remember from the Youth Centre days. “Gets you out of your head I guess.”
“But it’s meditative too,” says Owen. “It sort of gets you into your head at the same time.”
And I think he must be right, if only because my memories of being sixteen and incarcerated are so visceral right now. It’s as if the steady rhythm of our footsteps has put me in a hypnotic state and shot me back in time twenty-four years. A helpless, pleasant vagueness has come over me too — the same state of mind, I realize, that I inhabited the entire year following Sylvie’s death. A sort of contented imbecility. I couldn’t focus on anything, had no concentration, yet certain moments could be unbelievably vivid, and a lot of the time those moments took place on my walks with Owen. I remember the thick, living smell of mud thawing in the early spring. That yellow moment of blindness when the afternoon sun hits you square in the face. A black smear of crow cackling at you from a fencepost.
“I just remembered how you used to take us on all those stupid weekend hikes too,” I tell Owen. “Like in November, even.”
“Those were nice! They were good hikes. You would have rather stayed inside playing Atari, I suppose.”
“I would have, yeah. I didn’t have an Atari at home.”
And yes, we talk about other stuff at this point, Owen and I, but it’s stuff I haven’t bothered filling you in on thus far and I’m not going to start now — life stuff: work, family — none of it pertinent to this project you and I are currently engaged with. (By the way, did you think you were getting the whole story all this time, Adam? A complete picture? Were you even arrogant enough to suppose you could detect psychological subcurrents, underlying motivations that perhaps I’m not even aware of myself? Has it occurred to you that I could be making this entire thing up for reasons of my own — maybe just to fuck with you? Well, let me assure you, I’m not, but let me assure you also that my dealings with you in the past have led me to be very careful with the information I give out. Have you noticed, for example, there are basically no women in this story? Except for Sylvie — but you’ve already had your way with her. And Kirsten — but really, I’ve given you nothing about Kirsten except for a name. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson. Her name is all you’re ever going to get.)
We reach the woods and get on the path to the creek and I can see the splintered ruins of the mini Tarzan playland Gord set up for me back here when I was a kid. Wooden platforms nailed high up in the branches of the best climbing trees, strategic ropes hanging here and there — ancient now, a couple of them snapped off where other kids must’ve tried to swing from them — hopefully not from one of the tree-top platforms, otherwise Owen and I might be coming across a half-pint skeleton at some point. No tree house — Gord was never much of a carpenter — but a vestigial “fort” sits in the distance. More boards nailed to a circle of trees to form a rough enclosure. I remember feeling invulnerable behind that half-assed barricade, gleefully whiffing one crabapple after another at countless invading enemies.
Finally Owen and I arrive at the creek and we stand there and we look at it piddling away.
“It’s shrunk,” I remark to Owen.
I think he’s going to say something about how I’ve grown and it just looks that way, but he says, instead, “Not a lot of rain this summer.”
I crouch down and let the water piddle across my hand just for something to do. I remember doing the same thing as a kid — just hanging out, bored, by the creek, and reaching out to touch it every once in a while as though it were a friend or a pet.
“Well, this is scintillating,” I say, straightening up after another moment or two. “Should we head back?”
“All right,” says Owen. “Admit it, though. You feel better after the walk.”
“Well I don’t feel like I wanna tear Gord’s head off anymore, not right this minute anyway, no.”
“See?” says Owen. “You doubted.”
“I wasn’t saying walking is a bad thing, Owen, I didn’t mean to criticize you back there, I’m just saying those were some