The Antagonist

13


07/27/09, 10:31 p.m.


KYLE AND WADE ARE THE MOST popular guys on campus, reason being that both last year and this they have rented (correction: their parents have rented) an entire house just for the two of them. It isn’t a big house, or a particularly nice house, because who is going to rent that kind of house to a couple of twenty-year-old boys? So it is a student house, meaning a dive. But it has a huge yard, a cavernlike living room, and three bedrooms (they call the third the “crash pad” and make it available on a first-come-first-served basis to shitfaced compadres). They have of course named the house. The house has been dubbed, with equal parts reverence and irony, the Temple.

Kyle Jarvis is a magic man, gliding through the echelons of undergraduate society with ease and impunity. He plays rugby, so he might mingle with the jocks. He plays guitar and, god knows, loves himself some weed, so he’s cool with the hippies. He pulls down grades — a boy of his background dare not falter in this regard — which gives him an in with the keeners. Finally, barely out of his teens, Kyle is already an accomplished cocksman. You’d want to kill the bastard if he wasn’t such a decent guy.

Wade Kotch, on the other hand, Kyle’s best friend since Grade 6, enjoys loud music and is mostly majoring in hash. The pair are basically a middle-class echo of Mick Croft and Collie Chaisson — like if some overseeing deity had attacked a portrait of the aforementioned hoodlums with a paint-scraper and chipped away the layers of criminality and skeeze. There goes the smartass smirk in favour of the winning half-smile. Chip-chip go the remnants of Chaisson’s freckled spare tire to reveal the concave gut of Wade, swathed in one of those ugly-ass raw-cotton hoodies that was practically a Gen-X uniform in those days. Chip chip chip go the ball caps. Chip go the homemade knuckle tattoos — all the nastiness flaking away until at last they stand revealed, this wholesome new version of Croft and Chaisson: Jarvis and Kotch. Couple of really good guys.

Getting back to Kyle. The thing about Kyle’s magic is, it makes him a uniter, an axle. He brings the disparate social echelons together in their mutual attraction to himself. He knows this; everybody knows this. So when these diverse campus factions — typically so opposed — are gathered together one raucous evening at the Temple (“gathered in Dionysian worship,” Kyle likes to joke), the venue is understood to constitute a no man’s land, a place of peace. No sectarian conflict will be tolerated.

So say some thug from the hockey team spots some skinny wiener in his kill-me uniform of a cardigan and glasses, decides to dispense with introductions and instead to pick the wiener up, hoist the now squirming wiener over his head, and march over to a nearby open window to the ecstatic cheers of his hockey compadres. Kyle, in such a circumstance, could be relied upon to bound across the room, station himself between the thug and open window, sternly point at the thug with the spout of his beer bottle, and say, like dog trainer to a misbehaving mutt: No. No, Rank. Not here. Not in this house, man. No.

Chastened, knowing he has violated the code of the Temple, the thug reluctantly but gently places the wiener back on solid ground. His hockey buddies pout, jeer briefly, then turn away to look for girls.

The first person to speak is the wiener. “Thank you,” he says, rubbing his body where the thug’s pipelike fingers had dug into him.

Kyle turns a look of scorn onto the thug. “He just f*cking thanked you, Rank.”

Who in the universe but Kyle could make a normally unrepentant thug feel so very repentant — when all he was doing was acting the way any self-respecting thug was expected and encouraged to act? Jeez. The thug in question understands what has to happen next.

He turns and addresses the wiener.

“Sorry, man. Just getting a little exercise.”

The glasses shift toward him, flicker light into the thug’s eyes. “No problem.”

“Now shake hands,” says Kyle.

Rank winces. “Kyle, f*ck’s sake man.”

“This is my house. This is the Temple. It is a Temple of friendship, and it is a Temple of love.”

Only Kyle Jarvis can get away with saying this sort of thing.

So the two young men roll eyes and shake hands.

“Come with me,” insists Kyle, and ushers the two new acquaintances over to the kitchen. Together the three of them stand solemnly before the fridge like it is an altar. Kyle opens it with a somehow ceremonial yank, pulls out a couple of beer, and cracks them for each of his guests before handing them over.

“Now,” he instructs. “You two stand here with your beer and get to know each other. Don’t come out of the kitchen until you’re best friends. I’m serious.”

With that, he leaves them.

They regard each other. Rank pushes out his breath, making his lips flap a little. It isn’t an encouraging sound, but the wiener doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make the first appeasing move. Also, he seems to know precisely the right angle to point his glasses in order to make them reflect light into the eyes of the person in front of him. Safe behind his glasses, he gives nothing away. He just waits.

After a moment, Rank speaks.

“Can I say something here, Adam?”

“Certainly, Rank.”

“I know we haven’t known each other long. But, here it is. You are — bar none — the greatest guy I’ve ever met.”

The glasses shift then, pointing downward at the blackened kitchen linoleum. A silent, sombre nod, followed by a slightly choked-up throat-clearing. “That means . . . so much to me Rank. You have no idea.”

Rank begins to choke a bit himself. “And I . . . I just wanna say . . .”

“Just say it, Rank. It’s okay. I’m here.”

“I’d really like to offer you a hand job.”

Adam can’t keep it up and ends up spraying beer across the kitchen.

So the ritual was a success. Chalk up another for the magic man.



07/28/09, 12:03 a.m.

I’m sorry but I just have to stop and remark upon what a total trip down memory lane it is, being here, for me. I didn’t quite realize it until Owen Findlay came by for a beer the other night. He brought over a bunch of copies of those pics from my hockey days that Father Waugh had mentioned on the phone — one set for me and one for Gord. Neither of us had seen them before. It’s weird to see pictures of yourself as a kid that you’ve never seen before — it’s as if there’s a version of you, a double, that you didn’t even know existed, hanging around somewhere in the past.

So doesn’t Gord promptly haul out his own photo album (by which I mean hollers at me to haul it from the top shelf of the bookcase for him), preparing to set sail into Rankin family history.

The moment Gord opens the album, photos cascade from its pages and into his lap because after Sylvie died he couldn’t be bothered to maintain it properly. He likes to take the snapshots out of the book to show people and then just shoves them back in the album without bothering to reaffix any of them. I am pretty sure this is not just because he’s lazy. It’s because he doesn’t know how to do it — he’s never bothered to figure it out. Keeping albums was my mother’s job.

So there’s Gord with a crotchful of photos and he makes poor Owen sit there listening to extended narratives about every last one. Here’s the boy playing street hockey with his friends — already an enforcer, looka the size a the, etc. Here he hulks in his Icy Dream uniform on his first day of work, all of fourteen years old. Here he is with his lame certificate stating that he has graduated from “Hot Fudge High,” which was what Icy Dream Inc. called the weekend training seminar they offered to franchise employees. I remember at the time being pretty excited by the whole thing, because it meant we had to go into the city for the weekend and stay in a hotel, and I was the youngest person in the whole seminar, even though I didn’t look it. Gord introduced me to everyone there as his “new assistant manager” and at the bar afterward someone handed me a pint without a second glance.

Owen accepts every photo my father hands over, gazes at it for however long it takes for Gord to unfurl the fascinating Rank-centric anecdote attached, then politely places the photo in a growing stack on the end table beside him in time for Gord to hand him another. I decide that I will allow this to continue for as long as it takes me to hook up the wireless modem I’ve been fiddling with all day. It might seem a little rude toward Owen, but it’s good to have Gord distracted and nattering at someone else for a while. Besides, the modem has been making me crazy, and I can’t stand to put it aside until I’ve got it hooked up. My computer won’t pick up the signal. I have spoken, after waiting on hold for two successive eternities, to the tech support people representing both the manufacturers of the computer and the modem — neither party being of any help whatsoever — and I refuse to do it again. If I can’t figure it out myself, I am going to throw the computer away and buy another, more expensive one. I don’t give a shit anymore.

So as Gord hands over photographs to Owen, I sit there going back and forth between the modem and my computer, checking for a connection, occasionally giving absent-minded answers to Gord’s inane promptings, e.g.: “Remember that now Gordie?” “Didn’t care for that, much, did he son?” “Guess you showed them, eh, Gordie?”

And I’m muttering, “Yup. Yeah, I remember. Shit! This stupid . . . Yeah, I know Gord. Goddamnit!”

And Owen is saying things like: “He barely fits into that sweater!” and “That’s not the same sign as they have at the ID now is it? When’d you get that sign changed, Gordon?”

And as pissed off as I am at the computer situation I’m secretly very grateful to have something to distract me from the cure for insomnia that’s happening on the other side of the room.

And that’s when I exclaim: “You complete and total f*cker!” and notice that I have shouted these words into an uncharacteristic sound vacuum. So I glance up at Gord and Owen who are leaning toward each other like school boys sharing a textbook, only they’re not reading, they’re looking at a picture together.

And Gord has stopped talking, so I know it’s a picture of Sylvie.

What’s more, I know what photo it is. I don’t know how but I do. Maybe just because I saw it and handled it so many times in my youth — and saw Gord and Sylvie do the same, because everyone in my family always loved the damn thing, were always passing it around, taking it out of the album to show friends and relatives. It was just one of those photos. In these days of digicams you can take a picture a second and delete whatever looks like crap, so a decent snap of someone — where their eyes aren’t half closed or they don’t look like they have six chins — doesn’t have the same magic of really good old photographs. The uncanny luck of a picture that not only gets across everything good in the moment, but somehow composes itself into a representation of something more, something beyond that moment — even better than the moment itself.

It’s almost like a lie, a good photo. An unbearable lie. Like that moment you feel yourself starting to wake up after the best dream of your life. And you hold your eyes shut and you just lie there; you can’t stand it, you’re so disappointed to be waking up.

It’s the photograph of me and Sylvie after my Confirmation — that’s the photo Gord is holding. He took it himself, out in the church parking lot, immediately following the ceremony.

Finally Gord speaks.

“Mother and son.”

“That’s a nice shot,” murmurs Owen. He looks like he would be happy to sit there gazing away at the image of me with my buck teeth and tan corduroy suit for as long as Gord is willing to hold it up in front of him.

Without even thinking about it, I’ve shoved the laptop aside and am on my feet, reaching out to retrieve the snapshot, which Gord is now holding out to me.

Why did I want to see it again? As I turned it over in my fingers, I could see that I hadn’t forgotten a single detail. It was all there, the late morning sunlight, the gleaming cars behind us, the expanse of beige corduroy, purchased in a panic because I’d had the first of my two major growth spurts practically the day before and it was the only thing in the store that fit me. And, oh, it was godawful. And I was godawful. I was a post-growth-spurt mess. My teeth seemed to stick out a mile. My tie, which was Gord’s tie, was about the same distance wide and a glaring kelly green. If I had still looked like a child, this clown suit would have been okay, passable, because kids can get away with anything — kids are meant to look ridiculous — but I looked like a young man. A young man with no idea how to dress. Therefore, an imbecile. To top it all off, I still had my pre-growth spurt haircut — prodigious, everywhere, past my ears. Fine on a child, insane on a man in a corduroy suit. Why hadn’t Sylvie cut it? Like I said, I had grown up in a day, practically. None of us was ready.

In the photo, I am grinning from ear to ear. Sylvie is also grinning from ear to ear. She is peeping out from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my waist and her tiny hands locked together against my abdomen. There’s a slight look of incredulousness on her face, because I remember her exclaiming, as we posed: I can barely get my arms around him anymore! And that’s when I started laughing, giving the buck teeth a nice healthy airing, at which Gord started laughing, followed by Sylvie, who was also grunting as she reached around me, to indicate what an incredible effort it took.

And then, snap. Shot.

We are like — I don’t know how else to explain it — Sylvie and I are like two suns in this picture. We radiate.

And then Gord ruins it. As Gord has always ruined it. He nudges Owen.

“Young Gordie was always a bit of a mama’s boy, truth be told.”

I remember being this angry only a couple of times. Once was in that room at the courthouse with Sylvie, Gord, and Trisha after Gord insisted my suffering mother should absent herself from my trial and I, in turn, insisted I was going to kill him and Trish, in turn, insisted Gord should go get a drink from the water fountain down the hall.

The other time — you remember. You were there. And Kyle was there. And Kyle stood his ground pretty impressively, it seems to me now.

And I think something must happen to my face at that point, because Owen jumps to his feet.

I am talking. In a very low drawl, like a slowed-down recording, I hear myself say: “You know what Gord?”

But Owen won’t let me tell him what. His body is suddenly against mine and he is kind of fox-trotting me into the kitchen and out the front door, calling something to my father about us taking a walk out back to see the creek. I can hear myself talking over him the whole time, still in that low-slow tone but getting louder the farther away Owen manages to get me from my father. Have I mentioned Owen is only around 5 ' 11 "? So I don’t know how he accomplishes this exactly. Years of experience wrangling teenage gland-cases on the ice I suppose.

So we stand on the lawn in front of the house, and I notice I am still yelling, and as I slow down enough to take actual notice of what I am saying and maybe nuance it a little I also notice that my father’s own fulsome shouts are — as always — sounding in vigorous counterpoint to mine from somewhere inside the house. I even hear him bash the crutch against the wall a couple of times by way of emphatic punctuation. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the two of us sound like a couple of raging, incoherent twats. I take a breath and glance over at Owen. His eyebrows are up, his hands in the pockets of his cords.

“Ready?” he inquires.

We take a walk.



07/29/09, 9:14 p.m.

So, you’d think it would be strange hanging out with Owen Findlay after all these years, but in fact it feels as comfortable and familiar as my old bedroom at the back of the house. But when I say “as comfortable,” you shouldn’t mistake that to mean “comfortable,” exactly. We head up through the back field and I can’t help but be reminded of the walks we used to take together when I was in the Youth Centre. I know I haven’t spoken much about the Youth Centre, but that’s not because it was such a bad place. The tough-on-crime crowd won’t like to hear this, but I was sort of happy there. It was quiet, for one thing — something I never got a lot of, growing up in the house that Gord built — and my days were totally routinized. People told me when to get up and when to eat and when to shower and when to study and when to exercise and when to go to bed. If Owen’s social work colleagues ever wanted to develop some kind of ideal mental-health retreat geared toward a sixteen-year-old boy who had accidentally nearly killed somebody and whose mother had just died and who couldn’t stand the sight of his father, they would very likely end up with something resembling the Youth Centre. I needed the routine and the quiet but I also needed that overarching sense of being punished — that every morning when I woke up I could be sure I would go through my day enacting a punishment. Every breath of air, every step taken, every morsel of food ingested — everything punitive.

It was Owen’s job to interview me once a week and find out what I thought and how I was doing, but he never wanted to do this in one of the centre’s concrete-coloured interview rooms, adorned as they were with industrial seventies-era office furniture, uniformly orange for some reason, and further bleakened by fluorescent lighting. Instead, Owen always insisted we “take a walk” around the grounds, which wasn’t bad because the grounds overlooked the ocean. And I know I’m starting to make this place sound like more of a resort than a penal institute, but keep in mind that this was on the coast, so pretty much everything overlooked the ocean — pubs, grocery stores, and Youth Centres alike.

The funny thing is, I remember very little about the talks I had with Owen. Mostly I just remember the sound of our feet in the dirt — the dual rhythm of our footsteps. Being lulled by our shared, repetitive trudge. And maybe that’s why, trudging along beside Owen Findlay again after all these years, I can’t help but mention this memory to him — or this lack of memory, maybe. The memory of being lulled and not thinking or talking about much of anything, even though we must have.

“That was the idea,” says Owen. “That was the idea then and now.”

I look over when he says “now,” and he’s smiling at the oncoming woods in the distance.

“Oh, this is great,” I say. “You’re using the same therapeutic techniques on me that you used when I was sixteen years old. I thought I’d come so far.”

“It wasn’t so much a technique as it was just — you know — ‘let’s go for a walk,’ ” says Owen.

I remember this from the old days. Owen says or does exactly the right thing and when you point that out, he shrugs it off as common sense — as the obvious move. It took me a while to figure out that this was one of his techniques as well.

“Horseshit, Owen,” I say.

He smiles again at the approaching trees. Owen still wears the same round, wire-frame John Lennon glasses I remember from when I was a kid, back when his hair was black with flecks of white instead of the other way around. “I worked pretty intuitively in those days,” he tells me. “I thought kids needed to be out and moving around — you in particular. That’s why I started coaching hockey. But it makes sense, right? You get upset, you go for a walk. You walk it off. People do it on instinct.”

“Yeah,” I say, feeling a little bored but also content — again, exactly what I remember from the Youth Centre days. “Gets you out of your head I guess.”

“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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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, F*ck 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 something 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.”

“‘F*ck this noise,’” quoted Owen.

“That’s right,” I said. “F*ck this noise.”

“And you think saying ‘F*ck 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.