— and consider one another geniuses. They admire and look up to each other, but at the same time harbour their own secret senses of superiority, which keeps them from being too resentful of the others’ particular gifts. And they intuit this — that they have one another’s respect, but not too much, not enough of it to lead to jealousy or outright emulation. They are each their own man — and, in some kind of shared psychic acknowledgement, each has been deemed worthy of the other’s friendship.

They are often seen together as a group, but they pair off just as often too. Because Wade and Kyle have their shared hometown history, they make up one side of the coin, so Rank and Adam come to be the other. Rank and Adam are one of those superficially unlikely-seeming friend-pairings that eventually make a paradoxical kind of sense — in accordance with the eternal principle of “opposites attract,” one can only suppose. Rank’s big-mouthed bruiser alongside Adam’s introverted aesthete are sort of complementary — they click. They tone down what’s most provocatively stereotypical about each other. Just as Rank’s fellow gland-cases no longer compete to hurl the weedy Adam out of windows, classmates and profs are no longer as quick to dismiss Rank, for all his overgrowth, as a special-needs, Andre-the-Giant goon.

It’s a fact that his association with Adam causes Rank to consider that he, Rank, is perhaps a smarter person than he has given himself credit for all these years. People consider Adam deep, if only because he never wastes words — he’s not a bullshitter like Kyle, a smart guy who nonetheless believes the only path to profundity is to run off at the mouth until something intelligent inadvertently emerges. Adam just doesn’t talk if he doesn’t have anything real to say. There are people in their circle who find this annoying, and unnerving, and Rank was for a while one of them, but now he can’t help but think that there’s an enviable confidence in Adam’s zipped lip. He’s not trying to impress anyone. Which is a singular thing in a community of twentysomethings.

So when Adam opens his mouth to pronounce, a part of you trembles, thinking: Oh hell, he’s going to start quoting Kierkegaard or something and I’m going to have to nod a lot and then maybe pretend I have to go to the bathroom. But Rank found he never had to do that. Rank found he could keep up.

Like the talk they had on the way to the liquor store after Rank had walked out on one of his playoff games, thereby pretty much annihilating his academic future. Rank had gone directly to find Adam because he knew Adam would be the only guy on campus who would not realize that he should be utterly appalled and horrified by what Rank had done. You don’t, of course, leave the arena in the middle of a playoff game. Nobody does that. It’s not conceivable. But Adam could be relied upon not to grasp this principle quite as keenly as the other guys in Rank’s acquaintance. Which meant that they could just talk about what Rank had done as if it had been a rational, measured decision as opposed to the cataclysmic middle finger to his future — and his current, quasi-respectable college boy existence — that it was.

“Coach was a dick,” explains Rank.

“Right,” says Adam. “But you’ve been saying he’s a dick all year. Aren’t they all dicks?”

“No,” says Rank. “My high school coach wasn’t a dick.”

“So why is this guy a dick?”

“My high school coach would practically stop the game if a guy even got checked. Whereas Francis figured I should be an enforcer. He put me out there to bash the shit out of guys and I wasn’t gonna do it.”

“Isn’t that part of the game?”

“Yeah, it is,” says Rank after a moment. “It’s everybody’s favourite part of the game. So I quit.”

“I still don’t get why you quit
now,
though. If you knew it was part of the game.”

“It’s like I said, my high school coach coddled us. He was a social worker. I thought I could just keep my head down here and play defence like I did in school. And, you know, I’m good, so the coach gets pissed off but I figure he’s not going to kick me off the team for neglecting to maim people as I was clearly born to do.”

Adam just keeps quiet now — listening.

“Anyway, we’re losing, is the problem. We’re sucking hard. And Francis is practically bashing his head against the wall at half time. And he’s got his eyes closed like he’s praying to Jesus and he’s saying: I’m so sick of having pussies on my team. I’m so sick of trying to coach a bunch of goddamn pussies who don’t even have the balls to get out there and
punish
those bastards. And then his eyes pop open and he bulges them at us like he’s going to pick up a sledgehammer or something any minute and he barks: I want you to put up your hands. Who hasn’t fought all season? I’m fucking serious. Who hasn’t got out there and really slammed someone? And of course he’s glaring right at me, because I’m conspicuous, right, like he saw me at the beginning of the season and he’s been thinking I’m going to crush everything in my wake. But I haven’t, no matter how much pussy talk I get from Francis — and I’ve been getting a lot of it, Adam, and I don’t give a shit. And so he’s looking at me and we’re both aware of this.”