The Antagonist

Part Three





23


08/10/09, 10:58 p.m.


RANK NO LONGER answered the phone in his dorm — even when called to it, even when it was specifically for him — because whenever he came to the phone it was always his father, and ever since he quit the hockey team, Rank and his father did not so much converse as rail at each other. And because the phone was in the hallway (Rank’s school was old-school — it would be another year until phones were installed in individual student rooms), his dorm-mates would often congregate when these calls took place in the shared anticipation of seeing Rank completely lose his shit.

It wasn’t that Gordon Sr. was angry at Rank for having quit the hockey team. Indeed, he lauded his son’s decision. He thought it was the finest thing a boy could do.

“Just like your old man!” he’d crowed at the news. “Don’t take any crap from no one! You march to your own drummer, Gordie, and that’s a fine thing.”

“Yeah well I probably marched myself right out of an education if I can’t pay tuition next semester.”

Rank had said this a) because it was true but, also b) out of a vague, fantastical hope that somewhere Gord might have a cache of money tucked aside for precisely such a rainy day as this.

Gord, however, had other ideas altogether. “Forget it, son,” he said. “And come on home.”

“Come on home?” repeated Rank. “That’s what you want me to do?”

“Come on home, live rent-free for a year, earn some money. You can always go back to school after a year.”

“What am I gonna do?” demanded Rank. “You want me to work at SeaFare?” He could feel his grip on the receiver tightening and gaining heat in anticipation of what his father was about to suggest.

“Come on back to the ID! I’ll make you assistant manager. Nice pay bump for ya. Shelly’s not working out anyhow, keeps having to run home to her consumptive crew a kids. One of them down with the flu every other day.”

Even when Rank returned home for summer vacation after his first year, he hadn’t gone back to the Dream. He opted for a government grant requiring him to mow the lawns of every municipal building in town and, when all the lawns were mowed, walk up one side of the highway and down the other picking garbage.

“You want me to work at the Icy Dream. This is what you’re suggesting to me.”

“Oh for the love of Jesus, Gordie, it’s a job. What’s past is past. When are you gonna put all that shit behind you?”

“All that shit,” repeated Rank.

“Well I can see where this is going. I can see there’s no talking to you about this, as per usual.”

At which point Rank began to shout into the phone, and the phone immediately began to shout back. Which sounds bad, but actually was good, because it attracted enough of a crowd that when Rank commenced his eventual attempt to wrestle the unit from the wall, enough guys were present to dissuade him.

End-of-term exams were looming in the distance, radiating menace, like Dracula’s castle. Rank had no idea what to do about them. Why write exams when he was about to get kicked out on his ass? Wouldn’t it just be adding insult to injury? Then there was the question of Christmas break. Gord had kept asking, between bellows, sometimes via bellows, when the Jesus was Rank coming home for Christmas? Ivor, meanwhile, wanted to know if Rank would be around throughout the holidays. Lorna, he said, had kids and was looking to take some time off from behind the bar. If he could come a couple of extra nights over the next two weeks, she would train him, and he’d get a percentage of her tips.

Having embarrassed himself in the dorm, Rank started pinballing in earnest back and forth between the Temple and Goldfinger’s. Often at two in the morning after his shift he’d head straight to the unlaundered squalor of Wade and Kyle’s crash pad as opposed to going home. Still, undergrads gossiped worse than bridge-playing grannies, and word spread fast about what he tried to do to the payphone. Wade made fun of him for it.

“What the f*ck, dude? Were you drunk or something?”

“No,” said Rank. “Just my dad on the other end. Pissing me off.”

“I can’t picture it,” said Wade. “You get crazy, but you don’t usually get violent and shit.”

Kyle and Adam traded a look then that was not as surreptitious as they probably thought.

Rank’s emotional spectrum during this time ranged from panic to anger to drunkenness to boredom (and yes, drunkenness can be described as an emotion in this instance, considering Rank experienced so much of it). First, there would be the panic of the realization that he was expected to write exams and papers by end of term. Then, the anger quick on the heels of this, knowing there was no point to worrying about his academic obligations since he would not be able to continue next semester anyway, swiftly followed by the drunkenness he used to alleviate both these sensations. The emotion of drunkenness, if Rank had to write a paper or an exam on it, say, could be described thusly: it was similar to relief. It was similar to the sensation of kicking back in front of the TV on a Sunday morning and letting Jimmy Swaggart experience fear of the Lord on your behalf. Watching some other guy rail and blubber and holler in love and terror as you stay calm and feel somehow edified by proxy. It was similar to relaxation — in the same way TV is similar to real life. It allowed you to delude yourself, to pretend and then forget that you’re pretending.

And then boredom. It turned out that if you spent a lot of time inducing the emotion of drunkenness, the emotion of boredom would station itself just around the corner, just on the other side of sobriety, and wait — not to pounce, exactly, boredom wasn’t an emotion that pounced — but to sort of collapse against you and hang on, like a girl at a party late at night.

Speaking of girls and speaking of parties and speaking of boredom: the night before had been Kyle and Wade’s Christmas hoedown (on campus, holiday parties inevitably took place in early December, since everyone but Rank would be heading home to their loving, gingerbread-scented nuclear families by mid-month). So Rank had experienced the party and the sloshed, clinging girl the night before, and presently, standing aching in the Temple’s annihilated kitchen as he squints at the inside of the fridge, Rank is experiencing the boredom full-throttle. He is a bit worried about the boredom. The boredom has taken on a kind of desperate intensity of late. The boredom seems to be the only thing waiting for him these days on the other side of drunkenness. Even panic and anger have retreated as if in deference to boredom’s sudden domination. Rank has never experienced a boredom like this before. This boredom has edge; it has teeth. It’s like waking up every morning to discover the colour has been sucked out of the world, and finding this insufferable, but also not having the energy to do anything about it except sink angrily down into the grey.

Rank is the only person awake, and ready to die of thirst. His insides throb and shudder. He’s wishing there were some way of removing his entire nervous system and sending it out to be laundered. The kitchen’s overhead bulb hangs bare and unspeakably bright. It is nine o’clock in the morning. It is disgusting to be awake at nine o’clock in his state. Nobody should be awake at nine o’clock in the morning under such harsh light. He feels exposed, like a beetle. He has stuck his head under the kitchen sink tap and drunk a few gallons of water because there are no clean glasses anywhere in sight. Now he is looking for orange juice. He feels he could use a little vitamin C. There is a carton in the back, which he grabs and drinks from, discovering too late that it is mostly vodka.

Adam enters the kitchen to find Rank retching gallons of water into the sink. He announces himself with a sigh.

“Hey man,” glugs Rank, glancing up.

“Paris,” says Adam, “in the twenties.”

Rank holds on to either side of the sink and wonders, not for the first time, what the quip is actually supposed to mean and why they all find it so uproarious. Paris, okay. Land of elegance and cheese and, well, the French. Real French, not Canadian French, not hip-wader, goose-squashing chalice-of-the-tabernacle French. French perfume French. French bakery French.

But what about the twenties? Rank knows nothing about the twenties. He racks his brain, hunched over the sink. Flappers. Titless women dancing the Charleston. He doesn’t f*cking know. What is he doing here, with guys like these? He is a hulking, heaving hick. He is good at drinking, and lifting his fellow man over his head, and throwing up. Also, destroying lives. That’s why the not-so-good Lord placed him on this earth.

Rank straightens up. “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth on his bare arm. “That was gross.”

“No problem,” says Adam. “I just came to get some juice.”

“Don’t drink the OJ,” advises Rank. “It’s all vodka.”

Rank runs the tap to clean out the sink, grateful he had hardly eaten anything the night before.

“No chunks,” he remarks to Adam.

“Nice,” says Adam, pulling an unopened two-litre bottle of cola from the fridge.

Rank watches as Adam slowly unscrews the cap, careful not to let the carbonation out in one fizzy spew. All at once he remembers they had sex with the same person the night before, a girl named, Rank is pretty sure, Jennifer. Yes, because she said she spelled it with a V. He remembers now. He remembers laughing and saying, You do not. No one spells Jennifer with a V. And she pretending to be miffed, going, That’s how it’s spelled. You made it up, insisted Rank. You made up this lame spelling because you wanted to be different and special. It’s on my f*cking driver’s licence, replied Jennifer. You want me to show you? And then Rank recalls being a little chastened. He has met people with names like Zoltan and Paco and Mercedes since arriving at school and it didn’t take long for him to realize that his knee-jerk urge to laugh in these people’s faces when they introduced themselves did not make him the most sophisticated of men.

Anyway: Jenniver drank like a linebacker. She had been all about the Jell-O shots the night before — had an endless repertoire of shooter-based games she insisted everyone play. Afterwards, Rank had found himself fiddling with her wiry black hair as they slouched side by side on the couch, twirling the curls around his finger, to which they clung as if having been cultivated for this very purpose. And then he and Jenniver stumbled into the crash pad and had the kind of sex that Rank can barely remember. He mostly recollects trying to stuff both her boobs in his mouth and a distant gratitude that he’d been able to get it up. And Jenniver leaving to pee every five minutes. And then taking a long time to come back — in fact not coming back. At which point it was about four in the morning. And Rank, on the verge of passing out, suddenly brought around by an image of Jenniver lying on her back in the bathroom bubbling vomit through her nose. So getting up to check on her. And Wade passed out on the couch. But noises coming from Wade’s room. And, after finding the bathroom empty, going to see what those noises were.

So. That had been awkward.

Now Rank and Adam blink and wince and each other at 9 a.m. in the Temple’s kitchen with its screaming white overhead bulb practically bleaching them out of existence. Rank is only wearing shorts and Adam only jeans and they face each other bare-chested like boxers.

“Hey,” says Rank, leaning against the counter. “I get that we’re being ironic when we say it — I understand that much. But what was supposed to be so great about Paris in the twenties anyway? I mean in all seriousness.”

Adam takes a swig of cola, but the carbonation invades his nasal passages so he ends up having to spit it into the unfortunate sink.

“Ernest Hemingway,” he says once he has recovered.

“Hemingway? That’s it?”

“Well, you know. Paris. Everything Paris implies.”

“Yeah, yeah. But what about the whole twenties thing. Why is that a big deal?”

Adam takes another, more careful swig, thinking about it.

Eventually he shrugs.

“You don’t know?” says Rank, delighted.

“Why am I supposed to know?” says Adam.

“Because,” says Rank. “What’s the point of having guys like you around if you don’t know that stuff?”

Adam blinks at him a few more times, trying to gauge the atmosphere. It’s tricky, because everything is slightly off. The fact that it is nine o’clock in the morning, the fact of the operating-room light bulb overhead, the fact that they are half naked and semi-crippled by hangovers, the fact that they just had sex with the same girl, the fact that they haven’t had a real conversation since the night Rank delivered to Adam his grotesque confession.

And, needless to say, Rank has insulted and ridden his friend Adam many times in the past — for being pretentious, for being fruity, for being slight of frame, for wearing glasses, for being overly interested in school, for doing poorly with the opposite sex. Yes, this is standard operating procedure as far as their friendship goes. But there was something in Rank’s tone just now — what’s the point of guys like you? — that can’t be ignored. Rank is ready to deny it, but he knows it was there as well as Adam does. He’d been helpless to suppress it. It had something to do with this new, improved version of boredom he’s been experiencing of late: the edgy boredom, the boredom that doesn’t seem to give a f*ck one way or another.

“I’m going back to bed,” says Adam, turning.

“Hey!” calls Rank. “Is Jennifer with a V still around? You finished with her yet?”

It has to be understood at this point that Adam is entirely the kind of guy who would wave a dismissive hand — or finger — at this comment and continue on his way back to bed. Adam is a high-road kind of guy, the object of macho taunts and tough-guy jeers his entire life, one can only assume. So this kind of remark could typically be counted upon to bounce right off him for the most part.

Rank, therefore, is surprised to see him stop and turn back.

“If you’re pissed off at me,” says Adam, “just say it.”

“What,” says Rank. “Share and share alike, right?”

“She was completely shitfaced, Rank.”

“So you figured the gentlemanly thing to do . . .”

“A woman climbs on top of me in the middle of the night . . .”

“Look I’m saying I don’t care, man.”

“Okay, fine. And I’m just saying, if you do care I’d like you to tell me now because I’d rather not end up getting shoved across the room like Kyle some night when you’re pissed out of your head.”

Rank pauses to grind his molars. He’s at a loss for words due to the fact that his feelings are hurt. He certainly didn’t shove Kyle across the room. He knocked him off balance a little, yes. It was barely a shove at all — it was more of a gesture of aggression than an act. He is hurt that Adam could consider it otherwise, that Adam would portray his friend Rank as some kind of ongoing threat.

“Maybe,” says Adam, after Rank’s silence has entrenched itself, “you shouldn’t hang around here so much right now, you know? It’s almost exam time and you seem kind of out of control.”

“I have nowhere to go,” says Rank.

“Like . . . go to the library or something.”

Rank snorts so that Adam won’t notice him shudder. There’s no way to explain that the library is haunted for him now. T.S. Eliot lies in wait, crouched somewhere behind the stacks with a protective arm around his unfortunate friend Croft — still weeping angelically, still bleeding from the ears.

“Go to bed Adam,” says Rank. “Nighty-night.”

Instead, Adam takes a step closer and scratches his scalp in such a way to make his already preposterous bed-head even more mad-scientist than what he walked into the kitchen with. He now looks like he’s stepped out of a wind tunnel.

“Are you going home for Christmas?” Adam wants to know.

“No. I’m gonna work through the holidays. Make some money.”

Which, he knows, is stupid. What he’ll make over December working at Goldfinger’s, even behind the bar, won’t be anywhere near enough to cover his tuition next semester. At the same time, he doesn’t have to worry about his living expenses, because he’d paid for the room and meal plan in advance at the beginning of the year. So really, there is no compelling reason whatsoever to work at Goldfinger’s over Christmas break. And there is no good reason for him to stay on campus by himself in an empty dormitory over the holidays, with no one but a handful of lonely, language-challenged Chinese and Middle Eastern students to keep him company. He is just being perverse, and Adam seems to know it.

“You could come to my house,” suggests Adam, and Rank realizes something all of a sudden. The reason Adam looks so squinty and diminished this morning. It’s not the hangover, or the glaring overhead bulb.

He’s not wearing his glasses, is the thing.

“My folks are only three hours away,” he adds. “I’m taking off next week.”

Right, Adam’s “folks.” Adam’s folks, who are divorced, but still “friends.” Still friends. As if marriage and friendship are of the horse and carriage variety. Imagine having “folks,” and they are “friends”: chucking each other on the shoulder, getting together in bars to shoot some pool. Rank opens up the fridge again and sticks his head inside because he doesn’t want Adam to see his face. He has to appear to be looking for something, so he grabs the bottle of cola.

“I told you, man,” he says, staring down at the cap as he unscrews it. “I gotta work.”

Some of us, he wants to say, don’t have “folks” waiting three hours away. Some of us have tiny screaming lunatics instead, waiting in an empty house with a fresh-dead mother congesting every room.

Adam is just standing there and even though Rank has already unscrewed the cap he finds he is too sickened to drink. He stares at the bottle in his hands. If Adam doesn’t go back to bed soon, Rank is going to say something shitty to him. He can feel it creeping up his esophagus and filling his throat with sour. Something irrevocable.