Free Extraordinary by David Gilmour Page A

followed by an excited bark. “Shhh.”
    â€œNext thing we know, Kyle calls into work, says he’s sick. Not a word to his sponsor, naturally. He knew the guy wouldn’t buy it. Sometime around noon, Kyle ends up in a ravine with a couple of guys. The ravine right under the subway bridge that leads to GreekTown. They drink their way along the Danforth, walking out on a few bills, stop in to see one of the guy’s girlfriends who works in a health spa and borrow some money from her. Somebody sells them an eight ball, crack and heroin.
    â€œThey come back across town and end up in that private school on Avenue Road. What’s it called? The one you went to?”
    â€œUpper Canada College.”
    â€œThey bust into lockers looking for something to steal. They figure, because it’s a private school, all these rich kids have got to be keeping bags of loose cash in their lockers. A security guy hears them, they throw a pair of soccer boots at him and hightail it out of the school. They run across a cricket pitch where there’s a game on, all these guys in white flannels and cricket bats. By the time the police arrive, they’ve disappeared over a side fence and are hiding out in a backyard in Forest Hill. An hour later, the police get a call from a woman who says there are three naked guys swimming in her pool. They get away again.
    â€œTwo days later, a cop sees an illegally parked car with no plates on it. He opens the door. It’s my baby inside. Kyle. All by himself. They figured he died somewhere else and they dumped the body in a stolen car and walked away. In his pocket—and this always breaks my heart—is a city map, all the places he’s been over the past few days, this long arc through the city heading back to his apartment. Inscribed on the map were the words,
I am on a voyage of mysterious intent.
He was like a fish swimming upstream. He thought he was going home, but he wasn’t. He was getting ready to die. And he did.”
    We sat in the silence for a moment; her refrigerator came on with a hum. She said, “I’ve thought about this a lot, and the truth is, I think he knew he couldn’t manage more than six months of ‘being good,’ and the alternative wasn’t possible either.”
    Somewhere in the wall behind me, a metal pipe clanked.
    â€œBut why do you suppose he chose
that
morning to go into the bar? Why not the day before? Why not the day after? You lose a child, you keep wondering about those little things. As though, if I could find an answer, I could somehow make it not have happened. Which is absurd, I know. But still, I can’t seem to leave it alone.”
    I said nothing.
    She turned her dark eyes to me. “How could his sister be his sister and he be him?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThey slept in the same bedroom, they had the same parents, the same amount of love, the same things for breakfast. They used the same words, they spoke with the same speech rhythms. They liked the same TV shows. They disliked the same songs on the radio. They were like a little unit moving around the house together when they were small. How could they be so similar in so many ways and yet, in that small corner of their personalities where they were unalike, be
so
unalike, and have that same unlikeness be the deciding factor in the course of their lives? Why wouldn’t it be the other things, the other qualities, that set the course? Can you explain this to me?”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œIt’s the same with you and your brother, Jake. You hate each other.”
    I said, “I haven’t talked to Jake for years. Have you?”
    â€œSometimes. Rarely.”
    â€œWhat’s he like?” I asked, my voice rising half an octave, as though my body, independent of my will, was preparing to defend itself, as though the time between now and our last ugly confrontations had been reduced to a matter