The Antagonist

30


08/17/09, 6:46 a.m.


HATE IS NOT THE opposite of love, Kirsten told me once: indifference is. Adam, I accept you didn’t write your book out of hate or love for me, your former friend and sort-of brother. I accept what really pissed me off was your indifference. What I mean is I’m accepting your indifference.

I accept you know the answers to pretty much every f*cking question I have put to you this summer. And I accept that you are never going to give them to me, are you. You know, ultimately, what happened to Ivor and you know why the police never came after me and you could have put that stuff into your book, you could have couched the answers in there somewhere, secretly, as a little nod and wink to Rank, in a book I once thought consisted of nothing but such nods and winks, however malicious. And I accept that I was wrong in this regard. I still don’t quite get what you were doing. But I accept, at least, you weren’t doing that.

I accept that you will never respond to my emails. I accept that you have maybe not been reading them since May.

I accept that you exist, or else you don’t, and everything that happened from the point at which we became acquainted with each other to the point where we stopped being acquainted with each other, either did or did not take place the way I said.

Or maybe it’s what happened in your book that actually happened. And maybe the guy in your book, the alcool-guzzling football player, maybe he only exists around the edges, just the way you made him — big and bad, huge and crazy, marginally tragic, marginally interesting, somewhat related to the story itself.

I don’t expect to hear from you. I told you what I had to tell you, and you told me something back, and that’s our story, isn’t it Adam?

I told you how my mother died, is what I told you — exactly how. And the dominating way the blood announced itself that day, exploding everywhere, uncleanupabble: it was like I’d stuffed it in some kind of pressurized container the night I made it flow from Croft, tucked the thing beneath the driver’s side seat and breathed a nice, forgetful sigh of relief as the pressure built up, day after day. How else to explain my guilt, my immediate thought the blood belonged to me; that I had made this sudden mess and, what’s more, I should have known, I should have seen it coming and prepared.

So I told you all that, you’ll recall I sort of crucified myself in front of you, and as the morning light fingered its way through Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains, I asked you the question, and you gave me the answer. You gave it to me already, is the thing. And somewhere along the way I just forgot.

That’s what this has been about, I guess — trying to wrench from you an answer you’ve already given. This whole summer I’ve just been haranguing you to repeat yourself. So I am sorry for that too. All right? I should have listened, Adam, but I was beyond listening then, I was beyond belief or doubt.

Was that God? Adam? Yes? I think it was God. It was a God-joke, right, my mother? Because it had to be. Because it’s like that story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” where you wish for your ultimate, never-spoken wish and getting what you want becomes your punishment. Joke’s on you — someone has to die. Giveth; taketh. But wait, you have more wishes, so you wish for that person back, you’re stupid, you just never learn, and, sure, you get her back but you get her back dead and now she’s always with you, and she’s dead. Death is the only reply, no matter where you look, no matter how you phrase the question — it’s your cosmic smack upside the head. This is what you make happen.

Maybe I didn’t say it that way exactly, I can’t remember what I said exactly anymore, but I remember saying something along those lines to you, I remember basically blubbering a ranting stream of nonsense punctuated by the ultimate nonsense: God. God? God!

And you telling me, intermittently — frozen hand against my boiling forehead — you must’ve told me in a hundred different ways that morning: No.

And I seem to remember saying to you that night, after going into so much more explicit detail than I have here — and it just occurred to me that I should say I’m sorry for that too, by the way, Adam. All that explicit detail. I realize it was a lot of gore and grief to lay upon some twenty-year-old kid whose life experience has come entirely out of books, who’s never left the east coast of Canada and has a perfectly nice, perfectly intact mom and dad of his own living merely a three-hour drive away and looking forward to his return at Christmas. Let me just stop right here and tell you I am sorry for it all — for offering it up to you, of all people, all that gore and grief. I am heartily sorry for having offended you, as we say in the confessional — the good old Catholic penalty box. Whatever it was I did to you that night, that morning (we both know it was something; I struck a match, I flicked a switch), I’m sorry.

And thank you for not putting it in your book.

And f*ck you for not putting it in your book.

Your friend,

Gordon Rankin