by Lynn Coady
Not the glimmer. Her voice was always low and soothing, like the coo and flutter of overhead doves.
No, no, she cooed and fluttered at me, wafting over to close the cupboard door as if that would hide the hole. He doesn’t. He really doesn’t.
“When?” I yelled. This was the worst part — now I was yelling at the glimmer. I was yelling at her for having been yelled at. “When doesn’t he talk to you like that? He always talks to you like that!”
No, no, the glimmer cooed. He’s nice to me, Gordie. It’s just sometimes he wants to show off — you have to understand that.
“Sometimes he wants to show off,” I repeated with complete incomprehension.
He’s just trying to impress you, said the glimmer. You’re his boy.
“Impress me,” I repeated.
Otherwise he’s fine, said the glimmer. Don’t worry.
Otherwise Gord was fine. He sneered and berated and called my mother “goddamn useless,” but only when I was around. Otherwise he was fine.
That’s when the dread began to settle around me like ash.
That was my first major hint from the universe.
5
06/06/09, 9:16 a.m.
HERE'S ADAM. LOOK, EVERYBODY!
Lope-de-dope, gangly through the quad, awkward artsy four-eyes. His body doesn’t fit him somehow. He stoops, but in the strangest way. In a backwards kind of way. His hips jut a little forward, his hands dangle a little behind. A type of guy that other types of guys, hockey-team kinds of guys for example, want badly to scrape across the pavement. It is an instinctive, gorilla sort of thing, a phenomenon Dian Fossey might have witnessed. Culling the herd. Stamping out the genetic weaklings.
Once, in first year, Adam said, in the middle of a party, the word “methinks.” He was talking to girls, clearly a pretty new experience for a guy like him, one of the girls had opined something about something else, and Adam was actually going to quote Shakespeare at her — the line from Hamlet about the lady protesting too much — but his new friend quickly wrapped a forearm about Adam’s windpipe to spirit him away before too much social carnage could be inflicted. So the quote came out kind of: “Oh ho (the oh ho being what put the friend on alert). Methinks the gwaaaa.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Adam singularly unappreciative as he rubbed his overlong neck: “What?”
“Don’t say ‘methinks.’ Don’t ever say ‘methinks.’”
“It was a quote from . . .”
“For fuck’s sake I know it’s a quote. Don’t quote!”
Adam just hadn’t found his niche. There were girls you quoted at, and girls you didn’t. And once he learned to distinguish the girls ripe for the quoting, he knew enough not to quote Shakespeare, and not to stand there with a look of anticipation on his face as if to say: Oh boy! Time to quote! No, he figured out his routine pretty quick. You lounge, you smoke. Perhaps you twirl the ice cubes in your glass of mid-range scotch that by second year you’ve decided makes a more distinctive impression than a beer bottle dangling from an index finger. You never look at them directly, the girls who like to be quoted at, because that makes it seem as if you’re deliberately quoting as opposed to just thinking out loud, following the profound and languorous train of your own thoughts. Rattling off a little Beckett here, a little Kafka there. What’s that? Neruda! Adam did extremely well with Neruda, it was all you heard out of him for a while. The thing about the blood of the children in the streets. Betraying something of a social conscience. He doesn’t just live in his head, this guy, not Adam. He’d be at the barricades soon as the first shot rang out.
None of which made the guys who wanted to scrape him against the pavement any less eager to scrape him against the pavement, you understand. If anything it stoked the evolutionary-determinist fires: Cull herd! Squash faggot! Fortunately, Adam, as previously mentioned, had a friend. The same friend who was considerate enough to crush his windpipe at such a key moment in his social development. A big, strong, popular friend, genetically blessed if cursed with a tragic past and a disastrous readiness to trust his fellow man.
Adam was afraid of fat people. He was afraid of a lot of things. Rare meat, for example, made him gag and run away, wrists a-flapping, like a high-strung little girl. His friends found this out during an outdoor barbecue one early spring day in first year. It was too soon to be barbecuing, there was still snow on the ground, but everyone at Kyle and Wade’s house decided it was time for winter to be over so they put on shorts and flip-flops, spun a few of Wade’s Beach Boy records and bought some steaks for grilling.
They grabbed either side of the horrific couch — a Sally Ann special, natch, as this is a period in a young man’s life, although the young man never knows it at the time, that is riddled with clichés. You drink to excess. You carry the horrific couch out into the yard, sit it in the snow. You are so crazy! Little do you know you are caught up in some kind of Star Trek time warp, where in a million universes exactly like this one, throughout every possible history of every such universe, a billion college dorks exactly like you are doing exactly the same thing and declaring to their exact same selves: We are so crazy! Who’d have thought to bring a couch outside in early spring?
(I think sometimes I felt it, Adam, and that’s why I behaved the way I did. I felt the weight of those million universes, those billion clichés. Wade: pothead music freak. Kyle: pothead Future Leader, offhand alpha male, even with me around. You: geek; me: jock. All we wanna do is drink and get high and listen to guitar rock and talk about some interesting shit we might have read or heard, god forbid, in class, and have sex with girls, all the time, in all sorts of horrifying ways. And we talk about those ways. And we listen to Van Morrison. And suddenly I can’t stand it, I am suffocating under the weight of the billion college dorks who came before me — who exist on every side, in all the invisible universes — and I eat the by-now grievously abused poster of Van Morrison off the wall. I don’t even take it down first, decently ripping it into bite-sized morsels with my hands. I just lean into the wall and tear off chunks with my teeth and tongue and lips; chew and swallow — ahm, num, num like the Cookie Monster. Ahm, num, num as Wade gazes from behind his peevish cloud and mutters: Hey, man.)
Adam was afraid of rare meat. His big, popular, handsome friend unearthed this bit of information during the springtime barbecue. The big popular handsome friend had guzzled a jug of alcool like it was Mountain Dew and he was feeling the massive weight of the innumerable universes of college dorks who had guzzled innumerable jugs of alcool before him, so he blundered over to the barbecue, grabbing the still-semi-frozen steak off the rack (none of them knew how to cook in those days, no one thought to defrost it) and started tearing into the semi-frozen, mostly raw cowflesh with his teeth. He just stood there growling with the steak in his hands as his good friends — his band of brothers — gaped. He looked like some kind of upright animal, a monster, the Wolfman maybe, tearing off chunks of flesh like they were chunks of a Van Morrison poster and going ahm, num, num, blood trickling down his charismatic chin.
And that’s when Adam lurched to his feet about to run, but threw up instead.
Ha, ha, ha! declared the friend before throwing up himself.
06/06/09, 1:14 p.m.
Good times, Adam. Like Paris in the twenties. Do you remember Kyle saying that — that was his line: It’s like Paris in the twenties in this place! Whenever our interactions with one another grew particularly squalid. Like the time in second year we both ended up having sex with that one girl because she was so drunk she came back from the bathroom and forgot which one of us she’d been with previously, so went to you after having been with me, and then when I showed up wondering what the hell was going on everybody just kind of shrugged it off like — Oh . . . Sorry. And then I passed out on the floor beside you guys and I can only assume you just kept at it, because neither of you seemed particularly happy to be interrupted. Or the time Kyle slapped a girl he had in his b
edroom (I still believe he did this, Adam) and we all heard it and stared at one another for a minute and then went back to our beers and conversation. Or the time Wade came back from Goldfinger’s clutching his stash and terrified for his life.
Or that time I made someone die. Again. Remember that?
Well let me remind you. It was like Paris in the twenties.
06/06/09, 2:59 p.m.
Do I feel real to you? Do you feel that I actually exist, pounding keys two-fingered here at my kitchen table, or is it more like receiving email from a figment of your imagination? Is it like I’m a ghost coming back to haunt you? It sounds stupid, but that’s what it was like for me, reading your book. We get freaked out by ghosts because they aren’t supposed to exist, right? They’re not real, in the same way the past isn’t real, not really — and what are ghosts except the past floating around, occasionally taking shape and going booga-booga in your face? Strictly speaking, what’s past doesn’t exist anymore. And it shouldn’t. And you don’t want it to. And there it is, swirling up around the light fixture, trembling your tabletop, banging on the other side of the wall. Notice me — take me into account. I’m not supposed to be here; here I am. That is, here we are. Together again.
That was an experiment, when I was writing about you earlier, the way you came across back in school. How’d it feel reading that? I was trying to do what I felt you did to me and Sylvie — take you over. You’ll notice I didn’t make stuff up exactly, but at the same time I wasn’t really being fair, was I? I was brutally honest, as they say, which is never quite indicative of truth per se. I was making a smarmy story out of the person you innocuously were, out of the hackneyed college-guy life you were innocuously living. You couldn’t help it — you were nineteen, twenty. You were an idiot. We were all idiots. But not all of us end up being immortalized at our personal peak of idiocy do we? Or, say, at very nearly the worst moments of our lives. Not many of us are lucky enough to encounter a hungry young wannabe in the midst of our suffering, a would-be storyteller nearly lobotomized by the dullness of his own existence, famished for some kind of genuine emotional content.
And then I come along. And I am nothing but emotional content.
Anyway, the experiment failed. I got caught up again and lost sight of who I was writing about exactly. I started having a kind of weird, dreamy fun and next thing I knew I was writing not about you, exactly, but about us. All of us, back then.
Or, fun is not the right word. Let’s just say I get caught up and leave it at that.
06/06/09, 11:48 p.m.
Hey shitheels. What’s the deal? I thought we had a back and forth going on and now you leave me hanging in the breeze. WTF, as the kids say. I’m baring my soul for you here, yanking off one strip of flesh after another and feeding it into cyberspace. This is supposed to be a dialogue, not To Be or Not To Be, if you know what I mean, not a one-man show. A meeting of minds so to speak. Methinks the a-hole needs to drop a line, is what I’m saying. I mean I know I told you to shut up but I didn’t actually mean shut up. I meant it would be kind of nice if you could not talk to me like I am some kind of psycho stalker freak for a minute or so. You certainly had a great deal to say earlier, about the serving notice and the paper trails and whathaveyou. How can you create a paper trail if you don’t ever write me back?
In conclusion, get with the program.
Your pal,
GR
06/07/09, 8:38 a.m.
OK so I had some beers last night and got bored and was checking my email for word back from you, which I have started doing a tad too compulsively lately, and I guess I was feeling sort of fed up with the radio silence. Sorry about that. I hereby vow not to waste your time with random drunken harangues anymore. We’re not pen pals; I get that. I didn’t exactly kick this whole thing off in the spirit of friendship and, let’s face it, you didn’t pause to solicit my opinion at any point when you were busy chronicling The Life and Times of Danger Man. So just ignore that last email and we’ll continue.
Back to Gord. Needless to say, the Mounties didn’t give him a medal the night he flew at Croft. But they didn’t exactly give him a dressing-down either. Who could fault Gord, after all, an upstanding member of the small-business community, for wanting to kill Mick Croft? Everybody wanted to kill Croft — kids, teachers, small-businessmen and Mounties alike. This was nothing new.
At the same time, though, Croft was a kind of subliminal hero in our town. He was such a little bastard, and somehow he got away with it. On the surface, of course, everyone predicted dire things for Croft — he was the kind of guy a decent, God-fearing little town like ours was desperate to dismiss. Croft was insolent, criminal and rebellious. Surely he would come to no good. But in our secret outlaw dreams, I think, we rooted for him.
Croft was eighteen when he was expelled for kicking Mr. Fancy in the ass but only in Grade 10 because he’d been held back a couple years. So instead of sliding into some menial production-line gig at SeaFare like any self-respecting dropout, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment above the woeful Chinese restaurant on Howe Street and set up his drug-dispensary in earnest.
How do I know? Because I went there every couple of months. Croft was the man to see, like it or not. He was to my hometown what Wade was to the student body back in our beloved college days.
I was fifteen but about twice the size of Croft, and for all intents and purposes a man. It’s weird to think back to it now. I was always big, as I think I might’ve mentioned, but at fourteen I kind of exploded into manhood. I shot up an extra foot, putting me at 6 ' 4 ", I sprouted hair overnight like a werewolf — except the hair didn’t disappear after the full moon, but sallied forth from the ground zero of my crotch to obliterate my entire torso. My voice — already deep — plummeted into Darth Vader Luke-I-am-your-father territory and I had to shave practically twice a day to keep from looking like a prospector. You’d think that would be weird, and it was weird, but I’ll tell you what was weirder: other people — the way they changed, behaviourally, in response to what had happened to me physically. Almost overnight I went from being alternately marvelled at and teased for being the big lumpy kid I was, to being deferred to and even respected as a grown man.
Imagine one day the neighbourhood mothers are gleefully feeding you hot dogs to see how many you can down in one sitting, tousling your hair, exclaiming over your “big, hungry boy!” status as they pour you another glass of milk, and the next day those same ladies, who thought nothing of shouting at you to take your shoes off at the back door and wipe your pee off the seat next time, are blinking up at you respectfully and asking if you think they should replace their furnace now or give it another winter. Lady, I’m fourteen! Gimme another hot dog. But no more hot dog marathons for this strapping young man, suddenly they’re setting the table and frying me steaks and having to stop themselves from pouring us both a couple of fingers of scotch and plunking their mom-arses down onto my lap, practically.
I’m exaggerating to make my point, but you get it, right? And the problem with being a boy in a man’s body is that, basically, in this world, it isn’t a problem. It’s commonplace. There are lots of boys in men’s bodies walking around — I work with a few of them. Some of them are my age, trembling on the precipice of the big four-oh, and some are even older. What I’m saying is, a lot of boys don’t bother growing into men, because they don’t have to — their bodies have already done it and it turns out that’s all anybody requires.
Which is to say, Adam, that when you are fourteen and you walk around looking like you are twenty-two, you rapidly figure out a few things about the human condition. First, being a grown man gives you this instant, irrational power. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t graduated from junior high yet, it doesn’t matter if you spend most your evenings picking your nose in front of Family Ties, and it doesn’t matter if you have done precisely nothing in your life worthy of your fellow man’s respect. Doesn’t matter — you have it. Everyone figures you can fix th
eir cars, that you know what kind of aluminum siding they should buy, that you can file a tax return. And they turn to you, this is what’s astounding — they turn to you, these ladies with the bashed-up furnaces — in all your assumed expertise and aptitude.
Meanwhile you just want to eat hot dogs and pick your nose. And you do. You do eat hot dogs and pick your nose. And nobody notices. It doesn’t seem to sully your newfound respectability one bit.
So imagine you’re not just a grown man at fourteen but (and sorry for how this sounds) imagine you’re a spectacularly grown man. That you tower above other men. That your voice is deep and authoritative — your pronouncements, therefore, not to be denied. That your forearms and chest and genitals are practically carpeted. If being a grown man endows you with instantaneous authority, what do you suppose a body like mine was telling people?
It told people, I think: Make way.
It told people: Trust me.
Some people it told: I am your hero!
It told women: I’ll take care of it.
Men it asked: How could I have anything but contempt for you?
It said: Prove it. Prove to me how big you are.
06/07/09, 1:27 p.m.
So I was fifteen and Croft was eighteen, and I was the obvious choice among all my friends to head to Croft’s upstairs apartment on Howe every few months or so and purchase a few fragrant rabbit-turds of hash and multiple baggies of what my father so quaintly called “the maryjane.” There was never any discussion of this among me or my friends; it was simply understood that Croft was a dangerous skeeze, known to deal with bikers and carry knives, and therefore it fell to Gordon Rankin Jr., fifteen-year-old colossus, to do business with him. Everyone assumed I was invulnerable and would have no problem with this, and in fact I didn’t. I wasn’t scared of Croft. I wasn’t scared of anybody. Because when people make the kind of assumptions about you that I describe above, Adam — that you are basically a 214-pound superman — it is kind of hard not to assume it right along with them.
