I came home angry and panicked after the fight with Walid. And hurting, but I cared less about that. I had calmed down a little bit on the walk home, but somehow crossing the threshold caused a lot of the feelings that had dissipated to rise up again, choking me off.
I kneeled on the scuffed linoleum just past the entrance, to my relief just managing to close the door behind me. My breath came in rough, heaving gasps. I wanted to cry, but I wasn’t going to, because I didn’t want to admit what had happened and also because I didn’t want to own up to the fact that Walid had hurt my stupid fucking feelings.
I limped into the bathroom and turned on the light. There was blood caked over the right side of my face, my lip was fat, and my left cheek was swollen. My right eye was starting to bruise, too. I ran my tongue around my mouth and spit into the sink, and my spit was bright crimson against the porcelain. But at least I hadn’t lost a tooth. I was pretty sure.
I looked a little bit better once I washed my face. I thought I was lucky that the cut over my brow wasn’t so deep that it would need stitches, or at least it seemed that way — it had mostly closed up on its own by the time I got home.
I wish I could say that at least I’d gotten my share of hits in, but I’d only landed a few desperate punches before he really started returning fire. Walid is a lot stronger than I am, and he’s been in real fights before. I only really connected solidly once, with his chin. I could see that it had shocked him, but his next few punches were that much harder.
I went to the kitchen and took out a container of leftover pasta from the fridge. Then I put it back after staring at it with the lid off for a few minutes. I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, but I wasn’t really hungry, and I wasn’t sure whether I should eat, anyway, because my jaw was so sore. I didn’t want to make things worse, or bite off a piece of my tongue or something. Instead I poured myself a glass of milk and took it up to my room. It was early still, not even five o’clock, but I didn’t want to see Mom before I went to sleep, because I didn’t want to talk about what had happened, although I knew I’d have to see her eventually and that she would figure out pretty quickly that I’d been in a fight. I didn’t think I could lie to her.
Not well enough.
The camera, at least, was okay. I’d had the good sense to put my bag down before I rushed him. Because Walid was such a dumb asshole there was a moment when I was lying in the grass where he threatened to kick my bag or throw it in the street, but the look on my face, I think, told him what was inside. If he had fucked up my camera I would have gone to his parents without hesitation, and he would have got in real shit.
I knew that Walid could be a dick, that he was angry, but I’d always played it down, making excuses for him in my head. I also thought that I was protected, somehow, because we were friends. Because we had been friends for so long. But I guess that protection only went so far. Or maybe there was no such thing as protection. From anything.
I didn’t want to think about what I would do on Monday at school.
After wallowing for a while I got up and tried to call Lauren. Her mom answered and said that she was out. She didn’t say with whom or where she had gone. Lauren had a cellphone but I didn’t want to bother her so I just got back into bed. A little while later I heard my mom come in downstairs, but I buried my head in my pillow when she called up. Not too long after that I heard my door opening.
“Kent?” she said.
I lay absolutely still, with my head facing away from the door. When I didn’t answer her she turned the lights out in my room and shut the door.
I don’t know when I fell asleep. I didn’t intend to. When I woke up the house was eerily quiet. My clock radio said it was three in the morning. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and thought about getting under the covers, but put on new clothes instead. There was no way I was going to be able to get back to sleep.
The swelling in my lip had gone down, and my jaw didn’t hurt as much as it had before. I was able to eat a couple slices of toast. I put the dishes in the sink and went outside to sit on the front steps. It was cold, and so I put on my full winter gear. Most of the leaves were still up and I liked the way they looked in the street lights: their silence and their stillness. In the distance I could see cars passing on Highway 89, their lights twisting away in the dark.
My dream the night before had been crazy. I was climbing the stairs in an old hotel. I knew it was haunted and I wanted to get out of there, but for some reason I kept pressing upward, trying to escape a dull, thudding sound coming from below, like my heartbeat but louder by an order of magnitude. Coming from above or below. Actually I hadn’t been sure, unclear whether I was moving away from the noise or heading straight for it, like I thought I could pierce it with a javelin and get the noise to stop. The more I thought about it the more unsure I was. The hotel gave me an uncanny feeling: I imagined that behind each door I’d find a different future. Or past. I wasn’t sure. But each one distinct from its neighbours. In any case the hotel was at the centre of time, at its nexus. Jeff was in the dream, too, although he wasn’t a central figure, and I had to work hard to remember he was there. Jeff, I thought. Whenever I needed to remember. In the dream he had been waiting for me somewhere, but I couldn’t remember why or where or even how that knowledge had been communicated.
I sat out on the front steps for a little bit longer, watching the night lift, although sunrise was still a long way away. I started to think about my documentary, wondering what I was going to do, how all of my plans had fallen apart so spectacularly, how I was left with less than nothing even though I had already put more work into it than I thought most people would.
I watched the street and thought about how funny it was that I was up that early. That what I was seeing could only be seen just then, in that particular moment.
It was as I was sitting there watching the quiet when something clicked in my head. I realized I was trying to force myself into creating something obviously larger than I could handle. Why was I starting so big? It was true that I had put more work into the documentary than other people would.
It was stupid. Why not just shoot the Durham that I knew?
Just shoot it and see what happened.
I put on a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of legal paper and started writing out a script. By the time Mom got up I had already storyboarded some scenes. I was so deep into my work that when Mom asked me what had happened to me I almost told her about my dream until I realized that she was asking about my face.
* * *
I spent the next two weeks in the editing room, after school and over lunch, recording my voiceovers and putting the documentary together piece by piece. I got Lauren to show me how most of the equipment worked. She had experience with the machines because she sometimes made videos for drama class. When other people had the room booked I went in anyway, both because I could count on them sometimes not showing up, and because it was a relief to get away from the guys and the cafeteria. If someone else was in there I helped them out on the equipment or with their own editing, learning a lot in the process. No one seemed to mind.
Things were weird between me and Walid. For the first few days I started coming to school later, so that I wouldn’t have to spend any time hanging out before school, avoiding the hallway where we all stood, but after I got tired of rushing to my locker and then to my first class I’d find Lauren or Sash or Kyle or Christian in the caf. I discovered that it felt good to disrupt my habits like that, to realize that I had more friends — a wider circle — than I had thought. At first I was a little shy about changing my routine, but I realized after a while that nobody cared about what had happened, if they even knew, and that if they cared they probably felt sorry for me, because it was obvious that Walid had kicked my ass and not the other way around. And because most people thought he was kind of an asshole. When people asked me what had happened I told them that I’d gotten into a fight with a rhinoceros or that I’d been in a helicopter crash, and they laughed, and I could usually keep it at that.
When Mr. Wright was taking attendance that first Monday after the fight, he stopped what he was doing when he noticed that Walid and I were sitting far away from each other and asked out loud whether anything was wrong. “Trouble in paradise?” he said. He had meant it ironically, but the fact that neither of us responded told him everything he needed to know. He might have even made the connection to the bruises on my face, which I had explained coming into the class that I had picked up in a squash court, trying out a new manoeuvre.
The truth is, though, I felt better not hanging out with Walid. I don’t know if I could say that I felt happy, but I felt free, which made me realize that I hadn’t felt free before. Which was a weird thing to realize. I wondered how much of it was an illusion and how much of it was real.
* * *
I was still nervous the day of the documentary presentation, despite how much time I had put into the video. I was worried that too much of myself had gone into the project. That morning on the way to school I was overcome by the sudden urge to burn it and piece together something light and easy and safe — above all, something that didn’t have any part of me in the frame. Or only the most superficial parts. But it was too late for that.
Somehow Wright got us out of our other classes. Drama wasn’t running that semester, and so he had the drama room booked for the entire day. It was nice, with wall-to-wall carpets and a little stage on the far end. A huge black television had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was only something like thirty-two inches, but it was the nicest TV I had ever seen on the premises of any school in Durham. It was huge and boxy and had a tremendous weight, sucking in all of the available light in the room.
“I grabbed this out of the staff lounge,” Wright explained.
“Chalmers must be pissed,” someone said.
There were twenty of us in all, and we’d watch eight videos in the morning and eight in the afternoon. The other four we would watch over the next two days, in our regular class. I was in the afternoon. We had a forty-minute mongrel lunch in the cafeteria, catching the tail end of period two and the first half of period three. Walid stopped me in the hallway as we were coming back from lunch.
“What,” I said.
“You aren’t going to believe what my camera picked up, man,” said Walid.
“Okay,” I said, pushing past him. I wanted to say something else, too, like that I didn’t care, like he could go fuck himself, but I didn’t want to go that far. I didn’t want a repeat of before. Maybe it was a good sign that he had wanted to talk to me and maybe that meant that things were going to quiet down between us, even though they could never go back to where they were. I didn’t want them to, either.
I was also too nervous to give Walid any more of my attention than I already had. I’d spent most of lunch sitting with Lauren and her friends, trying to keep up, but too distracted by what I was going to show later that afternoon.
Most of the other videos were about achievements, hobbies, favourite bands, sports teams, actors, after-school jobs, revered elderly family members, topics I’d overlooked or hadn’t been able to think of a way to execute. I was rubbing my head after every presentation, getting more and more nervous, upper lip sweating, hands trembling, fever in my head, tangled fibrous knot forming in the pit of my stomach.
Bobby Booby’s video was a shakily rendered compilation of hockey highlights he had already sent to a selection of NCAA colleges. Except for a living-room interview that he conducted by getting up from his seat and stopping the camera on its tripod to change angles between his place on the couch and his mother in an easy chair, it was obvious that his father had shot the entire video, the elder Booby grunting “Yeah,” “Look at that,” “Marge, Marge! ” and “Go, Bobby” underneath the soundtrack, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” on repeat (even playing at a low volume throughout the entire interview with his mother, which felt like a step or two too far, but was probably just because he couldn’t figure out a way to turn it off while he was editing).
The class erupted in cheers at the video’s culmination, half-ironic, half-sincere, when Bobby scored a soft third goal to complete a hat trick, and, after pumping his fist, found his dad with the camera in the stands and, pointing his stick right down the lens, did a deep knee-bend flourish, while his teammates skated around him, confused and waiting for the theatrics to end so they could pat him on the back.
Bobby got up from where he was sitting on the carpet and did a couple of bows in front of the class before he ejected his video. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He was totally sincere. He came by it honestly, probably from staring too hard and too often at the hockey posters above his bed, through too many repeated viewings of Don Cherry’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em videos.
Wright called my name. I was next. Lauren patted me on the back and I stood up, stiffly making my way to the front of the room. I put the video into the VCR, but didn’t push it in all the way.
“Okay, uh, so I decided to do a documentary about Durham,” I said. “Because I didn’t know what else to do.”
I looked at Mr. Wright. I couldn’t read his expression, which made me even more nervous.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just start it now.”
* * *
“Durham. Town of ‘X’-thousand (the number’s too small to matter). Located one and a half hours out of Toronto, in the exact centre of nowhere. The centre’s centre? Not by accident, it’s the precise location where Principal Chalmers parks his 1999 ‘Woodland Pearl’ Toyota Camry on the Upper Canada Secondary parking lot.”
Some laughs.
“Like a zen koan, the question inevitably repeats itself: ‘What can anyone say about Durham?’ Is it possible to film a documentary on the nothing that this town is? What, if anything, is being filmed? … Durham wasn’t my first, or even my second, choice for the topic of this documentary. In fact, if I’d made a comprehensive list of all the things I wanted to produce a documentary on, Durham would be right at the very end, footnote to triple-z omega, double-bracketed, point-six font. But, like everyone who ends up in Durham, I ran out of options, and was stuck with the one topic I couldn’t escape. Durham: sinkhole, vortex, labyrinth, perpetual eye of the hurricane, leaking storm shelter, closed harbour, mirror world, fallback option, no one’s first choice — ever, emptiness, tabula rasa, sound of one hand clapping, home.”
My documentary started with shots of the town. Main Street, the school parking lot, shots out of my bedroom window, from the town bus that sometimes ran from the senior’s home to the strip mall. Cars passing on the highway late at night. The bar on Mill Street, lit up in neon. The empty library. The park on the edge of town.
“But even if Durham is nothing, it’s where I grew up. It’s probably where a lot of you grew up, too. People live here and that’s what makes it important.” Sweep of the cafeteria. Shot of Huddy eating lunch. Parking lot of the strip mall on Main. Shot of cars filling up at the gas station. The sun rising over my street on the Sunday morning following the fight. I knew I was bordering on cliché. I hoped that it didn’t matter. “It’s where my brother grew up, too. For those of you who don’t know, he died two springs ago. I’m not going to talk about that. I don’t want to. I can’t. Instead, I’m going to talk about an accident that he had when we were kids, which took place in the little forest on the edge of town, a forest that no longer exists.” I’d climbed the jungle gym to get a pan of the recently razed land. “It doesn’t look like much, but even in the middle of nowhere, in the most mundane places, stories happen that are worth being told.”
I buried my head between my knees, staring at the carpet. I didn’t want to watch the documentary and I was afraid of looking up at my classmates. I stayed that way until the end of the movie. It was eerily quiet and I worried that everyone was sitting in shocked silence, completely at a loss for what to say, united in their displeasure.
There was clapping once the credits ran. I didn’t move. To my ears it felt forced, muted. I only looked up when Wright walked up to the VCR and ejected the tape.
“Well,” he said, “that was certainly something.”
My face fell. I was sure he hated it.
But he saw my reaction.
“No, Kent,” he said. “I thought that was really good.”
There were murmurs of assent from the rest of the class. Stunned, I walked back to where I had been sitting. Lauren punched me lightly in the shoulder. She was smiling.
“Buddy,” she whispered. “Nice job.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m glad I’m going tomorrow,” she continued. “Can’t compete with that.”
“Jesus,” I said, trying to hide my grin.
I was so relieved that I didn’t even notice who was up next. It was Walid. For a minute I worried about what he had said outside class. What if he hadn’t done his documentary on Watt? What if I was the subject of his movie? I cringed, expecting the worst, wondering if I should leave the room. It didn’t seem fair that my relief could dissipate so fast.
But I didn’t have to worry.
“As some of you know,” he began, “my dad works at Headwaters.” That’s the hospital in Orangeville. “So I decided to do my video on him. As much as I could.” He popped the tape in. The screen opened on a fluorescent-lit corridor. The word MRI appeared on the screen, then separated, reading Most/Radical/Images. There were some laughs.
The rest of the documentary was pretty much as advertised.
I guess I’d underestimated him.
* * *
I found out what Walid had been alluding to during a break after his video. I was talking with Lauren and this guy Mark from our class. I didn’t know Mark very well because he mostly hung out with the skaters, but I liked him because he usually understood my jokes. He said that Walid had caught our fight on tape, and that he’d been showing it around earlier that day, playing it off his camcorder.
“The whole thing?” I asked.
Mark nodded.
My stomach dropped.
“But it looked like you kicked his ass,” he said.
“Really?” asked Lauren, turning to me.
“No,” said Mark. “It was pretty bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Walid destroyed me.”
“Good try, though,” said Mark.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re not much of a fighter, are you?” asked Lauren.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“That’s good,” said Lauren. “Fighting is dumb.”
My heart skipped.
“I, uh, also hate fighting,” said Mark, looking at Lauren.
I briefly wondered whether something was happening between them.
“Do you want to not fight later?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Mark. “In the parking lot, after school.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Lauren laughed.
I decided that I didn’t care that Walid was sharing the tape. I probably could have got him in trouble for that, but it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t care that people knew. I mean, maybe I would have cared if people made a big deal about it, but no one had, except Walid, I guess. Most people, I thought, wouldn’t.
That turned out to be an accurate assessment. Maybe it would have been a bigger deal when I was younger. I remembered when Yanni Caucescu beat up Scott Michaels in grade ten, and how people had made fun of Scott for weeks afterward because he had taken a huge swing at Yanni and totally whiffed, landing on his face. Maybe I just hadn’t embarrassed myself when I was getting beat up.
I felt a little bit proud of myself for that.
I was more concerned about Lauren and Mark, because it turned out they were actually dating. Or that they started dating pretty shortly afterward. I found out two weeks later, when I saw them holding hands in the cafeteria after school. One night I wrote her a long email, explaining that I had feelings for her, or thought I might have. I said that I felt hurt by the fact that she didn’t feel the same way about me, that she’d jumped into a new relationship without exploring whatever was happening between us. Oh god, I wish I’d written that out as reasonably as I just did now. I was angry. But I didn’t send it. I let it sit on the computer and then I watched some television and went for a walk and when I got back I deleted it. I didn’t want to lose any more friends. It wasn’t really any of my business.
I got an A-plus on the documentary, my first in almost four years of high school. It felt good. But also kind of hollow. It was nice to get the validation. But I also didn’t think it mattered, not in the way I thought it would. I didn’t even tell Mom.
Wright pulled me aside after handing our grades back.
“I want you to submit your documentary to the contest,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, surprising myself.
He looked confused.
“I think it’s really good,” he said. “You have a real chance to win. Seriously.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“I don’t see what there is to think about, but okay,” he said, giving me a long look.
I left the classroom quickly, and took a few minutes in the hallway to compose myself before heading to my locker, pretending I was looking through my bag. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to share my video, even though I knew it was good, even though I might have been able to use it to get out of Durham, at least in a small way. I thought about that for a long time. Maybe I wasn’t ready to go. Which was stupid, I thought. I needed to go. I had to leave. I told myself that I would submit the video.
But I never did.