The Antagonist

22


08/10/09, 4:32 p.m.


WHAT DID YOU THINK?

I figured I’d just let that information sit with you for a bit. I thought you might even be moved to drop me a line now that you know I’m not a drug kingpin or mob enforcer. Guess not, though. I guess you’re thinking even history teachers can be psychopaths. It’s always the quiet ones, after all. But I just want to point out, maybe you don’t quite realize it, but you’ve got something on me now. You know what I do and where I live. You even know my neighbourhood — you could send the police to my door if you thought you had cause. Okay? You can relax, is what I’m saying.

Throw me a bone, is what I’m saying.

But really: what did you think? What did you think happened to me after I disappeared that night? Into what corrupt underground existence did you suppose I, with my “innate criminality” and everything, allowed myself to sink? It might surprise you to know that, as much of a mystery as I left in my wake, I was hauling as big a mystery into the darkness with me. That is to say — you guys didn’t know where the hell I went, but neither did I ever find out what the hell happened after I took off. Was there a police investigation? Did cops swarm the Temple like locusts? Did you guys get questioned? What happened to Richard? I imagined it all — I imagined a rectangular army of Constable Hamms kicking in the Temple door and throwing you guys to the ground. Poor Adam, glasses flying across the room. Kyle, pleading in handcuffs, fearful of his future political career. I imagined Richard — who in reality that same army had to have been watching pretty closely all along — being dragged in for questioning, his whole half-assed druggie empire crumbling in one raw night, Goldfinger’s with a padlock and sign: Closed until further notice. My imagination went wild with the possibilities, scrolling through every worst-case outcome there could ever be for you, my friends, my sullied associates.

Needless to say, I wasn’t all that keen to learn the real truth, but all and all it constitutes a pretty big question mark to be carrying on your back for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you agree?

Speaking of cops at the door — I expected it myself any day, every day. I travelled all over the country doing the kind of work that didn’t require identification. Shit work, that is. It was easier to do in those days, there were a lot more of the kind of construction projects that happily paid under the table and didn’t ask questions. I even — this is kind of embarrassing — worked under an assumed name for a while, which I was not very good at. I’d tell the boss my name was Joe Smith, and then after a day or so of ignoring everybody calling me Joe, I’d explain that my nickname was actually Rank, and would they please call me Rank.

Which is to say, if the police had been looking for me, I may as well have been walking around waving a Come and get me sign.

And I kind of think I was. I dropped the assumed name pretty quickly, got tired of working shit jobs for crooks like Richard, so pretty soon I was signing my own name to EI forms and rental agreements.

Come and get me! Come and get me!

But as a nominal precaution, I kept moving around. This helped me to feel safe but had the additional merit of preventing me from making any more close friends. I would not be making that mistake again. I read the papers from out east. I watched those true crime shows about unsolved murders and criminals at large. Nothing about Goldfinger’s, nothing about a goon of a bouncer with a juvenile record wanted for questioning. Nothing about anybody dying under suspicious circumstances.

Nothing about it, ever. Not a trace, not a word. Can you blame me that I stopped believing in it, Adam? That the world seemed so eager to accommodate my most urgent, desperate wish? There was nothing I could do about Croft, or Sylvie. That stuff was on the record, written in stone — it had repercussions is what I’m saying — sent ripples throughout the cosmos. I had been on my way to living a certain kind of life and those two incidents blew me completely off course; made me the man I am today, whatever kind of man that is.

But what happened at Goldfinger’s — it was like it hadn’t happened. Which is exactly what I wanted it to be like but couldn’t dare hope. For a long time, I didn’t let myself believe that such could be the outcome. It was uncanny. It was miraculous.

It could only be, I realized, the gods, at work, again.

Which meant I couldn’t trust it. So I moved again, for what had to be the fifteenth time, this time to Ontario, knowing as I crossed the country in what had to be the fifteenth U-Haul that somewhere up there a bunch of jerkwads in togas were drawing their heads together, snickering down from their gilded cloud and just waiting for the moment I relaxed. Waiting, maybe, for me to find a wife, have a couple of kids, buy a house, set up a hammock in the yard, kick back, breathe the fragrant summer air and tell myself: I’m happy.

And only then, of course: the knock on the door.

So I didn’t. I refused. I was not going to even make the attempt to gear my life toward such an obvious outcome. I would show those bastards — I would be lonely. I would live in basement apartments. I would be broke. I would render myself repugnant to the opposite sex. I would drink! I’d be one of those smelly, belching a*sholes that hangs around in bars that cater to smelly, belching a*sholes, with other smelly, belching a*sholes because like attracts like. I would grow crude from my proximity to such company. I would end up slavering at any woman who crossed my transom, because I saw so little of women as a rule, thereby rendering me as repulsive in terms of personality as I was physically. Oh yes, I was winning this war. I was deteriorating nicely. I was one in a long line of mythic heroes acting in defiance of the gods.

When one day she appeared to me. The fat lady.

I felt a distinctive shift in the booth where I’d been sitting playing bar trivia with my usual drunken rabidity. A heavy shift. A protesting sort of creak. I looked up and I thought: Oh no. Mon doux, as Sylvie used to say.

Well hello, she said to me.

This, I thought. This is the kind of woman you attract now, hotshot. This is where you find yourself at twenty-six.

I just saw you sitting here all hunched over, she explained, and I thought you looked a little abject.

Ab-ject, she pronounced it. It was jaunty, her pronunciation; it made me smile. Abject was not the kind of word I heard a lot of lately, even as an obsessive player of bar trivia — my single intellectual pursuit.

She smiled back. Her lipstick was bright pink — a shade you might see on twelve-year-old girls in plastic barrettes. Her hair, like her lipstick, was frosted, sprouting stiffly from her scalp in aggressively gelled tufts.

She liked gold, the fat lady. Her wrists jangled with bangles. Her earlobes drooped with hoops.

She was wearing a velour purple hoodie, the luxuriant and authoritative colour of Monsignor’s robes.

The overall effect was queenlike.

I’m Beth, said the fat lady.

I’m Rank, I said.

You are most certainly not rank, replied Beth, folding her hands (the mere act of which caused an unholy racket of jangling bracelets). I’m sitting right across from you. I should know.

A thin, frosted smile.

She was quick, the fat lady. Most people just frowned and asked me to repeat myself a couple of times when I told them my name.

Ha ha, I said, to show Beth my appreciation.

Now tell me your name, insisted Beth.

I’m Rank, Beth. Rank is my name.

Rank is not your name.

She lowered her head as if peering at me over glasses. But she wasn’t wearing glasses. I shrugged: What do you want? It’s my name. But she continued to peer like a schoolmarm waiting for a math lesson to sink in. This was an very odd mode of flirtation.

Gordon, I said at last.

Her face expanded — beyond even its current expanse — in a beatific smile. She spread her hands and her bracelets clattered, sliding down her thick wrists.

Now, see? said Beth. That’s a perfectly lovely name.

Oh what the hell, I thought, draining my rye. Let’s have sex with the middle-aged fat lady. It’ll be freaky. It’ll be one for the books.

Can I buy you a drink? I asked, waving with both hands at the bartender.

No thank you Gordon, but that’s very kind. I didn’t come here to drink. I came here to talk to you.

Beth. I’m flattered. You don’t even know me.

I knew you, Gordon, the moment I saw you.

Over at the dartboard, a couple of my buddies had been entranced by the situation from the moment Beth sat down. Every once in a while I’d shift my eyes and see them performing various obscene pantomimes for my benefit, but now that the glee had worn off, they shot me more serious, questioning looks to ask if I needed a little conversational interference run. I leaned back and gave them a no-worries wave.

Beth glanced over her hulking shoulder when I did.

Your friends?

My friends, yeah. Best there are.

You know, Gordon, I’ve only caught a glimpse of them, but I find I really doubt that.

I’d been waving my arms at the bartender again when she said this. Now I stopped and dropped my hands onto the table.

You know, this isn’t a criticism or anything, Beth, but you’re very direct.

(Of course it wasn’t so much that she was so direct, but that she was so accurate. They were by no means a quality pair of friends. They were sort of thick and irritating. One of them ingested nothing but creatine shakes three times a day in an eternal obsession with “getting big,” and clearly hung out with me in the surreal hope of somehow absorbing a percentage of my body mass. The other one had a creepy obsession with World War II, collected Nazi memorabilia, and when drunk would expound upon how what we needed in this country was another “good war” against a nation of “truly evil f*ckers” like the Nazis so that we wouldn’t have to feel bad about completely annihilating them. “All this country needs,” he would explain, “is someone to annihilate. We’ve never just totally annihilated anyone before, and that’s why we get no respect on the world stage.”)

Beth multiplied her chins in a serene, fleshy nod.

Yes I am, Gordon, she agreed. I am direct. That’s something I’ve learned to be over the years. There’s not much point wasting time being anything else.

For all the cacophony of her appearance, Beth possessed a low, pleasant voice and the sort of gaze I can only describe as quiet. Not quiet in the sense of being subdued, but more along the lines of intensity and concentration.

It’s sort of fascinating, I admitted.

Has no one ever spoken to you like this before, Gordon?

Not really. And no one ever calls me Gordon, either, so that’s weird too.

Are you finding our conversation a bit weird?

Yeah, quite weird actually, considering I don’t even know you.

But like I said. I knew you the moment I saw you.

At that moment, I stopped smiling. I didn’t like the idea of that so much. Beth’s smile dropped as if to mirror mine, but not quite in mockery.

Did I say something to upset you, Gordon?

My rye arrived and I wrapped my hands around it.

I’d like to know what you meant by that, exactly, I said.

Exactly? All right. I meant that I came in here tonight looking for someone who needed my help. Someone who was lost. And that was you.

That was me, I repeated. I’m the lost guy.

You are the lost guy, Gordon.

Beth’s smile began to resurface, but mine stayed buried.

What makes you say that? I said, looking around the bar in affront. Me? I was the lost guy? What about the guy in his seventies with hair past his shoulders who could be counted upon at least once a night to shamble across the room and start humping the jukebox? What about Lingering Steve, who stank so badly that even when he was hustled outside after only a moment in the foyer, his olfactory signature would hang in the air long into the evening? What about my loser friends, for that matter — Creatine and the Annihilator? I was no lost guy. They were the lost guys, rambling and hovering around the bar, ricocheting against the VLTs, the tables and waitresses like sluggish pinballs. Whereas I, unlike maybe 90 percent of the soused clientele, was young and fit and winning. And I kept my mind sharp playing bar trivia, was in fact the reigning tournament champion, and had taken home my share of cash prizes.

I was, if anything in company such as this, a prince among men.

Why do you say that about me? I demanded again of Beth.

The fat lady leaned forward, bracelets clattering as they collapsed across the tabletop.

Gordon, she said, you wear it. It’s on you, from top to bottom. Like a rash. Or should I say: it’s wearing you.

Hey Beth? I said after a moment of just sitting and looking rudely around the bar, as if bored — as if to look at anyone but her. My buddies, I noticed, had long since lost interest in our unlikely tête-à-tête and returned to their game of darts. It’s been nice talking to you, I said.

You didn’t mind talking to me, replied Beth, when you thought I was just some silly old fat lady. But now that you intuit who I am, you find yourself uneasy.

It’s just that you’re getting a little personal.

Yes, agreed Beth. This is getting very personal, isn’t it?

We sat and looked at each other. I noticed then that I was feeling cold. I was feeling cold, but I was sweating. I had been about to bark, What? at Beth with her implacable gaze. But the moment that basic, belligerent question arrived in my mind, it was answered by a voice I hadn’t heard in years.

You know what, replied Constable Hamm. We both know what.

Gordon, said Beth. You’re perspiring, I see.

And then I was doing more than perspiring. I was crying. I was crying in the booth with the fat lady.

Oh, Gordon, she said. Dear.

Who are you? I said.

Her braceleted arms shot forward and noisily she took my hands in hers, which I allowed. Her palms gave off heat as if fresh-baked.

I’m an envoy, Gordon.

Of God, I said a moment later.

Our whole booth was shaking. Even with Beth’s weight to steady it.

He’s here now, Gordon. You think he hasn’t been but he’s always been. All you had to do was lift your gaze.

She closed her eyes and leaned her full mass toward my hands, the knuckles of which she kissed.