So I’m at this bar, busy place on the Esplanade the guys from my firm visit after work. I don’t often join them, my home life appeals to me and I see my family little enough as it is, but this time I’ve gone down for a quick drink, I think this is a Monday evening, long week ahead. I’m sitting at a table with Aaron Gold and Joe Harris, both of them guys around my age, we have work in common and similar taste in movies and music, we get along. There’s a certain testosterone quotient at the table, definitely, but none of us are the loud type, neither Aaron nor Joe nor I ever went in for the cutthroat stuff, we came to the law as idealistic, let’s say quasi-socialistic young guys, we were smart and we were interested in things like human rights law, social justice, advocacy for the voiceless and so on, and we never abandoned the spirit of that, but, it happens, we all got married, two out of three of us had kids, and our politics changed as we spent more time in the world. Now we make more money than we ever dreamed of making, way more than our fathers ever made, and sometimes the work’s interesting, it’s always demanding, which is fine, keeps you sharp, but it’s good to grab a drink and ease the pressure.
So I’m sitting there having a beer, laughing with my friends about our belligerent boss, when I notice that Joe and Aaron are staring past me. I stop talking, I look where they’re looking and I see this guy, around my age, standing by our table. He’s been waiting for a chance to cut in. He’s tall, pretty thin, brown guy with dark hair trimmed close, could be Pakistani, Lebanese. Dressed neatly, crisp white shirt and black slacks, loud red cufflinks. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.
“You don’t remember me,” he says.
And I’m like, “Sorry, we know each other?”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Good of you, but why would you do that?”
“For old times’ sake.”
So now I’m thoroughly confused. I can tell that Joe and Aaron have their guard up. There’s something provocative in the guy’s tone — half ingratiating, half ironic. I don’t understand it, don’t like it. “Do we know each other,” I say to him again.
“Yorkhill.”
And then I know who he is.
My heart starts to hammer, I’m cold and I’m hot and I don’t want my friends to see something’s fucked, so I get up and go, “I’ll be back in a sec,” with as much of a wry glance as I can muster.
I walk ahead of him to the bar. We sidle in among the schmoozers, he asks me what I’m drinking and I reply mechanically, I’m so distracted, shaken by him. I’m like, “What are you doing here?”
“I work nearby.”
“Yeah? Doing what?”
“Insurance,” says Mohammed. And he pays for our scotch.
Mohammed Khan. Terror of the sixth grade. I wasn’t a tough kid, I was openhearted and trusting, he was the product (I knew even then) of a family life fraught with emotional violence and other violence, and he paid that violence forward to me. He forbade the others in our class to be friends with me, and they obeyed him, such was his power. He belittled me, he insulted me without provocation and without end, after a while he had me convinced of his superiority, and whatever sense of self I had at twelve began to crumble. I was a case study in preteen anxiety and depression, and I think he knew it, revelled in it. I dreaded going to school, my parents sent me to a shrink, didn’t help, nothing helped till I switched schools and never saw him again, till today.
But look at me now, I think, I’m not that frightened little boy anymore, I’m a grown-up, I’m married, I have a child of my own, I make a good living and dress well and laugh deeply, there’s no way in which I’m vulnerable to Mohammed Khan anymore, so get a grip, I say to myself.
“I know you work at Gowlings,” he goes. “Mitchell Klein told me. I’ve followed your career.”
“Oh yeah? And you’re in insurance.”
“Sun Life. Risk management.”
“I thought you were going to be an actor.”
He flashes that thin, ironic smile.
“I hear you’re married,” he says.
“Mitchell Klein tell you that too?”
“Yes, actually.”
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“He’s an architect. His company did the new condo developments near Fort York.”
“Pillars of society, our class.”
“Cheers.”
We drink.
“You married?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You were the only one in our class who had a girlfriend.”
“Was I?”
“Diane,” I say. “You flaunted it like crazy. You’d go everywhere together, holding her hand.”
“I remember very little about that time.”
There’s a pause. We drink, watch the flow of others mingling, flirting.
“I was very unhappy,” he says. “I didn’t believe there would ever be a future. I was sure I would die before I turned into my parents, whatever, I’d kill myself. I thought grade six, grade seven, maybe grade eight, that would be the rest of my life, and I’d better make the most of it. I wanted to unleash my shitstorm on the world, I wanted to give the world a beating. I was not a normal boy.”
“Oh yeah?” Sadistic, vain, a cruel wit. That’s what I remember. “I think you were perfectly normal.”
“I’m not saying I …”
I down the rest of my scotch. “Thanks for the drink, man.” And I turn to go back to my friends. He puts his hand on my arm. I stare at it. He removes it. “Did you not hear what I said? Thank you for the drink, have a nice life — ”
“My first wet dreams were about you.”
He hasn’t said it quietly, but nobody around us is paying attention.
“I hated you. I was twelve years old and I was convinced I was a monster, I knew my parents would kill me if they so much as suspected … they would kill me, no figure of speech, my father would take me by the neck and strangle me till I was dead.”
His hands are shaking.
I watch him. I watch him drink. I notice for the first time how narrow his shoulders are, how frail he is, all jagged edges, nerve and bone. I think of him at twelve, alone in his parents’ house, terrified, crying himself to sleep at the thought that there might be something horribly wrong with him. I pity him. I do.
And then I think of my daughter. I think of my beautiful daughter. Starting school in the fall.
And what I do then is I gather a wad of phlegm, I clear it from the very back of my throat, and I spit my great wad of phlegm in Mohammed Khan’s face. Plastered across his face, along with my spit, is a look of astonishment and — I’m sure I see it — childlike fear. Before he can say anything, I’m walking away. I call back over my shoulder: “Likely story.”
Aaron and Joe are waiting for me, eager to hear. They’ve seen none of it.
Joe’s like, “Who was that?”
“An old friend.”
Fifteen minutes later I’m still shaking all over.