Flagged Victor (10 page)

I didn’t yet understand how determined Susan could be to get what she wanted, how strategic, how needy she was for the thing out of reach, the thing she shouldn’t have. I didn’t yet know about her fragile sense of self, her crazy impulses. And if I had understood all of those things, I doubt it would have made the slightest difference.

Then there was Chris. To my mind, he achieved something utterly magical that year. He’d bagged a hearty gust of chick wind and could avail himself of it like an expert sailor whenever he desired. He was, on top of that, physically in the best shape of anyone we knew, and in full command and control of his course work, and socially in sync with the world. By all tangible measures, he had reached that most elusive of psychological states known as
flow.
I only had to compare his situation with my own to observe the extremes that could be experienced by two different people in the same basic circumstances.

But, of course, Chris was actually experiencing his own inner torment, however unmerited that might have been. I learned the truth in mid-November when a series of severe snowstorms shut down the school and the city.

It was remarkable how much snow accumulated. You gave up shovelling your driveway because the stuff never ceased falling and the plows neutralized your hard work whenever they passed. Then the plows stopped coming because they had no place else to put the snow. The banks closed. The stores closed. Sidewalks got obliterated. Stranded cars disappeared beneath rounded humps.

We found ourselves with a few stolen days. We should have studied during that unexpected break, caught up on our papers and assignments. Naturally, we spent our time in Chris’s basement, drinking beer, looking through
Playboy
s, and talking random shit. Such shit was the foundation of our friendship. In Chris’s car, walking between classes, at the lake, standing bored at some house kegger, we talked and talked. We finished each other’s sentences. We built on each other’s ideas. We invoked
twists on each other’s ridiculous fantasies. Always joking. Always one-upping.

By Wednesday night, we got restless. The snow had stopped blowing hard despite our calls for it to keep going strong, and it seemed likely that, after one good plowing day, the world would start up again. Naturally, we headed for Oathill Lake around midnight with a football.

There was a full moon and the night was bright. The snow on the lake lay in drifts that mimicked waves on the beach. We ran like Charlie Chaplin across the ice, sliding, losing balance, shifting direction suddenly, and tumbling. We discovered that we could throw the ball wide of an easy catch and that the receiver could dive recklessly and slide along the ice for a few glorious feet and still conceivably manage a highlight-reel grab. We attempted it over and over until we were so snow covered, it was pointless to stay on our feet. Lying on our backs, we made obscene snow angels and then stared up at the moon-bright sky and watched the odd snowflake tumbling down in 3-D.

I feel like I’m meant to do something bigger, Chris said.

The words were so sudden and so discordant with the goofiness of our play that I was not sure, for a moment, he’d uttered them aloud. They might have been someone else’s thoughts, blown to us like a snowman’s hat.

Like what? I asked.

Silence. Then a pained laugh.

I guess that’s the question.

I had never known him to question anything before. I watched the snow dazzle above and felt a strange and comforting power over my closest friend. I knew the bigger thing I
was meant to do. I was going to be a writer. I understood now that Chris felt the lack of that. It made me appreciate all the more keenly his unwavering support, but I also felt a selfish and ignoble one-upmanship. I tried to cover that with humour, the familiar place friends go to for reassurances.

Give me a break. You’re nailing everything that moves. You’re coasting through school. You’re going to be a kick-ass cop. What more do you want?

He didn’t answer.

Maybe you should do the whole Navy SEAL–ranger-assassin thing, I suggested.

That got from him an easier laugh.

Yeah, well, maybe I will.

The silence came back. It was not ordinary silence but the silence of snow falling, the silence of solid ice beneath our backs, the silence of a city not moving, of an entire universe that had stopped to listen.

Actually, though, he said, I’ve been kind of thinking about doing something a little unusual.

Again, I did not have the words to answer him right away. I could have joked. Get a sex change? Try ballet? But I resisted, and maybe because I resisted, it gave him the freedom or the safety to utter what should never have been spoken.

You remember how we joked once how easy it would be to rob a bank? he said.

I did not remember at first because the context had been so different. Then it came back to me. It was one of our many running what-if conversations. What if zombies attacked—would you abandon anyone who might slow you down? What
if there were no guardrails on the side of the bridge—would you be able to stop yourself from driving off the edge? What if you knew you could get away with it—would you actually rob a bank?

Yeah, I said, hesitantly, warily, not entirely lacking in curiosity.

Well, I’ve been thinking about that one a lot, Chris said.

I waited.

What do you mean, thinking about it?

About the process. About the mechanics of how to do it.

I laughed, but not too harshly. I was, I have to admit, sort of in awe. The process? The mechanics of it?

And I’ve come to the conclusion, Chris continued, turning his head to look at me across the shared blanket of snow, that it’s completely doable. That, done right, no one would ever know.

I did not, could not, say a word.

I felt a kind of vertigo, as though the tectonic plates beneath us had suddenly forced our ice floor a hundred feet into the air, then dropped it a hundred feet back down. The vertigo was due to some innate realization, some unexpected illumination that Chris and Chris alone was fully capable of doing such a thing. Not merely robbing a bank—that was extraordinary enough—but doing it successfully and doing it without anyone knowing. Going on as before, as though nothing had ever happened, bearing secret knowledge.

Have you? I asked, a pit in my chest. I meant, Have you already done it? And I did not know whether that would have been a relief, or whether I would have felt betrayed and passed by if he’d said yes, the same way I’d felt when he got laid before me, and all those many times since.

No, he said. I’m not sure I could pull it off on my own. I’m thinking it takes two to commit the perfect crime.

That was what I wanted to know, and what I most feared. I wanted to be needed. I wanted to be essential. But I did not want to do the thing that was needed. I wanted only the knowing, not the being or doing.

If there ever was a time to stop the madness, it was then. A laugh. A disparaging comment. That was all it would have taken to quiet Chris about his feeling of lack, and his fantasy for filling it, to shove it all back within, and to force him to find other outlets or partners. Our friendship might have been altered forever, diminished by the absence of unconditional support, but I would have avoided the dangers that lay ahead. And yet, God help me, I said nothing.

More silence. Just snowflakes sparkling down in that
Star Wars
jump-to-hyperspace sort of way. I had no faith in hyperspace. To me, it had always seemed unlikely you could avoid being obliterated by a random meteorite.

Like a coward and a friend, I introduced that subject as a way of diverting our conversation.

Not surprisingly, Chris didn’t share my doubts.

Every writer, Graham Greene might have said, like every
spy, and every homosexual, leads a secret, double life.

So began mine, as writer and bank robber both.

When I look back on the process of being convinced—or convinced enough to co-conspire, though burdened by the lack of any wholehearted commitment to the cause—I grasp it through the filter of Nietzsche’s will to power. I’m not saying that Chris asserted his will over mine, dry-humped my values and viewpoints into submission like an alpha dog does to its smaller, less vicious companion, but I’m not saying he didn’t either. I think that a battle of wills, if you can forgive the cliché, takes place in every relationship at almost every moment. I remember it from childhood, between friends, between myself and my dad, between me and the kid with the locker next to mine elbowing for space. I’ve seen it in the most intimate relationships I’ve had since, as well as with editors, agents, business clients, waiters, hair stylists, prostitutes, appliance salesmen, and neighbours. How little we understand what’s going on between human beings when choices get made. His way or my way. Her way or
the highway. Why do we lean one way, not the other? How do we learn to force others, imperceptibly, with the precision of acupuncturists channelling and shifting energy flows that no scientist can prove exist? I’ve seen children do this! I’ve had children do it to me! And yet this process of influencing, this jostle of personal power, this rough dance of desires and drives goes utterly unstudied. We don’t even see it happening, though we feel the effect. No wonder, in the parlance of self-help, we’re fucking morons when it comes to other people.

I didn’t really believe Chris needed me to rob a bank. I didn’t think for a second that any contribution I made would mean the difference between success or failure, that I could augment Chris’s skill set. But I did have an inkling, the vaguest, most gossamer insight into what he was really looking for: he wanted nothing more and nothing less than my approval.

Chris
must have sensed I was emotionally rattled—wrecked, really, thrown to the side of the road like a hit-and-run victim—by the very idea of robbing a bank, so he went easy on me at first. It was a psychological relief. We did a lot of jokey kid stuff. We played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in a year. We ordered pizza and lobbed rancid farts at each other. We hung out at the mall, played video games in the arcade, and floated around the bookstore for hours. I talked to him about my ambition. He knew I wanted to be a writer, a goddamn great novelist, but it helped me to keep saying it aloud. I also told him about my deeper fear—that I was missing something, that I hadn’t accumulated enough experience in life to write really
great work, that I probably never would. I was an eighteen-year-old white male raised in a middle-class suburb in the armpit of North America. What kind of greatness could come from that?

You mean lopping off orc heads in a DnD session isn’t going to cut it?

Chris got it. He always did.

Like all writers who lack life experience, I turned to writing classes to fill the void. I focused on one particular course in second semester that was restricted to seniors unless you put together a kick-ass portfolio. I wanted someone to recognize my talent and give me a shove in the right direction. I worked my ass off to produce something worthy, driven by my fear that ordinary life was a trap designed to funnel me toward mediocrity. For the next few weeks, I roused myself at five to write for a couple hours before getting on with the day. My strategy was not very productive. I was so ripped by lack of sleep that I occasionally threw up. I sat bleary-eyed before my typewriter, not typing more often than I typed. And the words that appeared during those intermittent bursts of gunfire often didn’t sound right. But I was certain I had to squeeze the trigger on a regular, consistent basis, or die a failure.

In
early December, the evening after I turned my portfolio in, Chris and I drove to the larger mall (called Mic Mac, after the neighbouring lake, and the Indians who presumably once paddled there) to do some early Christmas shopping. We aimed to find a counter where they sold Chanel No. 5 for the moms (since that was the only gift any mom had ever wanted or been given
in the history of Christmases), and a store where some item not too expensive or embarrassing could be purchased for a dad. Chris drove. (He always drove; which put my role as the driver in his plan in an even more ludicrous light.) After we goofed around for a few hours and did our shopping, I felt migrained by the intense jangling, bright-lighted mall experience, and we slunk out into the slushy cold to go home. But instead of drag-racing through the parking lot for the exit, as we typically did, Chris drove slowly around the back side of the mall to a less parked-up region. He pulled into an empty slot away from the glow of lampposts and put the car in neutral, pulled up the emergency brake. Then did nothing more, just sat with hands in lap, staring toward the facade of the mall.

I started to laugh and say something, but stopped. Chris was not laughing, nor was he saying something. He was watching the bank.

It was still open on a Thursday night. The lights were on but you could tell that there were few people within. I had an itch on my forehead, but if I lifted my hand to scratch, I worried that my fingers would tremble. So I did nothing, and I tried to be silent even as I let out a ragged, timid breath.

They close off the mall entrance to the bank at eight-thirty, Chris said.

I tried to focus on what he was seeing.

For the next thirty minutes, he continued, there’s usually only one teller at the counter, and the other three workers disappear into the back. If you parked here, he said, you’d be out of sight from the mall but less than five seconds from the curb. I go in alone, but when I come out, you’re waiting for me, and we
drive away. Not too fast, not too slow. The east exit is right over your shoulder. There’s never any wait and there’s no traffic light. We’re on the highway within ninety seconds. The whole thing from beginning to end takes less than seven minutes.

Each word was a pulse in my forehead, a flick on the nerve along my cheek.

Chris seemed to break his own trance when he looked over to me finally, not with a mocking grin, or an air of all-seeing, all-knowing awareness, but an honest, straightforward question.