The Antagonist by Lynn Coady Page B

pack of loons who couldn’t give a shit what happens on earth but just for fun decide to come down every once in a while to screw with us?
    At nineteen years of age, three years following the extinguishment of Sylvia LeBlanc Rankin, glimmer of pure light, I remember feeling like I’d found a new religion. This was something I could believe in. It didn’t require me to feel bad, to do penance, to confess or be contrite. It required nothing. This cosmology fully expected and understood my exasperation with what the universe had inflicted on me thus far — and didn’t care. The gods were dicks — end of story. They had all the power, and guys like Homer and Hesiod and Ovid were damned if they were going to let them off the hook for their dickish behaviour. Not like us Judeo-Christians. Not like we do with our own white-bearded fucker-in-the-sky. (And if that sounds harsh remember I do have some experience with this. I served on Our Lord’s custodial staff as an enthusiastic whitewasher of His mysterious ways for longer than I care to admit. In the hope that He’d return the favour.)
    So that was good, that helped me for a while. Oh, I thought, Oh! You don’t care. That’s right , the cosmos patiently affirmed. You’re not punishing me, I gradually figured out; you don’t hate me. Hate you? Har, har, chortled the universe. Dude! You see a parade of ants trucking along and you cut off the route with a bunch of rocks or something just to watch them run in circles. As flies to wanton boys and all that.
    It was weirdly reassuring. I was an ant — I was a fly. Sylvie was just another bug to them. So was Gord. So had been Ghandi, Saddam Hussein and Princess Di. All of us specks. Nothing personal. That felt good. I could deal with that.
    Except of course you will recall what happened next — in what direction this new religion ended up taking me.

7
    06/11/09, 5:44 p.m.
    DID I EVER YELL YOU Gord’s famous pick-up line, from the first time he introduced himself to Sylvie? Sad. Two hicks working for isolation pay deep in the blackfly-riddled thickets of Northern Ontario.
    “Well mother of Christ, they got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
    Another excerpt from their storybook romance that Sylvie never cared to talk about. It wasn’t the insult to her language and people, mind you, but the cavalier name-in-vain-taking of Our Holy Mother. Sylvie was about a hundred times more Catholic than Gord. It was all about Notre Dame in Sylvie’s neck of the wood, so my old man’s offhand blasphemy — as natural to Gord as scratching his nuts — came very close to losing him the ball game.
    Not close enough, unfortunately for every last one of us. If the gods were keeping a pie-plate eye that day, they decided to let the ants go marching blindly forward.
    Sylvie was wearing hip waders for the occasion, standing with a fishing pole up to her knees in the Firesteel River as my dad came sloshing over, heedless of soaking his pants, more than a little sloshed himself.
    “They biting?” he hollered, slipping on a rock as he approached and having to steady himself against her.
    Sylvie frowned as she teetered, bracing her stomach muscles. Not yet annoyed, as she tells it, only perplexed. She didn’t understand how any self-respecting young man from a no-doubt rural, fishing-and-hunting background similar to her own could come sloshing through the river toward her, hollering greetings, and then exhibit, peacocklike, the sheer, splendored idiocy to ask, “Are they biting?”
    “No,” replied Sylvie. “Dey aren’t biting.”
    Gord, as unperceptive as he’d already proven himself to be, didn’t miss a beat when he caught wind of the accent.
    “Well mother of Christ,” he remarked. “They got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
    How is it my life unfurls from a seed as insignificant and stupid as this, Adam? And what kills me is, it isn’t even my seed. I was adopted, for the love of god. It’s not my