Fall (12 page)

Fuck.

Yes. Flesh. We’re all looking, and there’s your roommate with this swelling, crazy fuckin eye and a mouthful of Anderson’s, you know: body. And Haffey the Prefect’s screaming
That’s enough!
And everyone finally rushes in. And it was a pleasure seeing Anderson all pale, sort of shocked into reality, you know. But I’m telling you, J. Ever since that day. You know, it all blew over. There was talk about kicking out Anderson, kicking out Wink, and Anderson’s dad was gonna sue the school, supposedly, and try to press charges. Because, you can’t repair that, right. A piece of his arm’s missing forever. A small piece, but it’s not like it would grow back. But everyone saw it was Anderson’s fault, seeing him pound at Noel’s eye. You don’t do that, right. So I guess it blew over and Anderson left at Christmas.

Ok.

But the point is, ever since that day, there’s something about Noel. You know, man.

Noel is cool I say. He’s a nice sad guy.

There’s something I don’t trust, J. You had to see it. I mean, fuck, I was, whatever, fourteen, fifteen, and I’d never seen someone take a bite of someone. It was pretty fuckin spooky. But it wasn’t just that. And it wasn’t the look on his face. Look at your forearm, man. It’s tough, right. Imagine how hard it would be to bite a piece off that. Right.

Ok.

But it’s not even that. It’s just, right away, you know, Noel is completely back to normal. As normal as he is. Quiet as usual. Calm. Eh. In class he was, you know, he’s sitting there the next few days with his eye all pink and blue like a baboon’s ass, and he’s answering questions as calm and fuckin smart as ever.

He’s smart.

Yeah. But it’s like it was all normal for him. Like he just forgot about it.

Or like he’s just sad I’m saying. The guy was beating him up because of his eye. He’s a nice guy, Chuckie. He’s smart and fine and sad.

Mm.

It’s true. He’s one of those mysteries. You should get to know him.

I don’t trust him.

Fff.

And he’s gotta be on roids or something. Horse balls. Look at the size of him, man. Check him out in the shower.

I know.

Pow. Small cock though, eh.

Is it.

Tiny. He always hides it. I don’t trust him.

He should play rugby.

Maybe.

Replace Ant.

You think.

Yeah.

Maybe.

H
E SAID SHE
helped him with math.

He said, “She looks, like, elegant.”

He said she cried easily and saw things he didn’t see.

He said one night while we ate pizza in the room that she didn’t like pizza, didn’t eat much at all except chocolate and small delicious things, “you know, like, I don’t know: goat’s cheese.”

He told me her room at school and room at home were neat and I remember wondering how he saw her room at school.

He said, “If life is short I fuckin’ love her, and if it’s long, who knows.”

And I got annoyed sometimes, wondering what he could possibly know about love, when love was what I felt for her.

He said he had a girlfriend once who had a problem with her jaw but with Fall the blowjobs were amazing.

I could feel close to both of them sometimes, enter both their lives when he described certain scenes, but some of his crass intimacies I could never bear, never quite believe. I could feel happy for both of them, stand outside and watch with pure and honest pleasure. I could think these are two beautiful people, and knowing about their lives is a privilege. Her mother had a dog that lay on Julius’s shoes whenever he took them off. He liked standing in her mother’s gigantic kitchen, drinking ginger ale and looking out at acres of distance while the dog was near the door keeping his shoes warm. Every night a new glimpse of his green good luck and I felt so involved with him and their world;
but sometimes he spoke of her in a way that could have nothing to do with Fall’s real self. Pictures of her that I knew she never could have intended to project. Fall the girl he had sex with in his father’s limousine was not the Fall I wanted or the Fall she wanted to be. I had faith in that.

I watched Julius play soccer sometimes. My toes got cold. I remember the smell of the leaves. I remember black mud, black-limbed trees, darkening autumn days, and Julius a relentless force on the field, finding a way like water around stones. I remember thinking that the way to reach a goal was by finding fissures between people that no one else could see.

Fall stood on the sidelines with friends. I watched her smile from the corner of my eye. I started to time my arrival at the games so that I could stand near her group. I stood with Ant one day, five metres away from Fall who was with her friend Sarah. Ant was sizing up the opposing team and remarked that their goalie was fat. He said it loudly enough for Fall and Sarah to hear. I said to Ant that having a fat goalie was like having an oversized glove in baseball. A few minutes later Ant turned to the girls and said, “That fat fuckin’ goalie’s like an oversized glove, in baseball.”

Julius scored two goals. Ant was to my right, Sarah to his, and Fall was furthest from me. When Julius scored, Ant and Sarah hooted and danced. I smiled. Fall smiled. I caught her looking over at me and it was the first time our eyes ever met.

I said out of the blue, loudly to everyone, that there was no chance that Julius would score again. Fall looked at me with half a smile and half a frown.

“That’s not very nice,” she said.

“It’s just a feeling,” I said.

“He’s right,” Ant said. “There’s no fuckin’ chance.”

Fall gave him a mock-angry slap on the shoulder and looked over at me flirtatiously.

“If he scores,” I said, “I’ll pick up his laundry for the rest of the year.”

I liked reminding her that I lived in Julius’s room. I figured she might eventually want to know what it was like to live with him. He and I had a routine of cleaning each other’s backs before bed with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. We both had a problem with pimples on our shoulders. I knew that Fall must have shared all sorts of secrets with Julius, but there was much she didn’t know: that space which he and I shared, that yellow light and the darkness in the corners while we cleaned each other’s back. I knew for a fact that they had never spent an entire night together, that she didn’t know what it was like to feel his feet land by her bed in the morning.

“I’ll tell him what you said,” she said.

I smiled like he would.

Julius didn’t score again.

It was my first conversation with Fall.

Julius left his sweaty soccer clothes on the foot of my bed that evening. They were so wet that they soaked through the blanket and sheets. I knew he wasn’t thinking, that it hadn’t been intentional. Later that night while he was out I filled a mug with water and poured it over the foot of his bed. He didn’t say anything when he went to sleep.

I often looked at the particleboard underneath his bunk while I lay in bed. I thought of dragging my teeth along it somehow, of what it might feel like to get splinters in my gums.

I enjoy the privacy of pain; the knowledge that in this world of sameness and institutionalized experience, there can be a sensation which no one else will ever exactly understand.

After talking to her for the first time I felt somewhat emboldened, more at ease with showing her who I was. I tried to be spontaneously amusing. It was a while before I spent time alone with her. When she and Julius were talking I would sometimes join them. We never talked about anything substantial.

Other, minor things rush back to me.

I approached them one afternoon, seeing them laugh together. It seemed like a moment when I wouldn’t be intruding.

“Hey, guys.”

“Hey,” she said.

Julius looked hard at me. “I’ll talk to you later in the room,” he said. “Okay?”

I felt quite stung.

There was no perceivable change to her face, so as I walked away I did wonder whether he really had been rude or whether it was something I should simply brush off.

On another occasion I stole his lighter. I never smoked, but I wanted to take it. He mentioned its absence later. I was curious to see what he would do when something he liked was lost. I suggested that someone had stolen it. He didn’t seem to mind at all. “I’ve got lots of them,” he said. From then on I was careful to keep it in my left front trouser pocket, where I held it as I walked.

I remember also on another day I waited on the sideline until after a game, hoping to share a moment with Fall nearby. Julius had scored, as usual, and enjoyed the customary praise of his friends. Someone said, “You must be tired,” and he said, “I’m okay.” It occurred to me suddenly that this might be an opportunity to beat him in a race. “How about I race you to the end of the field?” I said.

We ran and were even for a while. I was in my suit, of course. He started laughing and pulling ahead. I was trying so hard that I could barely stay on my feet. He was still laughing when I reached him at the end of the field, and I pretended to share his amusement. I suppose everyone else saw him laughing.

Things began to relax for a time. I think of a man easing into a chair, loosening his belt, dozing off for a few moments. Dreams that disappear as quickly as they come and leave no trace but relaxation. The middle of the term was very peaceful.

I would be lying if I said that I told Julius a lot about myself. I tended to be quiet and wait for him to start a conversation. I occasionally mentioned things that I was reading, passages I found interesting.

Various people would come in and out of the room. I liked it when Julius and I were considered a corporate entity, when people would say, “I went by your room, but Julius wasn’t there.”

I was able to settle into the TV room, even, as long as Julius was there. I grew more comfortable hearing that Fall was about to arrive. I usually left them alone.

Ant wrote on me with toothpaste one night while I slept and I spent the next two days with the word
ANUS
faintly burned into my forehead.

Julius told me it was Ant who did it. Ant said Julius did it. Julius said he wouldn’t have known how to spell “anus.” That made me wonder whether Ant really could have done it. I asked Ant to spell “anus” for me and he looked away from my forehead and said, “C-H-U-C-K.”

That prompted Chuck to say, “It was Ant, he did it at three in the morning after we smoked a joint and he laughed about it for the next eight hours.”

“It’s how it happened,” said Julius.

Ant was smirking.

I thought it was funny. I felt welcomed somehow. I was at the oven of anger for a second, just when I washed off the toothpaste and the letters were at their reddest. But I knew there was friendliness in the joke. I had a dream that Fall was sitting at a table across from me with no expression at all on her face and I saw myself, my eye in a spasm and red like the letters on my forehead, and in the dream I cried but Julius woke me up, saying, “You were laughing in your sleep you fuckin’ nut,” and I spent the next waking moments wondering why Fall’s face was impassive in the dream.

In the past I never contemplated public retaliation, but something had changed. It was partly that I knew Ant was a friend.

I snuck into Chuck and Ant’s room with a bowl of lukewarm water and tried to dip Ant’s fingers into it while he slept. I’d heard that would make someone urinate in his sleep. I couldn’t get the bowl near his fingers.

The next night I lay my head on my pillow and found that my pillowcase had been filled with shaving cream. I stayed awake for a long time and dreamt about cutting a poem into Ant’s face with a razor.

We smirked at each other for weeks, wondering what would happen next.

Julius told me that he felt a sweet sadness with Fall sometimes and a feeling of completeness and comfort and yearning like his body held a family dreaming at midnight. I can’t always remember his nonsense verbatim. As close as we sometimes felt, I occasionally thought I was losing him, or like there was something that would always keep us apart.

He was planning an anniversary evening with Fall. I felt breathless when he told me they had been together for a year. Time was running away from me.

One night in November Ant taped down the nozzle of a can of aerosol deodorant and threw it into the room while Julius and I slept. We took our revenge together.

My brother and I used to play together, before our minds latched on to the interests that pull children apart. We had friends in common and played a game called Ditch, where someone would shout, for example, “Ditch Noel!” and everyone would run away from me. I would have to catch them all, one by one, as they hid in various places. It was like hide-and-seek, but with a greater sense of abandonment. I didn’t mind being ditched, but I preferred running and hiding.

That giddy feeling of mischief and suspense was predominantly what I felt when we retaliated against Ant. I was excited and nervous, and felt a pure, childish anticipation.

“A flood,” is what Julius proposed. “So he forgets what life is like on dry land.”

We wanted to get him while he slept. In every room there was a large plastic garbage can with a handle for lifting. If you took out the garbage bag, the can could be used as a large bucket, holding about ten litres of water. Julius borrowed garbage cans from other people’s rooms so that altogether we had four of them.

Ant slept on the bottom bunk. The idea was for me to sneak in and tie a sheet around his arms as quickly as I could while he slept. It
didn’t matter if I failed because we would soak him anyway, but we thought it would be better torture if we restrained his arms.

Julius told Chuck our plan in advance to prevent him from shouting out if he woke up when we came in to get Ant. Julius also bought ten litres of Coke to put in one of the buckets instead of water.

We carried the full buckets to various points in the hallway and left one outside Ant’s room. I got a sheet and opened the door. I could tell they were both asleep. Julius stood close behind me with a bucket of water which made quiet plips and slapped the carpet when it spilled. I felt like giggling. I remember looking at Ant and holding a rolled sheet and the closer I got the more a sort of angry smile stretched across my mind. I leaned over his body and pressed the sheet firmly over his chest and arms. He didn’t wake up and I thought about how stupid he looked with his mouth slightly open. In one quick movement I lifted his torso and tied the sheet together sharply behind his back. The honesty of his scream was unexpected. He was upright and, as he was saying “What the fu—” Julius dumped his bucket of water on him.