— an over-excited guy, say, a guy who has abused drugs his entire life, a guy who means well, who is only looking out for you, a guy who has to live with the fact that the most powerful forces in the universe have marshalled themselves against the scummy likes of him — and what difference does it make if that fact is a fantasy, and how can it be a fantasy anyway, when the loneliness gouges his face like scars? So a hunted, haunted guy. A guy who just happens to be coked out of his head at that very ill-starred moment. The very moment the powers eternally gunning for him finally muster themselves to gather overhead and funnel their way into a convenient, waiting vessel. A vessel who happens to be a bit of a hard-luck Charlie himself, let’s face it. Therefore, what better vessel? The point is: such a vessel can stop a guy’s heart simply by, it would seem, restraining him. As the obliging vessel does. Just by holding the guy down; applying force. Just by kneeling on the dude.
“Does he die?” I said to Wally. “Does he die? Every time? Does the guy die?”
Wally was looking at me vaguely — he was leaning against the refrigerator now and his big eyes had glazed over and were watering as if I’d been shining a flashlight into them this whole time.
“Well . . .” he began. “Hamish didn’t die.”
“But all the tasering guys. All the excited delirium guys. They croaked from it, right? That’s why it’s such a huge scandal, they die every time.”
“Rank,” said Wally, raising his hands and scratching either side of his head with them. “You only hear about the ones who die.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean the guys who live — it doesn’t get reported. Why would it?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“There’s no story there.”
This was when Wally actually yawned. Like the absence of a good story was getting to him.
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 fucking 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