by Ian Williams
The videos are down. Nobody can see them, Oliver said.
Be that as it may, it was a moderately popular video. Am I right? It has been seen.
Over seven thousand hits, the father said.
Which conceivably could mean that half of the students in this school could have watched this video in which you engage in masturbatory activity.
They’re not unique, Riot said. Could be one guy clicking seven thousand times.
The ombudsman looked squarely at Riot. The video down, your profile down. We have blocked the site from our servers. Servers, right? The university is investigating the cost of a forensic specialist to remove all traces of the video from the internet. But you understand that we can’t have one student costing us so much money.
The father took over for the ombudsman. We are clear about the appropriate action that the college needs to take right now. If it’s not resolved at this level, we intend to take this matter to court. The kind of tarnishing of reputation can hardly—
She’s not even in the video, Riot said.
The university understands your concerns. We will notify you both in writing.
Can you tell us what the possible outcomes are? Felicia asked so Riot could hear what she had been saying all week.
The ombudsman sat erect. For starters, there could be possible litigation if you decide to pursue the matter, which, naturally, we don’t advise. But internally Riot is facing expulsion with a record of the offence on his transcript. Or suspension for the academic year or a semester, depending. Or he could be asked to withdraw from the college.
I withdraw, Riot said.
That’s not your decision to make, the ombudsman said.
He doesn’t withdraw, Felicia said.
You’ll hear from us in writing within two weeks.
* * *
+
Later that afternoon (still Monday), Army emerged early from Principles of Business, no textbook, no laptop, not even a pen in hand, and found Riot loafing outside the classroom, waiting for him though not looking for him. He was coiled over his phone like a lanky question mark, waiting for him there—electronically.
Army assumed he wanted a ride. I thought you were going home with Mom.
They went to the hospital. Riot didn’t look up. Check your phone.
Sure enough, when Army checked, he found two texts from Riot.
Old boss? Army asked for clarification.
That’s what she said.
Army lowered Riot’s phone to get his full attention. That’s all?
Riot shrugged.
Whatever gene was reserved for bloodline intuition activated itself in that moment, like an agave plant blooming once after forty years then dying. Army knew who his mother had gone to see. He scanned his call history. How could Felicia not tell him this?
The tribunal went fine, Riot said. Thanks for asking.
You remember which hospital?
Toronto somewhere. Riot sighed. St. Xavier.
The rest of the class was emerging and Army steered Riot down the hallway into the washroom. His bladder was becoming middle-aged lately. He wondered how these kids could hold their piss for hours after consuming barrels of energy drinks when he had to piss by the time he swallowed.
At the urinal, Riot sidled up next to him, elbow to elbow. Army glared at him up and down, trying to ward him into the appropriate distance, but Riot’s zipper was already down and he was reading the ad in front of him. It was of a drunk girl passed out on the lap of a guy. The vague background suggested a basement party. If you don’t help her, you’re helping him, the slogan read. Riot sighed again and flicked his hair out of his face.
Look, playa, Army said. He intended to make short work of this conversation. Free expression is like your first amendment right.
This is Canada.
You made some videos. Did anybody get hurt?
You can’t quote an American document in Canada and expect—
Listen. Answer me. Did anybody get hurt?
Not really. But I was wearing the sweatshirt and—
That’s all they cared about, right?
Right. Riot shook himself but Army was barely halfway through his stream.
Now you see why I dropped out of this place, Army said.
I’m going to withdraw, Riot said. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. She was— It was messed up. Like the whole meeting, she was trying to save face with her parents. I’m not even all that interested in her. We didn’t have sex-sex.
Just digital sex.
Digitally, yeah.
Sad, Army said. Ask her parents if she’s still a virgin.
I don’t think she was. Is.
She probably doesn’t even know.
Silence.
Army looked over his shoulder. Riot had been pining for Faye, a girl he met in high school, for at least two years. Riot met her in Grade 12 Art. Faye did laborious, menial projects like poking paper with pins ten thousand times then shining a light through. She called that one Outliers. For their sculpture project, she wrote Tylenol on Tic Tacs and built a capsule. She called it Time Release. Riot, for his part, had the most technical skill of anyone in the class. Like Faye, he liked his projects to be labour intensive. He painted frames of a popular YouTube video at 30-second intervals. It was called Skip Ad. It was a comment on something. All their work was a comment on something. Army heard the play-by-play almost nightly. In art class, Faye had rested her head on his shoulder and poked dot-holes into her watercolour paper and asked him name by name did he think x was hot, scrolling through both genders. Riot washed his paintbrushes and set them to dry and asked her to be in his movies. Pervert, she said. She was fond of that word. In the caf, she sometimes sat with Riot after eating her actual lunch with her actual friends. They shared earbuds and listened to Adele. When Faye pre-emptively extolled the virtues of platonic male-female friendships over the summer, Riot slumped. He refused food and haircuts, and had begun Brownstone sporting a forlorn, poetic, in-need-of-repair look that attracted Unnamable to him during orientation.
You want to make a movie here? Riot asked.
You know where you should be instead of making movies in public bathrooms. Army had encouraged Riot to go to film school in New York. He got into his third choice there. When he got rejected from his first choice, Army drove him to the doors of the institute and told him to walk in there and Al-Pacino them, Al-Pacino them until they were clutching his legs, begging him to grace them with his genius. He lasted between three weeks and three months at his third choice.
Riot sighed a third time.
Not to bring up old wounds, Army said, but you know where you belong, little man, regardless of what they tell you.
The man? I need to stick it to the man?
Army joined Riot at the sinks. He wasn’t going to get caught in the ever narrowing gyre of Riot’s semantics.
You’re only here because of Mutter. I’m only here because— I’m here but I’m not really here. I might look like I’m here, he pointed to the sink, but up here, he tapped his temple, I’m on a yacht swirling a tumbler of Hennessy. I’m not even in the same time zone as all y’all. I’m light years ahead.
I have to shut down my profile.
Then shut it down, Army said. He turned his face side to side and observed himself in the mirror. His sideburns were greying. Are you hearing what I’m saying to you?
Here but not here. Riot pushed his limp hands into the Dyson Airblade dryer.
So you dicked around for a couple of years after high school. Army made eye contact with himself although he was speaking to Riot. Let me break it down for you, little man. You want to make movies. You didn’t get into the film school you wanted. You took no for an answer. You came to Brownstone and now they’re kicking you out. You think you might be getting what you deserve? You think the universe is trying to tell you something?
The dryer must have garbled Army’s spiel, else the force of Riot’s denial, or the force
of his persistence rather, prevented him from hearing.
I have to take it down, Riot said.
Army wiped his hands on his pants. He was done. You knew that going in.
Not the video, my whole channel.
Change your name. It was the obvious solution, yet Army could see Riot hadn’t thought of it.
Right? Riot said. I mean they’re so dumb.
Before they parted outside the bathroom, for Army was in the student lot and Riot was to drive Felicia’s car home from the faculty and staff lot, turning neither to the right nor the left, Army took Riot’s elbow.
That’s all she said about the hospital?
Pretty much.
She drove all the way downtown and that’s all she told you?
Pop-Pop drove.
Did it sound serious?
Riot shrugged. He took out his phone and illuminated his face. He bore no resemblance to any of the family as far as Army could discern. Army thought he looked like every other skinny white boy his age.
She didn’t tell you what was wrong with this guy?
No.
Army let go of Riot’s elbow. St. Xavier was forty minutes away, at this hour. He’d go home and change into a collared shirt. Splash on some John Varvatos. Maybe shave down his sideburns so the grey wouldn’t show as much. That’s how you prepare to meet your maker.
* * *
The parking lever to the hospital went up. Felicia and Oliver had spent the entire drive from the college prognosticating Riot’s academic future and only now did Felicia brief Oliver about Edgar. what are you missing
This man has cancer, she said. I used to work for him yesterday in the seventies.
before my mother get admitted So don’t say anything stupid. we had to peel the film off an onion and look at it under a microscope
I’ll read the Sun in the lobby, Oliver said.
Help me find the room, Felicia said. She didn’t want to be alone when she visited Edgar. and then you were supposed to draw the cells right She wanted to be seen draw and label with a man.
Edgar was asleep when they entered. His bed was on the side closest to the door. The curtain was drawn back and a black woman lay in the bed near the window. The scene was almost too much for Felicia, the symmetry to the past, the colour of the curtain, the faithful chairs at the bedsides. what did they look like disappointing naturally She was grateful for Oliver’s faithful Mastiff presence to tether her: she was not collapsible: she was a professionally dressed academic program manager; she prepared nutritious breakfasts for her household (this was her preferred term for her group though everyone else in the household called themselves a family despite the lack of matrimonial bonds); she was assistant treasurer at church, a former clerk who prepared indisputable chronicles of board meetings. She was not nineteen no and holding back they just look clear even with the dye death.
From behind, Oliver rested his hands on her shoulders, more to shield himself than to support her. He had steered her similarly through a haunted house in Niagara Falls when Army and Riot (or the children as Oliver called them despite the lack of matrimonial bonds though, admittedly, he never called them our children) forced the two of them to go through. Pawk-pawk-pawk.
Felicia folded her arms through the short straps of her handbag. I did find the nucleus Edgar was hooked up to an IV. Nothing else. but I couldn’t find nothing else As she inched toward him, he became exponentially larger, as if he were approaching too. Dolly zoom, Riot taught the household. so what are the parts you were looking for His head I know the parts seemed disproportionately large you tell me for his body. you went to school He had lost a lot of weight. His scalp was covered in white stubble, thinner at the temples so the top jutted forth in an enormous peninsula.
How does he look? Felicia asked when she arrived at Edgre’s head. She didn’t want to touch anything. The usual feeling in hospitals.
Oliver let go of her shoulders.
She turned to look at him and asked him the same question silently.
Oliver shrugged.
Riot’s filth broke lightning across her mind. There and gone.
I only paid for twenty minutes of parking, Oliver said. Finding courage, he bent toward Edgar’s face as if testing it for life. Then he walked to the window, nodding at the black woman in the other bed, and tried to spot his car among the others.
For ten minutes, they were like this, Oliver considering everything beyond the window, Felicia considering mostly Edgar well there’s the nucleus with brief disturbances of Riot. and the skin He had always been a tight sleeper, Edgar, face laced up into composure. She had only known the membrane him in good health. Ambulatory. A man without explanation. She observed the half-peeled-back lid from his cup of orange juice, the names and of course the mitonaise on the whiteboard mitochondria over his bed that’s what we used to call it of the nurse and doctor attending him. She thought, looking at the lines around his mouth, that he hadn’t eaten the cryptonaise a proper meal cytoplasm since the late seventies. the ectomorph I believe then there’s the plasma of course Army would organize a World I asking about normal cells Vision you sure you went to school campaign to support the soul-starved executives Mutter’s doctor said cancer cells have different parts of the world.
Edgar awoke. He frowned. Felicia perceived a series of recognitions: that he was in the hospital, that her face was indeed her face, that it wasn’t the seventies.
Felicia, he said. He tried to sit up.
She slipped back into dialect. I hear you was in hospital.
A little dizziness, Edgar said. I got dizzy. I fell. They’re observing is all. His eyes stretched to Oliver.
Edgar, this is Oliver, Felicia said. She hoisted Edgar by the armpit why you keep putting your watch on her to help him sit up. She likes having some weight on her wrists wouldn’t bracelets explain watches more.
Edgar looked Oliver in the face handcuffs a long while, said nothing, no then turned back to Felicia. but a knife now and then Dizziness. Just some dizziness.
That’s not what I hearing.
Horse’s mouth, Ender said.
Felicia still didn’t believe a word of it. not funny Oliver a boy in my class approached from the window, not just a boy then stood, fidgeting behind her like my lab partner a boy. drank a whole bottle of antifreeze On one hand she wanted to send him out of the room but he didn’t die so she could work the truth from Edgar he drank it after drinking rum but on the other she feared apparently there’s something in alcohol that prevents the antifreeze from working being worked from killing you right away by Edgar. Ants crawled over her. It was the kind of irritation that Oliver would later claim not to understand even after she revealed the source to him. He was hovering over them. Why couldn’t he say something manly to Edgar? people don’t realize all the benefits in a shot or two Why was he such a lump of irrelevance?
Edgrr sniffed the remainder of his juice. You cut off your hair.
Monday, she said.
It’s like how you used to look, he said. Your sister, remember, burned it off.
Felicia knew Oliver had never heard that story. It thrilled her.
I didn’t come here to talk about my hair, she said. How you feeling?
He frowned and swatted the question away.
Is there something you haven’t told me?
There are many things I haven’t told you. He took a swig of the orange juice. In fact, I’d say I haven’t told you the majority of things that can be told.
You know what I mean, Felicia said.
And you know what I mean, he replied. Then he glanced at Oliver and his eyelids flickered almost into an eyeroll. But, no, as I was saying, they’re releasing me any time now.
You not in any condition to leave. You have a nurse?
I have everything I need.
The meter’s almost up, Oliver said into Felicia’s neck.
What do you do? Edgar asked how did you get paired with this nut Oliver loudly and pointedly. we choose our own gr
oups Apart from monitor meters.
Oliver puckered his lips into oh an anus.
Edgar sat fully erect and waited.
Independently wealthy, Oliver said.
He used to teach mathematics, Felicia said. Independently wealthy—what kind of nonsense was that? Sounded like Army. Oliver hadn’t worked a real job what you missing in the twenty years she had known nothing him.
Then it was Oliver’s turn to pry. You and Felicia worked I serious at—?
My family owns Paperplane, Edgar said. I go in every day and do my thing By the eighties, you know we had outlets in every airport in this country. Even Yellowknife. what thing It’s pretty much the same now, I except now I we have stores in every terminal. I hold a long note Plus America it’s been years and Europe. And Asia.
Felicia felt she would have known that if it were true and not, say, machismo.
I bought two condos at the beginning of the boom, Oliver said.
Take that ROI and raise it exponentially, Edgar said. I’ve never bought a condo.
You should have.
The money I dealt with was more—Edgar searched for the word—abstract. Remember, Felicia, you used to call my money abstract.
Well, if you need real money, you should have bought a condo.
A building maybe, Edgar said.
Not now. It’s too late. Oliver made his anus face, but he was determined not to crack.
I’ll keep that in mind.
Edgar, I should head out, Felicia said. The conversation had quickly become very alpha, to her embarrassment via Oliver, who couldn’t compete with a fellow ape in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV. I just saying hello for now.
Edgar let Oliver out of his jaws and returned his attention to Felicia. He swept his eyes, his lashless eyes, up to her face. You you smell like baby powder haven’t aged, he said.