by André Babyn
Walid told me not to take it personally, and I didn’t, because it wasn’t the first time I had walked into the Khan household and felt like I was a ghost.
“I’ve been working on my storyboard all day,” said Walid, as he led me to his room. “I think I’m going to blow this documentary out of the water.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. I tried to remember what Walid was doing his documentary on. We talked about it a lot, somehow, without ever getting into specifics. I think it changed from day to day, and the only thing that remained constant was his expectation that it was going to be great.
“Yeah,” he said, handing me a bag to carry. “It’s a new idea. It’s going to be so good.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you later. I had a bolt of inspiration last night.” He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a Gatorade. “Want one?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. He handed me an orange bottle. I took a swig and then carefully resealed it and put it in my bag.
“Okay, Dad. I’m heading out,” Walid called from the foyer. His dad grunted in acknowledgement, but called us back when we were at the door, putting our shoes on.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“We’re going to shoot a video. It’s school work.”
Then his dad said something in Urdu and Walid responded. There was a little back and forth. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but his dad seemed angry, or at least annoyed.
“Okay, we’re going now,” said Walid, finally, bringing me back into the frame in order to cut the argument short. “Bye, Dad. C’mon,” he said, gesturing to me.
“What did he say?” I asked, after a little while.
“Nothing,” said Walid. “He just doesn’t like it when I go out without telling him.”
“But you told him,” I said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t, like, submit any formal documents. He usually tells me that I should be studying — not like he cares — so I think he was a little bit pissed that we’re going to go do something for school.”
I nodded. Walid could be punished for really random things.
“He told me I should have picked different courses,” he said. “More serious ones.”
“But you’re taking all the sciences. And calculus.”
“Like I said. He doesn’t really care. It’s stupid. And it doesn’t matter,” said Walid.
The day was bright and clear and there was a crisp wind blowing. The streets were empty, and we saw only the occasional car. In some of the houses we passed I could see through the front windows to entire families sitting in front of radiant televisions. We walked a little farther, finally turning into a little crescent, where Walid set his things down in the grass near a fire hydrant. “Anyway,” he said, “this is it.”
The houses looked familiar. Probably because I walked past their clones all the time, but I also wondered if it was possible that I knew someone who lived on this street. Or knew someone who knew someone.
“What’s ‘it’?” I asked. “Are you doing your doc on Durham, too?”
“No,” he said. “Fuck, no. But I did get the idea from you.”
I felt a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Walid was digging into the bag I had carried for him, pulling out parts and setting up a tripod.
“Guess who lives here,” he said. “In this crescent. You’ll never guess.”
“Walid, are you sure …”
“Watt.”
For a moment I was stunned, and even a little relieved, because I had expected him to say Huddy. I had been worried that Huddy was going to turn the corner at any moment. Huddy, or Vice-Principal Johnson and Huddy linking arms. Or Huddy and a police officer. Or Huddy and an axe from his garage. I didn’t know what he was capable of outside of school.
“What? Since when do you care about Watt?” I asked.
“Since last night. I saw him duck into this street and I tailed him to his house.” He had his camera open and was watching the screen boot.
“Yeah, but — what’s the hook? You’re just going to film his house?”
“No, man,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to, like, do a kind of exposé on him. Find out why he’s so messed up. You said it yourself — he’s a creep. I’m going to find out why.”
“Yeah,” I said, “he’s creepy, but …”
I stared across the street, at the house Walid had singled out, while Walid made himself busy, happily flitting from his notes to the camera, to a microphone he was unwrapping from its cord and preparing to slot into the top of his camera. I noticed that he was already recording.
“This is insane,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, through a huge grin.
“But, like — Wright’s going to destroy you.”
Walid stopped what he was doing.
“No, he isn’t,” he said. “I’m going to do this like how you were planning on shooting Huddy. Like he was a mystery or something.”
“You think that’s why I was filming Huddy? To make fun of him?”
“Wasn’t it?” he said.
“No,” I said, sitting down.
“Hey, can you grab the camera for me? I think we should be closer to the house. I want you to knock on the door later.”
I just looked at him.
“Okay,” he said, picking up the camera. “Then can you grab those bags?”
He came back a minute later and picked up the bags himself. “Are you going to help me at all?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“Oh, Jesus. Come on.”
“Watt might be creepy, but he doesn’t deserve this.”
Walid laughed. “What! Are you kidding? Yes, he does.”
For some reason I imagined Watt as a giant papier-mâché doll, with huge spider limbs that let him move quickly through the streets as he was chased off by attackers.
Creepy and weird, but delicate, too. I was sorry that Walid had discovered where he lived.
“I’m going home,” I said, picking up my backpack and walking away.
“Really?” Walid said, after a minute. Just loud enough so I could hear him.
I didn’t turn around.
“Fuck you!” he screamed, suddenly, at the top of his lungs.
I turned around.
“What?”
“Fuck you!” he yelled again. “You think you’re better than me?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“Good! Because you’re not better than me. Just because you’re quiet doesn’t mean that you aren’t a piece of shit, too.”
He was genuinely angry, really angry, and I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m not a piece of shit,” I said.
The last time I’d gotten into a shouting match with anyone who wasn’t in my family was in grade five, during lunch break, when some kids from the other class wrecked our soccer ball. That was before I’d met Walid. I’d spent the whole rest of the day crying.
I thought it would be best if I left.
“Turn around!” Walid yelled. “I’m not done!”
I kept walking.
“You start hanging out with Lauren, and all of a sudden you’re better than me?”
I shook my head, but I didn’t turn around.
God, he was so wrong.
He ran up and pushed me from behind.
“Hey!” he said.
“What?” I said. My face was hot. I was angry, but I felt like crying more than anything. I was afraid of breaking down in front of him, like I had broken down in Wright’s office. I knew that he would never let it go if I did.
He pushed me again.
“Fuck you,” I said, and I pushed him back. It was much easier than I thought it would be.
“Do that again,” said Walid, with menace in his voice.
I did.
10
It was Spink who told me about what happened at the tournament. I knew it hadn’t gone well, because if it had gone well Jeff would have told me about it himself. Instead, when JC’s dad dropped him off, early Sunday afternoon, Jeff stole into the house quietly, dropping his coat on his shoes and creeping upstairs. His footsteps were heavy, like it took all of his strength not only to climb each step, but to stop himself from sinking into the floor.
The tournament was supposed to be for the full three days. The winner wouldn’t be declared until seven or eight o’clock that night.
“How’d it go?” I asked, later. At his door.
He just looked at me.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Are you still going to quit school?”
“I haven’t decided,” he said, getting up and looking at something on his shelf. Turning his big, dumb back to me. Mom didn’t come home until much later that night. When she saw his stuff in the foyer she came into the living room and asked me how it went. I told her that I had no idea.
“Not good, I think.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “that’s too bad.” Then she laughed, like she was letting go of something. Like she’d thrown her wallet off a bridge. “That’s just too bad,” she said, again.
Jeff stayed pretty quiet from then on. I’d knock on the door to his room and he wouldn’t answer. Sometimes he would tell me to go away. Once or twice I opened the door and peeked inside to say hello and he got angry and told me to shut it. I never did, not right away, and so he kept yelling. Once he rushed me and knocked the door so hard back in my direction that it cut my lip.
“You asshole,” I said, tasting blood.
“Stay out of my room.”
He missed a tournament at Wizard Palace and stopped going to the weeknight hangs. I was worried about him, mostly because I knew what he was doing in there. He hadn’t given up. He was still working on his deck, trying to refine it and to figure out what had gone wrong. But it seemed obvious to me that it didn’t matter anymore. He’d missed his chance. Not because he’d failed, but because of what he let that failure do to him.
How badly had he missed his chance? I wasn’t sure why it even mattered to me. Why the specifics of it mattered.
But I had to know.
I found Spink sitting by the windows, his bright canvas sneakers propped up on a chair next to him while a girl I didn’t know tossed microwave popcorn into his mouth from across the table. “You’re missing me deliberately,” he said, after the fifth kernel bounced off his cheek. She laughed. I’d already finished eating with the guys. Spink’s jeans were covered in marker drawings and safety pins, pretty much a daily look for him.
He told me that Jeff had won the first two matches, which surprised me because it was already much better than I expected. “He actually did better than most of us,” Spink said, shaking his head. Jeff’s first victory seemed to go exactly according to plan. Jeff’s opponent was playing a known variant, but wasn’t particularly skilled. The second game was against a totally unique five-colour deck that managed to keep Jeff off balance for most of their three matches. “Jeff won by the skin of his teeth,” said Spink. “I mean, he was really sweating.” Then Jeff and Spink got separated. “I heard he’d split against his next two opponents,” he said. “I’d only won one of my first four matches. I was pretty envious.” But Jeff’s victory had been against an opponent he had planned for, and it had been really close. “He was having trouble getting his mana out,” Spink said. “Or he maybe thought he had too much. It was one or the other.”
Linnean leaned over from the other side of the table.
“Are you talking about Jeff?” he asked.
We both nodded.
“He thought it would be easy. That he could just roll over the competition. But it’s not easy. Not everyone plays as bad as me.”
“Of course,” said Spink.
Linnean tried to hit him from across the table.
“But anyway, he thought he didn’t have enough mana. So he traded some in from his sideboard. And then he lost the next two matches.”
“The next four, really,” said Spink.
“He didn’t win any more?” I said.
“But he took the mana out again after the next two losses. And then he tried putting more in again. And then tweaking other things. But he didn’t win again,” said Linnean. “I couldn’t stay with him for the last two matches. I kept an eye on him, but not very closely. You could tell he was really upset. I mean, Jeff would never say it.”
“No,” said Spink.
“But he was practically on the verge of tears —”
“I don’t know if Jeff would cry,” said Spink.
“Maybe that’s true,” said Linnean, thinking about it.
“More like a nervous breakdown,” said Spink. “Like he might start flipping tables.”
“Yeah,” Linnean and I said simultaneously.
“Anyway,” continued Linnean, “I was surprised he even finished those matches. He wasn’t playing like he normally did. He’d draw a card and the look on his face —”
“I saw the last match,” Spink said. “Or the last fifteen minutes of the last match. I’d drawn my last opponent. It was a quick game — I think we both were relieved to be able to pad our standings a little bit. I finished at two-four-two. Not bad. But obviously the tournament was over for me.”
“It was over for Jeff, too,” said Linnean. “After his third loss? I think? No chance of getting into the top eight.”
“Right — but it wasn’t over for him. The look on his face. When he drew a card — as I was saying — good or bad, he always looked crushed. It didn’t matter what he got,” said Spink. “It was like his cards had been infected somehow.”
“He didn’t go out with us that night,” said Linnean.
“What, really?” I asked.
“Not even for dinner. He stayed at the hotel,” said Linnean. “Said he was practising. Which was crazy. He wasn’t practising. Or, at least, I don’t think he was. I offered to stay with him, but he told me no. Said I should go out with the others.”
“He wasn’t there when we got back,” said Spink.
“Where did he go?”
“That’s the thing,” said Linnean. “We have no idea.”
“He didn’t tell you?” asked Spink.
“He hasn’t told me anything,” I said.
“He didn’t get back until late the next morning. We had to lie to JC’s dad so that he wouldn’t freak out,” said Spink.
“But we were pretty worried,” said Linnean.
“Has he ever done that sort of thing before?” asked Spink.
“I guess,” I said. “But not in a strange place.”
“It was so messed up,” said Spink.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me any of this?” I said.
They both shrugged.
Where could Jeff have gone?
* * *
I wanted to ask Jeff where he’d been when I got home, but when I went upstairs I saw that his door was open and his room was empty. On the days he didn’t go to school it was often a long time before he came home. I used to think he was at a friend’s, or at Wizard Palace, or maybe at the coffee shop, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. I wondered, for some reason, whether he wasn’t in the forest on the edge of town, the one we used to go to when we were kids. And the one we hadn’t really been back to after the accident.
I decided to walk out along the highway to find him, and I left a note for Mom to let her know. I didn’t say where I was going, only that I was out and probably wouldn’t be back until dinner, if that. I hoped she would save me some.
We were in the middle of a freak warm spell. A few days with the temperature at five or six degrees Celsius. Which maybe wasn’t so freakish for March, but it felt that way, because the winter had been long and that was our first relief. I put on my coat and my boots and a hat and
I left my coat unzipped and took my gloves, but stuffed them in my pockets because I didn’t expect to use them.
Jeff could be a mystery sometimes, since it was so rare for him to talk about what was on his mind. Or for him to respond directly to what he would consider personal questions. He was always lobbing them back to you, forcing you to respond to something else entirely. Even with me. I guess I was kind of hoping that if I caught him he would finally break down and open up.
I imagined Jeff playing his last few matches. Feeling like the cards were conspiring against him, melting into each other, turning diseased and spreading the disease to him. Like the angel, dragged into incoherence by the knights and the Phyrexians, losing her detail, becoming just a smudge of paint. Evacuating the foreground, leaving only a ray of light, a call from God that was left unanswered. I could see it. And it scared me because I hadn’t thought he would take it that seriously and I didn’t know what he would do.
Why hadn’t he just stopped playing? I wish he had put down his cards and gotten up from the table and walked back to the hotel room. As soon as he realized he wasn’t going to win the tournament. I wish he’d gone out that night with his friends and had fun and gone to the second day of the tournament just to take it all in, as they’d planned, and told me all about it and then gone back to school again on Monday. Like normal. And put the game behind him, at least for a little while.
The park was almost deserted. There was a small child playing in the snow with their mother near the fenceline, a sled on the snow behind them. The kid so deep in their purple snowsuit that I couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl. A tiny pink backpack lay abandoned by the jungle gym, sitting on the frozen gravel. It was half-unzipped, and a crumby Ziploc bag peeked out from the hole.
I felt a peculiar kind of sadness looking at it.
I don’t know what I was expecting — I thought that by the time I got out to the park it would be eight or nine o’clock at night and I’d have to brave the forest in pitch-black darkness to find Jeff. Which was absurd, it was barely four. It was getting darker, but the sun wouldn’t set for at least another couple hours. I had imagined a ghostly scene, with the threat of animals patrolling the park’s border. For some reason it didn’t reassure me to see the park so differently, bathed in white, in the daylight, in its mundanity. I didn’t want to think that it could be indifferent to the crisis that I thought was on its way.