The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  It was lying that was the ultimate trespass to Kirsten, so no surprise that it was lying that broke us up. I wasn’t cheating on her, if that’s the conclusion you just leaped to. Eventually she just came to see how I was faking my way through faith — characteristically, she saw it before I did. Don’t get me wrong, I had no desire to leave the church. I loved the church. I just didn’t buy what they were peddling anymore. I still loved it; I wanted to buy it. I would have done anything to buy it. But I didn’t. Every time I closed my eyes and tried to feel the Holy Spirit bearing down on me like a typhoon of love and terror, all I’d get was Zeus, aiming drunken thunderbolts, sticking it to nymphs. Other times, I’d picture Kirsten’s father in the dust. She saw through me, somehow. And she would be damned, literally, if she was going to let me keep pretending otherwise.

  “My husband,” she said to me at one point very close to the end, “was less of a coward than you.”

  So that was it with me and Kirsten.

  But that’s not really enough for you, is it, Adam? I’m starting to figure out how it works. I remember the details in your book that freaked me out the most — it was the minor stuff, those dead-on grace notes that no one else would notice. Some tiny, throwaway item like how every once in a while I used to shave between my eyebrows — I’d inevitably use dirty razors and give myself a rash. There it was, between your pages. I cannot believe you wrote about my eyebrow rash, Adam. Or the time during one of our parties when Wade walked into the kitchen with an enormous zit on his chin, moving me to quip: “Who’s your friend?” It got, needless to say, a huge laugh, from Wade as much as anyone, and I never gave it a second thought. Until I read the same line, delivered in almost precisely the same context, meant to demonstrate to your readers what a mean-spirited asshole the guy could be.

  It’s like seeing pictures of yourself that you didn’t even know anyone was taking — candid camera — a whole album of worst-moment closed-circuit stills. There you are taking a dump. There you are saying precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. There you are stepping on someone’s puppy while scratching your crotch.

  So I get you now, is what I’m saying. I understand how you do it — I know what kind of food someone like you is scrounging for when it comes to the character of Kirsten.

  1) She used to like to eat in the bathtub. She’d bring apples in there with her. Milkshakes. Bowls of cereal. Even stuff that could get soggy — I think she liked the challenge of it. Toast and peanut butter; crackers. Once I heard the long plop of a banana fallen from its peel.

  2) Sometimes, when she was overcome by the holy spirit, I recognized the expression on her face from her orgasms.

  3) She would also, sometimes, when we were sitting together chastely side by side at worship, wrap her entire hand around my index finger. We’d just sit like that. My finger totally encased in the warmth and darkness of her palm.

  (This was probably the sexiest time of my life.

  “I’m not faking this,” I remember pleading with her near the end of everything. “You and I.”

  “You and I are not what matters,” she said. Her eyes had begun to puddle up. Her chin was vibrating as if at any moment it would lose cohesion. I could see that pretty soon the conversation would be over; she would begin to flop and gasp. “You and I are nothing.”

  This was where we parted company, theologically speaking.)

  4) Whenever someone asked her to do something social, go shopping or out to dinner — even people she liked — it made her feel flustered for the rest of the day.

  5) I think she liked prayer meetings so much because they let her have the experience of community without having to actually interact with anyone. Together we’d all raise our hands in the air, palms forward — as if to say, “Over here, Lord” or “Stop it, Lord” — together we’d cry, together we’d call on Jesus. It was powerful stuff. But you never had to have a conversation. You could just roll your eyes back into your head and let the spirit overtake you.

  6) She liked it when I cooked, even though the only thing I ever did was fry steak and boil pasta.

  7) Whenever she spoke with her mother on the phone, she always ended up screaming, and a lot of the time, after she hung up, didn’t seem aware that she had done this. She seemed refreshed, edified. Like she had just come back from a run or stepped out of the shower.

  8) There was a radio program on the oldies station called The Disco Diner, which played old Wolfman Jack broadcasts. She listened to it every Saturday while she did the dishes. She liked the Bee Gees, because she could sing in the exact same key as them. She actually referred to this habit as one of her “vices.”

  Kirsten didn’t realize that Wolfman Jack had died back in ’95 and the broadcasts were repeats. When I mentioned this one Saturday during the program, she stopped what she was doing, turned from the sink, and I thought she would come after me with the meat fork she’d been cleaning.

  08/09/09, 12:46 a.m.

  So it only seems fair to confess that immediately after writing that last email to you I went looking for Kirsten on Facebook and there she was, flanked by children and still — miracle of miracles — sporting her Bettie Page bangs. I clicked on her name and started writing her a message without even thinking about it. I wrote: Kirsten, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe that I am thinking about you one minute, writing about you — dreaming you — embellishing you as if you are a figment of my imagination or a creature out of mythology, and then the next minute typing your name into a website that delivers a photo of you twelve years later and an actual portal of contact. You are out there, apparently, and you are real. I am writing for confirmation. Are you out there? Are you real? My whole summer has been one long surreal dream, and now you are a part of it.

  Then I deleted that. I wrote: Dear Kirsten. Hey! Don’t be fooled by my internet moniker, it’s me, Rank. How are you? Wow. Are those your kids in the photo? Nice job, if so. Nice cat, also. Looks like you are living a very rich life these days, which is great to see. I just discovered Facebook recently and thought I’d look you up. And there you are. It’s kind of amazing.

  all best,

  GR

  Of course what I wanted to write was, I am so glad you haven’t let your bangs grow out. Are you still into Jesus? Do you still go in for the occasional light spanking pre-intercourse?

  And she wrote back.

  Dear Rankenstein,

  I see you have no friends. Way to go! It is so nice to hear from you Rank. Yes, I have kids and a cat. Am living the dream. Thank you for telling me exactly nothing about how you are or what you’re doing these days. Wonder why you’re friendless. Get with the program!

  xo,

  K

  Adam, it is Kirsten. It is so, precisely Kirsten, ascending from the muck of my afflicted dreams and persecuted memory, clean as a whistle, entirely herself despite my guilty distortions — hands over heart, rolling her eyes sarcastically toward heaven.

  So now I have a friend on Facebook. And now I have to write to her and tell her how I am and what I’m doing.

  Then I went a bit nuts thinking to myself if Kirsten is on Facebook, everyone must be on there. All the ghosts and figments — all people I thought I had successfully kept to myself for so long. I typed in, for example, T.S. Eliot, and do you know what? He was there. He has a fan page — a couple of them. It sounds stupid, I mean I realize he’s famous and everything, but it freaked me out. I typed in Ivor Breese — no Ivor. I mean, lots of Ivors, obviously — there’s lots of everyone on Facebook — but no Ivor from Goldfinger’s. I typed in Richard’s name and a bunch of Richards came up with the same last name, but none of them were the greasy, pit-faced son of a bitch in question.

  I typed in Sylvie Rankin. Five names came up but, I was relieved to see, all of them called themselves Sylvia, which my mother never had.

  Then I tried Sylvie Le Blanc. There were five again, all of them younger than me, except for one I couldn’t see, one who hadn’t post
ed a photo. There was only an empty square containing an androgynous silhouette where her photo should have been. I was tempted to drop that one a line.

  To keep myself from doing this, I typed Kyle, and Kyle was there, in hiking clothes and sunglasses with a mountain lake the colour of a swimming pool behind him, just as he’d been the first time he contacted me after I’d signed up to find you. And Wade was still there too, perched atop a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, giving the photographer a hearty thumbs-up, sporting an ill-advised Vandyke beard to camouflage his double chin — everything but a banner proclaiming I CAN’T STAND THAT I AM MIDDLE-AGED fluttering in the background.

  But where was Adam? There weren’t even any versions of Adam, with his weird last name, hanging around Facebook. No teenage Adams giving gang signs in Etobicoke, no corporate Adams with their bland headshots looking to network with fellow drones. No photo-less, phantom Adams, even — and no fan page touting the Respected Author, I might point out. No vestiges. Adam was hiding out. Adam remained solidly nowhere.

  I typed in Mick Croft. Three Micks, two Michaels, none of them the man whose head I crushed. Then it occurred to me if I wanted to get a glimpse of Croft, all I’d really have to do was head downtown and ask around.

  Or I could just call Owen Findlay.

  Or I could type in Colin Chaisson, which I did, and there he was — same photo as when he sent me his ignored friend request — fat and old and freckled like a dissolute leprechaun, smilingly giving me the finger from his living room couch. No mountain lake backdrop for Collie, surprise surprise. And where is Collie keeping himself these days, you might ask? Only five miles up the coast it would seem.

  I am starting to view my past in a different way these days. Strange to say under the circumstances, but I think now that I used to see my past as a book — a story with a beginning, middle, and end, all of which I knew by heart, and therefore had no reason to even crack the spine. But now I’m starting to see it as something more like a frontier — a landscape I have spent my life cultivating, fortifying against the random elements. But the landscape is alive, is what I’m realizing — is a thing unto itself — and if you’re brave enough to ever leave your house you start to see this. In fact, the landscape consists of multiple things, multiple wills that shift and change and occasionally assert themselves in force. None of this, you eventually understand, belongs to you — not a rock or flower a broken branch — no matter how you work it, no matter how much scrub you clear. The ground could decide to open up beneath your feet. The sky could decide to open up above your head.

  The world is independent. It moves, and moves on, with or without you.

  Everything, that is, except that which you make die. What you’ve killed is yours, forever — a trophy picked off from the landscape and hung up on your wall.

  So you can greet one another each day.

  I write: Dear Kirsten, looking around me I see to my chagrin that it is 2009 and I am nearly forty years of age and staying with my father in the house where I grew up while he recovers from having fallen off the roof like an idiot. You remember Gord, right? He kept trying not to say “goddamn” when you visited that time, which for Gord is like trying to keep from drawing breath. He liked you: would you believe he said that to me just the other day, out of the blue? And you liked him, I seem to recall.

  Since we last spoke, which was an unbelievably long time ago, I managed to graduate. Now I teach Grade 7 and 8 History and coach soccer. I stayed in Hamilton after getting my teacher’s licence, believe it or not. I bought a house a few years ago just off Barton, so you’ll be disappointed to learn that I no longer have that elegant bachelor suite that overlooked the slag heaps.

  Hobbies: trying not to kill Gord, eating church-bake-sale confections in front of the TV, getting fat, not preparing for the upcoming school year, cyber-stalking a friend from twenty years ago.

  You?

  22

  08/10/09, 4:32 p.m.

  WHAT DID YOU THINK?

  I figured I’d just let that information sit with you for a bit. I thought you might even be moved to drop me a line now that you know I’m not a drug kingpin or mob enforcer. Guess not, though. I guess you’re thinking even history teachers can be psychopaths. It’s always the quiet ones, after all. But I just want to point out, maybe you don’t quite realize it, but you’ve got something on me now. You know what I do and where I live. You even know my neighbourhood — you could send the police to my door if you thought you had cause. Okay? You can relax, is what I’m saying.

  Throw me a bone, is what I’m saying.

  But really: what did you think? What did you think happened to me after I disappeared that night? Into what corrupt underground existence did you suppose I, with my “innate criminality” and everything, allowed myself to sink? It might surprise you to know that, as much of a mystery as I left in my wake, I was hauling as big a mystery into the darkness with me. That is to say — you guys didn’t know where the hell I went, but neither did I ever find out what the hell happened after I took off. Was there a police investigation? Did cops swarm the Temple like locusts? Did you guys get questioned? What happened to Richard? I imagined it all — I imagined a rectangular army of Constable Hamms kicking in the Temple door and throwing you guys to the ground. Poor Adam, glasses flying across the room. Kyle, pleading in handcuffs, fearful of his future political career. I imagined Richard — who in reality that same army had to have been watching pretty closely all along — being dragged in for questioning, his whole half-assed druggie empire crumbling in one raw night, Goldfinger’s with a padlock and sign: Closed until further notice. My imagination went wild with the possibilities, scrolling through every worst-case outcome there could ever be for you, my friends, my sullied associates.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t all that keen to learn the real truth, but all and all it constitutes a pretty big question mark to be carrying on your back for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you agree?

  Speaking of cops at the door — I expected it myself any day, every day. I travelled all over the country doing the kind of work that didn’t require identification. Shit work, that is. It was easier to do in those days, there were a lot more of the kind of construction projects that happily paid under the table and didn’t ask questions. I even — this is kind of embarrassing — worked under an assumed name for a while, which I was not very good at. I’d tell the boss my name was Joe Smith, and then after a day or so of ignoring everybody calling me Joe, I’d explain that my nickname was actually Rank, and would they please call me Rank.

  Which is to say, if the police had been looking for me, I may as well have been walking around waving a Come and get me sign.

  And I kind of think I was. I dropped the assumed name pretty quickly, got tired of working shit jobs for crooks like Richard, so pretty soon I was signing my own name to EI forms and rental agreements.

  Come and get me! Come and get me!

  But as a nominal precaution, I kept moving around. This helped me to feel safe but had the additional merit of preventing me from making any more close friends. I would not be making that mistake again. I read the papers from out east. I watched those true crime shows about unsolved murders and criminals at large. Nothing about Goldfinger’s, nothing about a goon of a bouncer with a juvenile record wanted for questioning. Nothing about anybody dying under suspicious circumstances.

  Nothing about it, ever. Not a trace, not a word. Can you blame me that I stopped believing in it, Adam? That the world seemed so eager to accommodate my most urgent, desperate wish? There was nothing I could do about Croft, or Sylvie. That stuff was on the record, written in stone — it had repercussions is what I’m saying — sent ripples throughout the cosmos. I had been on my way to living a certain kind of life and those two incidents blew me completely off course; made me the man I am today, whatever kind of man that is.

  But what happened at Goldfinger’s — it was like it hadn’t happened. Which is exactly what I wanted it to be like but c
ouldn’t dare hope. For a long time, I didn’t let myself believe that such could be the outcome. It was uncanny. It was miraculous.

  It could only be, I realized, the gods, at work, again.

  Which meant I couldn’t trust it. So I moved again, for what had to be the fifteenth time, this time to Ontario, knowing as I crossed the country in what had to be the fifteenth U-Haul that somewhere up there a bunch of jerkwads in togas were drawing their heads together, snickering down from their gilded cloud and just waiting for the moment I relaxed. Waiting, maybe, for me to find a wife, have a couple of kids, buy a house, set up a hammock in the yard, kick back, breathe the fragrant summer air and tell myself: I’m happy.

  And only then, of course: the knock on the door.

  So I didn’t. I refused. I was not going to even make the attempt to gear my life toward such an obvious outcome. I would show those bastards — I would be lonely. I would live in basement apartments. I would be broke. I would render myself repugnant to the opposite sex. I would drink! I’d be one of those smelly, belching assholes that hangs around in bars that cater to smelly, belching assholes, with other smelly, belching assholes because like attracts like. I would grow crude from my proximity to such company. I would end up slavering at any woman who crossed my transom, because I saw so little of women as a rule, thereby rendering me as repulsive in terms of personality as I was physically. Oh yes, I was winning this war. I was deteriorating nicely. I was one in a long line of mythic heroes acting in defiance of the gods.

  When one day she appeared to me. The fat lady.

  I felt a distinctive shift in the booth where I’d been sitting playing bar trivia with my usual drunken rabidity. A heavy shift. A protesting sort of creak. I looked up and I thought: Oh no. Mon doux, as Sylvie used to say.