The Antagonist (10 page)

“Rank, he’s fine, he had his helmet on.”

I stared up at Owen. “No he didn’t — it came off. I heard the crack.”

“It stayed on, Rank. You heard his helmet.”

“Bullshit,” I said, parsing my memory. My memory was insisting that the helmet had come off.

“He’s fine, trust me. Are you coming back to play?”

“I don’t know, Owen.”

“I would like it if you came back to play.”

“I threw up.”

“Do you feel better?”

I thought about it. “No.”

“You have to trust me that he’s okay,” said Findlay. “And you have to get up and come back to the game. Okay? And then you’ll feel better.”

It relieved me a little that he gave me a directive. That he told me what had to be done, and what would be the result. But I was still too scared to budge.

“You want me off this team,” I told him.

“No I don’t. Don’t tell me what I want.”

“This is what happens,” I explained. “This is what I make happen.”

It was the first time I’d said it out loud. Sylvie was a year into her grave, I was seventeen years old, and that was the first time I’d said it out loud.

07/06/09, 6:43 p.m.

Anyway. Findlay eventually got me off the bench. And I finished the game, and Chisholm really was fine. I kept on playing season after season, harder than ever, thinking that at some point if I could just get my blood whooshing loud enough in my ears, if I could just lose myself in the glory of a really great play, I could disappear into it like I used to — that little hatch in my mind would finally drop open again, flushing everything away but what was happening on the ice. But what do you know: just when I was ready to give up, an entirely different escape hatch revealed itself. My game got noticed. I was offered a scholarship, of all things, applied for a student loan on the strength of that, and next thing I know I’m on my way to university — where I met you.

Ready Adam? Because we’re finally getting to the good part — the part you’ll recognize. This is where I, the all-powerful author, get to explore my exciting new character. Let’s really zoom in on him, what do you say? What kind of narrator would I be if I didn’t ruthlessly delve into what makes good old Adam tick, warts and all — oh yes, warts and all! The insecurities, the conglomerate of loser qualities to which he is oblivious, the nerdy tics, the wincing attempts at self-aggrandizement. (And yes, I realize I’ve skipped over a significant detail, a key incident that occurred sometime between crushing Croft’s skull and packing for university, but I believe I’ve already outlined that particular scenario to you in one boiling regurgitative flush and just maybe I’d prefer not to go into it again, okay?)

And so, to begin.

Actually before I begin I feel like I should mention I ran into Kyle not long ago. I wish it could have been Wade, if it had to be anyone — Wade, I imagine, even after all these years, would have blearily stuck out his hand and rambled about his new speakers or his new Guns N’ Roses box set or his new insert-whogivesashit-here — but it was Kyle. And as you’ll recall, there is nothing bleary about Kyle in the least.

“Oh my freaking god,” said Kyle once we’d locked eyes the way teenagers once were rumoured to lock braces when making out. That is, we were stuck together, suddenly and inextricably. Kyle’s head jerked forward on his neck like a bird’s, his mouth fell open, and I knew there was no denying the mutual recognition. The next second he was loping over to me with that same easy, chest-forward stride he used on campus, the walk that made you think his grandfather must have founded the university or something.

Do you wonder where we were, Adam — Kyle and I, meeting up after all these years? I’ll tell you. We were at a Winners in downtown Toronto.

I had deked in off the street to get dry and maybe buy an umbrella because I’d been walking around downtown and the sky had been hanging overhead in a cluster of great grey bellies before finally it belched once then opened up.

How long ago was this
, wonders the man behind the Plexiglas. What time of year was it? What was Rank, townie shitkicker extraordinaire last time we checked, doing wandering downtown TO?

Who knows, Adam? Not you.

If Kyle was at all dubious about approaching the shitkicker apparition in question, he didn’t let that dull his politician’s twinkle. He transferred the two ties he’d been pawing from his right hand to his left and waded in to make my re-acquaintance. Firm handshake, followed by that direct yet easygoing half-smile that got him laid with such maddening efficiency back in school. Cool blue-eyed greeting.

“Rank,” he said. “Man!”

“Hey. Kyle, right?”

I don’t know why I threw that in, that question —
right?
Like there was any doubt either of us remembered one another. Kyle — hemp-wearing student union president, rugby captain, Guatemalan-sweatered, pothead friend to all — he let it pass, or course. Faked along with me.

“That’s right, that’s right. Kyle Jarvis.” He even spoke his last name for me as if I needed a reminder. It was almost embarrassing how readily he accommodated my bullshit. “How you doing, man?”

“I’m good,” I replied. And so on and et cetera. You know how these things go. Maybe I should write the rest of the conversation as translated subtext just to hurry things along.

Kyle: Jesus Christ I don’t know what to say because last time I saw you you were running from the cops after what you did to that guy!

Rank: Yeah I know — crazy, right?

Kyle: And you disappeared and none of us ever thought we’d see you again!

Rank: Yup — same here.

Kyle: I am dying to ask you what the hell happened! But I can’t because we’re standing here in Winners and for all I know you’ve been in jail the last nineteen fucking years! It’s very awkward, even for a suave son of a bitch like myself!

Rank: Yes, I can see that, Kyle, but rest assured you’re doing very well. How about I change the subject? Tell me, what’s your story these days? Venture capitalist? Hotshot parliamentarian? Jet-setting —

Kyle: I work at City Hall.

Rank: Well piss on a plate.

For those last two remarks, I have switched back into the non-subtextual — that’s what was really spoken. Kyle looked only slightly thrown by my Gordism — I could tell by the excess teeth he showed me when he grinned.

“Well, hey, it’s really great to see you. You look good, Rank. Fit.” I saw him eye my pecs just the way he used to do when we were kids. You’ll recall, Adam, how Kyle was never quite comfortable with the idea that any guy could have a natural advantage over him. He was that way about your superior GPA too, I seem to recall — all the things charm and orthodontics couldn’t necessarily help a young man achieve. “Are you living in Toronto now?” he wanted to know.

I replied, perhaps truthfully, to Kyle’s question then.

We were already beginning to extract ourselves at this point in the conversation. Kyle had intuited there would be no going for coffee and getting caught up, a suggestion I could practically see hopping around behind his nice white teeth. This incident at Winners, he eventually realized, was a cosmic oversight; no more than a blip in the time-space continuum — best to just let things blip back to normal. Kyle and I were never meant to intersect again — how could we be, after things had ended so perfectly and decisively all those years ago? Like a novel, come to think of it. It was just the gods, again, unable to leave well enough alone, celestial George Lucases writing bad sequels nobody wants to see.

Kyle started to turn away to pay for his ties (“Paul Frank,” he confided, waggling them at me) — and I was content. The encounter was everything it should be — acutely awkward, but blessedly brief and inconsequential. We would go our separate ways and soon would shake each other off like rain.

Except Kyle remembered something. And when he remembered this thing, he turned around. And when he turned around, he met my eyes again. And in this meeting of eyes was the memory of the last look that occurred between us, that look of nineteen years ago. Which had marked the moment Kyle lost it all — the chest-thrust, the half-smile, the unflappable gaze. All the stuff he’d been busy practising and cultivating to get himself to precisely this point in his life. But back then, none of those traits had solidified yet. They wobbled like Jell-O in unguarded moments; they could still be displaced, wiped clean, by, say, a terrible act, a terrible thing. Kyle stood revealed as a kid in such a moment, a scared boy, and like a scared, helpless boy, would look around, for the first time in our acquaintanceship, for somebody else to take charge and tell us what to do. But if Kyle wasn’t going to take up that mantle, certainly nobody else would — certainly not the stammering mess of Wade, certainly not the repulsed, already retreating Adam. All the guy could do, ultimately, was resettle his helpless blue eyes into those of the perpetrator, the author of this terrible act and thing, take a calculatedly large step away from the scene and say a useless thing like: “Whoa. Whoa Rank, Jesus, man.”

Anyway, that wasn’t what Kyle was remembering that rainy day in Winners. That’s what I was remembering. Kyle was remembering something else.

“Hey!” he said, holding up the ties again as if to flag me down. “Remember Grix?”

I stopped mid-stride and pretended to think about it. “Glasses,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, with the glasses.” Kyle was back on his game now, growing more comfortable as he moved toward the cash and the distance grew between us, calling to me over his shoulder like we were old friends, like we had just seen each other the day before and might see each other again the day after.

“There’s a bookstore over by the food court,” he told me, digging around for his credit card and ignoring the cashier the way guys like Kyle always do. “Go check it out. Grix has a book in there.”

“No way,” I said, genuinely surprised. Also this: pleased.

“Seriously, he was in the paper on the weekend. I Facebooked him to say congrats.”

This new verb: to Facebook.
But you’re like forty years old,
I wanted to say.

“Look him up,” said Kyle. “Adam Grix.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “I remember.”

Kyle’s ties had been rung through and bagged — he’d managed to exchange neither words nor eye contact with the cashier the whole time — and now he was on the opposite side of the counter from me. This was our goodbye. He waved a hand and smiled, and I raised a hand and smiled in return without even thinking about it. It was as if in that moment of being mutually happy for our friend we’d forgotten that none of us were friends — that we hadn’t been since 1990.

I let that feeling, that forgetting, carry me all the way to the other end of the mall and into the bookstore.

07/21/09, 11:24 p.m.

Hi Adam,

You have received a friend request from Rankenstein.

07/26/09, 11:00 p.m.

I KNOW. SORRY.
Not very nice of me to write such a big set-up to the exciting Adam portion of our story and then go and leave you hanging for three weeks. Did you think I’d said to hell with it again and didn’t bother to tell you this time? Did you think it was the last you’d ever hear from me? Did you hope? Were you sorry?

I’ve been wondering, whenever I had time these past few weeks, what you might be thinking. If I would maybe get a line from you, finally, wanting to know what’s been going on, why I just cut things off all of a sudden. Gord doesn’t have a computer, needless to say, let alone internet, so whenever I got a chance this last little while I would deke over the library to check my messages. Nope — nothing. I even checked the spam folder: dick enlargers and Nigerian investment opportunities.

Aren’t you even curious? I mean after all, we’ve made it this far, you and I. Despite your early jitters and my monumental inability to get to the point.

I see that you have deleted your Facebook account. I don’t blame you — Facebook freaks me out too. I only started my account to find you after that time I ran into Kyle, but it never occurred to me (and I suppose this makes me pretty stupid) that people would use it to find me too. It’s sort of creepy how viral the thing is. The second I friended you, the entire class of ’91 starts pouring in for a reunion party. There’s Kyle:
Hey Mystery Man awesome running into you downtown. We should grab a drink sometime, what’s your sched this week?
And then, just like in our college days, Wade comes tumbling after:
Rank! No way we all thought you were dead or something what’s the story??

That’s when I panicked and actually emailed a couple of kids I work with to find out what you’re supposed to do when all these unsolicited voices from the past start honking at you. The kids assured me I could just click
ignore
and all would be well, and if
ignore
didn’t work then I could
block
, no worries, no more voices — no more ghosts. So I blocked (Wade:
Yo, slacker, friend up!
) and ignored (Kyle:
Rank in all seriousness I’ve thought about you a lot over the years . . . 
). But then Tina came knocking. And Tina’s friend the championship highland dancer, the one who used to get shitfaced and then cross two hockey sticks on Wade and Kyle’s kitchen floor so she could perform a sword dance at four in the morning, and she’d make the bagpipe noises herself as she hopped up and down and it always had us in hysterics. Janine. Whose name, along with everything else, I’d forgotten until the moment she tried to friend me. And Scott, from the hockey team. And Mitch, also from the hockey team, who tells me he now lives next door to Scott and their families take vacations together, which is weird because I distinctly remember them throwing punches at each other at the student pub during a Tragically Hip show.
Ignore, block, ignore, block
. But it’s no good because with every friend request it’s like I have to
go over
these people again — I have to confirm their continuing existence beyond their existence in my memory. With every block and ignore, it’s like I’m doing the opposite — every time I click on a name it’s an acknowledgement.

And then sometimes you just get these total doozies out of left field:

You have a friend request from Colin Chaisson.

It was like, as long as all these people existed only in my memory, it was just a short step to the belief that in fact I’d mistaken memory for imagination and, in fact, these people were actually figments — just like the events that they participated in — part of a long, dark dream that only you and I shared, Adam. (And it was hard enough when I discovered you shared it, when I found it immortalized in your book — immortalized, but in such a freakily offhand sort of way. Somehow enshrined and chucked aside all at once.) Now I had to contemplate that my private, guilty dream was out there, scattered across the internet in fragments, embedded in other people’s memories like ancient chunks of pottery waiting for some archaeologist to come along and piece it together.

Then Kyle again:
Hey Rank. I really hope you don’t think I’m being nosy — seriously that’s not what this is about . . . 

But I didn’t want to shut down my account as long as yours was up there. I had no good reason for this really. It was just a kind of superstition. So that’s when I got the idea to deactivate my old account and change my identity.

And now I’m Rankenstein — no photo, no info. And nobody tries to friend me because nobody knows who I am.

But you’re not even out there anymore, my only friend, my reason for being.

You’re not anywhere — not even in the paper. I check the newspaper every weekend, and the web of course, but it looks like all your reviews and interviews have pretty much trickled off. How’s that feel, by the bye? And how come you don’t have a web page? Stephen King has a web page. Wouldn’t it be good for business? What’s it like to have disappeared so all-of-a-sudden? On this end, it’s a feeling like you’ve been absorbed back into my imagination where you should’ve stayed in the first place — you’ve reverted to being a ghost.

Well, whatever. I believe in you Adam, even if you’ve disappeared. I know you exist, like the fairies in Peter Pan — if I shout and clap my hands you live; if I shrug and turn away you die. But I won’t — I won’t let myself forget. I still carry around your book, and it still has your picture on the back, and you, old friend, are still looking pretty porked-out. My emails haven’t been bounced back, and so I figure you’re still out there —
lurking,
as the kids like to say — so I am going to proceed as such. I’m going to clap my hands and shout, like I’ve been doing all along.

I do believe in you, you big fat fairy. I do. I do.

Now let’s get you caught up.

I get this phone call the other day — the same day I wrote to you about Kyle. Young guy — young voice. “Oh, hello there — Gordon Rankin?” Which nobody I know actually calls me. So I’m immediately thinking: telemarketer.

“Who’s this?” I demand in my best belligerent-psycho grunt.

“Might I speak with Gordon Rankin?”

“Identify yourself!” I yell. Because I hate how these assholes will try to reel you in, get you off-guard, happy to be chatting to a friendly soul, meanwhile the second you’ve done something as innocuous as cop to your own identity they tick a box, press a key and forward your digits to a million assholes exactly like themselves, all in pursuit of your credit card number. I never make it easy, or pleasant, for them.

“Owen Findlay,” said the voice, after clearing its throat, “gave me this number.”

I sat down then. “Okay,” I said after a moment.

“So, now . . . Would this be Gordon Rankin Junior?”

And that’s when I noticed the accent. And that’s when I sighed, realizing what kind of phone call this was going to be.

So Gord fell off the roof is what happened, and broke his collarbone and his right ankle. What was he doing on the roof? He was being an idiot, characteristically, replacing the shingles by his seventy-five-year-old self. Fortunately someone happened to be driving past and saw him plummet. He was lucky — it’s not a busy road in particular. He might have lain there trapped on his back like a turtle, obscenities rising feebly from the overgrown lawn, for the next twenty-four hours if this had not been the case.

“I’m Father Waugh,” said the guy on the phone.

“Father wha?” I said.

“Yes.”

So, Jesus, the priest was calling. It was like getting a call from fifty years ago — from a time when the parish priests called their communities “flocks” and wandered around town bringing the Host to seniors, praying with the sick and making sure no one was dancing to rock and roll. It was so old school. Of course, I hadn’t been back home for years, not since that time with the born-again girlfriend. But back home didn’t change.

Except for the fact that the priests were younger than me now.

So, as young Father Waugh tells it, he was wandering around the hospital — as apparently priests still do — visiting seniors, sorting out who was going to need communion from who would need last rites, when this student nurse rushes past him purple-faced and a shout follows her down the hall along the lines of (and needless to say the priest relayed this line in euphemism): “I can handle my own goddamn wanger when I piss thank you lady!”

My dad.

Handling his wanger was one thing, sure, but what about everything else? Like feeding himself for example? Here was a laid-up senior citizen with no family on hand — Father Waugh took an interest, naturally. Social Services was called, of which none other than coach Owen Findlay is now grand poobah. Gordon Rankin, you say? Findlay got out from behind his desk and drove to the hospital himself.

And apparently they would never have been able to dig up my number if it hadn’t been for Findlay. Gord refused to give it up. “Don’t bother the boy,” he insisted. But Findlay had my address from the occasional Christmas card — when I remembered to send them — and looked me up.

This is what passes for bureaucracy in my home town. The priest contacts the head of Social Services, who goes home and digs through his old Christmas cards.

“Listen, Father,” I said to Waugh, feeling ridiculous — I don’t think I’ve ever called another human being “Father” since my confirmation. “If Gord doesn’t want me, you know . . . that’s fine.” I knew how lame it sounded, how bad-son, but in my defence I hadn’t quite digested the severity of Gord’s injuries at that point. I had forgotten how stubbornness and irrationality can mingle so potently in my father.

“Well, whether he wants you or not, Mr. Rankin, he’s going to need some assistance above and beyond what the public health nurse can offer.”

“Can you call me Rank?”

“I . . . you want me to call you
Rank
?”

“That’s what people call me. Didn’t Owen call me Rank, when you were talking to him?”

“I don’t recall, no. He just called you ‘the son.’”

For some reason, I started to feel upset.

“So what then,” I said, “I have to come out there? Me and my dad don’t get along, you know.”

“I didn’t get that impression at all, uh. Rank. Not at all. I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

“You said it yourself, he doesn’t want me to come.”

“Well the impression I got was that he felt you’re too important to bother with what-all that’s happening down here. And perhaps he’s not important enough.”

I snorted, because I didn’t know what to say at that point. I could hear something peevish and familiar in Waugh’s voice, something I hadn’t heard in a long time. Good old redneck reverse-snobbery.
My! Isn’t the cityfella special?

“It seems to me,” continued Father Waugh, voice prissier by the moment, “Mr. Rankin holds you in very high esteem. You wouldn’t believe how delighted he was to speak with Owen Findlay about you. Owen brought some pictures along of your hockey days and the dear old fella’s eyes just lit up. He thinks you walk on water, is my impression. Like a god.”

The priest threw this last line out just a bit dismissively as if to add: Poor deluded old fart. My back went up. The gods, I wanted to tell Father Waugh, are
known
for being shitheads, okay? So maybe the dear old fella’s not as dumb as you think. Gods don’t rush to the side of ailing mortals. They never help you in your time of need. They would double over in disbelieving glee at the idea of answering someone’s prayers, after which they might deliver a nice thunderbolt or locust plague by way of extending the joke. And do you really think your guy is any better, Father? You think your guy isn’t just Zeus with better PR?

Anyway, long story short, I’m on a plane to the coast. Or a train. Or maybe it’s close enough I can just drive for a few hours.

Who knows, right? Not you Adam.

So it turns out Father Waugh is something like thirty-six, clearly gay, clearly in denial about it because he’s never left this oh-so-Catholic coast except to go to seminary. The sight of him makes me feel sorry for both him and the Catholic Church combined. Because let’s face it, Waugh is probably the only kind of priest the church can get these days after so many years of scandal and disillusionment: holy-terrorized hillbillies who grew up believing every word of the hairy-palm story, the it’ll-rot-off-if-you-even-think-about-it stuff. So he’s this roly-poly self-made eunuch with an accent thicker than my Gaelic-speaking grandmother’s and a really rather grotesque way of talking about his elderly parishioners like they were his personal collection of teddy bears.

For example, Father Waugh on Gord: “God love him, but he’s a lively little fella.” This is not an endearment prompted by Gord’s height. Everyone is a “little fella” in Father Waugh’s Care Bear cosmology, and the women are “dear little dears.”

Gord loves him, of course, because Father Waugh is of another century. He is exactly what Gord intuits a priest should be — a creature outside of masculinity, outside sexuality itself and therefore comfortably inhuman.

Sorry to go on about Father Waugh, I just had to vent because I’ve been seeing a lot of the pudgy bastard lately. He takes good care of his parishioners, I’ll give him that. He’s here checking up on Gord every other day, and because I am a good east coast boy, and Gord harangues me if I don’t, I have to make the fucker
tea
. Every. Goddamn. Time.

This new laptop is destroying my wrists. I went to the Radio Shack at the strip mall downtown yesterday, which is exactly as I remember it except for being called The Source, and bought the crappiest laptop I could find. The keyboard is freaking infinitesimal. The other thing is, I find I have to write when Gord is sleeping because otherwise he is at me all day, even if I go into my room and close the door. He’ll just sit in the front room nattering away with the TV cranked up, bashing on the wall with his crutch whenever something comes on that I simply
must see.

“Look son, look! [Triple crutch-bash.] Get in here! She wants her tits chopped off! Fourteen years old and says she wants to be a boy! What’s she gonna do for tackle, that’s what I wanna know. Good luck on that front, girlie. Christ! Gordie! Look at the tattoos! [Double crutch-bash.] Kick her out of the house and let her try living on the streets looking like that, see how she does. Let her pay her own room and board for a while. Single mother, obviously, lookather, lets the foolish thing do whatever she wants. Sure, wear an earring in your eyebrow, who gives a shit, live and let live. Look at
this!
Jesus Christ, the mother’s got tattoos herself! [Quadruple crutch-bash.] Get
in
here, for the love of god and
see
this!”