The Antagonist

20


08/06/09, 11:15 p.m.


APPARENTLY, IT CAN ALL BE traced back to Nixon. In the guise of conducting cancer research, the Nixon administration was actually neck-deep in biowarfare. Genetic engineering of viruses became a common practice under Tricky Dick. Sure, says Ivor, everyone these days thinks Nixon was a “total cock.” And he was, no doubt about it. But Watergate? Tapping a few telephone wires?

“Tip a the iceberg,” says Ivor, wiping his forever-running nose on his forever-crusted sleeve. “How about unleashing a plague that sweeps across the planet, killing millions? How many people did Hitler kill? Well, how many people did Nixon kill — how many people did the American government kill, Rank?”

“I don’t know,” says Rank, wishing some redneck Gold-

finger’s patron would attempt to kick in the teeth of another so that he and Ivor would have something to do besides shoot the preposterous shit. “I don’t have those numbers on me, man.”

“More than six million, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah,” says Rank, scanning the thin early-evening crowd of Goldfinger’s die hards. Rank so far only works weekends, when the bar is at capacity and the crowd at its most unruly. He gets to split bullshit tips with the coat check girl at the end of every evening, and so far it sucks. He needs to get more hours if this is going to be worthwhile, and he needs to tend bar, because already he can see behind the bar is where the real tips happen. Lorna’s tip jar is insane. Ivor has explained, however, that Rank must “work his way up” in the Goldfinger’s hierarchy before Richard will even consider putting him behind the bar. Which is a blatant lie, because Rank recalls how Wade was stuffed back there with Lorna only a few days after inquiring. But Rank is in no position to complain.

After a handful of nights on the job, Rank has already broken up a fair number of fights with relative ease. Non-events for the most part, men too drunk to even see, except for the occasion when a couple of girls called him outside to stop some tosspot from trampling an elderly cab driver. Rank arrived in the parking lot just as the old guy was being slammed against his car. His false teeth went flying, startling everybody. The drunk loosened his grip on the cabbie’s jacket, eyes following the airborne teeth in confusion, and it was just the opening Rank needed to pull him off the driver and shove him into the street.

“Don’t come back,” said Rank, feeling mildly heroic.

“Pardon?” said the drunk, looking around him and patting his jacket. “I need a taxi.”

“You don’t have to bother with what’s going on in the parking lot,” Ivor told him when he was back inside. “Once they’re off the premises they can shoot each other in the face for all that Richard gives a care.”

Rank was about to say, The parking lot is still our property, like he used to recite to the punks at Icy Dream. And we want you off it. Instead he shrugged. Goldfinger’s was clearly a different sort of establishment.

“What makes me sick,” says Ivor now, “is how the government covers it up. One administration after another. When Ford pardoned him for Watergate, what most people don’t realize is that it was a blanket pardon. It pardoned him for anything and everything the law might eventually dig up on him — and those bastards knew it. They are all complicit, Rank. Bush, Reagan — all the way back to Carter, even.”

Complicit, thinks Rank. Ivor recited the word with care, as if he had practised it. It makes Rank feel depressed. He doesn’t know if he can continue having this conversation night after night. Back when he and the boys would accompany Wade to Goldfinger’s for a quick beer, it was entertaining to have red-faced Ivor plunk himself down and sweatily expound upon his alternate reality. A few minutes of this was one thing, but it was sort of disturbing to realize that Ivor never changed the subject. His mind was stuck on this particular track, and there was no getting him off it.

Rank had tried one time.

“You got a family, Ivor?”

“No, I. Well, yes, I have a family, I have a mother and father and sisters and that shit. I had them, growing up. Now I work for Rich.”

“But you don’t —”

“When you are poor, Rank, when you spend your life hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks like yours truly, you don’t get many breaks in life.”

“Yeah, but I’m just wondering —” Rank didn’t want to push the matter, but he could already see, after only a handful of conversations, where Ivor was leading this one — the same place as ever.

“And you are lucky, if you are someone like me, who has had the kind of life I’ve had, if you can work for a man like Richard. You know, maybe I got nothing but I don’t drink and I haven’t used needles for over a decade and I hold down a job and I’m good at it. And when the government of the most powerful nation on the planet is dead set on the extermination of people like you — because you’re poor, and you’re scummy, and you’ve got a single possession charge on your record — it doesn’t make existence any easier.”

Rank was a little dumbstruck by the word scummy. He had never heard a man describe himself as scummy before.

“You’re not scummy, man,” said Rank, after a moment of singing along with “Heartache Tonight.”

“It doesn’t matter how I see myself,” explained Ivor, scanning the crowd. “The point is, the most powerful people in the world think I’m expendable. They have me in their crosshairs, is the point. I have to live with that. Every day.”

“Jesus,” said Rank.

“Yes, it’s very stressful,” said Ivor.

Things were different with the guys from the Temple. They were still friends, of course. Rank still went there all the time, often after his weekend shift, to wind down with a beer. And they came sometimes to visit him at Goldfinger’s. But it was different. When they left, usually around eleven at night, which was practically like Sunday morning at Goldfinger’s in terms of the comparative drunken mayhem to come, Rank had to stay and see the mayhem through. Rank was stuck there, and the novelty of Goldfinger’s — which for him had never been that novel in the first place — had worn off entirely. Even Richard in his back office no longer seemed like much of a mystery. He’d spoken to Rank a couple of times since Rank’s hiring (if you could call getting a few twenties shoved at you at the end of every shift being “hired”) and both times hadn’t met his eye. It occurred to Rank that Richard simply didn’t have a lot of social skills — that Richard hung out in his office night and day, cracking the door only to grunt at Ivor or snap his fingers at Lorna, because he was, in fact, shy.

And Rank had seen inside the office. It held filing cabinets mostly, had fluorescent overhead lighting. In its glare, Rank had noticed Richard’s acne scars.

He had apologized to Kyle immediately and unreservedly. Rank spent the whole day following their dust-up sleeping off the rye, groaning his way through dreams of satyrs in hockey skates, and by the time he got up it was suppertime. Supper was out of the question, needless to say. He headed to the Temple. There, he found Kyle practising guitar tabs with Wade, and didn’t beat around the bush. Kyle stood, grave and respectful as the apology unfurled. He allowed Rank to stand there for only a single sadistic moment of silence before responding with predictable Jarvis magnanimity, even going so far as to insist that they hug.

Rank (stepping back): That’s okay, man — as long as we’re good.

Kyle (stepping forward): Let me love you, my brother. Then we’ll be good.

So they hugged, Rank rolling eyes, Kyle closing his in reverence of their ongoing brotherhood, Wade clapping and grinning like a chimp in the corner.

It was a slap, thought Rank.

Where was Adam that day? Rank didn’t see Adam for a while after that, not for about a week, not until the evening at Goldfinger’s when Ivor pronounced Rank a “big f*ckin guy” and a job offer was on the table. Rank had been disappointed not to find Adam at the Temple when he arrived to apologize to Kyle. Adam had witnessed the altercation, it seemed right that he should witness the reconciliation too. The result was that it didn’t feel complete to Rank.

Strange to say that even though he knew he was right with Kyle after that, things never quite felt right again with Adam.

It makes Rank feel panicky to remember what he’d confessed in those seasick morning hours. He trudges the campus wondering what Adam must think of him. It makes him resentful. He imagines a slow crust of loathing hardening over Adam’s perceptions now that he knows what he knows about Rank. Adam had barely said anything that night. He couldn’t find the words, he’d been so revolted. He’d put his hand on Rank’s forehead, but what did that mean? At the time, Rank didn’t care. He took it kindly. He took it kindly because he needed kindness. But, in retrospect, a hand on the head at such a moment could mean anything. It could mean: Jesus, stop. It could mean: Ew.

Or maybe he had genuinely meant it kindly at the time. But even if he did, he’s had time to think about it since. He’s had time to turn it over in his mind and draw conclusions, adjust his view.

They didn’t talk about it afterwards, though — not at all. There’d been little opportunity. Adam isn’t around as much, and when he is, the other guys are there. So Rank and Adam never get a moment to discuss it much further. They only communicate obliquely, via the usual drunken and/or hungover half-assed, semi-serious bull sessions with Kyle and Wade.

You want to crack skulls? said Adam during one such conversation. Be my guest. Their eyes connected through his glasses. It felt like the first time they’d looked directly at each other in a while.

F*ck you, thought Rank.

It makes no sense but they are angry at each other now.



08/07/09, 3:16 p.m.

“Ivor has a gun,” says Wade.

It’s a Thursday night, and the three have been sitting around eating pizza waiting for Wade to return home with what Kyle likes to call “party favours” from Goldfinger’s. The Temple will be hosting a Christmas bash tomorrow night and Kyle has put in a special order for tabs of acid in the shape of Santa hats and a few bags of mushrooms. Kyle is all about the psychotropics of late. He has been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead and even getting into tie-dye. Rank himself would sooner self-flagellate than succumb to hippiedom, but he understands the draw of the psychedelic. One of the best times he’s ever had with Kyle was in the early fall when they ate mushrooms and lay down on their jackets by the duck pond to look at stars. The mushrooms were taking forever to kick in, and they began to worry they’d swallowed duds, so they focused their minds on the stars and tried to talk themselves into a trip. A few minutes later, the stars began to pour from the sky. Kyle and Rank held their heads and moaned at each other in disbelief. It turned out there’d been a meteor shower that night, but the magic of the moment was all it took to switch the mushrooms on and for the rest of the evening they saw beauty everywhere they went.

Kyle has been playing inept guitar as they wait on Wade’s return. Rank has been amusing himself by rifling through Wade’s record collection and putting aside a few of what he knows to be Wade’s favourite albums. Rank plans on trying to convince him that each contains a secret, coded pro-homosexuality message. Ever since the revelation about Freddie Mercury and Queen, Wade has been in a homophobic tailspin and doesn’t know what to believe about his favourite bands anymore. For the coup de grâce, Rank is preparing a bombshell having to do with a sordid songwriting ritual regularly indulged in by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

He’s rehearsing some of what he’s going to say out loud, to Adam, in the hope of making Adam laugh. He keeps trying and Adam is laughing, it seems to him, politely.

And otherwise what is Adam doing? Adam is just sitting there on the couch doing nothing, staring into space like a malnourished, bespectacled Buddha. He has stayed for pizza, but turned down an offer of beer. He says he has to get back to residence and write a paper on the idea that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. Neither Rank nor Kyle has read it, so neither can weigh in.

Wade comes in and tells them Ivor has a gun.

“Ivor doesn’t have a gun,” says Rank instinctively. “Get serious.”

“He has it! He showed it to me.”

“What kind of gun?” says Kyle, putting the guitar aside.

Adam leans forward at the same time and says, “What were the circumstances?” Rank wants to laugh at this lawyerly question. Wade doesn’t even hear it.

“I don’t know what kind of gun. I’ve never seen a gun except on TV.”

“Was it, like, a handgun?”

“Yes! It was a handgun.”

“Was it in a holster?”

This was Kyle. These were very Kyle questions. Kyle was excited by the news. He wanted Wade to paint a picture for him. Kyle didn’t get it.

Of course, it’s probably fair to say that none of them did just yet. Maybe only Wade, a little, because he had actually seen the thing — seen Ivor with it — and his eyes still hadn’t quite returned to their sockets. It was pretty clear he had run the entire way up the hill from Goldfinger’s to the Temple. Now, he whipped off his jacket but didn’t sit down.

“What were the circumstances,” repeats Adam.

“What?” says Wade, panting a bit.

“He’s asking,” says Kyle, “Why was he showing you a gun? Did he, like, threaten you?”

“No,” says Wade, diving onto the couch beside Adam. “I think he was kind of showing off. I think Richard must’ve just given it to him or something.”

“Was it in a holster?” repeated Kyle.

“No! He had it in his jacket frigging pocket like it was, like it was one of his mittens or something.”

They all start laughing at the word mittens. The idea that someone like Ivor would have mittens in his pockets.

“There’s no way Richard would give Ivor a gun,” says Rank. But as he says it, Rank realizes he knows no such thing. What he meant, when he said the word Richard, was “anyone with any sense.” You would have to be crazy to give a paranoiac cokehead a gun. But Rank knows nothing about Richard, really, except that he owns Goldfinger’s, sells drugs from his morose, fluorescent-lit office, and suffered raging acne is his youth.

They’re all silent for a moment. Wade leans over to retrieve the remaining slice of pizza sitting lonely in its box. Solid, miniscule beads of grease have formed across the pepperoni.

“Should we call the cops?” says Adam, and everyone laughs again.