word spread fast about what he tried to do to the payphone. Wade made fun of him for it.
“What the fuck, dude? Were you drunk or something?”
“No,” said Rank. “Just my dad on the other end. Pissing me off.”
“I can’t picture it,” said Wade. “You get crazy, but you don’t usually get violent and shit.”
Kyle and Adam traded a look then that was not as surreptitious as they probably thought.
Rank’s emotional spectrum during this time ranged from panic to anger to drunkenness to boredom (and yes, drunkenness can be described as an emotion in this instance, considering Rank experienced so much of it). First, there would be the panic of the realization that he was expected to write exams and papers by end of term. Then, the anger quick on the heels of this, knowing there was no point to worrying about his academic obligations since he would not be able to continue next semester anyway, swiftly followed by the drunkenness he used to alleviate both these sensations. The emotion of drunkenness, if Rank had to write a paper or an exam on it, say, could be described thusly: it was similar to relief. It was similar to the sensation of kicking back in front of the TV on a Sunday morning and letting Jimmy Swaggart experience fear of the Lord on your behalf. Watching some other guy rail and blubber and holler in love and terror as you stay calm and feel somehow edified by proxy. It was similar to relaxation — in the same way TV is similar to real life. It allowed you to delude yourself, to pretend and then forget that you’re pretending.
And then boredom. It turned out that if you spent a lot of time inducing the emotion of drunkenness, the emotion of boredom would station itself just around the corner, just on the other side of sobriety, and wait — not to pounce, exactly, boredom wasn’t an emotion that pounced — but to sort of collapse against you and hang on, like a girl at a party late at night.
Speaking of girls and speaking of parties and speaking of boredom: the night before had been Kyle and Wade’s Christmas hoedown (on campus, holiday parties inevitably took place in early December, since everyone but Rank would be heading home to their loving, gingerbread-scented nuclear families by mid-month). So Rank had experienced the party and the sloshed, clinging girl the night before, and presently, standing aching in the Temple’s annihilated kitchen as he squints at the inside of the fridge, Rank is experiencing the boredom full-throttle. He is a bit worried about the boredom. The boredom has taken on a kind of desperate intensity of late. The boredom seems to be the only thing waiting for him these days on the other side of drunkenness. Even panic and anger have retreated as if in deference to boredom’s sudden domination. Rank has never experienced a boredom like this before. This boredom has edge; it has teeth. It’s like waking up every morning to discover the colour has been sucked out of the world, and finding this insufferable, but also not having the energy to do anything about it except sink angrily down into the grey.
Rank is the only person awake, and ready to die of thirst. His insides throb and shudder. He’s wishing there were some way of removing his entire nervous system and sending it out to be laundered. The kitchen’s overhead bulb hangs bare and unspeakably bright. It is nine o’clock in the morning. It is disgusting to be awake at nine o’clock in his state. Nobody should be awake at nine o’clock in the morning under such harsh light. He feels exposed, like a beetle. He has stuck his head under the kitchen sink tap and drunk a few gallons of water because there are no clean glasses anywhere in sight. Now he is looking for orange juice. He feels he could use a little vitamin C. There is a carton in the back, which he grabs and drinks from, discovering too late that it is mostly vodka.
Adam enters the kitchen to find Rank retching gallons of water into the sink. He announces himself with a sigh.
“Hey man,” glugs Rank, glancing up.
“Paris,” says Adam, “in the twenties.”
Rank holds on to either side of the sink and wonders, not for the first time, what the quip is actually supposed to mean and why they all find it so uproarious. Paris, okay. Land of elegance and