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.”
28
08/16/09, 10:04 p.m.
AND SO, WHAT A coincidence. There sits Wade’s beloved with two of her friends, huddled together around a pitcher of Long Island ice tea at the closest table to the door, all the more easily to greet the Brothers of the Temple when they at last present their half-cocked selves at Goldfinger’s. Kyle is so disgusted with Wade, with this screamingly obvious set-up, he refuses to even look at him and simply heads to the bar with his hands in the air. Wade follows, laughing and protesting his innocence, but actually — you can tell — a little worried.
Emily sits there smiling like a sixties-era Mona Lisa. “Sit with us!” she calls to Rank and Adam. Rank casts an eye over Emily’s friends and thinks okay. Adam also doesn’t hesitate, maybe because he figures the university girls’ table will provide a nice little bulwark of decency against the bar’s progressively squalid atmosphere. Saturday night at Goldfinger’s is hitting its stride.
It had been crazy even in the line-up. They’d tried to greet Ivor upon their arrival, but he’d been too distracted by the necessity of repeatedly shoving a couple of guys — two nearly identical brothers, a shitfaced, belligerent Tweedledee and Tweedledum — from out of the doorway, which they kept trying to rush.
“I said get out of here before I murder you,” Ivor kept screaming.
“I know where you live! I am a human with human-being rights! And I know where you live!” Tweedledee was screaming in counterpoint. Tweedledum, meanwhile, was holding his gut and threatening to “blow chunks all over this shithole.”
Rank stepped out of line and helpfully grabbed Tweedledum by the back of the collar, propelling him into the back alley where he could blow chunks in relative peace. Tweedledee, meanwhile, had taken issue with Ivor’s gold