me. It was my “I just want another hot dog” gesture. I’m only a kid, is what I was trying to transmit to Constable Hamm. It’s not my fault you have to tilt your chin upward to fix me with that null-eyed stare of yours. I’ve only been on this earth for fifteen years. Please don’t say this kind of thing to me.
“What,” repeated Constable Hamm. “You know what. We both know what.”
He turned his back — no handshake, nothing.
And that was my second big hint.
It wasn’t fair, but it was — it turned out — true. That’s what made Bill Hamm a kind of oracle. He wasn’t talking about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. He was a man plugged into the cosmos, a moustachioed fortune teller, just talking about the way life was — the way it was going to be. He was talking about fate. Fate’s representative stood in the Icy Dream that day like it was the temple at Delphi — and duly he pronounced.
Not bad for a university dropout, eh? I remember almost nothing from my undergraduate career, but I do remember the stuff you and I talked about, the classes we took together. You were studying English — very unoriginal, Adam — and you’ll recall that I was doing a basic humanities mishmash in the hope of discovering an aptitude for something other than skating at high speed directly into other versions of myself. Is it any surprise the stuff from Classical Lit would stick with me all this time? If you’re going to believe in one or more gods, I remember thinking, the gang from Mount Olympus made a lot more sense than the guy I’d been hearing about most of my life up until that point. Who are you going to believe runs the show if you are a citizen of Planet Earth with any kind of awareness as to what’s going on around you? Are you going to buy into the story about this great guy, who is actually somehow three guys, one-third human, and he loves everybody equally, and all he wants is for everyone to behave themselves? (But, oh yeah, sometimes tsunamis at Christmastime. Sometimes bombs on civilian populations. Sometimes mothers dying horribly.) Or do you believe in this self-absorbed pack of loons who couldn’t give a shit what happens on earth but just for fun decide to come down every once in a while to screw with us?
At nineteen years of age, three years following the extinguishment of Sylvia LeBlanc Rankin, glimmer of pure light, I remember feeling like I’d found a new religion. This was something I could believe in. It didn’t require me to feel bad, to do penance, to confess or be contrite. It required nothing. This cosmology fully expected and understood my exasperation with what the universe had inflicted on me thus far — and didn’t care. The gods were dicks — end of story. They had all the power, and guys like Homer and Hesiod and Ovid were damned if they were going to let them off the hook for their dickish behaviour. Not like us Judeo-Christians. Not like we do with our own white-bearded fucker-in-the-sky. (And if that sounds harsh remember I do have some experience with this. I served on Our Lord’s custodial staff as an enthusiastic whitewasher of His mysterious ways for longer than I care to admit. In the hope that He’d return the favour.)
So that was good, that helped me for a while. Oh, I thought, Oh! You don’t care. That’s right, the cosmos patiently affirmed. You’re not punishing me, I gradually figured out; you don’t hate me. Hate you? Har, har, chortled the universe. Dude! You see a parade of ants trucking along and you cut off the route with a bunch of rocks or something just to watch them run in circles. As flies to wanton boys and all that.
It was weirdly reassuring. I was an ant — I was a fly. Sylvie was just another bug to them. So was Gord. So had been Ghandi, Saddam Hussein and Princess Di. All of us specks. Nothing personal. That felt good. I could deal with that.
Except of course you will recall what happened next — in what direction this new religion ended up taking me.
7
06/11/09, 5:44 p.m.
DID I EVER YELL YOU Gord’s famous pick-up line, from the first time he introduced himself to Sylvie? Sad. Two hicks working for isolation pay deep in the