The Antagonist - By Lynn Coady Page 0,115

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 fuck you for not putting it in your book.

Your friend,

Gordon Rankin

Acknowledgements

MY HEARTFELT THANKS go out to the following for their witting and unwitting support:

Melanie Little, Sarah MacLachlan and Christy Fletcher

The Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta

The Banff Centre, Literary Arts Program

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts

Karen MacFarlane and Judge Richard J. MacKinnon

Kurt Stenburg, EMT

Marguerite Pigeon, francophone blasphemer

Karen Engle, prairie apostate

my parents, whose hunting trip I stole

Peter Sinemma, Peter Ormshaw, Curtis Gillespie — consultants/hockey thugs

Rob Appleford, Paris in the twenties.

To those I haven’t even asked:

Thank you;

I’m sorry.

About the Author

LYNN COADY'S fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published when she was twenty-eight. Strange Heaven was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and was followed up by a bestselling short story collection, Play the Monster Blind, as well as the award-winning novels Saints of Big Harbour and Mean Boy. When not writing fiction she works as a journalist, editor, and newspaper columnist, and is co-founder and senior editor of Eighteen Bridges, a magazine of narrative journalism. Lynn Coady grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and now lives in Edmonton.

Also by Lynn Coady

Strange Heaven

Play the Monster Blind

Saints of Big Harbour

Mean Boy

About The Publisher

HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”

Table of Contents

Cover

Openers

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Lynn Coady

About The Publisher

Table of Contents

Cover

Openers

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Lynn Coady

About The Publisher

The Antagonist - By Lynn Coady Page 0,115

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