it was like for me, reading your book. We get freaked out by ghosts because they aren’t supposed to exist, right? They’re not real, in the same way the past isn’t real, not really — and what are ghosts except the past floating around, occasionally taking shape and going booga-booga in your face? Strictly speaking, what’s past doesn’t exist anymore. And it shouldn’t. And you don’t want it to. And there it is, swirling up around the light fixture, trembling your tabletop, banging on the other side of the wall. Notice me — take me into account. I’m not supposed to be here; here I am. That is, here we are. Together again.
That was an experiment, when I was writing about you earlier, the way you came across back in school. How’d it feel reading that? I was trying to do what I felt you did to me and Sylvie — take you over. You’ll notice I didn’t make stuff up exactly, but at the same time I wasn’t really being fair, was I? I was brutally honest, as they say, which is never quite indicative of truth per se. I was making a smarmy story out of the person you innocuously were, out of the hackneyed college-guy life you were innocuously living. You couldn’t help it — you were nineteen, twenty. You were an idiot. We were all idiots. But not all of us end up being immortalized at our personal peak of idiocy do we? Or, say, at very nearly the worst moments of our lives. Not many of us are lucky enough to encounter a hungry young wannabe in the midst of our suffering, a would-be storyteller nearly lobotomized by the dullness of his own existence, famished for some kind of genuine emotional content.
And then I come along. And I am nothing but emotional content.
Anyway, the experiment failed. I got caught up again and lost sight of who I was writing about exactly. I started having a kind of weird, dreamy fun and next thing I knew I was writing not about you, exactly, but about us. All of us, back then.
Or, fun is not the right word. Let’s just say I get caught up and leave it at that.
06/06/09, 11:48 p.m.
Hey shitheels. What’s the deal? I thought we had a back and forth going on and now you leave me hanging in the breeze. WTF, as the kids say. I’m baring my soul for you here, yanking off one strip of flesh after another and feeding it into cyberspace. This is supposed to be a dialogue, not To Be or Not To Be, if you know what I mean, not a one-man show. A meeting of minds so to speak. Methinks the a-hole needs to drop a line, is what I’m saying. I mean I know I told you to shut up but I didn’t actually mean shut up. I meant it would be kind of nice if you could not talk to me like I am some kind of psycho stalker freak for a minute or so. You certainly had a great deal to say earlier, about the serving notice and the paper trails and whathaveyou. How can you create a paper trail if you don’t ever write me back?
In conclusion, get with the program.
Your pal,
GR
06/07/09, 8:38 a.m.
OK so I had some beers last night and got bored and was checking my email for word back from you, which I have started doing a tad too compulsively lately, and I guess I was feeling sort of fed up with the radio silence. Sorry about that. I hereby vow not to waste your time with random drunken harangues anymore. We’re not pen pals; I get that. I didn’t exactly kick this whole thing off in the spirit of friendship and, let’s face it, you didn’t pause to solicit my opinion at any point when you were busy chronicling The Life and Times of Danger Man. So just ignore that last email and we’ll continue.
Back to Gord. Needless to say, the Mounties didn’t give him a medal the night he flew at Croft. But they didn’t exactly give him a dressing-down either. Who could fault Gord, after all, an upstanding member of the small-business community, for wanting to kill Mick Croft? Everybody wanted to kill Croft — kids, teachers, small-businessmen and Mounties alike. This was nothing new.
At the same time, though, Croft was a kind of subliminal hero in our town. He was such a little bastard,