The Antagonist Read Online Free PDF

kind of friend would I be if I didn’t make him aware of the gradual bloating process to which he, middle-aged fatso, has succumbed?
    I forget about him and I instead remember you. And I think by you what I’m really getting at is a person who doesn’t exist. There’s the angle-y Adam with glasses in my memory who I was at first a bit put off by because he never said much and had that quiet observer thing going on of which any sane person, I think now, would be suspicious. You reminded me of a certain type of spectator from my hockey games. Guys who’d sit directly behind the net and be so immersed in the action that even when the puck came straight at them and bounced against the Plexiglas in front of their faces, they wouldn’t blink. They’d even lean forward sometimes, as if to meet it. So they were completely absorbed in the action, these guys, but at the same time completely apart. And they knew it, they never forgot for a second. They never doubted they were safe.
    And instinctively, I didn’t like that about you at first. It goes to show a guy like me should always trust his instincts.
    Later — and this gets to the heart of the You I’m speaking of, the You who doesn’t actually exist — I took the fact of how you sat and stared, how your eyebrows went up and then went down, how you spoke one or two sentences in response to my five hundred — and even those only after a long, agonizing, eyebrow-jimmying silence — I took all this to mean you must be some kind of oracle, a man of profound sympathy and insight. Someone, in short, who understood the way things were, who got it. Who maybe even got me.
    One time, I remember, you put your hand on my forehead. You probably don’t remember this. We were very drunk, or I was anyway, and dawn was going to break at any minute, and I was talking — I’d been talking for hours and it was like labour or something, like giving birth, I was working myself up and now I could feel it coming, I could feel it coming, I was going to tell it, and I broke out in a sweat and started talking faster, willing it to come but terrified and the next thing I knew I was telling it, telling you, and the fluorescent light from the kitchen was glinting off your glasses in a way that drove me crazy, so that I actually got up and moved at one point, closer to you, mid-sentence, just to change the angle so I could see what was happening behind your eyes.
    But that was when you held out your hand, as if to stop me from seeing, or as if I had moved toward you precisely to receive a kind of benediction. You leaned forward and held up your palm like a traffic cop or Diana Ross mid-routine and you placed it against my forehead and your hand felt fantastically cool, which made me realize how heated I’d become with all this talking and confessing.
    And everything stopped. I don’t know how else to describe it. I wasn’t talking anymore because words seemed not to exist. And that was wonderful — it was a wonderful feeling, the sudden nonexistence of words — like a cool shower after a long gruelling hockey practice.
    And morning light started fingering its way through the gaps in Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains. Curtains he’d hung precisely to keep the morning light from doing this very thing and auguring its way into our hungover dreams, but curtains that consistently failed to hold up against the tenacious morning rays.
    And long fingers of light, I remember, gradually stretched themselves across the room, illuminating the beer bottles. I’m sure you don’t remember. Probably it only lasted for a second, your hand against my head. It would be years before I hooked up with my church but I think I had a moment of precognition then. Faith-healers, charismatics, weeping, shrieking supplicants, the laying on of hands and then — all that pain followed by all that peace.
    But you know what Adam? Fuck this. That’s what I have decided, just now. Fuck you, traitorous fat man, and you,