disease guy, Mr. Shakes.
'I can see you're starting to like this hero stuff,' Carl says when I return to our room. 'Don't bother denying it.'
Why would I deny it? A guy whose only boasts up until now were owning a disco for a while and having a decent wrist shot when he was sixteen?
So I'l take it. You're goddamn right I'l take it.
I look forward to Sarah and Kieran coming by more than just about anyone else. They're twice-a-dayers, bringers of chocolate and celebrity magazines ('It's al they've got down in that crappy store') and flowers.
The kid finds the whole bandages-and-IV business pretty interesting, and I can feel my stock rising in his estimation, my banged- up condition helping him to see me as an aging but furious warrior from one of his video games, rather than a middle-aged guy who used to date his mom in the unimaginable depths of history
'I stil owe you that car you lent me,' I tel him when his mom has stepped out of the room. 'The Ferrari.'
'You remember that?'
'A promise is a promise.'
Kieran nods his mother's nod. Tels me I can keep it.
Carl is here the whole time, of course. We don't talk in detail about the big questions, about Randy and how he'd falen prey to the boy's invitations. I tel him about finding Roy DeLisle's bones in the crawlspace, how they were likely turned to ash in the fire, which would leave us the only holders of the last chapter of his regrettable biography. I also share my theory that it was Paul Schantz who put him there, and his quiet is answer enough.
Believe it or not, we spend most of the time laughing. Not gales of barroom hilarity, but the chuckles that come from old jokes retold, stories of childhood embarrassments and foolishness.
The doctors say Carl and I wil be out of here soon. I offer Carl the use of my condo, tel him he can stay as long as he wants. Which is when he tels me that his boyfriend, Adam, is arriving in Toronto in a couple of days. That they're planning to get a place of their own in the city.
'Boyfriend?'
'It's been twenty-four years, Trev.'
'I guess people change over that much time.'
'No, they don't,' Carl says, and rises onto an elbow to whip his pilow at my head. 'They just become more of what they always were.'
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 16
I have to believe that we weren't alone.
I have to believe that some of the things al of us did when we were young were strange. So strange that in recolection they strike us as the products of distorted dreams. Later, we may work to untangle these dreams, dismiss them, grapple with their meanings so that we might 'move on.' Or, more usualy, we do our best to ignore them, to discount them as that-which-never- actualy-happened. But they
And why did they happen at al? The imagination, The boundless possibility that goes with being a child, the brief period of ignorance before coming to understand that everything we do comes with a coat.
This wil be my final entry. Not only because my memory of what happened to us over the winter of 1984 has found its end but because I wil soon be unable to manage what I am doing now: sitting alone in a room, turning a recorder on and off, speaking aloud in a voice that anyone other than me might understand.
Right now, for instance, I'm in Sarah's room, sitting on the edge of her bed. It's where I slept last night, huddled against her warmth, my limbs calmed by the happy exertions of our keep-it-simple lovemaking. Why would I ever leave? Because there are only so many more days of my being capable of returning another's embrace, of being a man as most of us understand it. Soon I wil be reduced to a human to-do list and little more. Sarah says that I'm welcome to stay, that Kieran would be thriled if I did, that the three of us can face whatever's coming our way together if we're honest enough about it. She's a tough nut, as my mother used to say. Yet toughness might not be enough in my case. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, and there's no getting it back. It's likely to be the kind of process best left to me and professionals and Carl visiting now and again.
But you never know. You realy don't.
I should stop now. Such considerations are getting close to overstepping the bounds of a memory diary, and I should colour within the lines I started out with.
So what's left to remember? Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean (and if you have piled on enough years to feel like your life is coming in for a landing rather than taking off, then I'm wiling to bet you do). Anyway, I'm done with al that now. If the keeping of this diary has taught me anything, it's that the past is an anvil, or maybe a grand piano, the kind of thing that, in the cartoons of my youth, drops from the sky to flatten you into a pancake. And I'm too tired to try to stand up again after it does.
Except for this:
I seem to recal saying, sometime back near the beginning, that every town has a haunted house. But what do I know of every town? What I realy meant, I think, is that there is a haunted house in every boy's life. A place where al the wants he is not yet old enough to act upon or even understand can be rehearsed or hidden away.
A place he fears because he can sense its endlessness, how it reaches back into the pasts of other boys before him, as wel as his own.
When I started this I thought I was recording a secret history, or maybe a kind of ghost story. I was wrong. It is a confession. I entered the Thurman house each time believing I was trying to do good, whether it was rescuing Heather Langham, or finding Tracey Flanagan, or saving Grimshaw from the darkest aspect of itself. But like the fireman who runs into the burning building upon hearing a baby's cry within, I realy entered the red-brick shel on Caledonia Street not because of Heather or Tracey, or to protect future innocents from the likes of the boy, but
