at all. There’d been little opportunity. Adam isn’t around as much, and when he is, the other guys are there. So Rank and Adam never get a moment to discuss it much further. They only communicate obliquely, via the usual drunken and/or hungover half-assed, semi-serious bull sessions with Kyle and Wade.
You want to crack skulls? said Adam during one such conversation. Be my guest. Their eyes connected through his glasses. It felt like the first time they’d looked directly at each other in a while.
Fuck you, thought Rank.
It makes no sense but they are angry at each other now.
08/07/09, 3:16 p.m.
“Ivor has a gun,” says Wade.
It’s a Thursday night, and the three have been sitting around eating pizza waiting for Wade to return home with what Kyle likes to call “party favours” from Goldfinger’s. The Temple will be hosting a Christmas bash tomorrow night and Kyle has put in a special order for tabs of acid in the shape of Santa hats and a few bags of mushrooms. Kyle is all about the psychotropics of late. He has been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead and even getting into tie-dye. Rank himself would sooner self-flagellate than succumb to hippiedom, but he understands the draw of the psychedelic. One of the best times he’s ever had with Kyle was in the early fall when they ate mushrooms and lay down on their jackets by the duck pond to look at stars. The mushrooms were taking forever to kick in, and they began to worry they’d swallowed duds, so they focused their minds on the stars and tried to talk themselves into a trip. A few minutes later, the stars began to pour from the sky. Kyle and Rank held their heads and moaned at each other in disbelief. It turned out there’d been a meteor shower that night, but the magic of the moment was all it took to switch the mushrooms on and for the rest of the evening they saw beauty everywhere they went.
Kyle has been playing inept guitar as they wait on Wade’s return. Rank has been amusing himself by rifling through Wade’s record collection and putting aside a few of what he knows to be Wade’s favourite albums. Rank plans on trying to convince him that each contains a secret, coded pro-homosexuality message. Ever since the revelation about Freddie Mercury and Queen, Wade has been in a homophobic tailspin and doesn’t know what to believe about his favourite bands anymore. For the coup de grâce, Rank is preparing a bombshell having to do with a sordid songwriting ritual regularly indulged in by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
He’s rehearsing some of what he’s going to say out loud, to Adam, in the hope of making Adam laugh. He keeps trying and Adam is laughing, it seems to him, politely.
And otherwise what is Adam doing? Adam is just sitting there on the couch doing nothing, staring into space like a malnourished, bespectacled Buddha. He has stayed for pizza, but turned down an offer of beer. He says he has to get back to residence and write a paper on the idea that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. Neither Rank nor Kyle has read it, so neither can weigh in.
Wade comes in and tells them Ivor has a gun.
“Ivor doesn’t have a gun,” says Rank instinctively. “Get serious.”
“He has it! He showed it to me.”
“What kind of gun?” says Kyle, putting the guitar aside.
Adam leans forward at the same time and says, “What were the circumstances?” Rank wants to laugh at this lawyerly question. Wade doesn’t even hear it.
“I don’t know what kind of gun. I’ve never seen a gun except on TV.”
“Was it, like, a handgun?”
“Yes! It was a handgun.”
“Was it in a holster?”
This was Kyle. These were very Kyle questions. Kyle was excited by the news. He wanted Wade to paint a picture for him. Kyle didn’t get it.
Of course, it’s probably fair to say that none of them did just yet. Maybe only Wade, a little, because he had actually seen the thing — seen Ivor with it — and his eyes still hadn’t quite returned to their sockets. It was pretty clear he had run the entire way up the hill from Goldfinger’s to the Temple. Now, he whipped off his jacket but didn’t sit down.
“What were the circumstances,” repeats Adam.
“What?” says Wade, panting a bit.
“He’s asking,” says Kyle, “Why was he showing you a gun? Did he, like, threaten you?”