Free The Antagonist by Lynn Coady Page A

remark upon any of this. It kind of helps me to keep going if I know someone is digesting the story and responding to it. I guess it’s nice to have an audience, to know I’m not just whistling into the void. When I asked you that question before, about whether or not I felt real to you, if it felt like you were getting email from a figment of your imagination, it wasn’t rhetorical. I was genuinely wanting an answer. It kind of bugged me when you didn’t answer.
    I know I came off a little psycho previously but I was just pissed off because you were being so defensive with that “serving notice” shit. Why is it you can’t seem to get around the whole “innate criminality” thing when it comes to me? You turned me into a criminal in your book and you are treating me like a criminal even now. Just because of a few emails. But they’re my emails, right, therefore they must have an innate criminality nestled somewhere in their genetic soup.
    I told that story about Jeeves because I knew it would ring a bell with you. Aha, you’d think, that’s why none of it was new to him. That’s why he settled into that world so comfortably, treated those people like he’d known them all along. Wrong, Adam. That was the first and last time I ever met Jeeves. Pretty innocuous, right? Just a bunch of dirtbags sitting in a crappy apartment drinking beer, dealing hash and pot. Sound familiar at all? Replace the dirtbags with a clutch of fine young college men and what do you have? No guns, no prostitutes, no intravenous drugs. I bet you had all these big expectations — Rank running with bikers, some kind of enforcer, beating the crap out of rival gang members, all at the tender age of fifteen. Innate criminality and all that. You’d lap it up. Ahm, num, num. You’d be on to your next book in a flash.
    But Jeeves didn’t have anything to do with what happened next — or very little anyway. Like I said, I never saw him again. Jeeves wasn’t the problem. The problem, as always, was Gord.

6
    06/08/09, 7:06 p.m.
    I JUST REMEMBERED I didn’t tell you what the Mounties actually said when they showed up at ID a few hours after Gord flew at Croft. And I should, because it kind of began there.
    They arrived just as Gord and I were closing up, so Gord invited them in and we all sat across from one another in a booth like four kids on a double date.
    There was this one cop called Hamm. The best way I can describe him is rectangular — the guy was all corners. Even his moustache was a rectangle. If it had been any smaller, he’d have looked like Hitler.
    Hamm’s partner was one of those cops whose job it was to be unobtrusive. To just sit there recording everything, saving it for later, and fade into the background meanwhile. Therefore, I can’t tell you much about him, but the way I just described him reminds me of a certain someone. So let’s call him Constable Adams, in homage.
    Gord had learned somewhere, at some point, that Constable Hamm’s first name was Bill and kept referring to him by it. By his full name, that is — Bill Hamm. I had no idea why. Gord was the kind of guy who did this sort of thing sometimes — resorted to random rhetorical flourishes.
    “I’ll tellya something right now, Bill Hamm,” he began before we had even quite settled into the booth. “If I’d managed to get my hands around that little Christer’s neck you’d be drawing a chalk outline over by the counter, there, rather than having this nice little talk with me.”
    I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. We were going to jail.
    But Hamm chuckled. “Now, Gordon,” he said. “You can’t —”
    “You explain to me what I done wrong, Bill Hamm. Explain it to me right now.”
    “You can’t attack —”
    “Why is it a load of drug-dealing little shits are permitted to come into my place, sit back there using bad language and stinking of dope, and I’m not allowed to do a goddamn thing about it?”
    “Gordon, you have every