Findlay.
Or I could type in Colin Chaisson, which I did, and there he was — same photo as when he sent me his ignored friend request — fat and old and freckled like a dissolute leprechaun, smilingly giving me the finger from his living room couch. No mountain lake backdrop for Collie, surprise surprise. And where is Collie keeping himself these days, you might ask? Only five miles up the coast it would seem.
I am starting to view my past in a different way these days. Strange to say under the circumstances, but I think now that I used to see my past as a book — a story with a beginning, middle, and end, all of which I knew by heart, and therefore had no reason to even crack the spine. But now I’m starting to see it as something more like a frontier — a landscape I have spent my life cultivating, fortifying against the random elements. But the landscape is alive, is what I’m realizing — is a thing unto itself — and if you’re brave enough to ever leave your house you start to see this. In fact, the landscape consists of multiple things, multiple wills that shift and change and occasionally assert themselves in force. None of this, you eventually understand, belongs to you — not a rock or flower a broken branch — no matter how you work it, no matter how much scrub you clear. The ground could decide to open up beneath your feet. The sky could decide to open up above your head.
The world is independent. It moves, and moves on, with or without you.
Everything, that is, except that which you make die. What you’ve killed is yours, forever — a trophy picked off from the landscape and hung up on your wall.
So you can greet one another each day.
I write: Dear Kirsten, looking around me I see to my chagrin that it is 2009 and I am nearly forty years of age and staying with my father in the house where I grew up while he recovers from having fallen off the roof like an idiot. You remember Gord, right? He kept trying not to say “goddamn” when you visited that time, which for Gord is like trying to keep from drawing breath. He liked you: would you believe he said that to me just the other day, out of the blue? And you liked him, I seem to recall.
Since we last spoke, which was an unbelievably long time ago, I managed to graduate. Now I teach Grade 7 and 8 History and coach soccer. I stayed in Hamilton after getting my teacher’s licence, believe it or not. I bought a house a few years ago just off Barton, so you’ll be disappointed to learn that I no longer have that elegant bachelor suite that overlooked the slag heaps.
Hobbies: trying not to kill Gord, eating church-bake-sale confections in front of the TV, getting fat, not preparing for the upcoming school year, cyber-stalking a friend from twenty years ago.
You?
22
08/10/09, 4:32 p.m.
WHAT DID YOU THINK?
I figured I’d just let that information sit with you for a bit. I thought you might even be moved to drop me a line now that you know I’m not a drug kingpin or mob enforcer. Guess not, though. I guess you’re thinking even history teachers can be psychopaths. It’s always the quiet ones, after all. But I just want to point out, maybe you don’t quite realize it, but you’ve got something on me now. You know what I do and where I live. You even know my neighbourhood — you could send the police to my door if you thought you had cause. Okay? You can relax, is what I’m saying.
Throw me a bone, is what I’m saying.
But really: what did you think? What did you think happened to me after I disappeared that night? Into what corrupt underground existence did you suppose I, with my “innate criminality” and everything, allowed myself to sink? It might surprise you to know that, as much of a mystery as I left in my wake, I was hauling as big a mystery into the darkness with me. That is to say — you guys didn’t know where the hell I went, but neither did I ever find out what the hell happened after I took off. Was there a police investigation? Did cops swarm the Temple like locusts? Did you guys get questioned? What happened to Richard? I