THINGS DID CHANGE between us. “You betrayed me, man. From now on, it’s war the whole fucking way. It’s over between us. Over! Fini! Snitch!” He sliced the air with a hand sweep. “I’m your mortal enemy . . . And listen to me carefully: stop fooling with your life. Never you make the mistake of dissing me again in front of my friends, or you’ll be dead, man. Dead! You’re lucky I didn’t tell you to kiss my arse or go fuck yourself, or give you the finger. You snitch!”
I didn’t always resent how much of my time Paul took; there were pleasurable moments, like when he shared something he’d written or read me passages from books he was reading. I missed that. About a week before the incident with Mrs. Bensemana, he’d come into my bedroom, handed me a sheet of paper and said: “What you think of this? I just finished it.”
The Metro
Blue pythons speeding, hissing
Through burrows underground
Blessed to have food come willingly
Cursed to expel it undigested
From the same mouths
Eating and shitting.
Keep far from their mating
It’s a cataclysmic coming.
Nodding admiringly, I handed the sheet back to him. “How many poems do you have?”
“At least a hundred.”
“You must show me some more.” But he never did.
During the next year he called me every insulting epithet that I’d already heard: dolt, dingbat, clotbrain, twit, boho, bozo; a few that I hadn’t: foozle, gunk-head; and many I have since forgotten.
And the putdowns! “Paul, will you please turn the music down? I have a headache.”
“No, it’s a herniated brain. It happens to cretins who think they’re Einsteins.”
Not long after this Paul began putting weekly maxims outside his bedroom door. On occasion Anna invited work colleagues to the flat. After she rejoined fundamentalism her guests included church members. She argued with Paul to put his maxims up inside his room. He refused, saying they were there to make her think, “if you still think.” They left me intrigued and on occasion worried. But I complimented him for those maxims I liked (a mistake I now think):
Obedience is warm because it lives in a barn.
Opt for comfort and lose your sight,
Soon followed by your rights.
Flee compliance. It’s a deadly blight.
Cultivate your thoughts;
They’re swords of light.
Honey and traps are never far apart.
By the time he was 14 his behaviour worsened. Luck and his teachers’ interventions — Mrs. Bensemana’s and Mrs. Mehta’s — kept him from ending up at Batshaw. He stopped participating in his classes and had some sort of arrangement with his French, English, and history teachers to hand in his assignments and pick up the corrected work at the office. That year too he read Walden and “Civil Disobedience” and met with Mrs. Mehta outside of class hours to discuss Thoreau and Gandhi. At the parent-teachers’ meeting that May, she exclaimed to Anna about it, told her that Paul’s reading scores put him at the university level, and suggested that he be sent back to St. Vincent to finish high school there. When Anna broached the subject with Paul, he said no; she should have done so the year before.
A Friday afternoon, about ten days after the parent-teacher’s meeting, Paul came home sullen. “Nobody talk to me. Say one word to me and I’ll kill somebody.” He remained in his bedroom all evening. It turned out that three days earlier, he’d gone to see Bégin about setting up a course of independent study. It would have involved broadcasts from the learning channel, various programmes on PBS, and material from my college texts. He told Bégin that the MRE teacher insulted his intelligence and needed a course in logic, grammar, and spelling and that most of his teachers were only slightly better. Bégin had promised to look into his request. That Friday Bégin had given him his answer: “Who do you think you are? The ministry of education sets the curriculum. The gall! You think you know more than your teachers? You will follow the curriculum set by the ministry of education and no other. Now put your tail between your legs, go back to class, and do the work your teachers set for you.” Paul looked away from me and took a deep breath. He was sitting on the edge of my bed; I sat at my desk. When Paul faced me again, he said: “You know what, Jay: I’m proud of how I handled myself today. I came close to telling Bégin: ‘You know something about tails. They’ve been going up your arse for a long time.’ But I swallowed, took a deep breath, and walked out of his office.”
Shortly afterwards we found out that Paul had joined a gang. Then the maxims became sporadic but more caustic:
Clap for fucking and flying.
Boo for conformity and crawling.
Classifications are misleading:
Wasps trump cattle in all my readings.
Try raising cain;
Guaranteed to grow your brain.
Better to carp than be a harp.
Be a knife. Wait coolly to take
Your user’s life.
I appeal to the living:
Let’s bury the dead
And kill the half living.
The Easter weekend that year, he had one of his periodic outbursts, and I told him: “When you get to know your inner self, it will disgust you. You want us mortals to be God? First become God and show us the way. You’d better start ignoring what’s wrong with others and focus on finding and mending the cracks in your own psyche.”
“The cracks in my psyche, huh! Focus on your own cracks? Wanna know an open secret? You’re a faggot.” Smirking, teeth clenched, torso rocking. “You take it up the arse, Jay Jackson. You and Jonathan are lovers.”
“In this day and age, there’s nothing wrong with Jonathan, me — or you — being gay.”
“Leave me out of it. I knew it! I knew it!” He smiled broadly, open-mouthed. He shouted to Anna in her bedroom. “Ma, there’s vermin in the house. Call the exterminator.” He bristled with excitement.
“Paul, stop it!” Anna shouted to him from inside her bedroom.
“But, Ma, he’s a vector for disease.”
“Oh, my sick little brother,” I said, shaking my head. By now Anna was standing at her bedroom door.
“Little brother! Your sense of duty’s killing you, man. I’m not your little brother. You’re duller than cardboard. Jonathan will soon ditch you, and nobody else will want you. Little brother. You never cared that much for me anyway. You only wanted to impress Grama, and now Ma. Fuck your sense of duty, man! Go get yourself a fat plantain.”
All three of us were silent for about 30 seconds. Even Paul seemed shocked. Then he said, his tone a trifle apologetic: “Do you ever get angry? What will it take to get you angry?” He came to stand within 30 cm of me.
Anna came into the dinette. I stared at her and shook my head.
“Do I have to like punch you to get something human out of you? Know what: your face looks like a gorilla’s butt.” He chuckled.
“Why don’t you come let me like teach you how to toke? You’ll understand that life — my life, your life, Ma’s life — is a huge joke, and we would laugh at all the human ants scurrying everywhere, pulled by invisible strings. Man, don’t I understand what Thoreau meant. ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
“Well, Thoreau’s no longer around, so he can’t say what lives know-it-all punks lead, or advise them that hurling filth at others is no way to get attention.”
“Why do I like bother talking to you? Why do I like cast my pearls before swine?”
“Right. Just wear them and shut your mouth.”
He balled his fists and shook them. “You drivel on and on about what you don’t know. At least that dunderhead” — he indicated Anna with a toss of his chin — “keeps her drivel to herself. Talk like a man! That or go let them chop off your cock. That way you’d be my sister for real. Voice like a violin in F. Like fucking cleats on my soul.”
“Your soul! Where do you hide it?”
“You’re so pathetic! No wonder those professors have you on a leash. Breaking you in for the plough. Your classmates party night and day and get better grades than you. Education’s a con game, man. Sucker! Sucker-r!” He whistled and snapped his fingers. “Hey, Rover. Rover how ya doing? Praise, Rover? Okay. No fucking sleep before 4 am.” He snapped his fingers again. “Read them books, boy.” He laughed, and then, his tone slightly serious: “Know what you make me think of, man? That seal on the West Coast that they like released from captivity, and no matter how far away they carried it, it kept coming back to the aquarium they’d kept it in. Rats, too, man; you and Ma. Rats that come back to their cages and re-imprison themselves for pellets.” He paused to catch his now wheezing breath.
He turned to stare at Anna. “Can’t live without handcuffs, eh? Look at you! Had to go back to your superstitions. Now, if you’d gone there to find a man.” He laughed. “What a foolish woman” — he shook his head slowly — “you belong to a religion that believed you were born to be white people’s slave!” A monstrous smirk deforming his face, his voice clanking. “Know what I call you in my journal? Felicity Foil, devotee of Serena Joy.”
Grinning, he looked from Anna to me, then walked to the coat closet, put on his windbreaker, and slammed the door as he left.
A week later, around 2 pm, I was sitting at the dining table desperately trying to finish a paper I was late handing in. Anna, dressed for work, came out of her bedroom and was putting her coat on when Paul, who was stretched out on the sofa said: “Ma, I’m going to spend this summer with Grama. You can afford to pay my plane fare.”
“I know what I can afford, and your plane fare is not included,” she told him, then walked to the phone on a side table, dialled Grama’s number, and told her, in Paul’s presence, not to send Paul any money for him to travel to St. Vincent. He got up with a sprint, glared at her, then went to the kitchen counter and began hurling the dishes from the drain board at her, aiming them to miss, the pieces of crockery clattering and scattering over the wooden floor.
“For God’s sake, stop! Enough! Leave! Go for a walk! Calm down!” I told him, frightened, worried that he’d gone insane.
“And if I don’t leave?”
I said nothing.
“You’ll throw me out, right?” He gave a feral, high-pitched laugh. “And I’ll pop your faggoty ass like a dry twig.” He balled his fists and gestured the popping; his eyes became small and piercing, his body odour rank. “One of these days you all will drive me so mad, I’ll show up here with a Uzi and blow your asses to smithereens.”
We were too shocked to respond.
Seconds later he left the apartment.