The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  “But it’s meditative too,” says Owen. “It sort of gets you into your head at the same time.”

  And I think he must be right, if only because my memories of being sixteen and incarcerated are so visceral right now. It’s as if the steady rhythm of our footsteps has put me in a hypnotic state and shot me back in time twenty-four years. A helpless, pleasant vagueness has come over me too — the same state of mind, I realize, that I inhabited the entire year following Sylvie’s death. A sort of contented imbecility. I couldn’t focus on anything, had no concentration, yet certain moments could be unbelievably vivid, and a lot of the time those moments took place on my walks with Owen. I remember the thick, living smell of mud thawing in the early spring. That yellow moment of blindness when the afternoon sun hits you square in the face. A black smear of crow cackling at you from a fencepost.

  “I just remembered how you used to take us on all those stupid weekend hikes too,” I tell Owen. “Like in November, even.”

  “Those were nice! They were good hikes. You would have rather stayed inside playing Atari, I suppose.”

  “I would have, yeah. I didn’t have an Atari at home.”

  And yes, we talk about other stuff at this point, Owen and I, but it’s stuff I haven’t bothered filling you in on thus far and I’m not going to start now — life stuff: work, family — none of it pertinent to this project you and I are currently engaged with. (By the way, did you think you were getting the whole story all this time, Adam? A complete picture? Were you even arrogant enough to suppose you could detect psychological subcurrents, underlying motivations that perhaps I’m not even aware of myself? Has it occurred to you that I could be making this entire thing up for reasons of my own — maybe just to fuck with you? Well, let me assure you, I’m not, but let me assure you also that my dealings with you in the past have led me to be very careful with the information I give out. Have you noticed, for example, there are basically no women in this story? Except for Sylvie — but you’ve already had your way with her. And Kirsten — but really, I’ve given you nothing about Kirsten except for a name. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson. Her name is all you’re ever going to get.)

  We reach the woods and get on the path to the creek and I can see the splintered ruins of the mini Tarzan playland Gord set up for me back here when I was a kid. Wooden platforms nailed high up in the branches of the best climbing trees, strategic ropes hanging here and there — ancient now, a couple of them snapped off where other kids must’ve tried to swing from them — hopefully not from one of the tree-top platforms, otherwise Owen and I might be coming across a half-pint skeleton at some point. No tree house — Gord was never much of a carpenter — but a vestigial “fort” sits in the distance. More boards nailed to a circle of trees to form a rough enclosure. I remember feeling invulnerable behind that half-assed barricade, gleefully whiffing one crabapple after another at countless invading enemies.

  Finally Owen and I arrive at the creek and we stand there and we look at it piddling away.

  “It’s shrunk,” I remark to Owen.

  I think he’s going to say something about how I’ve grown and it just looks that way, but he says, instead, “Not a lot of rain this summer.”

  I crouch down and let the water piddle across my hand just for something to do. I remember doing the same thing as a kid — just hanging out, bored, by the creek, and reaching out to touch it every once in a while as though it were a friend or a pet.

  “Well, this is scintillating,” I say, straightening up after another moment or two. “Should we head back?”

  “All right,” says Owen. “Admit it, though. You feel better after the walk.”

  “Well I don’t feel like I wanna tear Gord’s head off anymore, not right this minute anyway, no.”

  “See?” says Owen. “You doubted.”

  “I wasn’t saying walking is a bad thing, Owen, I didn’t mean to criticize you back there, I’m just saying those were some frigging long walks you made us go on. You had us walking all day sometimes. Was that supposed to be part of our punishment? Like did the province order we had to walk a certain number of miles every week?”

  We turn and head back in the direction from which we came, and Owen shakes his head.

  “Your ‘punishment’! You’re happy as a pig in shit locked in a room with a television set but the moment someone takes you out for exercise and fresh air it’s — Oh my god! What did I do to deserve this?”

  “I’m just saying,” I say as we crunch our way past my old fort again. “Those were some long walks.”

  “You know, there are still Catholic pilgrims who’ll walk for over a month to reach the holy sites.”

  “Yes but Catholics are insane,” I point out. “They worship martyrs. People who were burned at the stake and eaten by lions and tortured to death. The more you suffer, the more gold stars you get. So of course they’re gonna walk for a month straight, that’s as good as it gets, that’s right up there with self-flagellation. Look at me! My feet are mangled stumps! Look how pious I am!”

  Owen, who I happen to know is carrying a set of rosary beads on him at this very moment, laughs his head off at this.

  “And besides,” I say. “At least the pilgrims have some kind of destination at the end of it. They’re not just out there walking around for the hell of it. They’re trying to get to Lourdes or wherever.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true, now,” says Owen, reaching behind his John Lennon glasses to finger a laugh tear out of the inner corner of his eye. “I mean you don’t have to do all that walking to get to Lourdes or the Shrine of Saint James in Spain, say. You can take a plane, or a bus. The walk is optional. People choose to do that walk for a reason.”

  “So they can suffer,” I explain.

  “No,” says Owen. “For penance.”

  “That’s what I mean. To punish themselves.”

  “I don’t believe it’s the same thing.”

  “Yeah well walk for a month straight to the Shrine of Saint James or wherever and then tell me you don’t feel like you’ve been punished, Owen,” I say.

  “Ah dear,” says Owen, craning his head back and smiling up at the sky now that we’re out of the woods and trudging back across the field. “Whatever happened to that god-fearing young man in his confirmation photo?”

  I feel a bit aggravated with Owen now, like it’s not very good social worker strategy to bring up the very thing that made me so pissed off I had to leave the house in the first place. Besides, Owen knows as well as anyone what happened to that pious young man.

  “He got old,” I say.

  “Penance,” continues Owen, pretending not to notice I’m annoyed. “Is a very deliberate process. It’s thoughtful. You engage in it because on some level you need to. It isn’t something that’s inflicted on you from the outside. You go willingly.”

  I decide in that instance to get in an argument with Owen.

  “Then why,” I say, “is it always so repetitive — so, like, mind-numbingly repetitious? It’s not about being thoughtful — it’s about rote, like having to recite the times tables in school — it’s about drilling stuff into your brain, precisely so that you don’t have to think about it anymore. Or anything. You know what my mother used to do, when she was worried about something? If Gord was off on a tear or something? She’d haul out her fucking rosary and babble Our Fathers and Hail Marys until she was blue in the face.”

  “Well, maybe that helped her,” says Owen.

  “It did help her,” I say. “It helped her not to think. It helped her to stay put and let herself get walked all over. It helped her to tolerate suffering, like a good Catholic lady, instead of saying, Fuck this noise! and putting an end to it. It was a huge help to my mother, her Catholic faith.”

  Owen doesn’t say anything. You have to know Owen as well as I do to understand that Owen not saying anything when it is manifestly his turn to do so is one of the ways Owen goes about “saying” something — usually some
thing really irritating once you settle down to decoding it.

  But I refuse to decode. I just let the silence be silence, ignoring whatever it is that Owen is psychically attempting to beam into my brain.

  And after he’s finished this silent transmission, he follows it up — as he always has — with a seemingly simple, seemingly innocent question.

  “What could she have done differently, do you suppose?”

  I guess I should have been ready for it, but I glance over at Owen with my mouth hanging open. The question is so outrageous, and so Owen in that shrugging, fake-naive manner I remember from when I was a kid — I can barely even start to form a word.

  “I just told you,” I say after a moment. “Jesus Christ, I just told you what she could’ve done differently, Owen.”

  “‘Fuck this noise,’” quoted Owen.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Fuck this noise.”

  “And you think saying ‘Fuck this noise’ was a realistic option for someone like your mom?”

  “Well it was either that or the other option,” I tell Owen after a moment, trying not to raise my voice over the loud grind of tooth enamel happening inside my head. “And look where that got her.”

  Owen’s eyebrows twitch behind his glasses. “Seem a little pissed, there, Rank.”

  “Well no kidding, Owen.”

  I look away from him, toward the house. Conversation over. Conversation too idiotic to be pursued.

  We walk. Our footsteps go out of sync for a moment or two, then gradually fall into pace with one another again. It’s impossible to tell if we have made this happen deliberately or not.

  “You know,” says Owen, “there’s still a tradition in Flanders. They release one prisoner a year — this is in Switzerland, now. And they get him to do the walk all the way to the Shrine of Saint James in Spain, carrying a heavy pack. And then when he’s finished, once he’s reached the Shrine, he’s let free.”

  I sigh.

  “Punishment,” I say.

  “I don’t know,” says Owen.

  I don’t feel like arguing anymore — especially if that’s the best Owen can do — and we’re almost back at the house in any case.

  “Have I mentioned how nice it is to see you again?” Owen asks me out of nowhere.

  I’m so angry, all I can do is laugh.

  14

  07/30/09, 10:16 p.m.

  HERACLITUS IS SAYING THAT no man can step twice into the same river and Rank is thugging it up for the boys saying, Yes you can. Of course you can. Duh. Out there is the Saint John River and we could go out and walk to it right now and I would step in it, and then step out of it again, and then step in it again and then I would have stepped into it twice. There. So take that ’Clitus. How do you like that, Captain Clit?

  Wade is rolling around on the floor laughing. He’s been doing this, at various volumes, for the last hour or so. It is 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon and they are all, of course, stoned brainless. They are doing what they always attempt to do when stoned brainless: talk philosophy. As second-year humanities students, Adam, Kyle and Rank all had to take the pre-Socratics course. Wade is doing a year of sciences in the hope of gaining entrance into the Engineering program at some point, and therefore he gets to refer to the other three as art fags. Rank finds this hilarious — for Wade is the biggest such fag of the bunch of them. Kyle is simply doing whatever he needs to make law school happen. Adam is an all-around grade-maker — a kind of robot who seems to hoover up knowledge and file it away as a matter of protocol, as opposed to deriving any kind of enjoyment or pleasure out of it. And Rank is your average directionless undergrad, hoping one day he’ll arrive at a class and the professor will open his mouth and all of a sudden Rank will know exactly where he is supposed to go and what he is supposed to do. Which is to say, none of them come across as particularly passionate about Arts and Humanities — they are all too busy enacting a private duty.

  Which makes Wade the only real zealot in the group. If you mention Led Zeppelin one too many times in his presence, he will veer into ecstasy. He’ll not only deliver a lecture about the timeless, groundbreaking brilliance of Jimmy Page’s guitar — if you let him continue in this vein, he’ll actually start in on their album cover art. He’ll give you a breakdown of the Arthur C. Clarke novel that inspired the cover for Houses of the Holy, and even tell you how the guy who took the photo was a member of some British design group who did album covers for all the big art-rock outfits like Genesis and Pink Floyd back in the day. At which point, he’ll be staggering over to his record collection to show you a few pertinent examples, and that’s when you’ll realize you should have changed the subject long ago.

  Captain Clit, wheezes Wade now.

  The only time any of them get passionate about what they are learning at school are times like these, stoned brainless and trying to outdo one another.

  No, no, no! shouts Kyle over Wade’s rug-muffled hee-haws. Kyle sinks from his armchair onto his knees in order to be closer to Adam and Rank — who are sprawled on the Sally-Ann-tastic couch — when he makes his point. As always, he gestures with the spout of his beer bottle for emphasis.

  No, Rank. He’s not talking about the river, like a river with a name — the Nile or the Saint John or the Thames or whatever. You’re thinking about a river as a single, solid object — but he’s talking about, like, a moving body of water. It’s all a gazillion water molecules right? All different.

  Rank knows what Kyle is on about but he’s enjoying playing the thick-headed moose to Kyle’s impassioned orator.

  Bullshit, man, grunts Rank. We go out there, I stick my foot in the water, it’s fucking wet. It’s wet from the river. I stick my other foot in, it’s not a different river that got my other foot wet. It’s still the Saint John River, and I’m still wet.

  You’re getting too caught up in names, man.

  What’s in a name, really? asks Wade from the floor. Of all things, this is what starts Adam giggling.

  Let’s say we go out there right now, and I push you in the river . . . says Rank, leaning back against the couch, the more comfortably to spin his scenario.

  Rank, huffs Kyle, it’s not about getting wet.

  Yeah it is. That’s what he’s on about. That’s what happens when you step, or for our purposes let’s say get pushed, into a river. You’re wet and it sucks. So let’s say I push you into the river and you flail around and glug for a while but eventually you crawl back out. You’re shivering and you’re soaking wet. I push you in again. Does it feel any different the second time around? How about when you get out? Still freezing and soaking wet. So, for good measure, I push you in a third time . . .

  Rank, you’re just . . . this is just turning into a sick fantasy about pushing me into the river. You’re not taking the argument seriously.

  He’s also talking about the man, says Adam, smiling but no longer giggling. Rank and Kyle turn to look at him. You never know when Adam is going to interject. Sometimes he’ll just sit there for hours, listening to the rest of them toss bullshit back and forth, and they almost could forget he’s there.

  Who, says Rank. Me?

  No. Heraclitus. Captain Clit. It’s not just the river he’s talking about; it’s the man.

  What man?

  The man with the wet foot, says Adam. It’s never the same man, either.

  This stops even Kyle for a moment. The spout of his beer bottle hovers, directionless. Rank can feel his eyebrows begin to pinch together as a half-assed comprehension descends, but before he can call bullshit, a question wanders up from Wade, still flat on his back on the floor.

  Is it the same foot?

  Ever since Wade became a dealer, they have had far too much access to hash and pot and acid and mushrooms than is strictly advisable for college-aged men. Particularly if one of those men has a juvenile criminal past, some all-seeing narrator might observe at this point. But it’s hard to turn away from such largesse — they are students, after all. These are
supposedly the best years of their lives. They are built to party, just like Wade’s T-shirt says, they are kids in a candy store, which means they are helpless not to indulge. This is what happens when your best friend is a drug dealer, Rank thinks in his more lucid moments. This is what happened to Collie Chaisson, I bet. At some point, your brain just falls out your ass.

  But they are the popular boys this year as a result — the campus-god charisma of Rank and Kyle in combination with their stewardship of the Temple’s weekend excesses, added to Wade’s superlative music collection and stereo system, with Adam providing just enough bookish gravitas to keep them from looking like your typical fratboy gang-rape-in-waiting — this, plus an on-site drug connection? They may as well be dipped in gold.

  Wade made the connection back in first year. He’d been the only one of them without any kind of scholarship, meaning he had to get a job to see him through. He brooded on this problem as he partied his way through frosh week, when in the middle of a pub crawl it came to him: he could bartend. It so happened that when this occurred to him he was sitting in one of the sketchiest bars in town, a former disco, presently a dive, that nonetheless had retained its Studio-54-era moniker: Goldfinger’s. Wade stood up and staggered over to the bar, tended by a woman wearing a kind of corset-tank top who he’d been looking for an excuse to talk to anyway and asked her, “Where can I apply?”

  “Apply for what?” she hollered over the music.

  Wade could see from her already-wincing expression that she was expecting a sleazy come-on. He tried for a moment to come up with one: To be your man, beautiful lady.

  “To tend bar. You guys need any help?”

  “Right now?” she asked.

  “No, not right now, I’m hammered right now.”

  “That aint stopping me,” she told him, and winked before downing a shot she’d been keeping under the counter.

  Wade shivered with pleasure. Not at the shot, or even the wink. It was his first year away from home and he’d never met a woman who said aint without any kind of ironic inflection before.