The Antagonist Read Online Free PDF Page A

do the same. This after months of painstaking effort trying to prove myself a gentle man — the blissed-out, easygoing kind of guy who walked in the light of Christ’s love and all that.
    I knew it wasn’t going to work, is what I’m saying, and it didn’t. My shiny new halo flickered and fizzled out like past-date Christmas lights. It was no match for Gord. We’d been in his company for scarcely an hour and the whole time it had felt like sitting inside a cloud of mosquitoes — every word he spoke a needly humming in my ear. It made me want to swat.
    I announced that I wanted to take Kirsten down to Jessop’s for a beer — her mouth just kind of dropped open at the word “beer,” I remember, as if her jaw had abruptly unhinged. And I did take her to Jessop’s, but first I took her to a motel on the highway and booked us a room, where we proceeded to argue into the night.
    Kirsten didn’t get it. She thought I was crazy and insisted I had to at least call Gord and tell him we wouldn’t be staying the night as planned. She said she couldn’t believe how rude I was being toward my poor old father. “What?” She kept saying. “So he’s a little crotchety — so what?”
    I yelled at her that he wasn’t “crotchety,” he was a fucking prick. It was the first time anyone had done any yelling in this relationship, let alone any wielding of the F-word. I could feel all my work with this girl — all my good behaviour and act-cleaning-up — start to flake away like dandruff.
    “Sorry, sorry,” I said fast. (The problem with being a man of my size is that I can’t get away with displays of aggression in mixed company. I can’t shout around women no matter how angry or frustrated I get because it scares the living shit out of them. They start cowering, and then I feel like a monster. I remember one time riding the bus I was sitting beside a baby and I sneezed — I just sneezed — and the kid nearly turned itself inside out with screaming. It’s not a nice way to feel.)
    So I got my act together and said some other things about Gord, trying to explain myself. I strove to paint Gord as a kind of evil genius. Every word he uttered, every gesture, I explained, was a jab at me — a perfectly timed, precisely aimed barb.
    Admittedly, I was just desperate to get my girlfriend onside. I knew how ridiculous this portrait was even as I was painting it. Gord shrimpy in his polyester workpants, floating in one of my discarded hockey jerseys as he waved us a confused goodbye. Anyone who watches him in operation can see my dad is not exactly a man of strategic foresight. Gord is a nerve ending, an involuntary muscle — he fires according to certain stimuli.
    “Rank ,” I remember Kirsten saying — this astonished girl who had accepted Jesus as her personal saviour when she was all of eleven years old and never looked back with even a hint of nostalgia on her pagan childhood. “He’s an old man ,” she said. “He’s a frail, little old man.”
    And then she held her arms out toward me, not in invitation, but as if to say Behold . She shook her head at me. As if to say Good lord, you could snuff him like a birthday candle.
    And Gord is now twelve years smaller and more frail than he even was then.
    And, look at this: I still can’t stop talking about him.
    05/25/09, 10:56 p.m.
    All right. Jesus. Here we go.
    I was born, and next thing I know I’m a teenager and my father runs the Icy Dream.
    But you realize if I tell this story, it’s just going to be more Gord.
    I find, writing this, I keep getting caught up. Sometimes this is fun and at other times it isn’t and other times it’s not exactly one or the other. I just get caught up and forget who I’m talking to. Not who exactly, but what version of you, Adam. It keeps shifting around. I forget about the thief and liar on the back of the book, the guy who needs regular reminders of how portly he has become given that he was once so afraid of it because what