The Antagonist

Part Two





10


07/04/09, 1:15 p.m.


IT DIDN'T HELP MY CASE that once he regained consciousness all Croft could do was sit around blubbering. It didn’t help me to have this sweet-faced boy quietly bawling his eyes out in front of the judge throughout the entire proceedings. And I mean the entire proceedings — non-stop. It was a brain-injury thing, my lawyer assured me and Gord and Sylvie — Sylvie whose own eyes filled immediately at the sight and sound of Croft. But it wasn’t that he was actually sad, the lawyer murmured to us kindly — it was just that he was brain-damaged. That was all, just a little brain damage. Either way, it didn’t help my case.

There was no jury because it was juvenile court and thank god because there’s the sweet-faced bawling boy fresh out of a coma, and in this corner here’s the hairy, hulking six-foot-four monster accused of aggravated assault. Oh, and here’s the hulking monster’s father, by the way, who can’t keep his mouth shut, who keeps jumping up and calling the Crown attorney “dickface,” to the delight of the gathered townsfolk who are taking such keen advantage of the proceedings being (and whose bright idea was this?) open to the public. Rankin Sr., keeping things entertaining as always, having more than once referred to the lawyer defending said monster as a “this dumb bitch here,” who had to be very nearly forcibly restrained from delivering similar epithets in the judge’s direction. I kept wondering if there was any way I could casually lean over and put a headlock on my father without tarnishing my image even further in the eyes of the court.

Meanwhile, there is Sylvie and there is Croft; the two of them drenching their respective sides of the courtroom.

“You’re just making it worse!” Gord would holler at her during recess. “Making us look guilty — oh, his poor mother, they’re going. Stuck with a bad son like that. Like he done something wrong!”

Sylvie would just shake her head and blow her nose, so I spoke up.

“Gord? I’m going to kill you.”

“Now now now now now,” my lawyer, Trisha, would interrupt at around this point.

“Just let me handle this, son. You’re under a lot of stress.”

“No, I’m serious, I’ll kill you Gord.”

“OK!” said Trisha, clapping her hands together, smiling her face-eating Marie Osmond smile. “We stop this. We change the subject now.”

“She stays out of the courtroom,” proclaimed Gord, pointing at Sylvie. “She’s ruining everything.”

This coming from the man whose outbursts had nearly got him kicked out of the courtroom twice already that morning.

“The crying mother does not stay out of the courtroom,” explained Trish — Trisha had astounded me throughout this process in her dealings with Gord. The enormous, face-eating smile acted as a bulwark against every “dumb bitch” he could chuck her way. “The crying mother is the only sympathy vote we get, fellas.”

I looked at Sylvie tiny in her chair, clicking her rosary beads between white fingers with shredded fingernails, and I thought someone should go over there and comfort her. Or else someone should’ve just scooped her up and carried her out of there — some flannel-wearing Canadianized Superman — dump her in the woods in Northern Ontario, give her a gun, something to shoot. Put her back in hip waders and let her evolve into the backwoods amazon she was always meant to be.

I never thought it should be me, however — clearly I was not the superhero for Sylvie. I’d turned out to be as big a downward drag as Gord — maybe bigger. For all his daily shouts and insults, Gord had never reduced her to puddles before — not even close. With Gord, she shook her head, rolled her eyes and assured me “He never really talks to me like that,” usually after he’d just finished talking to her like that. But the puddles? The puddles were new. The puddles were for and by yours truly. You could say I was the author of the puddles.

So no. It never occurred to me to shift out of my rigid, fist-clenching gonna-kill-Gord carriage and put my arms around my mother. I was a contagion, after all. I was a destructive force. I was an injurer of men’s brains.

I later learned that once Croft stopped crying, he developed epilepsy. Also, he had no idea who I was throughout the trial. He didn’t remember anything from before his skull hit the pavement. I think the memories came back a little later, but at the trial, he was a blank slate, an innocent. And in this state of purity (the kind of literal born-again status that my church later had me convinced even a Great Contagion could achieve if I just bashed my head against the pavement of Christ’s love long enough), Croft had gone from being a badass with an angelic quality to a sheer, full-potency angel — a weeping one at that.

It did not help my case.

But then, what could?

Somewhere in there, my sixteenth birthday happened.



07/05/09, 12:37 a.m.

The night was preparing, in that slow, summertime way, to spread itself against the sky — the sun smeared like a broken egg yolk along the horizon. And I knew the world had flipped itself over like an all-beef patty, done on one side, when I heard the sound Croft’s head made when it struck the pavement. Okay, the sound was bad, but the truth is, I knew it was pretty much game over the minute I felt my fist invade his skull. In the name of getting-it-over-with/avoiding-knife-punctures, I had decided I would have to knock Croft out. This was something I had never attempted in all the nights of parking-lot punk-grappling previous to this. Usually, these sessions mostly involved peeling guys off me and shoving them into the sides of cars. I hadn’t realized it up until the moment I hit Croft, but those fights hadn’t been fights at all. They’d been play. We’d been like kids brandishing lightsabers at one another in the schoolyard. We’d been getting our exercise.

And I realized those fights were nothing so immediately, so assuredly, because of the experience of my fist smashing into someone’s face — an experience I’d never had before. Because of the way it made me feel, instinctively, on some kind of primal, sub-literate level: Poor Croft! Poor Croft’s face!

Because it crunched. I felt how it crunched in a couple of places.

I felt Croft’s bones absorb the force and velocity I threw at him; I felt how easily they shuddered and gave way. I felt this in my own bones; in the bones of my fist. It was simply a vibration; it didn’t cause me any pain at all.

That said, it was a vibration that transmitted precisely what I was doing to Croft’s face at the moment I did it, meaning that even as I was doing it, I was regretting it.

I flashed on a memory of accidentally breaking an egg in one hand; standing there cradling the runny mess of it.

Which was around when Croft’s blood announced itself in a deluge from his nose: Surprise! Look how red I am! How much of me there is! Wow, I’m not slowing down, am I? Now it’s a party!

Some of it hit me as Croft was going down, very warm against my very cold skin — I’m surprised it didn’t sizzle — hot and snotty.

Then came the sound — and the party was over before it could even get cooking.

It didn’t echo. It was so loud — so loud, Adam — but it didn’t echo. We were in a parking lot — everything echoed. The shouts of Croft’s pals, my cornball, pro-forma threats (back off, man), the excited cries of the Legionnaires next door, Croft’s final taunt. These noises ricocheted against the cinderblock walls of the Icy Dream, flung themselves back at us like near-simultaneous mockery. But the crack of Croft’s skull did not echo. It was this blank, bottomless sound, with no layers, no resonance. A sound unto itself.

But how could the sound (the man behind the glass wonders to himself as he sips at his hot chocolate, turns up the collar of his coat) possibly have been any worse than the crunching bones, the sudden blood-parade?

Adam, the sound was worse.

I heard that sound a second time not long after, in the middle of one of my hockey games. My coach and former social worker, Owen Findlay, had a strict no-fighting rule, which outraged a lot of parents, not to mention the opposing coaches, because he pulled guys off the ice the minute he spotted a tussle taking shape, which was no fun at all. If the ref didn’t call it, he simply walked out onto the ice himself — fans howling for his killjoy blood — and put an end to things. He had also vowed to kick anyone who got into a fight off the team no matter how good they were or how much clout their parents might have on the town council or school board. I didn’t realize at the time how unique Findlay was in this regard. It’s probably safe to say you and I would never have met in the hallowed halls of academe if the gods had presented me with any coach in the world who was not Owen Findlay.

Still, shit happens on the ice. Helmets get knocked off, kids go flying, skulls crash against solidity. And I should add none of that used to really bother me, before Croft — before I set foot into the grownup world of consequences — the innocent “before” juxtaposed against the catastrophic “after.” Before Croft, I might have even got a little irritated myself with Owen’s hard line on fighting. If some guy whammed me into the boards so hard it stole my breath, what was the harm of shoving a not-so-friendly warning? Most guys expected and — I’d venture to say — enjoyed it when you did.

But barely a year into the catastrophic after, I made it happen again: that sound. It had been a nice, easy check, I thought, as far as these things go. Clean. I’d practically said “Excuse me” as I knocked the guy aside. Still, his face hit the lip of the boards, and down he went. That’s when I heard it. The players surrounded him and the coaches surged forward and meanwhile I was moving in the opposite direction, away, off the ice, I didn’t even stay to see if the kid, a pudge-faced winger named Chisholm, was okay. I turned away the moment the sound reached my ears, but that didn’t keep me from witnessing the blood-parade again (Hi Rank!) this time pouring from Chisholm’s mouth. It skipped across the ice, Chisholm’s blood, happy to be set free, and I went straight to the locker room and pulled off nearly all my gear I was sweating so much. Then I just sat on the bench. Then I got up, headed to a stall, threw up, and sat down on the bench again. I drank some water. I sat there. After a while, Findlay came looking for me.

He knew my story. Findlay, as I’ve mentioned, was a social worker in the non-hockey part of his life. He was the guy who got me out of the Youth Centre early so my punishment wouldn’t mess too much with the school year. At some point during the fog of my fifteenth and sixteenth years, Owen had taken over coaching the high school team, the one I’d tried out for pre-Croft as a means of getting out of spending all my free time working for Gord.

Before that, I’d only played shinny, for fun. I was one of the few guys in my town who wasn’t gunning for the NHL from the moment I learned to skate — very likely a subconscious (or maybe not so subconscious) response to Gord’s oft-voiced fantasies of becoming the next Walter Gretzky. High school hockey wasn’t going to get me any closer to the Stanley Cup, but it was still hockey, therefore the one activity Gord would cheerfully let me off work to pursue.

But I was careful to never let my father see how much I loved it. Because if he knew I loved it, I knew he would wreck it. Because pretty much the moment I first set foot on the pond with a stick in my hands, I realized in a secret and essential way that hockey was actually mine — not Gord’s, not my NHL-crazed buddies’, not even the NHL’s itself. It was mine. It was the only thing in my life that shut out the noise, all those desperate voices — the ones that sounded like Gord (anger, fear) and the ones that sounded like Sylvie (sorrow, fear). All it took to break through to a more serene plane of existence, it turned out, was some hard skating, a beautiful pass, the magical-seeming synchrony of human minds and bodies when a play goes just right. It had to do with that feeling of being caught up in something bigger, of team in the purest sense — when you’re as individual as you’ve ever been while knowing you’re completely unalone. Completely with. Thinking back on it now it seems to me that hockey was the church I found before I found my church; the institution that brought home to me — a hell of a lot more effectively than any droning priest ever could — the virtues of Communion and Grace.

So it was my escape, in short. But it couldn’t be my escape if I let Gord turn it into another trap, which is why I showed zero interest in the leagues as a kid. Otherwise it would’ve been drills at 6 a.m at the pond on weekends. It would’ve been coaches filing restraining orders to staunch the flow of apoplectic phone calls, death-threats shrieked from across the street. It would’ve been pitying, disgusted looks from other parents.

High school hockey felt lower-stakes and therefore a safer bet. And once I was sprung from the Youth Centre, Owen placed me back on the team without even asking me, practically. He just told me what time to show up for practice, and because he was Owen, I did. At the time it made sense — as much as anything could make sense in that catastrophic after. Hockey had always been my escape, after all, and the idea of escape was sounding particularly good around that time.

But when Chisholm’s cranium hit the ice I came up against one of the biggest downsides to living in the after — the realization that no matter how hard I played, how much I tried to lose myself, escape wasn’t really on the menu anymore.

Now Owen stood in the doorway of the locker room, a bright blue Icy Dream toque perched on his head — a gift from Gord — watching me shake and sip water. “Chisholm’s fine,” he said after a moment. “He’ll sit out the rest of the game. Not too happy about it.”

“He could have a hairline fracture,” I said. “He could go home and say good night to his mom and go to sleep and not wake up. Sometimes brain injuries — they have to settle in.” I was babbling. I was basically regurgitating everything I’d learned in court about the danger and insidiousness of brain injuries courtesy of the Crown prosecutor during my trial. “He’s just forgetful, or something, can’t quite put words together and if it’s not treated, all of a sudden he’s in a coma or he has a f*cking hemorrhage . . .”

“Rank, he’s fine, he had his helmet on.”

I stared up at Owen. “No he didn’t — it came off. I heard the crack.”

“It stayed on, Rank. You heard his helmet.”

“Bullshit,” I said, parsing my memory. My memory was insisting that the helmet had come off.

“He’s fine, trust me. Are you coming back to play?”

“I don’t know, Owen.”

“I would like it if you came back to play.”

“I threw up.”

“Do you feel better?”

I thought about it. “No.”

“You have to trust me that he’s okay,” said Findlay. “And you have to get up and come back to the game. Okay? And then you’ll feel better.”

It relieved me a little that he gave me a directive. That he told me what had to be done, and what would be the result. But I was still too scared to budge.

“You want me off this team,” I told him.

“No I don’t. Don’t tell me what I want.”

“This is what happens,” I explained. “This is what I make happen.”

It was the first time I’d said it out loud. Sylvie was a year into her grave, I was seventeen years old, and that was the first time I’d said it out loud.



07/06/09, 6:43 p.m.

Anyway. Findlay eventually got me off the bench. And I finished the game, and Chisholm really was fine. I kept on playing season after season, harder than ever, thinking that at some point if I could just get my blood whooshing loud enough in my ears, if I could just lose myself in the glory of a really great play, I could disappear into it like I used to — that little hatch in my mind would finally drop open again, flushing everything away but what was happening on the ice. But what do you know: just when I was ready to give up, an entirely different escape hatch revealed itself. My game got noticed. I was offered a scholarship, of all things, applied for a student loan on the strength of that, and next thing I know I’m on my way to university — where I met you.

Ready Adam? Because we’re finally getting to the good part — the part you’ll recognize. This is where I, the all-powerful author, get to explore my exciting new character. Let’s really zoom in on him, what do you say? What kind of narrator would I be if I didn’t ruthlessly delve into what makes good old Adam tick, warts and all — oh yes, warts and all! The insecurities, the conglomerate of loser qualities to which he is oblivious, the nerdy tics, the wincing attempts at self-aggrandizement. (And yes, I realize I’ve skipped over a significant detail, a key incident that occurred sometime between crushing Croft’s skull and packing for university, but I believe I’ve already outlined that particular scenario to you in one boiling regurgitative flush and just maybe I’d prefer not to go into it again, okay?)

And so, to begin.

Actually before I begin I feel like I should mention I ran into Kyle not long ago. I wish it could have been Wade, if it had to be anyone — Wade, I imagine, even after all these years, would have blearily stuck out his hand and rambled about his new speakers or his new Guns N’ Roses box set or his new insert-whogivesashit-here — but it was Kyle. And as you’ll recall, there is nothing bleary about Kyle in the least.

“Oh my freaking god,” said Kyle once we’d locked eyes the way teenagers once were rumoured to lock braces when making out. That is, we were stuck together, suddenly and inextricably. Kyle’s head jerked forward on his neck like a bird’s, his mouth fell open, and I knew there was no denying the mutual recognition. The next second he was loping over to me with that same easy, chest-forward stride he used on campus, the walk that made you think his grandfather must have founded the university or something.

Do you wonder where we were, Adam — Kyle and I, meeting up after all these years? I’ll tell you. We were at a Winners in downtown Toronto.

I had deked in off the street to get dry and maybe buy an umbrella because I’d been walking around downtown and the sky had been hanging overhead in a cluster of great grey bellies before finally it belched once then opened up.

How long ago was this, wonders the man behind the Plexiglas. What time of year was it? What was Rank, townie shitkicker extraordinaire last time we checked, doing wandering downtown TO?

Who knows, Adam? Not you.

If Kyle was at all dubious about approaching the shitkicker apparition in question, he didn’t let that dull his politician’s twinkle. He transferred the two ties he’d been pawing from his right hand to his left and waded in to make my re-acquaintance. Firm handshake, followed by that direct yet easygoing half-smile that got him laid with such maddening efficiency back in school. Cool blue-eyed greeting.

“Rank,” he said. “Man!”

“Hey. Kyle, right?”

I don’t know why I threw that in, that question — right? Like there was any doubt either of us remembered one another. Kyle — hemp-wearing student union president, rugby captain, Guatemalan-sweatered, pothead friend to all — he let it pass, or course. Faked along with me.

“That’s right, that’s right. Kyle Jarvis.” He even spoke his last name for me as if I needed a reminder. It was almost embarrassing how readily he accommodated my bullshit. “How you doing, man?”

“I’m good,” I replied. And so on and et cetera. You know how these things go. Maybe I should write the rest of the conversation as translated subtext just to hurry things along.

Kyle: Jesus Christ I don’t know what to say because last time I saw you you were running from the cops after what you did to that guy!

Rank: Yeah I know — crazy, right?

Kyle: And you disappeared and none of us ever thought we’d see you again!

Rank: Yup — same here.

Kyle: I am dying to ask you what the hell happened! But I can’t because we’re standing here in Winners and for all I know you’ve been in jail the last nineteen f*cking years! It’s very awkward, even for a suave son of a bitch like myself!

Rank: Yes, I can see that, Kyle, but rest assured you’re doing very well. How about I change the subject? Tell me, what’s your story these days? Venture capitalist? Hotshot parliamentarian? Jet-setting —

Kyle: I work at City Hall.

Rank: Well piss on a plate.

For those last two remarks, I have switched back into the non-subtextual — that’s what was really spoken. Kyle looked only slightly thrown by my Gordism — I could tell by the excess teeth he showed me when he grinned.

“Well, hey, it’s really great to see you. You look good, Rank. Fit.” I saw him eye my pecs just the way he used to do when we were kids. You’ll recall, Adam, how Kyle was never quite comfortable with the idea that any guy could have a natural advantage over him. He was that way about your superior GPA too, I seem to recall — all the things charm and orthodontics couldn’t necessarily help a young man achieve. “Are you living in Toronto now?” he wanted to know.

I replied, perhaps truthfully, to Kyle’s question then.

We were already beginning to extract ourselves at this point in the conversation. Kyle had intuited there would be no going for coffee and getting caught up, a suggestion I could practically see hopping around behind his nice white teeth. This incident at Winners, he eventually realized, was a cosmic oversight; no more than a blip in the time-space continuum — best to just let things blip back to normal. Kyle and I were never meant to intersect again — how could we be, after things had ended so perfectly and decisively all those years ago? Like a novel, come to think of it. It was just the gods, again, unable to leave well enough alone, celestial George Lucases writing bad sequels nobody wants to see.

Kyle started to turn away to pay for his ties (“Paul Frank,” he confided, waggling them at me) — and I was content. The encounter was everything it should be — acutely awkward, but blessedly brief and inconsequential. We would go our separate ways and soon would shake each other off like rain.

Except Kyle remembered something. And when he remembered this thing, he turned around. And when he turned around, he met my eyes again. And in this meeting of eyes was the memory of the last look that occurred between us, that look of nineteen years ago. Which had marked the moment Kyle lost it all — the chest-thrust, the half-smile, the unflappable gaze. All the stuff he’d been busy practising and cultivating to get himself to precisely this point in his life. But back then, none of those traits had solidified yet. They wobbled like Jell-O in unguarded moments; they could still be displaced, wiped clean, by, say, a terrible act, a terrible thing. Kyle stood revealed as a kid in such a moment, a scared boy, and like a scared, helpless boy, would look around, for the first time in our acquaintanceship, for somebody else to take charge and tell us what to do. But if Kyle wasn’t going to take up that mantle, certainly nobody else would — certainly not the stammering mess of Wade, certainly not the repulsed, already retreating Adam. All the guy could do, ultimately, was resettle his helpless blue eyes into those of the perpetrator, the author of this terrible act and thing, take a calculatedly large step away from the scene and say a useless thing like: “Whoa. Whoa Rank, Jesus, man.”

Anyway, that wasn’t what Kyle was remembering that rainy day in Winners. That’s what I was remembering. Kyle was remembering something else.

“Hey!” he said, holding up the ties again as if to flag me down. “Remember Grix?”

I stopped mid-stride and pretended to think about it. “Glasses,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, with the glasses.” Kyle was back on his game now, growing more comfortable as he moved toward the cash and the distance grew between us, calling to me over his shoulder like we were old friends, like we had just seen each other the day before and might see each other again the day after.

“There’s a bookstore over by the food court,” he told me, digging around for his credit card and ignoring the cashier the way guys like Kyle always do. “Go check it out. Grix has a book in there.”

“No way,” I said, genuinely surprised. Also this: pleased.

“Seriously, he was in the paper on the weekend. I Facebooked him to say congrats.”

This new verb: to Facebook. But you’re like forty years old, I wanted to say.

“Look him up,” said Kyle. “Adam Grix.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “I remember.”

Kyle’s ties had been rung through and bagged — he’d managed to exchange neither words nor eye contact with the cashier the whole time — and now he was on the opposite side of the counter from me. This was our goodbye. He waved a hand and smiled, and I raised a hand and smiled in return without even thinking about it. It was as if in that moment of being mutually happy for our friend we’d forgotten that none of us were friends — that we hadn’t been since 1990.

I let that feeling, that forgetting, carry me all the way to the other end of the mall and into the bookstore.