The Antagonist (27 page)

So Wally got very exercised on this subject. Wally appeared to be among the outraged, and because I’d been following the details on the news pretty carefully — you can imagine how stories of accidental deaths tend to claim my sympathy — I shoved the platter of ribs aside and gave him my full attention.

“I mean, Christ,” Wally was saying as he struggled to open a non-screwtop beer with his hands. “You send up to fifty thousand volts of electricity through a guy’s body — and maybe the guy is freaked out as it is, maybe the guy has a heart condition; he’s angry, he’s terrified. You are pretty much begging for the worst possible outcome.”

“That’s not a screwtop, Wally.”

“I’ve almost got it,” said Wally. He didn’t, but it was a matter of face-saving now.

“Dude,” I said, holding out a bottle opener. “You’re a doctor. Save your hands.”

“So anyway,” continued Wally, accepting it quickly. “They say it’s perfectly safe, right, all this electricity coursing through your body, but for who? An eighteen-year-old maybe. A guy who runs ten K every day and watches his cholesterol. But they have no idea who they might be jazzing, what a guy’s heart might be doing, what kind of shape it might be in. They’re dealing with crackheads? Drug addicts? The guy’s in a state of excited delirium — just holding him down could stop his heart.”

At Wally’s last remark, I responded, as you can imagine, “What?”

“It’s a controversial term, but generally it just means if a guy’s all cranked up his heart could blow. The last thing you want to do is zap him.”

“But what about holding him down?” I said. “You said you can’t even hold him down.”

“It’s not a good idea,” allowed Wally, “with someone in that state.”

I had picked up my own beer once I shoved the ribs aside, but now I placed it on the counter again without taking a swig. “But how do you know? How are you supposed to know if someone’s in that state or not?”

“Well I suppose the dilemma for the cops,” said Wally, “is probably every other guy they wanna taser is in that state.”

“Excited what-did-you-call-it?”

“Excited delirium.”

“And what happens?”

“When?”

“When a guy’s in excited delirium.”

Wally rolled his sleep-deprived eyes to an upper corner of my kitchen and seemed to recite from a memorized textbook. “He’s agitated, violent. Sweats profusely, seems unusually strong — doesn’t really feel pain. I mean, definitely the kind of guy the cops are going to want to tase. But definitely the last guy that you should.”

This painted something of a familiar portrait, would you agree?

“But you said you don’t even need to taser him.”

Wally’s eyes rolled back to me and he leaned on the counter, smiling, making himself comfortable. He seemed to almost wallow now that he had my full attention.

“Just by restraining him, yeah. Because he’s in a heightened state, right? The heart is just flailing, it’s going flat-out, it can’t go any harder, and then you grab him from behind, throw him to the ground. What’s it gonna do next?”

I was in a bit of a heightened state myself at this point. My beer, I noticed, had overflowed after I placed it — gently, I’d thought — on the counter, so I moved on autopilot to get a rag and wipe it up, still firing questions at Wally so he wouldn’t get the idea the conversation was winding down. I kept him there in the kitchen for a while, making him go over a few details of particular interest to me. Pretty soon he stopped wallowing and took on the demeanour of what he actually was, i.e., a guy under interrogation. He’d finished his beer and just stood there and fidgeted, wondering why I wasn’t offering him another, why I wasn’t putting on the ribs and letting him get back to the party. A few of our teammates wandered in from the living room, wanting to know the same thing. I dumped a bunch of chips into a bowl and shoved it at them and told them to go sit down.

“Not you,” I said to Wally, who’d made a move to sort of unobtrusively attach himself to the other two and wander unnoticed from the kitchen.

I didn’t offer him another beer until I was sure I had all the facts straight. Not that the facts of the initial revelation really changed much under my questioning. I just needed them affirmed, and then re-affirmed.

So here’s what I learned.

You can stop a guy’s heart, Adam — an over-excited guy, say, a guy who has abused drugs his entire life, a guy who means well, who is only looking out for you, a guy who has to live with the fact that the most powerful forces in the universe have marshalled themselves against the scummy likes of him — and what difference does it make if that fact is a fantasy, and how can it be a fantasy anyway, when the loneliness gouges his face like scars? So a hunted, haunted guy. A guy who just happens to be coked out of his head at that very ill-starred moment. The very moment the powers eternally gunning for him finally muster themselves to gather overhead and funnel their way into a convenient, waiting vessel. A vessel who happens to be a bit of a hard-luck Charlie himself, let’s face it. Therefore, what better vessel? The point is: such a vessel can stop a guy’s heart simply by, it would seem, restraining him. As the obliging vessel does. Just by holding the guy down; applying force. Just by kneeling on the dude.

“Does he die?” I said to Wally. “Does he die? Every time? Does the guy die?”

Wally was looking at me vaguely — he was leaning against the refrigerator now and his big eyes had glazed over and were watering as if I’d been shining a flashlight into them this whole time.

“Well . . .” he began. “Hamish didn’t die.”

“But all the tasering guys. All the excited delirium guys. They croaked from it, right? That’s why it’s such a huge scandal, they die every time.”

“Rank,” said Wally, raising his hands and scratching either side of his head with them. “You only hear about the ones who die.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean the guys who live — it doesn’t get reported. Why would it?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“There’s no story there.”

This was when Wally actually yawned. Like the absence of a good story was getting to him.

08/17/09, 6:46 a.m.

HATE IS NOT THE
opposite of love, Kirsten told me once: indifference is. Adam, I accept you didn’t write your book out of hate or love for me, your former friend and sort-of brother. I accept what really pissed me off was your indifference. What I mean is I’m accepting your indifference.

I accept you know the answers to pretty much every fucking question I have put to you this summer. And I accept that you are never going to give them to me, are you. You know, ultimately, what happened to Ivor and you know why the police never came after me and you could have put that stuff into your book, you could have couched the answers in there somewhere, secretly, as a little nod and wink to Rank, in a book I once thought consisted of nothing but such nods and winks, however malicious. And I accept that I was wrong in this regard. I still don’t quite get what you were doing. But I accept, at least, you weren’t doing that.

I accept that you will never respond to my emails. I accept that you have maybe not been reading them since May.

I accept that you exist, or else you don’t, and everything that happened from the point at which we became acquainted with each other to the point where we stopped being acquainted with each other, either did or did not take place the way I said.

Or maybe it’s what happened in your book that actually happened. And maybe the guy in your book, the alcool-guzzling football player, maybe he only exists around the edges, just the way you made him — big and bad, huge and crazy, marginally tragic, marginally interesting, somewhat related to the story itself.

I don’t expect to hear from you. I told you what I had to tell you, and you told me something back, and that’s our story, isn’t it Adam?

I told you how my mother died, is what I told you — exactly how. And the dominating way the blood announced itself that day, exploding everywhere, uncleanupabble: it was like I’d stuffed it in some kind of pressurized container the night I made it flow from Croft, tucked the thing beneath the driver’s side seat and breathed a nice, forgetful sigh of relief as the pressure built up, day after day. How else to explain my guilt, my immediate thought the blood belonged to me; that
I
had made this sudden mess and, what’s more, I should have known, I should have seen it coming and prepared.

So I told you all that, you’ll recall I sort of crucified myself in front of you, and as the morning light fingered its way through Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains, I asked you the question, and you gave me the answer. You
gave
it to me already, is the thing. And somewhere along the way I just forgot.

That’s what this has been about, I guess — trying to wrench from you an answer you’ve already given. This whole summer I’ve just been haranguing you to repeat yourself. So I am sorry for that too. All right? I should have listened, Adam, but I was beyond listening then, I was beyond belief or doubt.

Was that God? Adam? Yes? I think it was God. It was a God-joke, right, my mother? Because it had to be. Because it’s like that story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” where you wish for your ultimate, never-spoken wish and getting what you want becomes your punishment. Joke’s on you — someone has to die. Giveth; taketh. But wait, you have more wishes, so you wish for that person back, you’re stupid, you just never learn, and, sure, you get her back but you get her back dead and now she’s always with you, and she’s dead. Death is the only reply, no matter where you look, no matter how you phrase the question — it’s your cosmic smack upside the head. This is what you make happen.

Maybe I didn’t say it that way exactly, I can’t remember what I said exactly anymore, but I remember saying something along those lines to you, I remember basically blubbering a ranting stream of nonsense punctuated by the ultimate nonsense:
God. God? God!

And you telling me, intermittently — frozen hand against my boiling forehead — you must’ve told me in a hundred different ways that morning:
No.

And I seem to remember saying to you that night, after going into so much more explicit detail than I have here — and it just occurred to me that I should say I’m sorry for that too, by the way, Adam. All that explicit detail. I realize it was a lot of gore and grief to lay upon some twenty-year-old kid whose life experience has come entirely out of books, who’s never left the east coast of Canada and has a perfectly nice, perfectly intact mom and dad of his own living merely a three-hour drive away and looking forward to his return at Christmas. Let me just stop right here and tell you I am sorry for it all — for offering it up to you, of all people, all that gore and grief. I am heartily sorry for having offended you, as we say in the confessional — the good old Catholic penalty box. Whatever it was I did to you that night, that morning (we both know it was something; I struck a match, I flicked a switch), I’m sorry.

And thank you for not putting it in your book.

And fuck you for not putting it in your book.

Your friend,

Gordon Rankin

MY HEARTFELT THANKS
go out to the following for their witting and unwitting support:

Melanie Little, Sarah MacLachlan and Christy Fletcher

The Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta

The Banff Centre, Literary Arts Program

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts

Karen MacFarlane and Judge Richard J. MacKinnon

Kurt Stenburg, EMT

Marguerite Pigeon, francophone blasphemer

Karen Engle, prairie apostate

my parents, whose hunting trip I stole

Peter Sinemma, Peter Ormshaw, Curtis Gillespie — consultants/hockey thugs

Rob Appleford, Paris in the twenties.

To those I haven’t even asked:

Thank you;

I’m sorry.

LYNN COADY'S
fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel,
Strange Heaven
, was published when she was twenty-eight.
Strange Heaven
was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and was followed up by a bestselling short story collection,
Play the Monster Blind
, as well as the award-winning novels
Saints of Big Harbour
and
Mean Boy
. When not writing fiction she works as a journalist, editor, and newspaper columnist, and is co-founder and senior editor of
Eighteen Bridges
, a magazine of narrative journalism. Lynn Coady grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and now lives in Edmonton.

Strange Heaven

Play the Monster Blind

Saints of Big Harbour

Mean Boy