as I’m recovering from him: the incident. The awful Incident. The awful, unspeakable, inevitable (as you paint it — and you have no idea how sick that made me feel) incident. Right alongside those occasional, sadistic, close-ups of yours: my rash, Wade’s zit. Even worse: those throw-away lines — the most annihilating moments of my life dispensed with in just a handful of words: His mother had died. Jesus, Adam! Why this attack after twenty years? That’s what it felt like — an attack, vicious, out of the blue, out of nowhere. I wanted to make sure you understood that. And the only way to do that was hit back.
Mostly I wanted to confirm whether or not you had done it on purpose, deliberately, hoping I’d see. Because you were trying to tell me something — or else tell the world something about me.
You have to admit, I’ve been trying very hard to see things from your point of view, Adam. The least you could do is acknowledge mine. I have been learning about you — and how and why you’ve done what you done — through every part of this experience. I figured out the thing about the noble purpose, and I figured out about getting caught up, and how the Noble Purpose is gradually shunted aside by something else, something deeper and more selfish, and I figured out about the lying, and how easy and natural and seductive it can be — to the extent that it starts to feel like a separate truth unto itself.
So what I’m saying is, I’ve come pretty far without any help or participation from you whatsoever.
I have been generous, if anything. I’ve been trying to understand you.
And you have given me precisely nothing back.
Anyway, I’ll tell you why I started reading your book again.
Lately, I can’t keep Gord out of my room, whether I’m in it or not. When I’m in here, typing, he tries to come in and dictate what I should say to “them” in my grand, cosmic appeal. That I can bench four hundred pounds, or used to be able to anyway, that I am a beloved soccer coach, that I graduated with honours from Teaching College, that I was a scholarship student (fact of it being a hockey scholarship, to a school I dropped out of, tactfully omitted), that I served for two years as an altar boy, that I was chosen to narrate the Christmas pageant in Grade 3 because I was the best and clearest speaker in the class, that my father started his own business from nothing, that my great-grand-uncle had a hand in starting the Co-operative movement.
And, it turns out, when I’m not here Gord’s obsession with what I’m doing doesn’t wane.
“Gord,” I called to him yesterday afternoon after getting home from a run and ducking into my room for some clean clothes. “If you are going to go through my drawers, can you at least not leave all my stuff in a pile on the floor?”
“I’m sorry,” Gord called back. “But I heard you coming in and thought you’d probably wanna get right back atcher book, so figured I better clear out. Did you tell them about that birdhouse you made for your mother in Grade 9?”
I ambled down the hall as he was speaking and found my father in the kitchen holding down the tab on the toaster. He’d broken it the day before — as I’d shouted at him he was about to do — by slamming it down repeatedly. (He said it never kept the toast down long enough to properly blacken it the way he liked.) We immediately started fighting about whether to buy a new one (me) or take a screwdriver to the old which was still “perfectly good” and had cost “an arseload of money” when purchased in 1982.
“Were you looking for something in particular?” I inquired as threads of smoke drifted up from the toaster and formed a stratus above our heads. “Needed to borrow some underwear?”
Gord released the tab and leaned over to check if the bread had been charred to his satisfaction. A second later, he pushed it down again.
He wasn’t meeting my eye. This was about as abashed as I’d ever seen my father.
“Well I’m pretty anxious to read that book a yours,” he confessed.
“Gord, the toast is done, okay?”
He leaned over to check, waving smoke from his view.
“Not quite yet,” he said.
“I’m going downtown and buying another toaster tomorrow.”