The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  “Oh gross,” says Adam, a few days later when Rank mentions Ivor’s invitation to the guys. “Don’t work at Goldfinger’s, man. You can work anywhere — don’t work there.”

  “You totally have to do it!” enthuses Kyle. “We’ll finally find out what’s in the back office. You can free the meth-addicted hookers! You’ll be their hero! They can stay with us while they rebuild their lives.”

  “Work at the campus pub,” says Adam. “If you want to work somewhere.”

  “What’s wrong with Goldfinger’s?” says Rank.

  “Yeah,” says Wade, offended on behalf of his associates.

  “Adam is a class snob,” pronounces Kyle. This is a term he’s learned recently from a politically active girlfriend who has spent two summers volunteering in El Salvador. “He thinks you’re better than Goldfinger’s, Rank.”

  “Trust me,” says Rank, remembering the Ah feeling when he first walked through the tavern doors. “I’m not.”

  Let’s press the pause button here. An omnipotent narrator can do that sort of thing. Let’s just stop and, with the benefit of adult hindsight, compare the opposing influences of Adam and Kyle at this moment — their conflicting versions of obliviousness. Because I think we can agree: just because Adam happened to be right, he wasn’t any less oblivious about what Rank was getting into than Kyle. True, Kyle was wholly oblivious. He was enthusiastically oblivious, even. It did not occur to Kyle for a second that Goldfinger’s could exist as anything other than a joke — that Goldfinger’s was something other than a kind of vaudeville show, a pageant performed for us college kids. On some level, Kyle really believed that Lorna’s bruised upper arms were not in fact bruised upper arms — they were an ironic commentary on bruised upper arms, a parody if you will. Kyle had never experienced the idea of bruised women as anything but a satire of a certain kind of lifestyle, and he couldn’t get his head around the fact that when they stepped into Goldfinger’s, they were face to face with that world itself. He didn’t believe that world existed, really. He believed it was a representation. In Richard’s back office there wasn’t the rug, the weapons, the wet bar, the safe. Not really. There was nothing — that’s what Kyle really believed. It was backstage, and Richard simply stood behind the door, adjusting his airplane collar, combing pomade into his hair, waiting for his cue.

  Kyle didn’t know he believed this, but that’s what he believed. Let’s forgive him for it. He was barely twenty.

  Now how about Adam?

  Adam is a thoughtful guy, we’ll admit, but he’s operating on instinct here. Of all four buddies, he has always been the least enthusiastic about visiting Goldfinger’s, even though he’s certainly shown no aversion to the product Wade acquires there. But unlike the rest of them, he doesn’t care to hang out in the bar. He’ll do it, but he isn’t keen. He has no interest whatsoever in catching a glimpse of Lorna’s teeth. He’ll only listen to Ivor’s elaborate claims about how the first instance of AIDS occurred in Manhattan as opposed to Africa, like most people have been duped into believing (“Monkeys! How you gonna catch it from a monkey?”), for so long. Is this because Adam is smarter than the rest of them? Is Adam’s radar for danger more finely attuned? No. Adam just finds the place distasteful. Simple as that.

  Okay, maybe it’s not fair to call him a class snob, as Kyle was so happy to do. If we give Adam the benefit of the doubt — which is only fair — we can explain it like this. Adam, like Kyle, is oblivious to a point, but he is also perceptive. Intuitive. He is a future author, you know. Maybe it’s not appropriate to reveal this out of the blue. Maybe it’s not fair of your humble narrator to jerk you into the future in this way. But, yes. Adam will go on to write novels, or one novel at least, a novel that critics will describe as “devastatingly perceptive.” Let it be said: Adam, even now, barely into his twenties, is a perceptive son of a bitch. He perceives something about Goldfinger’s — something Kyle is missing, something Kyle just doesn’t have enough personal depth to believe in. But Adam does possess that depth. He intuits that behind the joke of Goldfinger’s is the reality of Goldfinger’s. He doesn’t quite grasp what that reality is, but he feels it. He believes in it. Unlike Kyle, on some level he respects it.

  Press play.

  “You wanna be a bouncer?” says Adam. “At Goldfinger’s? Come on.”

  “I dunno,” says Rank, feeling that Adam is being prissy — feeling insulted, somehow. How dare Adam suppose Rank is too good to work at Goldfinger’s? Who does he think he is? “What else am I gonna be?”

  “Like, anything,” says Adam. “Pack groceries. Work in the library. But you wanna get puked on, you wanna wrestle drunks and crack skulls? Be my guest.”

  Their eyes connect through Adam’s glasses when he says the words: crack skulls. But it’s the way he said that other thing — like Rank needed his permission — be my guest. This is what decides it.

  Yes! Rank does it, ultimately, out of spite.

  08/03/09, 11:13 p.m.

  Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Well, it does, a little, when you consider what took place between them only a few nights before. Something both have up until this point pretended not to remember.

  It had been sort of a bad day all around. Rank had been in a bit of a state, brooding on the fleshy smack that rang out from Kyle’s bedroom the night before and the soft grunt of female pain he is pretty sure he heard in counterpoint. Kyle had been in there with Janine, the championship highland dancer with zero chest to speak of. And before that, Rank had discovered a poem by T.S. Eliot in the library which for some reason jacked his stress about school and his irritation with Kyle to unreasonable levels. And before that, earlier that afternoon, Rank had met with the registrar to discuss what exactly his status was now that he was no longer the recipient of a hockey scholarship. The registrar — a minty-smelling lady with a Dead Poets Society poster on the wall behind her — gave him to understand that everything would be fine, no worries whatsoever, as long as his tuition was paid in full next semester and he kept his GPA up. Easy! At which point Rank decided not to worry about tuition for the time being and sequester his ass in the library to embark on his new career as an academic achiever.

  Whereupon he opened the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and found himself, once again, a trinket of the gods.

  Let us go then, you and I.

  Whereupon he closed the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and decided it was time to get drunk.

  If Kyle had been home when Rank arrived, it might have calmed things between them. As it was, however, there was only Adam hanging out by himself, using the empty house to study in, and Rank was grateful. He didn’t want to think about Kyle, he told himself. When in fact, for some reason, all he could think about was Kyle. Kyle had swelled like a Macy’s balloon in his mind, obliterating the minty registrar, the terrifying moment in the library — everything.

  Kyle, and the sounds from Kyle’s bedroom. The loud noise Rank knows he heard, followed by the soft noise he is almost sure he heard.

  The twisting, seething never-the-same river of his thoughts as he yanked Adam to his feet to accompany him to the liquor store and talked a blue streak in order to distract them both, went something like this: Kyle was such a dick. Kyle thought he was God’s gift. Kyle paraded himself around campus like he owned it. Sometimes, if you hailed Kyle from a distance, he engaged in an elaborate ritual of greeting. He would point to you, then to his own chest, then to his crotch. Nobody knew precisely what it was supposed to mean, but everybody knew approximately. This pantomime all of a sudden struck Rank, who had once laughed at it, as an asshole thing to do. Me, my dick. Me, my dick. You? No. Me. My dick.

  Kyle was constantly getting laid. Yearning, sometimes sobbing, women were always showing up at the Temple in the middle of the night. Kyle took a kind of pride in this — you could see it. He’d laugh about it with th
e boys the following day.

  He gave girls shitty nicknames behind their back. A girl they knew named Selina, he’d dubbed Vaselina. He was the one who started calling Tina Tiny once she put on weight. He’d done Tina long ago, way back in first year. He didn’t have to be nice to Tina anymore.

  Even though he always was, of course, nice to Tina, to her face. Kyle was nice to everyone to their faces. Inordinately nice. He’d maybe talk to you for five seconds, but in those seconds he’d turn his face to you entirely, let it beam his love and fellowship. Every woman on campus was convinced he found her fascinating.

  One morning they actually found one sleeping and shivering, curled up outside the back door. This was late October. Kyle had not even come home that night. Wade had given her a cup of instant Maxwell House, which she blubbered into. When do you expect him back? she asked, once she’d regained the power of speech. I have his scarf. And there’s this book he said he wanted to borrow. I brought it for him. She held it up. Anne of Green Gables.

  You could not feel more sorry for a person, yet they’d all laughed once she was gone and teased Kyle about it forever.

  But of course Kyle loved to be teased about this sort of thing.

  It seemed to Rank, which he did not say or even give any indication of to Adam as they walked back from the liquor store, that Kyle was a bad influence. It sounded very 1950s, but he remembered laughing at and with Kyle about the girl in the doorway, and it made him angry at himself. He was not that sort of guy. You don’t laugh at a woman shivering in a doorway, no matter how deluded she might be.

  You don’t stop your conversation, look at your friends, then look away, moments after you hear the sound of someone getting smacked coming from your buddy’s bedroom in the middle of the night. A smack, followed by a groan. Or grunt. A human sound, in any event, of pain. Almost certainly of pain. That is something else you do not do.

  But Kyle Jarvis is, after all, a magic man. This has been established. Kyle somehow worked his mojo and kept them in their seats.

  So by the time Kyle gets back to the Temple after his late class, his buddy Rank — who has been making innocuous if feverish conversation with Adam for the last three hours and given no indication of his mood whatsoever — is more or less ready to kill him.

  17

  08/04/09, 4:25 p.m.

  BRIEF INTERMISSION HERE TO relay what I have to contend with now that Gord’s ankle is healing and he knows what I am up to in the back bedroom.

  Crutch-bash! A nice solid whack that vibrates one entire wall of my room. He has to be standing directly outside my door.

  “How’s it going in there son?”

  “Well you just scared the shit out of me and I spilled my coffee everywhere, but otherwise it’s fine, Gord, thanks.”

  “You need any help?”

  “You can put on more coffee if you’re up to it.”

  “No, I mean with your book stupidarse. “

  A befuddled pause. This is the first time he’s even acknowledged what I’m doing since he learned I wasn’t in here compulsively masturbating. Since the revelation that provoked his attack on Sylvie’s teapot.

  “Help?” I say. “With my book?”

  “Like when you called me that time. I got a good memory for details. Thought you might need help.”

  “No, I — not right now. I’ll let you know, Gord, okay?”

  “Don’t forget to tell them about that nice letter Owen wrote the judge.”

  I’m sitting there in front of the laptop holding the dirty T-shirt I’ve been using to sop up the spilled coffee. The stench of it co-mingling with my sweat fills the room. Gord is talking about my release at age sixteen, after Owen wrote a letter to the judge to help get me out of the Youth Centre early so I wouldn’t have to start the school year midway through. It was, according to the judge, a “glowing” letter.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Wow. I forgot about that letter.”

  “This is why you need me. I still have it somewhere.”

  “How the hell did you get a copy?”

  “I asked him for one. You want me to dig it up?”

  “No, Gord. That’s okay. I gotta get back to this.”

  Silence. I chuck the T-shirt into the closet, read over where I was, am just about to hit a key, and then:

  “Make sure you tell them about your hockey scholarship! And that you went to university.”

  I have to smile at Gord’s “them.” Who is them? Who does Gord think I’m in here appealing to?

  “Yeah. I will,” I say. “I’ll tell them, Gord.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, son.”

  “No — I won’t.”

  “I dug out some more old pictures for ya. You gonna use pictures?”

  I drop my poised hands into my lap, collapse backward in my chair.

  “I didn’t plan on it, no.”

  “You should. I hate a book without pictures. Most people don’t even bother if there’s no pictures.”

  “Well —”

  “A picture’s worth a thousand words, they say.”

  “It’s not really —”

  “Might help jar your memory in any case.”

  “I’ll take a look at them when I’m —”

  “I’ll bring em in. Can I come in?”

  He’s already in.

  18

  08/04/09, 11:58 p.m.

  EVERYONE GETS THAT SOMETHING is wrong practically the moment Kyle plunks himself down on the couch with a beer to join them. Who knows what Adam and Rank have been talking about up until this point. They’ve been drinking for hours, playing Century, downing shots, except Adam’s shots have all been beer whereas Rank has at some point switched to rye. Rank has mostly been trying to get Adam to talk about himself for a change. Rank wants to know about Adam’s family, his parents, his sisters. He has learned that Adam has only sisters, two of them, which Rank finds puzzling considering his friend’s ineptitude with women. Rank always figured guys who had sisters totally got the dirt, entered the world of sexual gamesmanship packing a distinct advantage. Rank also learns that Adam’s parents are divorced, which, as a Catholic, he finds very cosmopolitan and a little shocking. Not only divorced, but still friends, says Adam. Not only still friends but planning on getting together with Adam and his sisters for a big two-parent family Christmas. Rank is impressed. Divorce, he thinks dimly. If only. You get a lock, if you’re not Catholic, but at least you get the key as well. They don’t make you throw away the key. You’re not meant to kneel on the goose until it’s dead.

  “Goose?” says Adam.

  “What?” says Rank.

  “Statistics,” says Kyle, plunking himself down on the couch beside Adam. “Is a bullshit course. That’s what I’ve decided. Why does a humanities major have to do Statistics?”

  This is Kyle in a nutshell. He doesn’t wait to be included in a conversation that’s already taking place without him. This whole “without Kyle” phenomenon is of no interest whatsoever. He simply sits down, interrupts, and starts a new one with himself comfortably at the centre.

  “Are Stats some kind of pre-Law requirement?” asks Adam.

  “You know what else is bullshit?” Rank mumbles from his chair. “Hitting women in the face.”

  The other guys laugh, because Rank is so drunk they assume he’s approaching incoherence.

  “Yeah,” says Kyle. “Umm I’d say that’s bullshit, Rank. It’s a little beside the point, but it’s bullshit, sure. What else do we think is bullshit? Adam, care to contribute?”

  But Adam does not care to contribute because, as always, he is quicker on the uptake than Kyle, even with multiple shots of beer inside him. He gives Rank a wary look, sensing the change of atmosphere, as if the temperature in the room just dropped several abrupt and inexplicable degrees.

  “Compact discs,” says Kyle, turning it into a game. “Digital music — all your albums are obsolete overnight, and you have to rebuild your entire collection. Total marketing scam. What else?�
��

  Rank is just looking at Kyle and Adam is looking at Rank.

  “Hot chicks who get fat,” continues Kyle around a swig. Adam suddenly leans forward. “You fuck em when they’re thin, and then they still expect you to wanna fuck em after they’re fat.”

  “You know what, Kyle?” says Adam carefully.

  “Like you’re not supposed to notice. Like our friend Tiny,” adds Kyle.

  “Stand up,” says Rank.

  “Rank,” says Adam.

  “What?” says Kyle.

  “Stand the fuck up,” says Rank, standing up himself.

  Kyle takes Rank in for a moment.

  “You,” he says, “are wasted, my friend.”

  “Stand. Up,” says Rank.

  Kyle jumps to his feet with a sudden, simian instinct, indignation taking shape on its heels. This is the Temple, after all — love, brotherhood, and so forth. This is his Temple, more to the point.

  Press pause. Let’s compare. Needless to say Kyle, in terms of size, is not a grotesque like Rank. But he’s doing okay. He plays rugby. He works out, lifts weights; is broad-shouldered and muscularly compact at an even six feet.

  Still, Rank looms over him rather nicely. Or, weaves over him, might be the more honest description. Looms and weaves.

  Press play. Adam doesn’t exactly jump between them. He doesn’t have the physical presence to pull that one off. He stands off to the side exactly like a referee.

  “Guys,” he says.

  “What’s your problem, Rank?”

  Oh and here it gets embarrassing. It just gets so cliché, so guy. Did Rank respond: You’re my fuckin problem? Yes he did. Did he give his buddy Kyle a shove by way of punctuation? Maybe a little one.

  Kyle just stands there once he has regained his balance like he cannot freaking believe what is happening. This is Kyle Jarvis we’re talking about, founder and overseer of the Temple. Magic man. Loved by all. Soon to be elected student union president by a landslide.