by André Babyn
“Right,” said Lauren. “Well, I hope you got what you came for.”
Watt looked at me for support. I didn’t think he was lying. I felt sorry for him, because I was pretty sure Watt went up there so he could be as inconspicuous as possible, to be alone and to not get in anyone’s way. But Lauren was already way ahead of us. So I shrugged and ran down the stairs.
The bus was almost full, but, miraculously, Walid and Samantha had saved a space for each of us. Watt was the last one on, and he had to sit up front with Mrs. Wilson.
9
Jeff had told me there was going to be a huge Magic tournament in Toronto that February, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre over three days. Winner and runner-up earned automatic qualifications and airfare to the Worlds in Berlin, plus prize money, and anyone who finished in the top eight was guaranteed at least qualifications. Jeff won most of the bimonthly tournaments at the Palace, a degree of consistency that was impressive regardless of the generally low level of competition. But he had another trick up his sleeve. The deck he was working on, he told me, was nothing like the rotation of five or six decks currently considered competitive. He let me see it once in action, moving quickly to demolish Linnean at our kitchen table, taking the match in something outrageous, like four turns. Linnean was the only one allowed to see it because even though he planned on going to Toronto with everyone else, he hadn’t registered for the tournament. He was just going to offer his support. He’d also signed a flimsy-looking non-disclosure agreement that Jeff had drafted and printed off of our ancient Compaq. Jeff tried to make me sign one, too, but I just laughed at him. He didn’t want word to get out in advance of the Toronto contest, although I don’t know how far he could have expected the news to travel. Even though you can do the trip in just a couple of hours, it’s a long way down 10, longer than it seems.
High-level Magic play, Jeff explained to me, is something like a complex game of rock-paper-scissors, with chance to level the playing field. After the first few tournaments for a particular set, a number of decks appear which are considered viable, and these decks all have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, which a knowledgeable opponent will know how to identify and exploit. Creating a viable deck that was outside this rotation — looking at cards in the format, determining which underused cards had potential, and then developing a unique engine or variant — could therefore create a huge advantage against an opponent. All decks changed as the season progressed, and so the aim was to create something entirely new, to not just keep up with the new developments, but to get a step or two ahead of everyone else and blow them out of the water.
Fifteen thousand dollars was on the line, not to mention the trip to Berlin the following August. Jeff told me that if he won the tournament he was going to drop out of school. Lots of professional Magic players did, he said.
“Yeah, but high school?”
“What’s the difference? School is school. You don’t need it to play.”
But he only had a few months to go. We were in his room, and he was shuffling through his cards and laying them out in piles. He had just paid the eighty-dollar entrance fee. Things weren’t going well, he said. Even if he finished out the term he’d still have to come back for another full semester.
I was incredulous.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re already doing an extra year.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said, looking at his cards.
“You have to finish. Just, I don’t know, buckle down.”
“I’ll just get my GED.”
“That’s stupid.”
“No,” he said, separating a stack of cards into small piles, “it’s smart. You’re stupid.”
He was always saying that the education system was a scam, that you could learn more reading on your own. He’d read that on the internet somewhere. I’d already known he wasn’t going to university, but this was still a huge surprise.
I mean, high school is free. That’s what I said. It’s free.
He just shrugged. “There are other costs,” he said, ominously.
School was generally a subject that we never addressed because I knew it embarrassed him and in a way it embarrassed me, too, even though I didn’t like to think of it that way. Because it wasn’t his fault. Not really.
“Is this just because, like, people make fun of you?”
I could hear something rising in his voice, either anger or another feeling I couldn’t identify. A messier feeling.
“Who does?” he said.
I was afraid to answer, at first.
“I don’t know … people.” I shrugged.
He looked at me, in the eyes, once, then lowered them to the floor.
“You aren’t exactly popular,” I continued.
“I don’t care about being popular,” he said, turning back to his desk and reshuffling the cards.
“I know. I was just saying.”
I felt like I’d gone too far, even though I hadn’t said anything that either of us didn’t already know. It still seemed like a violation whenever it came up in conversation. But him dropping out was an extreme enough situation to warrant crossing that boundary.
“You should forget about the other kids and just focus on finishing.”
“I’m doing that. Just in another way.”
“But —”
“Listen,” he said, rounding on me. “I don’t need your advice, okay? I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s a good idea. Mom thinks so, too.”
“She does not.”
“If you don’t believe me, ask her yourself.”
I didn’t believe him. I thought he must have exaggerated or deliberately misinterpreted something else she had said.
I was on the point of leaving, but I decided to watch him some more. I needed to calm down and I didn’t want to storm out. I wanted it to seem like I wasn’t that upset, like it wasn’t a big deal, or like it was a big deal, but it was his problem, not mine.
I wanted to reassure myself, too. Even then I wanted to know that the world wasn’t as flimsy as he made it seem.
That it wouldn’t be, for me.
After a while I noticed that he wasn’t really doing anything, just moving cards around in a way that seemed to soothe him. He built up piles and tore them down without any purpose that was apparent.
I started to find it soothing, too.
But one thing was bothering me. I mean, more than one thing was bothering me. But I wanted to ask him another question.
“What if you don’t win?”
“Huh?”
“What if you don’t win the tournament? Or come in second. Or finish in the top eight. What if you don’t even qualify for Worlds?”
He thought about that for a bit.
“I’m still dropping out. Maybe I’ll write a book.”
It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say in my entire life. I punched him in the shoulder and walked out. He seemed surprised. I was lucky that he wasn’t in the mood to chase me down and give it back — he had at least fifty pounds on me, and he could really go at it if given half a chance.
I asked Mom about it later. Maybe the next Saturday. We were in the car. She was running errands, and I had tagged along. That was usually the best time to talk. I had spent the entire trip thinking of ways to bring it up. I guess I was acting strange because she asked me if I was feeling okay.
“Do you have a fever?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
She put her hand on my forehead. “You feel clammy. Maybe it was something you ate. What did you have for breakfast?”
“Just cereal,” I said, weakly, afraid to give away any more.
I put my seat belt on and stared out the window, watching the hydro poles and imagining that the passenger-side mirror was a buzz saw that cut down every single one.
I blurted it out, finally, as we were pulling onto the highway
on our way back.
“Did you know that Jeff wants to drop out of school?”
Mom didn’t look at me. I wondered if she hadn’t heard — the heat was on and so was the radio. I lowered the volume and repeated myself, but louder.
“I heard you the first time,” she said, not taking her eyes off the road.
“Oh,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“That’s what I thought! He said —”
“But it might be the best idea,” she said. “For Jeff.”
I was stunned.
“I just don’t have time to deal with this. Right now.”
“What?” I said, finally.
She didn’t answer.
“Deal with what?”
She gave me a look that said I mean it.
So I resigned myself to looking back out the window. Eventually Mom turned the radio up, and the rest of the way home we listened to a story about how Greenland was losing its ice cover in the face of global warming, and what that meant for the Inuit people who still made their living there.
“It’s a changing world,” said the announcer.
* * *
“Another reason I’m dropping out,” Jeff told me, later, “is that I just don’t feel compatible with any of my friends.”
“What?” I said. I felt like I’d been saying that a lot lately. Like I was a bird and that was the only noise I could make: Whaaaat? WhaAAT? Like instead of asking for bread crumbs I was strutting up and down sidewalks asking fundamental questions about the decisions people I loved were making. I had only just recently sort of accepted the fact that he wasn’t going to finish high school, which was made a little bit easier by the fact that he’d made a nonsensical pact with Mom to finish out the term (he was still going to fail most of his classes).
We were leaning on the wall outside Mac’s, eating Klondike bars. The one thing I’d always envied about Jeff, even if he wasn’t doing great, even if people made fun of him, was that he had his group of friends, and they shared a lot of common interests, hanging out after school all the time. They seemed tight — like there were no ambiguities between them. Like they were part of a team. But maybe I didn’t really know anything about that. I guess I didn’t.
He shrugged.
We watched the cars go by. Someone honked, either at another car or at us. The driver might have been a friend or an enemy, I wasn’t sure. They looked young, but in Durham that meant they could have been twenty-five or seventeen. Or thirty-six. It was difficult to tell.
“I don’t know,” Jeff said, finally, shielding his eyes from the late-afternoon sun. “I just … I don’t belong here,” he said.
“I don’t belong here, either,” I said, trying to hide my relief.
“But you belong here more than me.”
Why did I have to explain to my older brother that “belonging” was constructed and that if you didn’t want to belong you didn’t put in the effort and if you wanted to belong you did? Hadn’t he sort of taught me that?
“I thought you didn’t care,” I said.
“I don’t.”
“Okay …”
“It’s like, look.” He reached into his pocket. “See this card?”
It was a Magic card, of course.
“Yes,” I said. He just had it in his pocket? It was pretty beat-up, I guess partially from being carried around, but it also looked pretty old. Like it was from an older set. On its face there was an angel, painted in a vague Renaissance style, but wearing battle armour and looking up to the heavens. Behind the angel, gross combinations of machines and flesh (“Phyrexians,” Jeff had told me), were battling knights in (literally) shining armour.
“Don’t tell me that you’re the angel,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“And the knights are your friends?”
He nodded.
“You’re letting them fight alone.”
“I’m asking for help from God. Or a god. I’m not actually sure how that works in the Magic universe. I don’t read the books. But, anyway, she’s praying for favour — see? The card prevents damage to up to three targets. It’s a decent card, though maybe a little bit expensive. But that’s not the point. The point is,” he continued, “that the angel is painted differently than everyone else. A higher level of detail. She’s different. Everyone in the background runs together — there’s nothing that really distinguishes the knights from the Phyrexians, or any of the combatants from the battlefield itself, or the sky, or from the birds scattering in the distance. At that resolution. I mean, there is, but there isn’t.”
“They only have, like, three inches to fit in an entire painting,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Jeff, shrugging. “Never mind. You don’t understand.”
“Everything in that picture is paint. It’s all paint,” I said. “The angel is the same as everyone fighting in the background. She’s the same because she could be them and they could be her. Every inch of that canvas carries the potential to be anything else. You can’t just … separate an object from itself like that. They’re all constructed together. One allows the other to exist, even if it seems like they don’t fit together or they exist on different planes.… The background gives the angel definition, context. It’s all an illusion. That’s all painting is.”
“You really don’t understand,” said Jeff, putting the card back into his pocket, annoyed.
I don’t think he knew what he was talking about.
* * *
I thought about what Jeff had said that day, so long ago now, as I walked around town with my video camera stuffed in my bag, looking for something to film for the documentary, but too shy to carry the camcorder at the ready on my shoulder. I thought about the angel in the painting and how she was different just because the artist had painted her with highlights, because of an accident of orientation that put the angel in the foreground and the others in the back.
I thought about what I had said about the paint, too, about how you can’t separate yourself from your environment, not entirely, and I wondered whether I could use that in my documentary. Even though I hated Durham and desperately wanted to leave, I was also a product of it, probably in a lot of ways that I didn’t understand, that I wouldn’t even begin to see until I had finally put Durham behind me for good.
I only had so much tape left — I had wasted a lot on Huddy, and wasn’t quite ready to erase it, even though I knew I’d have to eventually to finish the documentary — and I wanted to think about what I was going to put in next, really consider it. Or at least that’s what I told myself when I made the decision to keep the camera off my shoulder. Actually, I think I felt afraid of taking my documentary in any one direction, afraid that it would be wrong and that I would be wasting my time. And since that was the case, it was better to delay. The only way to get there was to think deeply about it. That’s how it seemed to me. But I wasn’t making any progress, and all of a sudden, even though I’d started so well, or at least I thought I had, I looked up at the calendar and realized that I only had two weeks left. That meant that I didn’t have time to think at all, that for my own sake I had better start frantically shooting, but the problem was that I was still stuck.
I walked around town for a little while, absently dismissing everything I passed as a potential subject for my movie. The fish and chips spot, the donair place, the gas stations, the convenience stores, the main strip, the highway, the real estate office, the cemetery on the edge of town, and the park. None of them seemed like worthy subjects for one reason or another. Finally, I sat down on a bench and watched some elementary-school kids run circles around a jungle gym while a five-year-old, younger than the rest, stood at its highest point and shouted frantically, over and over, while pointing his finger down at them with damning purpose. I’m not really sure what his deal was. I looked around for a parent and didn’t see any. The other kids didn’t notice, or care, what he was doing. They seemed concent
rated on their game, which seemed like tag to me, but with more complicated rules. A variant I’d never played before or one they’d made up themselves.
I thought about taking the camera out for a minute, but decided against it. In general it doesn’t seem like good practice to film young children at the park when you are older and male and sitting alone. After a while the kids got tired and either stopped or finished the game, and one of the girls climbed up the jungle gym and tried to pick up the little guy up top. He was obviously too heavy for her, but she managed it, anyway, holding him at chest level, his legs dangling close to the ground. He’d long ago given up his weird crusade and had instead sat down on the platform and looked to be deeply investigating the wooden planks that made up the structure. He might have been reading the graffiti that I’m sure was scratched up there, or trying to, or maybe he made up his own game, in his head, with imaginary players. Instead of letting himself get lifted up by the girl, who was probably his sister, he wriggled away and ran down the stairs and then off the jungle gym and away, forcing his sister to chase after him. He started running faster and faster and tripped and fell in the grass. He didn’t seem too bothered by it and his sister jumped on him and pretended to attack him. He squealed at first with what sounded like pleasure and then with a kind of forced ill humour. Like he was having fun but he thought it would be better if he wasn’t. While I was watching that action most of the other kids had sort of wandered away, and I thought that it was probably time for me to head off, too, so I walked over to Walid’s house and knocked on his front door. When he answered he said it was perfect timing because he had just called me at home. He wanted to work on his documentary and asked if I could help. I said yes because I had long ago given up any hope of doing anything productive for myself that day.
I walked into Walid’s house and said hello to his dad, who responded by barely acknowledging me. Maybe he nodded, I don’t know. He was sitting in a chair in the living room and staring off into space. It looked like he had a couple of medical articles or something on his lap. He was an MRI technician at the hospital down in Orangeville and Walid said that it was his mom’s opinion that the research he did was basically professionally unnecessary, but that his father liked to do it because it gave him an excuse to zone out.