The Antagonist

27


08/14/09, 12:22 p.m.


I HOPE YOU DON'T MIND if I take a break here. I’m not sure if you noticed but we’re well into August already and Gord is basically healed up and I only have a couple of weeks to finish this thing and it’s stressing me out. Really, I should be home by now, getting ready for classes. I’ve had to email the school and bow out of a couple of meetings already — an ailing father is pretty handy for that kind of thing, and as long as I’m back by the 23rd it’s no big deal.

But, Christ, I just want to be finished this. And I know I’m coming up to the most important part, but then I think: Jesus, Adam, we were both there. Do I really have to do this? Why am I even doing this?

You could just drop me a line, you know, and tell me to stop. Tell me you remember, and tell me that you understand what I am doing, and why. After which you might even consider telling me your reasons for doing what you did — and for the way you did it, the half-assed way you told my story. Your approach, I’m noticing as I go over your book for the fourth time, was practically not to tell it at all. That is, to tell it second-hand, in barely a couple of paragraphs. To just allude to it, really, as if it wasn’t even central to the plot.

In fact, I’m realizing as I reread the thing, it wasn’t.

I didn’t really notice that before — or else, on some level I guess I did, and that’s part of what pissed me off so much. I remembered Gord yelling panicked in the kitchen: It’s all about me! And how I laughed at his narcissism. Because it isn’t, obviously. But then again, of course, it is. I mean, you had taken the time to put me there — to preserve the twenty-year-old me in all my misery like a bug someone had closed the pages on, squashing it between the covers forever — and didn’t even end up paying me nearly enough attention. Same with the thing about the character’s — my character’s — mother. His mother who had died — who never even got to be alive in your version. Offhand. Sideline action. Just another squashed bug.

So I’m reading your book again, after all these other reads, and all of a sudden I find myself thinking F*ck! It’s not about me at all.

So what am I doing there?

What am I for?

Anyway, enough. Enough about you and your book that didn’t even do all that well or get all that much attention or even particularly good reviews, from what I can find on the internet. I was in the mall the other day to buy Gord a new toaster and stopped in at the Coles to see if they even carry it at this end of the country. Turns out they do. I found it tossed in a bin marked 60 percent off. I don’t know why but for months after I first read the thing it felt as if you were the most famous man on the planet — your face on buses and billboards, magazine covers; hitting the talk show circuit, yukking it up with Oprah; throwing the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. When, really, it was just a few reviews in handful of papers.

But it seemed to me like you had taken over the world.



08/15/09, 1:00 a.m.

OK. I know I have to start again, but I have been writing my ass off to get this thing finished and the closer I get to the end the more the process seems to slow itself down — and this is exactly the opposite of what I want to happen. Today I actually got up from the desk, wandered into the living room and tried to strike up a conversation with Gord — that’s how desperate I am. I just want it to be over now. I want to stop.

Gord, by the way, has been behaving himself beyond all expectation. Now that he doesn’t need as much help getting around and can brew his own tea and blacken his own toast I’ve heard nary a crutch-bash out of the guy. That was part of the reason I ambled from my room to see how he was doing — the silence had been deafening. It was afternoon talk show time of day and I imagined him gearing up to yell at me to come see the guy with tattoos all over his head, or the brother and sister who got married and defiantly produced a special-needs rainbow of offspring, or the men who paid hookers to put them in diapers and offer them the breast. And then I imagined a jolt of pain in Gord’s arm as he raised the crutch to bash me to attention, a feeling like a caber to the chest, his mouth working to produce one final, soundless Piss on a plate! before collapsing in his chair as the freaks on Jerry Springer shook their rattles.

“You okay out here Gord?”

“Jesus! Yes! You pretty near scared the dick off me, son.”

I flung myself down onto the couch. “Anything good on?”

“I thought you were supposed to be hard at work in there.”

“I was but you’re so quiet out here.”

“Well I know you’re trying to work,” said Gord, reaching primly for the box of Kleenex he kept stationed by his chair and giving his nose an elaborate honk.

“You getting sick, Gord?”

He eyed me over the wad of tissue.

“Listen, you don’t have to worry about me. You get back in there and finish your book.”

I sat up on the couch and stared at him. All of a sudden I was twelve and there was homework to be done.

“I’m taking a break all right? You don’t even — look, it’s not even a real book.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. All week you’ve been growling around here like a bear how you gotta finish that goddamn thing before you head on back to school. Well get in there and finish it. I won’t disturb you.”

“Well what about lunch?”

“I’ve had my lunch. Had some Chef Boyardee. Oh and thank you very much for the new toaster, by the way, I put it in the trash.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said, jumping to my feet, intending to head outside and upend the garbage cans.

“Leave it,” barked Gord, picking up his crutch and brandishing it at me. “I told you, we don’t waste money in this house. Now quit procrastinating and get back to work.”

I stood there speechless, my arms spread out, appealing silently to the universe to for the love of God get off its ass and do something about Gord, until I felt a hard poke in my thigh. I looked over and saw him leaning forward, crutch extended.

“Git!” my father ordered, raising it above his head.

So back I went. And here I am.

Kirsten told me that she returned to Alberta to see her father, the town engineer, a few years ago. It was just after she got divorced, and just before she left the church. Her marriage, she said — second marriage, that is — had been the penultimate nail in the coffin of her evangelical faith. Hubby number two had been a fresh-faced, hard-working, upstanding Christian male, active in the church, an inspired speaker who had his oratorical skills honed by many years of AA meetings, and often brought his religious community to tears with stories of his parents’ alcoholism and his own impious, dissolute youth. Also, he’d been “having an affair,” as he delicately described it (once he’d been found out), with a teenage goth-girl from the homeless youth group he volunteered with. They’d been engaged in this affair-having while Kirsten was in the hospital giving birth to her twins, she learned, hence him showing up well after the fact toting two huge bouquets. Oh and also a woman — not even someone who was saved — who taught the cardio pole-dancing class at his gym.

“One cliché after another,” Kirsten told me. “And I remember thinking, No more Christian guys.”

“But how was that gonna work as long as you were in the church?”

“Well exactly,” said Kirsten. “I tried not to think about that.”

But it got harder and harder not to think about that after a while because the husband was tearfully repentant, even fled to the fleshy arms of Beth for support in his contrition — when he wasn’t flying into rages at Kirsten over the telephone, that is, declaiming against her godless audacity in having initiated divorce proceedings against him.

Beth tried to act as intermediary.

Baby, she said to Kirsten (she referred to all female members of our community as “baby,” I recalled as Kirsten told the story). Baby, she said. Carl is sorry. He’s suffering.

But he’s not sorry. He’s actually furious at me. He can’t believe I won’t forgive him. The whole time it was happening, I’m convinced he told himself that if he ever got caught, I’d just forgive him and life would go on as it always has.

Men tell themselves a lot of things, baby, when they open themselves to Satan.

He believed, said Kirsten, realizing it as she spoke it, he was entitled.

Beth assured her it had been the devil talking, not Carl.

Yeah, okay, but in that case the devil’s still doing the talking. Because you don’t hear him when he talks to me, Beth, he isn’t repentant. I mean, he tells me he is, but when I say, Well that’s not good enough, he goes crazy. He curses at me, Beth. He threatens to take the kids. Not sue for custody but just take them. And disappear.

I can see Beth’s face as Kirsten says this. Sorrowful; jowls fluttering as if windblown. Beth told her that she loved them both, so much, and this was killing her — which Kirsten believed, and I believe it too, hearing it in retrospect. She told Kirsten they had to try to work it out for the sake of the children and for, of course, Lord Jesus.

“So, my heart kind of broke then,” Kirsten told me. “Because I knew I was going to have to let Beth down. And if I let Beth down — if I didn’t do what Beth asked — because ultimately, you know, I believed Beth was wrong and I was right — then that would mean —”

“I know,” I told Kirsten. “I know what that would mean.”

(When I, your humble narrator, left our church, I didn’t go see Beth first, even though I’d always promised her I would if I were ever entertaining “doubts.” But it wasn’t an issue of doubts at that point — I was too far gone, no doubt about it. And there was no way I could show my doubtless, godless face to Beth, the woman who’d found me when I was lost and wanted so much to see me saved. So I left without saying goodbye, or even thanks. Fortunately I had practice at this sort of thing. I stole away like the criminal I had long been, carried off on a mighty gust of grief and guilt, exactly the same way I disappeared when you knew me, Adam. It was kind of my forte by that time.)

The kidnapping threats were pretty much the breaking point for Kirsten. Once Beth, despite all her love and sorrow, had proved herself of zero use as mediator, Kirsten decided to pack up the twins and book herself a trip to Alberta to visit the town engineer, whom she hadn’t seen since she was eleven. Practically the day she turned eighteen, however, letters had begun to arrive for her. He had sent them care of the church. Which made her think either her mother had been intercepting them up to that point, or else he had been politely waiting for Kirsten’s adulthood to occur before reintroducing himself.

For a long time, she didn’t answer him. Her mother had told her that this was a man who luxuriated in sin, who had gleefully opened himself to Satan and refused to shut the gates unto the evil one, even if it meant losing his own family.

“It’s hard,” Kirsten told me. “To overcome that fear when you’ve had it cultivated in you your whole life. And have cultivated it in yourself. Even when you start to know better. It’s like those fizzy candies.”

“Pardon?” I said after a moment of trying and failing to put her last sentence into some kind of context.

“When we were kids,” she said. “And there were those candies that fizzed in your mouth. And people said if you drank pop with one of those candies in your mouth, it would explode in your head and you’d die.”

I’d been lying on my side in bed with my cell phone squashed against my ear as we had this conversation. But at that point I rolled onto my back and bellowed laughter.

“Wow,” I said, “you are such an apostate now! You’re comparing the tenets of our faith to, like, urban myths about Pop Rocks!”

“What I’m saying is, if you gave me even one Pop Rock and a can of Coke to this day I probably wouldn’t put the Pop Rock in my mouth and take a swig. I just wouldn’t. Because I just spent so many years being afraid of it as a kid.”

“So it was the same with your dad.”

“It was the same with my dad. There was a part of me that was convinced we’d get off the airplane in Edmonton and he’d be standing there with horns growing out of his head.”

“It’s brave of you,” I told her. “That you did that. That you just said, Damn the theological torpedoes, I’m going to Alberta.”

“The day after I got there,” she told me. “I woke up and my lips were cracked. And I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror in our hotel room and it was as if I’d aged overnight. I had all these little spider-wrinkles I’d never seen before. And I realized, It’s because it’s so dry here. It’s the prairies and it’s dry. And the minute I figured that out, Rank, this weird wave of nostalgia I didn’t even know I had washed over me. And I realized I liked it, I’ve always liked dry climates. When I went to Arizona on my honeymoon to see the Grand Canyon, I remember standing there in the desert and heat and every cell in my body was going: Yes, yes, yes. This is what I like. This is home to me. And it didn’t even occur to me that I came by that liking honestly — because of where I had grown up. I forgot I was a prairie girl.”

I didn’t say anything. I was picturing her happy in the desert.

“So that was like my dad too,” she said. “I forgot how I felt about my dad. I forgot my dad was sweet. The girls and I spent a week with him and he drove us all over town. He brought me down to his old office, where he used to show me off to the secretaries. I remembered they kept toys for me in a box in the closet. He took us to Drumheller on the weekend so the kids could see the dinosaurs. I tried to talk to him about what happened and he kept saying, I won’t say a bad word about your mother. And I was like, No, come on. I’d love you to; I’m dying for you to. Jeepers, if you won’t I will. And he’s like, No, honey, no. Let’s just leave all that in the past where it belongs.”

“So that was Satan.”

“That was Satan. Or, Satan’s backscratcher, as Mom used to call him.”

“Satan’s backscratcher?”

But that hadn’t been the final nail in the crucifix. That wasn’t what ultimately sent Kirsten packing from the faith. The final nail occurred not long after they got back from Alberta and one of her daughters staggered up to her after Sunday school as if punch drunk and announced to her mother that she was really, really sure she didn’t want to go to hell and then burst into tears.

And Kirsten had said, like any mother would, Honey, that’s not going to happen.

And the daughter, whose name was Gabrielle but who mysteriously had at some point managed to nickname herself Giddy, replied in that breathless, hysterical way of sobbing children, How is it not going to happen? I don’t see how it can’t. I hit Tyler with a block. I wanted to hit him. He smashed my tower and I wanted to hit him.

But even that hadn’t been the final nail exactly. The final nail was when she spoke with Beth about it, and Beth told her: Baby, this is good. We want her to be afraid of hell. We want her to be terrified.

It was like dominoes, Kirsten told me. Something happened in her head that was like dominoes.

She thought: No.

Then she thought: But, yes. Of course. Of course I want her to be afraid to go to Hell.

(No.)

But, yes. That’s how I was raised. To love Jesus. To fear Satan.

She remembered how she sobbed and rolled around on the floor of the dining hall at summer camp, while other kids performed variations of the same activity, howled and babbled on all sides. Ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old disgusting sinners all. Hapless, helpless carriers of original sin, as rats once toted plague across Europe. Each of them panicking, Please Lord. Please Jesus. Oh my God. I can’t do this. The flames practically blistering their heels. Save me! What can I do? Name it, Jesus!

(Not my daughter.)

But, yes.

Yes, agreed Beth. You know how Satan works, baby, as well as I do. He lies in wait.

(Like my father. Patient. Abandoned.)

No, thought Kirsten.

But, yes, thought Kirsten.

The way she tells it, it went like that for a couple of months. But each No constituted another domino. The Yeses weren’t managing to set any of the dominoes upright again — the Yeses just stalled the dominoes’ inevitable toppling — and never for very long.

Meanwhile, Giddy started having nightmares. Giddy dreamed, one night, that she’d been crucified as Kirsten watched from the centre of the jeering crowd and waved a blasé bye-bye.

“And that was it,” Kirsten told me. “That was just freaking it.”

We sat together on the phone in silence for a while. I thought about my cell phone minutes ticking away. The call was costing me a fortune, but I didn’t want to use Gord’s landline in the kitchen. I was hiding in my room like a teenager so he wouldn’t know I was procrastinating again, talking on the phone to a girl.

“So,” I said after a moment or two. “That must’ve been pretty hard. I mean, it was hard for me, and I hadn’t even been raised with it. Truth be told, I kind of knew it was bullshit the whole time.”

“Yes,” said Kirsten. “I remember.”

This was the first thing she or I had said that was even close to an allusion to our breakup. I said nothing. She said nothing.

Then: “I think now it’s an addiction like any other,” Kirsten told me. “Carl taught me a lot about addiction when we were together. I think you can get addicted to stories the way you can to booze or drugs.”

“Stories,” I repeated.

“It all serves basically the same purpose, right? It gives you some kind of comfort, even when it doesn’t. Even when it’s tearing you apart, it still has the comfort of familiarity, at least. Carl used to tell us when he preached: Yes, my liver hurt and yes I threw up every morning and yes people wouldn’t come near me because I perspired pure vodka. But that first drink of the day — the ice cubes clinking into my favourite glass, that warm/cold swallow. Feeling my brain and my bones go loose with every sip. I just couldn’t give that up, he said. It made him feel secure the whole time it was wrecking him.”

“But I don’t understand what you mean about stories,” I said.

“It’s the same with our stories. Jesus loves us, Satan hates us. One is in heaven and one is in Hell, and throughout our entire lives we just kind of balance on a clothesline strung between the two and the slightest breeze could send us tumbling where we don’t want to go. Forever. It’s terrifying and it’s cruel and awful. But that’s the story that we grew up hearing and that’s the story that we know best and that’s the story that makes us feel secure.”

“That’s your story,” I said, “and you’re sticking to it.”

“It’s really hard to give that up, Rank. To go cold turkey.”

“I know,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course you know. Because you’ve done it.”

“No,” I said. “Because I haven’t.”