The Perfect Order of Things

by David Gilmour

  You can’t explain why you love someone, why a best friend is a best friend. It always sounds oversold, never quite convincing. Better take the route of the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Talking about the death of his closest friend, he said in one simple, heartbreaking sentence: “Si l’on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne peut s’exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” (“If you were to press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was I.”)

  In our early twenties, Justin and I had a tiff over a Polish girl (sexy in a consumptive way). She played us both for fools, and we didn’t see each other for many wasted years. And then one night more than a decade later, I found myself nostalgically tipsy in a bar and I called him. It took only several seconds to dial the numbers and even as the phone rang, it seemed odd that so simple, so brief a gesture—dialing a number—had kept old friends apart for a decade.

  We met a few days later in a dark, sordid strip club downtown. (His idea.) The years had hardened him physically. He looked thin and greasy, hunched over the Formica table, shovelling some kind of salad into his mouth with a too-small plastic fork. He had a room upstairs, over the bar, he told me. Two men passed the table wearing three-quarter-length brown leather jackets. Small-time thugs. He nodded at them. They sat over in the corner and looked at us. One of them said something and the other laughed and I had the uncomfortable feeling they were talking about me, about what a wimp I was. The waitress came over, dollar bills spread between her red-tipped fingers. I ordered a beer; Justin shot the waitress a look, as if just the act of my ordering bothered him.

  “Bobby?” she said. She was talking to him. To Justin.

  “I’m good,” he said. The waitress went over and stood by the bar.

  “Bobby?” I said.

  “That’s what they call me down here. Bobby Blue.” He said it with a dusting of mildly aggressive pride, as if being called a tough-guy name, however absurd, was, for a rich kid slumming it “down here,” some kind of accomplishment. Notwithstanding the fact that it makes me nervous when people change their names: there’s almost always something wrong with them, a mine shaft right through the middle of their personality. But I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want any of that today.

  We chatted about this and that, but Justin seemed stiff, rather formal. It was as though, after my phone call, a videotape of the “incident” with the Polish girl (a drunken, late-night visit) had started up in his imagination and his thoughts had taken an unforgiving turn. After a while (me nodding, finishing his sentences, laughing a touch too heartily), I noticed a man standing by the bar, looking this way. I’d seen him on the way in. A weightlifter’s body in a black turtleneck sweater and beret.

  Justin put down his too-small fork and reached for his coat on the chair behind him.

  “Are you going?” I said.

  It was disgracefully rude, he knew it, and for a second he lost his resolve. “I’m meeting my mother.” There it was again, the phony, parent-pleasing frown that I had distrusted even as a child. (It always signalled a betrayal at hand.) Except now he was thirty-five. From the corner of my eye I saw him join the man at the bar. Then Justin Strawbridge, wearing a long-tailed cowboy coat, disappeared into the bright light of the doorway, the ape in the beret following.

  What an absurd coat, I thought. What could he be playing at?

  But sometimes it’s simply too much trouble to stay mad at an old friend, and I suppose that’s what happened with us. Again memory fails me, who contacted whom, I don’t recall, although I have a feeling it was Justin who phoned. Why, I’m not sure, perhaps a last grasp for a life raft.

  Six months later, it was spring now, I found myself riding a motorcycle along a country road, the same Sweet Cherry Lane that I would later notice from the car with my wife. You could smell the warm grass; farms dotted the horizon; the whole world, it seemed, swam in a lush green wind. In my overnight bag was a bottle of Scotch and a well-worn, brick-sized paperback of War and Peace (the divine Constance Garnett translation). I wanted to give my old friend a taste of the greatest novel ever written but also a glimpse of what I was like, what pleased me, moved me, delighted me these days. In anticipation, I’d even highlighted certain passages. I imagined a late night, boozy reading: perhaps an excerpt from Nicholas Rostov’s flight in the rush of French troops; or Princess Marya Bolkonsky’s monologue about love never coming her way—a section so heartbreaking that I’d never read it aloud for fear my throat would tighten and my voice take an embarrassing wobble.

  Turning onto a gravel road, I caught sight of Justin Strawbridge waiting in the distance. Behind him, a house with a crooked spine. Crows sat on power lines overhead. Black butterflies flickered among the dandelions. He waved once and then quickly went inside. That was how it began.

  We had a great deal of fun that night, those rituals that old friends do when they haven’t seen each other for years. You retell stories you both know, and know you both know, revisit old hangovers and old lovers and old disgraceful moments, all in extreme colours now, all agreeably weightless; we touched on “the incident” with the Polish girl and apart from his eyes lingering a moment longer than they should have on my features, the evening moved on. We played songs for each other from albums that no one listened to anymore.

  “You know,” Justin said, listening for a moment to the Beatles’ “All My Loving,” “I’ve never really liked that song. There’s something dull right at the heart of it.”

  “Like an apple. It’s boring the way eating an apple is boring,” I said.

  “Too true.”

  “It’s all promise and no delivery.”

  “No chorus, either. All the best Beatle songs have a great chorus.”

  “‘I Saw Her Standing There.’”

  “‘When I Get Home.’”

  “Does a hook get any better than the hook in ‘When I Get Home’? The Beatles doing Wilson Pickett.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Absolutely unfucking believable.”

  “‘This Boy.’”

  “It does get better. ‘This Boy’s got an even better chorus. How could anybody write a chorus that’s so fucking great?”

  And at this we both laughed in delight, for no apparent reason.

  Refreshing his drink in the kitchen, Justin said, “If I asked you to kill my mother, would you help me?”

  Pause. “Come again.”

  “She never liked the Beatles.”

  “You want to kill your mother because she didn’t like the Beatles?”

  “No, I want to kill my mother because she’s a cunt.”

  From that point on, the evening only comes back to me in fragments, like an avant-garde film. (It must have been the switch to brandy.) We talked about Walt Whitman (Justin’s guy); standing by his library (quite a large, distinguished collection of hardbacks), he read me the final stanzas of Song of Myself. I listened with pleasure not because I gave a shit about Whitman (I don’t) but because Justin Strawbridge was there, in front of me, my boyhood friend, and we were at ease with each other again, as if it had been weeks, not more than a decade. As if a part of my life which I’d believed lost forever had simply recommenced. God, how I’d missed him!

  He retrieved a manuscript from a mahogany desk—I had the feeling I’d seen some of this furniture before—and read me a selection of poems that he’d written himself; rolling stanzas affecting a sugary reverence for nature, the godliness in all things living, the circle of seasons, the big round moon. It was, from beginning to end, bullshit, but I clapped and called for more.

  Then it was my turn. “Here’s a little something I came across while you were away.” His eyes settled on me again. I read him Prince Andrei’s thoughts just seconds before a shell explodes in front of him in the Battle of Austerlitz:

  “Can this be death?” Prince Andrei wondered, with an utterly new, wistful feeling, looking
at the grass. At the wormwood, and at the thread of smoke coiling from the rotating shell. “I can’t die, I don’t want to die, I love life, I love this grass and earth . . .”

  I looked up with an expression of anticipation and found my friend staring into the other room.

  “Just a moment,” he said, and went quickly into the kitchen. Sitting there, the book still open in my hands, I felt a sting of embarrassment, but also a sensation of having squandered something delicate. And with that came a sudden, unwelcome memory of an incident which had taken place a few years earlier in a bar on the island of Martinique. Lonely and a bit drunk one night, I struck up a conversation with a handful of French sailors—they were on shore leave—and in the course of events, more drinks, the evening getting later and later, I told them I was a “writer”; and to prove it (as if it needed proving) I produced from my shoulder bag a pristine edition of my very first novel, it had just been published, and began to show it around; and one of the sailors yanked the book from my hands and, standing on his tiptoes (the bar was crowded), began to read from the first chapter in a singsong voice with a heavy French accent. I snatched it back, but it was too late; the damage, the “sullying,” was done.

  Justin came back into the room, animated with relief. “I thought I lost it,” he said.

  Remembering that night in Martinique (you must protect the precious things in your life), I discreetly closed War and Peace and laid it on the table beside my chair. Justin appeared not to notice or, for that matter, to remember what we’d just been doing.

  Things moved forward, and near midnight he took me upstairs and showed me a machine gun he’d purchased through the mail. We went onto the second-floor patio. In the distance you could see a single pair of headlights moving across the darkness. A sky of needle-prick stars. The air warm and thicker than in the city, a smell that excites.

  Justin went to the end of the patio, shouldered the weapon and fired off a deafening round of automated fire into the lawn below. You could see lumps of grass and earth jumping up like hedgehogs. The air around us turned grey with smoke and the smell of cordite.

  “Those cocksuckers,” he said.

  I woke up the next morning in an airy room on the main floor. Outside my window was the driveway, behind it a field bespeckled with dandelions and daisies. The sun was high in the sky; noon maybe; bees hummed in the eavestrough. It had been years since I’d drunk hard liquor and when I sat up in bed, it was as though a tray of silverware slid forward inside my head and clanked against the front of my skull. I wondered fleetingly if I might have damaged my brain.

  I found Justin in the kitchen. He was seated at the table, chopping up a greyish powder with a razor blade. He looked grim, oddly purposeful.

  I picked up my copy of War and Peace from the table and was about to return it to my bag when he said, “Not now.” I put it down. After a moment I said, “What’s that?”

  “TCP.”

  I said, “What does that stand for?”

  He ignored the question.

  “Will it work for a hangover?” I asked cheerfully.

  A slight, ironic smile. “It’ll make you stupider, but it’s worth it.”

  Twenty minutes later, I lay in the dandelion field behind his house. Nauseated, sweating, a sense of iron dread, of a life misspent, clawing at my heart.

  “Have I taken something that might kill me?” I said.

  Justin sat beside me, chewing nonchalantly on a blade of grass. “What?” he said.

  “What is that stuff, that TCP?”

  He said, “It wouldn’t make any sense if I told you.”

  I said, “My heart is racing. I’m not going to have a heart attack, am I?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Should I go to the hospital?”

  “It’s a glorious day,” he said. “You shouldn’t be like this. You hold on too tight.”

  “Just tell me,” I said, “please, do I have anything to worry about? Am I going to die from this stuff?”

  Turning his pale blue eyes toward me, he said, “You will if you don’t pray with me.” And then he did the most extraordinary thing. He stripped off his clothes, his shirt, his pants, his underwear, and began a series of obscene somersaults, like a maggot rolling in the dandelions under the bright summer sunlight. It was clear that my childhood friend had gone completely insane.

  Kneeling as though in church, he clamped his hands together and began to pray. “Our Father, Which art in heaven—”

  “What does TCP stand for?” I shouted.

  “Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come . . .”

  “Justin! TCP! What does it mean!”

  He came to a halt. His eyes settled on me again, shattered prisms in a sweaty face. “You should never have fucked her,” he said, almost with regret, as if to say, It’s too bad all this has to happen to you, but you asked for it.

  Then he started back to the house, stark naked, carrying his clothes. “You should never have fucked her,” he repeated, not looking back. And in a moment he was gone—into his car and down the driveway, a plume of dust rising behind him. The hum of cicadas rose and fell in the yellow fields.

  I went back inside the farmhouse and lay down in the white bedroom. Time passed. The room cooled off; the sky darkened; I got up to go to the bathroom; I drank three glasses of water from a toothbrush glass; I looked out the window; across the dark fields, the city glowed like an icebox.

  I was just drifting off, that very second between sleep and wakefulness when your thoughts seem to forget whose they are and, like a herd of frightened deer, take off in their own direction. The sound of a car door slamming woke me up; there were voices and the musical notes of a wind instrument. When I looked out the window, I saw this: a stocky man in a beret tootling on a flute while Justin danced clumsily, like a bear, in the driveway.

  I came out onto the porch.

  “I want to introduce you to somebody,” Justin said.

  The man in the beret removed the flute from his full red lips. It was the man I’d seen in the strip club. There was a sudden knocking at my heart. Some people’s eyes you know not to look into for too long.

  “Duane Hickok,” Justin said.

  I shook hands with him, avoiding his eyes, frightened that he might smell fear on me, like a dog can. I can’t say why he scared me except I sensed that he was capable of a kind of violence the borders of which went well beyond my experience, beyond even my occasional four-in-the-morning revenge fantasies. A man who could kick you in the mouth without an elevation in his pulse. Moreover, I suspected, or rather intuited at an animal level, that you could never be entirely sure what would set it off; a remark, a look, a gesture of “disrespect,” you wouldn’t know it until he was on you.

  I stepped back inside the house and gestured privately to Justin. “You can’t let that man in the house,” I whispered.

  Pale, his breath metallic, Justin rounded his eyes with parent-pleasing surprise. “Why not?”

  I don’t think I replied, but I felt something fall inside me. I went back into my bedroom, packed up War and Peace along with my toothbrush, leaving behind Justin’s self-published book of “poetry” (so exuberantly accepted the night before), and soon after started down the darkening driveway, the sound of stones crunching under my motorcycle. Justin, his brow guiltily furrowed, stood on the porch stairs, his hand raised in farewell. (Where had I seen that gesture? Yes, right. The Great Gatsby.)

  I stopped at the juncture with the main road. Justin and Duane had gone inside; the house was wildly lit up now, the light spilling out the windows onto the grass. It was very quiet out there, but you could hear the hum of electricity pouring through the thick wires overhead. For a moment or two I wondered if I should go back to the farmhouse. I had a feeling that if I didn’t, the damage between us would harden like cement. But I also knew not to. I knew I was safer driving drugged and jumpy all the way back to the city, in the dark, on a motorcycle, than I would have been if I’d staye
d in that house, that night, with my old friend.

  Peculiar as it sounds, I can’t recall how I heard what I heard next. Was there a phone call? I simply don’t know. But this is what I read in the newspaper a few days later. Shortly after my departure, Justin fired a short blast from a machine gun into Duane’s mouth. Brain tissue splattered against the library books. Several hours later (that’s hours), local police were called. On arriving, they observed that the body had been “interfered with.” Which meant moved from the living room to the kitchen to the porch. The study was in disarray: smashed furniture, lamps overturned, a valuable Spanish acoustic guitar snapped off at the neck. One detail in particular snagged their attention: given where Justin claimed he was standing when the gun was discharged (self-defence, carving knife on the Persian carpet), the brain tissue appeared to be on the wrong part of the wall.

  A blond woman with the eyes of a drowsy garter snake was also in the house. Justin’s mother. It turned out she lived just down the road. A lawyer was also present.

  By midnight the following day, Justin was a patient at the Bosley Centre for Criminal Psychiatry in Toronto, which, in a touch almost too literary to mention, faced the kitchen of my apartment several blocks away. In fact, I believe that first night, the day after the killing, I saw him standing at the window of his “room.” With his hands in his pockets. I don’t think he knew I lived nearby.

  I never talked to the police. I’ve always had the suspicion that it was Justin’s mother’s idea to keep them from me, that she thought, as only the evil think, that I might do to her and her son what she, without question, would have done to me if our positions had been reversed. And more than once I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart thwacking at the notion that she might somehow— any way she could—implicate me in the murder. I say “murder” because I know that’s what it was. I knew it then, I know it now. And they both know I know.