The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  Getting back to Kyle. The thing about Kyle’s magic is, it makes him a uniter, an axle. He brings the disparate social echelons together in their mutual attraction to himself. He knows this; everybody knows this. So when these diverse campus factions — typically so opposed — are gathered together one raucous evening at the Temple (“gathered in Dionysian worship,” Kyle likes to joke), the venue is understood to constitute a no man’s land, a place of peace. No sectarian conflict will be tolerated.

  So say some thug from the hockey team spots some skinny wiener in his kill-me uniform of a cardigan and glasses, decides to dispense with introductions and instead to pick the wiener up, hoist the now squirming wiener over his head, and march over to a nearby open window to the ecstatic cheers of his hockey compadres. Kyle, in such a circumstance, could be relied upon to bound across the room, station himself between the thug and open window, sternly point at the thug with the spout of his beer bottle, and say, like dog trainer to a misbehaving mutt: No. No, Rank. Not here. Not in this house, man. No.

  Chastened, knowing he has violated the code of the Temple, the thug reluctantly but gently places the wiener back on solid ground. His hockey buddies pout, jeer briefly, then turn away to look for girls.

  The first person to speak is the wiener. “Thank you,” he says, rubbing his body where the thug’s pipelike fingers had dug into him.

  Kyle turns a look of scorn onto the thug. “He just fucking thanked you, Rank.”

  Who in the universe but Kyle could make a normally unrepentant thug feel so very repentant — when all he was doing was acting the way any self-respecting thug was expected and encouraged to act? Jeez. The thug in question understands what has to happen next.

  He turns and addresses the wiener.

  “Sorry, man. Just getting a little exercise.”

  The glasses shift toward him, flicker light into the thug’s eyes. “No problem.”

  “Now shake hands,” says Kyle.

  Rank winces. “Kyle, fuck’s sake man.”

  “This is my house. This is the Temple. It is a Temple of friendship, and it is a Temple of love.”

  Only Kyle Jarvis can get away with saying this sort of thing.

  So the two young men roll eyes and shake hands.

  “Come with me,” insists Kyle, and ushers the two new acquaintances over to the kitchen. Together the three of them stand solemnly before the fridge like it is an altar. Kyle opens it with a somehow ceremonial yank, pulls out a couple of beer, and cracks them for each of his guests before handing them over.

  “Now,” he instructs. “You two stand here with your beer and get to know each other. Don’t come out of the kitchen until you’re best friends. I’m serious.”

  With that, he leaves them.

  They regard each other. Rank pushes out his breath, making his lips flap a little. It isn’t an encouraging sound, but the wiener doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make the first appeasing move. Also, he seems to know precisely the right angle to point his glasses in order to make them reflect light into the eyes of the person in front of him. Safe behind his glasses, he gives nothing away. He just waits.

  After a moment, Rank speaks.

  “Can I say something here, Adam?”

  “Certainly, Rank.”

  “I know we haven’t known each other long. But, here it is. You are — bar none — the greatest guy I’ve ever met.”

  The glasses shift then, pointing downward at the blackened kitchen linoleum. A silent, sombre nod, followed by a slightly choked-up throat-clearing. “That means . . . so much to me Rank. You have no idea.”

  Rank begins to choke a bit himself. “And I . . . I just wanna say . . .”

  “Just say it, Rank. It’s okay. I’m here.”

  “I’d really like to offer you a hand job.”

  Adam can’t keep it up and ends up spraying beer across the kitchen.

  So the ritual was a success. Chalk up another for the magic man.

  07/28/09, 12:03 a.m.

  I’m sorry but I just have to stop and remark upon what a total trip down memory lane it is, being here, for me. I didn’t quite realize it until Owen Findlay came by for a beer the other night. He brought over a bunch of copies of those pics from my hockey days that Father Waugh had mentioned on the phone — one set for me and one for Gord. Neither of us had seen them before. It’s weird to see pictures of yourself as a kid that you’ve never seen before — it’s as if there’s a version of you, a double, that you didn’t even know existed, hanging around somewhere in the past.

  So doesn’t Gord promptly haul out his own photo album (by which I mean hollers at me to haul it from the top shelf of the bookcase for him), preparing to set sail into Rankin family history.

  The moment Gord opens the album, photos cascade from its pages and into his lap because after Sylvie died he couldn’t be bothered to maintain it properly. He likes to take the snapshots out of the book to show people and then just shoves them back in the album without bothering to reaffix any of them. I am pretty sure this is not just because he’s lazy. It’s because he doesn’t know how to do it — he’s never bothered to figure it out. Keeping albums was my mother’s job.

  So there’s Gord with a crotchful of photos and he makes poor Owen sit there listening to extended narratives about every last one. Here’s the boy playing street hockey with his friends — already an enforcer, looka the size a the, etc. Here he hulks in his Icy Dream uniform on his first day of work, all of fourteen years old. Here he is with his lame certificate stating that he has graduated from “Hot Fudge High,” which was what Icy Dream Inc. called the weekend training seminar they offered to franchise employees. I remember at the time being pretty excited by the whole thing, because it meant we had to go into the city for the weekend and stay in a hotel, and I was the youngest person in the whole seminar, even though I didn’t look it. Gord introduced me to everyone there as his “new assistant manager” and at the bar afterward someone handed me a pint without a second glance.

  Owen accepts every photo my father hands over, gazes at it for however long it takes for Gord to unfurl the fascinating Rank-centric anecdote attached, then politely places the photo in a growing stack on the end table beside him in time for Gord to hand him another. I decide that I will allow this to continue for as long as it takes me to hook up the wireless modem I’ve been fiddling with all day. It might seem a little rude toward Owen, but it’s good to have Gord distracted and nattering at someone else for a while. Besides, the modem has been making me crazy, and I can’t stand to put it aside until I’ve got it hooked up. My computer won’t pick up the signal. I have spoken, after waiting on hold for two successive eternities, to the tech support people representing both the manufacturers of the computer and the modem — neither party being of any help whatsoever — and I refuse to do it again. If I can’t figure it out myself, I am going to throw the computer away and buy another, more expensive one. I don’t give a shit anymore.

  So as Gord hands over photographs to Owen, I sit there going back and forth between the modem and my computer, checking for a connection, occasionally giving absent-minded answers to Gord’s inane promptings, e.g.: “Remember that now Gordie?” “Didn’t care for that, much, did he son?” “Guess you showed them, eh, Gordie?”

  And I’m muttering, “Yup. Yeah, I remember. Shit! This stupid . . . Yeah, I know Gord. Goddamnit!”

  And Owen is saying things like: “He barely fits into that sweater!” and “That’s not the same sign as they have at the ID now is it? When’d you get that sign changed, Gordon?”

  And as pissed off as I am at the computer situation I’m secretly very grateful to have something to distract me from the cure for insomnia that’s happening on the other side of the room.

  And that’s when I exclaim: “You complete and total fucker!” and notice that I have shouted these words into an uncharacteristic sound vacuum. So I glance up at Gord and Owen who are leaning toward each other like school boys sharing a textbook, only th
ey’re not reading, they’re looking at a picture together.

  And Gord has stopped talking, so I know it’s a picture of Sylvie.

  What’s more, I know what photo it is. I don’t know how but I do. Maybe just because I saw it and handled it so many times in my youth — and saw Gord and Sylvie do the same, because everyone in my family always loved the damn thing, were always passing it around, taking it out of the album to show friends and relatives. It was just one of those photos. In these days of digicams you can take a picture a second and delete whatever looks like crap, so a decent snap of someone — where their eyes aren’t half closed or they don’t look like they have six chins — doesn’t have the same magic of really good old photographs. The uncanny luck of a picture that not only gets across everything good in the moment, but somehow composes itself into a representation of something more, something beyond that moment — even better than the moment itself.

  It’s almost like a lie, a good photo. An unbearable lie. Like that moment you feel yourself starting to wake up after the best dream of your life. And you hold your eyes shut and you just lie there; you can’t stand it, you’re so disappointed to be waking up.

  It’s the photograph of me and Sylvie after my Confirmation — that’s the photo Gord is holding. He took it himself, out in the church parking lot, immediately following the ceremony.

  Finally Gord speaks.

  “Mother and son.”

  “That’s a nice shot,” murmurs Owen. He looks like he would be happy to sit there gazing away at the image of me with my buck teeth and tan corduroy suit for as long as Gord is willing to hold it up in front of him.

  Without even thinking about it, I’ve shoved the laptop aside and am on my feet, reaching out to retrieve the snapshot, which Gord is now holding out to me.

  Why did I want to see it again? As I turned it over in my fingers, I could see that I hadn’t forgotten a single detail. It was all there, the late morning sunlight, the gleaming cars behind us, the expanse of beige corduroy, purchased in a panic because I’d had the first of my two major growth spurts practically the day before and it was the only thing in the store that fit me. And, oh, it was godawful. And I was godawful. I was a post-growth-spurt mess. My teeth seemed to stick out a mile. My tie, which was Gord’s tie, was about the same distance wide and a glaring kelly green. If I had still looked like a child, this clown suit would have been okay, passable, because kids can get away with anything — kids are meant to look ridiculous — but I looked like a young man. A young man with no idea how to dress. Therefore, an imbecile. To top it all off, I still had my pre-growth spurt haircut — prodigious, everywhere, past my ears. Fine on a child, insane on a man in a corduroy suit. Why hadn’t Sylvie cut it? Like I said, I had grown up in a day, practically. None of us was ready.

  In the photo, I am grinning from ear to ear. Sylvie is also grinning from ear to ear. She is peeping out from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my waist and her tiny hands locked together against my abdomen. There’s a slight look of incredulousness on her face, because I remember her exclaiming, as we posed: I can barely get my arms around him anymore! And that’s when I started laughing, giving the buck teeth a nice healthy airing, at which Gord started laughing, followed by Sylvie, who was also grunting as she reached around me, to indicate what an incredible effort it took.

  And then, snap. Shot.

  We are like — I don’t know how else to explain it — Sylvie and I are like two suns in this picture. We radiate.

  And then Gord ruins it. As Gord has always ruined it. He nudges Owen.

  “Young Gordie was always a bit of a mama’s boy, truth be told.”

  I remember being this angry only a couple of times. Once was in that room at the courthouse with Sylvie, Gord, and Trisha after Gord insisted my suffering mother should absent herself from my trial and I, in turn, insisted I was going to kill him and Trish, in turn, insisted Gord should go get a drink from the water fountain down the hall.

  The other time — you remember. You were there. And Kyle was there. And Kyle stood his ground pretty impressively, it seems to me now.

  And I think something must happen to my face at that point, because Owen jumps to his feet.

  I am talking. In a very low drawl, like a slowed-down recording, I hear myself say: “You know what Gord?”

  But Owen won’t let me tell him what. His body is suddenly against mine and he is kind of fox-trotting me into the kitchen and out the front door, calling something to my father about us taking a walk out back to see the creek. I can hear myself talking over him the whole time, still in that low-slow tone but getting louder the farther away Owen manages to get me from my father. Have I mentioned Owen is only around 5 ' 11 "? So I don’t know how he accomplishes this exactly. Years of experience wrangling teenage gland-cases on the ice I suppose.

  So we stand on the lawn in front of the house, and I notice I am still yelling, and as I slow down enough to take actual notice of what I am saying and maybe nuance it a little I also notice that my father’s own fulsome shouts are — as always — sounding in vigorous counterpoint to mine from somewhere inside the house. I even hear him bash the crutch against the wall a couple of times by way of emphatic punctuation. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the two of us sound like a couple of raging, incoherent twats. I take a breath and glance over at Owen. His eyebrows are up, his hands in the pockets of his cords.

  “Ready?” he inquires.

  We take a walk.

  07/29/09, 9:14 p.m.

  So, you’d think it would be strange hanging out with Owen Findlay after all these years, but in fact it feels as comfortable and familiar as my old bedroom at the back of the house. But when I say “as comfortable,” you shouldn’t mistake that to mean “comfortable,” exactly. We head up through the back field and I can’t help but be reminded of the walks we used to take together when I was in the Youth Centre. I know I haven’t spoken much about the Youth Centre, but that’s not because it was such a bad place. The tough-on-crime crowd won’t like to hear this, but I was sort of happy there. It was quiet, for one thing — something I never got a lot of, growing up in the house that Gord built — and my days were totally routinized. People told me when to get up and when to eat and when to shower and when to study and when to exercise and when to go to bed. If Owen’s social work colleagues ever wanted to develop some kind of ideal mental-health retreat geared toward a sixteen-year-old boy who had accidentally nearly killed somebody and whose mother had just died and who couldn’t stand the sight of his father, they would very likely end up with something resembling the Youth Centre. I needed the routine and the quiet but I also needed that overarching sense of being punished — that every morning when I woke up I could be sure I would go through my day enacting a punishment. Every breath of air, every step taken, every morsel of food ingested — everything punitive.

  It was Owen’s job to interview me once a week and find out what I thought and how I was doing, but he never wanted to do this in one of the centre’s concrete-coloured interview rooms, adorned as they were with industrial seventies-era office furniture, uniformly orange for some reason, and further bleakened by fluorescent lighting. Instead, Owen always insisted we “take a walk” around the grounds, which wasn’t bad because the grounds overlooked the ocean. And I know I’m starting to make this place sound like more of a resort than a penal institute, but keep in mind that this was on the coast, so pretty much everything overlooked the ocean — pubs, grocery stores, and Youth Centres alike.

  The funny thing is, I remember very little about the talks I had with Owen. Mostly I just remember the sound of our feet in the dirt — the dual rhythm of our footsteps. Being lulled by our shared, repetitive trudge. And maybe that’s why, trudging along beside Owen Findlay again after all these years, I can’t help but mention this memory to him — or this lack of memory, maybe. The memory of being lulled and not thinking or talking about much of anything, even though we must have.

  “
That was the idea,” says Owen. “That was the idea then and now.”

  I look over when he says “now,” and he’s smiling at the oncoming woods in the distance.

  “Oh, this is great,” I say. “You’re using the same therapeutic techniques on me that you used when I was sixteen years old. I thought I’d come so far.”

  “It wasn’t so much a technique as it was just — you know — ‘let’s go for a walk,’ ” says Owen.

  I remember this from the old days. Owen says or does exactly the right thing and when you point that out, he shrugs it off as common sense — as the obvious move. It took me a while to figure out that this was one of his techniques as well.

  “Horseshit, Owen,” I say.

  He smiles again at the approaching trees. Owen still wears the same round, wire-frame John Lennon glasses I remember from when I was a kid, back when his hair was black with flecks of white instead of the other way around. “I worked pretty intuitively in those days,” he tells me. “I thought kids needed to be out and moving around — you in particular. That’s why I started coaching hockey. But it makes sense, right? You get upset, you go for a walk. You walk it off. People do it on instinct.”

  “Yeah,” I say, feeling a little bored but also content — again, exactly what I remember from the Youth Centre days. “Gets you out of your head I guess.”