The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  When it was, Ivor dropped his forearms back onto the bar where they landed like pair of immense sausages. He looked up at Rank. “You gonna be able to cover it?”

  “Cover what?” said Rank, who had become a bit lost in Ivor’s head-ritual.

  “Your tuition.”

  “Um,” said Rank. “No, actually. There’s no way I’m going to be able to cover it.”

  “How much is it?” Ivor wanted to know.

  As Rank stared into Ivor’s bulging, frankly inquiring eyes, he understood what the deal was with Goldfinger’s. Ivor felt no shame in asking such a question — as anyone else in his circle would — because such questions were the foundation upon which the establishment he stood in was built. Goldfinger’s was after all about the numbers. Goldfinger’s was a counting house done up as a pleasure palace. Up the hill at the university there was Milton and Heraclitus, Take Back the Night, Evolutionary Biology and the Western Canon. Here, it was Basic Math. It was Economics 101. It was a turquoise fingernail tapping a tip jar.

  Rank told him how much.

  Ivor said, “Let me talk to Rich.”

  Press pause. This is a little break to remind you that Rank was barely twenty years old. It’s all very well to assume he would know better than to invest seriously in those five words: Let me talk to Rich. Words spoken by a criminal about a criminal. Spoken by a man who has a gun about the man who gave him the gun. Bad news all around, yes? Red flags abounding. Well, my friend, you give our hero too much credit. Earlier your humble narrator was riding poor Kyle pretty hard about his naiveté around the subject of Goldfinger’s. About the fact that, as many rumours as Kyle might have heard about drugs and guns and various shady dealings, he couldn’t quite believe it. The implication of course is that Kyle didn’t have the kind of background to believe it — to believe that Richard and Goldfinger’s could exist as anything but a joke. Well, let’s face it. Rank didn’t have that background either. Rank had years ago encountered a less clownish version of Ivor, a fatso of menace called Jeeves, from whom badness seemed to broadcast itself in radio waves. But that was pretty much as close as Rank had ever got to the kind of nasty that lay beyond Goldfinger’s scummy surface, should you happen to scratch it with a turquoise fingernail.

  Rank, even for his time in the Youth Centre, remained basically what social worker Owen Findlay had dubbed him in his earnest letter to the Provincial Judge’s Office circa 1986: a decent kid. So let’s not quibble with Owen on this one. Owen knew whereof he spoke. Let’s give Rank, at least, that much.

  But let’s not forgive him. No, we can’t. Sorry. Because his good-kid naiveté was only half of his mistake. Part two of this mistake is what’s significant. Part two is what’s outright unforgivable.

  Part two being that, like any guy his age, Rank believed he was immortal. And no, just because this belief was typical of any guy his age doesn’t make it okay for a guy like Rank. Rank, if anyone, should’ve known better. The gods had grabbed Rank by the neck a couple of times now and rubbed the barbed fact of mortality directly into his idiot face. And still the big lug ambled on his way, wiping the blood from his eyes, assuming it didn’t apply to him specifically.

  But what’s even worse?

  Rank had forgotten to remember the essential thing about himself. To wit: where there was a powder keg, Rankin Jr. was as fire. He was King Midas in reverse, our hero: fingertips Black Plague.

  25

  08/12/09, 10:52 p.m.

  I DIDN'T THINK I WOULD ever do this after I took up correspondence with you, but I’ve started reading your book again. It has to be my fourth or so time through it. I know I told you when we started this up months ago — decades ago, it seems like — that’d I’d read it quite a few times, but here’s a confession: this was and wasn’t true. I read it the first time the way I would any book, taking my time to get into it, wondering when in God’s name the action would pick up. And then the slow, cold recognition started to take over and I couldn’t really concentrate after that. I started reading specifically for the recognition — I remember sitting rigid at the kitchen table holding the book up in front of my face, the most unrelaxed book-reading posture you can imagine. I started blasting through paragraphs and pages until I got to something I recognized and I would feel my heart thumping in my face as my outrage reignited. It was addictive, in a way. There he was, the character I knew to be myself, lumbering in and out of scenes, and I’d be outraged when he was like me — because that was stealing — and outraged when he wasn’t — because that was lying. I started folding down pages so I could go back and read these parts again. If there was a scenario I recognized, I’d go apeshit, marvelling at your gall, at how wrong you got it, or else how mercilessly dead-on the whole thing was. Either way, it was a violation. Lies and theft; theft and lies.

  So when I said I read it three more times after that, what I meant is I read it in that same state, in that same way — blasting through the pages I’d folded down in a state of high piss-off, ignoring everything that didn’t feel relevant to me personally.

  Which maybe wasn’t fair.

  I want to say again that I am sorry if I scared you when I first got in touch. I was aggressive and creepy about it, and I apologize. All I really wanted to tell you was what I have just said — that I took your book personally. It felt as if you had reached across the decades just to poke me hard in the gut a few times, and I didn’t understand why. What had I done to deserve this double assault? First: the angry guy, the football thug, the “innate criminal” with the eyebrow rash. Then, just as I’m recovering from him: the incident. The awful Incident. The awful, unspeakable, inevitable (as you paint it — and you have no idea how sick that made me feel) incident. Right alongside those occasional, sadistic, close-ups of yours: my rash, Wade’s zit. Even worse: those throw-away lines — the most annihilating moments of my life dispensed with in just a handful of words: His mother had died. Jesus, Adam! Why this attack after twenty years? That’s what it felt like — an attack, vicious, out of the blue, out of nowhere. I wanted to make sure you understood that. And the only way to do that was hit back.

  Mostly I wanted to confirm whether or not you had done it on purpose, deliberately, hoping I’d see. Because you were trying to tell me something — or else tell the world something about me.

  You have to admit, I’ve been trying very hard to see things from your point of view, Adam. The least you could do is acknowledge mine. I have been learning about you — and how and why you’ve done what you done — through every part of this experience. I figured out the thing about the noble purpose, and I figured out about getting caught up, and how the Noble Purpose is gradually shunted aside by something else, something deeper and more selfish, and I figured out about the lying, and how easy and natural and seductive it can be — to the extent that it starts to feel like a separate truth unto itself.

  So what I’m saying is, I’ve come pretty far without any help or participation from you whatsoever.

  I have been generous, if anything. I’ve been trying to understand you.

  And you have given me precisely nothing back.

  Anyway, I’ll tell you why I started reading your book again.

  Lately, I can’t keep Gord out of my room, whether I’m in it or not. When I’m in here, typing, he tries to come in and dictate what I should say to “them” in my grand, cosmic appeal. That I can bench four hundred pounds, or used to be able to anyway, that I am a beloved soccer coach, that I graduated with honours from Teaching College, that I was a scholarship student (fact of it being a hockey scholarship, to a school I dropped out of, tactfully omitted), that I served for two years as an altar boy, that I was chosen to narrate the Christmas pageant in Grade 3 because I was the best and clearest speaker in the class, that my father started his own business from nothing, that my great-grand-uncle had a hand in starting the Co-operative movement.

  And, it turns out, when I’m not here Gord’s obsession with what I’m doing doesn’t wane. />
  “Gord,” I called to him yesterday afternoon after getting home from a run and ducking into my room for some clean clothes. “If you are going to go through my drawers, can you at least not leave all my stuff in a pile on the floor?”

  “I’m sorry,” Gord called back. “But I heard you coming in and thought you’d probably wanna get right back atcher book, so figured I better clear out. Did you tell them about that birdhouse you made for your mother in Grade 9?”

  I ambled down the hall as he was speaking and found my father in the kitchen holding down the tab on the toaster. He’d broken it the day before — as I’d shouted at him he was about to do — by slamming it down repeatedly. (He said it never kept the toast down long enough to properly blacken it the way he liked.) We immediately started fighting about whether to buy a new one (me) or take a screwdriver to the old which was still “perfectly good” and had cost “an arseload of money” when purchased in 1982.

  “Were you looking for something in particular?” I inquired as threads of smoke drifted up from the toaster and formed a stratus above our heads. “Needed to borrow some underwear?”

  Gord released the tab and leaned over to check if the bread had been charred to his satisfaction. A second later, he pushed it down again.

  He wasn’t meeting my eye. This was about as abashed as I’d ever seen my father.

  “Well I’m pretty anxious to read that book a yours,” he confessed.

  “Gord, the toast is done, okay?”

  He leaned over to check, waving smoke from his view.

  “Not quite yet,” he said.

  “I’m going downtown and buying another toaster tomorrow.”

  “Go right ahead and I’ll just chuck er right on out the window because we do not waste money in this house, Gordie.”

  “There’s no book, Dad. Just so you know.”

  Gord looked up, scowling, from his bread-blackening vigil.

  “Well I’d like to know what you’re in there tapping away on all day if there’s no goddamn book.”

  “I mean I’m not printing out pages. There’s no manuscript. So you can stop digging around in my shit.”

  He released the toaster and crossed his arms at me. “What do you mean no pages? What’s the good a that? You just tap-tapping away into the air?”

  “No, I mean it’s on the computer.”

  “Well nobody’s gonna read it on a goddamn computer!”

  “Okay, one, lots of people read on computers —”

  “Bullshit!” barked Gord.

  I took a breath. “Two, someone is reading it. Right now. Friend of mine. I’ve been emailing it to him in chunks, okay?”

  “Well why the hell does he get to read it and I don’t?”

  “Because it’s not for you, Gord.”

  “Who the hell is it for if not your own goddamn family?”

  I rubbed my face. There were no answers to these questions.

  “I’m taking a shower,” I said.

  “It’s all about me,” Gord said as I turned to go down the hall.

  I stopped. “It’s not, Gord. You think everything’s about you.”

  “That whole goddamn book is about me and what an asshole I am and I defy you — I defy you Gordie — to tell me any different.”

  I came back into the kitchen, feeling my major muscle groups bunch.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’ve been defied. Jesus. I think I just pissed my pants.”

  “You try and tell me different!”

  “Gord it’s not about you, don’t be so narcissistic.”

  Gord picked up his crutch from where it was leaning against the counter and I thought, Oh great. He’s going to do to the entire kitchen what he did to Sylvie’s elephant. I’ve got to get that crutch away from him. But he just pointed at me with it.

  “You’re the one who’s narcissistic,” he shouted. “About me! All you do is sit around tap-tapping all day trying to come up with ways to blame your old man for every goddamn thing that’s ever gone wrong in your life.”

  I was about to blow up, as per usual in these circumstances. I was about to yell at him to get over himself, and to buy a dictionary, and to mind his own fucking business, and to stay out of my room, and, oh, by the way a lot of the shit that went wrong in my life was his fault, measured against any objective standard. I was about to spew all this at him in one volcanic cascade when Gord added in a minor shriek:

  “You’re writing it all down for posterity! And sending it off over the internet where it could end up God knows where! Well maybe I’ll just sit on down and write my own book, how do you like that Gordie? Maybe I’ve got one or two opinions of my own to contribute!”

  I was about to laugh at the idea. Gord sitting down at the kitchen table with a big pot of tea, gearing up to write his own goddamn story of my life — answering my version chapter for chapter, page for page, with his own. I was about to laugh at the idea, except I could see that Gord was kind of terrified.

  Long story short, I’ve started reading your book again. With a little more attention this time and maybe a little less adrenalin.

  Kirsten said, Cyber-stalking? Sounds very high-tech.

  And I said, It’s not really, it’s basically what I’m doing now, with you, the only difference being you write me back.

  And Kirsten said, So if I stop writing you back will you officially be stalking me?

  And I said, No, if you stop writing me back I’ll stop too.

  And after a while Kirsten wrote, I don’t think I could be a cyber-stalker. I don’t have the self-confidence for it.

  And I said, You would be amazed how little self-confidence it takes.

  And she said, So what does it take to be a really superlative cyber-stalker?

  To start, I said, you need anger. Like a really good jolt, high-dosage adrenalin like someone’s just kicked you in the ass for no good reason. And then you just need a bit of contact, a bit of back and forth to grease the wheels, to feel like you’ve really established yourselves in each other’s vision. And then abrupt withdrawal — the contact has to be taken away just as you’re getting comfortable; the moment you feel your fingers taking hold of something vulnerable — yank, it’s gone. And you are in the dark. And you’re alone, but it feels like something has been done to you and is continuing to be done, as if you have been tricked. As if you are a big stupid animal who’s been led into a trap. So the only way you can think to get out of the trap is to chase down the guy who led you there in the first place.

  And Kirsten wrote, Rank in all seriousness wtf?

  And I said OMG you just wrote WTF. What are you, fourteen?

  And she said IMHO, OMG is worse than WTF.

  And I said, Do you mean because G is worse than F?

  And she said G, as you know, is great.

  And I said, F is pretty great too.

  Ha ha, said Kirsten. I mean LOL.

  RAOTFL, I said.

  E2&ITCYP9, she wrote back. I just made that one up. My kids say you can’t do that. It’s a very lockstep sort of place, the internet.

  Like religion, is what I wanted to reply. But stopped myself. We hadn’t broached this yet — where exactly Kirsten stood on the whole Lord Jesus thing lately. There was that offhand G is great remark, but I had no idea how to take it. It could be anything from a fervent avowal to a smirking reference to our holy-roller past. This led me to remember that the problem with Kirsten and I back in the day is that we were basically incapable of having a serious conversation. We could talk about God, because that was sort of required — and, looking back on it, just another way of avoiding what was really going on — but the minute we tried to talk about each other, or our lives, or how we felt, we’d start joking around and never could quite get down to it. We entertained each other too much — it was always more fun to exchange quips than to dig into what was going on. She asked me once how I met Beth, for example, and I gave her the sitcom version. There I am in the bar when this fat, excessively bangled lady twice
my age, who I can only assume is looking for some hot young meat, heaves herself into my booth and I decide in all my drunken beneficence to go for it and even try to buy her a drink. (Beth! Kirsten had screamed, dying. You tried to buy BETH a DRINK?) But I told her nothing about how the booth shook, how I gulped and sweated, how Beth’s eyes were like a scalpel down my chest. Kirsten knew this was my conversion experience, and therefore the most important thing to ever happen to me, but she never insisted on hearing any version other than the joke. Anything else made us both uncomfortable.

  And I’m noticing that pattern emerging again already, and it’s great, don’t get me wrong, it’s as fun as it ever was but I also don’t want to lose sight of the way it eventually sunk us. So before I replied to her lockstep note I sat and thought for quite a while.

  And I wrote, So. I have told you about my irrational obsession. What about you? What kind of pointless bullshit is needlessly consuming all your time and emotional energy these days?

  And she wrote back five seconds later, practically: I have kids, Rank. I’m not permitted pointless bullshit anymore.

  Which was when I thought: For Christ’s sake next year I’ll be a forty-year-old man.

  And I wrote, I would like to call you, Kirsten.

  26

  08/13/09, 11:22 p.m.

  HEREWITH BEGINS OUR HERO'S life of crime, which is not really much of a crime-life at all since it consists basically of driving around with Ivor in a mud-coloured Dodge Aries making “drop-offs” and “pick-ups.” Ivor, on Richard’s instructions, doesn’t even let Rank drive. Richard is perhaps the most cautious son of a bitch Rank has ever encountered. Rank is asked to do nothing but accompany Ivor — to climb into Ivor’s barn-smelling K-car on departure, and out of it on arrival, at which point Rank follows Ivor into the abysmal apartment block or dilapidated household where business is being done. Glamour! Intrigue! Once inside, Rank stands there so that everyone present can get a good look at him before Ivor suggests to the host or hostess that they adjourn to another room to do business. Rank is not invited to come along at this point. Rank is instructed to stand by the door and wait. As he stands there — smelling stale cigarette smoke, or stale toast, or stale sweat, or stale macaroni and cheese — he wonders if this is yet another stage in the process of being brought up through the ranks of Goldfinger’s — another tier on the hierarchical ladder.