Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Despite this, we were stil close. There was a love between us too. A sexless, stilborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood.

But this wasn't the thing that bridged the long absence that lay between our adult lives. What connected Ben and me was a secret. A whole inbred family of secrets.

Some of them so wilfuly forgotten they were unknown even to ourselves.

Only after I've hung up do I notice that, for the entire time I was on the phone with Randy, my hands were stil. I didn't even have to concentrate on it, play the increasingly unwinnable game of Mind Over Muscles.

Don't move .

It's like hypnosis. And like hypnosis, it usualy doesn't work.

Everything's okay. Just stay where you are. Relax. Be still .

Now, in the orange dust of city light that sneaks through the blinds, I watch as the tremor returns to my limbs. Delicate flutterings at first. Nervous and quick as a sparrow dunking its head in a puddle. An index finger that abruptly stiffens, points with alarm at the chair in the corner-—and then colapses, asleep. A thumb standing in a Fonzie salute before turtling back inside a fist.

You know what I need? A week in Bermuda .

These were the sort of thoughts I had when the twitches showed up.

I need to eat more whole grains.

I need a drink .

The hand-jerks and finger-flicks were just the normal flaws, the software glitches the body has to work through when first booting up after a certain age. I had just turned forty, after al. There was a price to be paid—a smal, concealable impediment to be endured for al the fun I'd had up until now. But it was nothing to worry about. It wasn't a real problem of the kind suffered by the wheelchaired souls you wish away from your line of sight in restaurants, your appetite spoiled.

But then, a few months ago, the acceptable irregularities of the body inched into something less acceptable. Something wrong.

I went to the doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who confirmed her diagnosis after a conversation with a third doctor. And then, once the doctors had that straightened out, al of them said there was next to nothing they could do, wished me wel and buggered off.

What I have, after al, is one of those inoperable, medicaly unsexy conditions. It has al the worst qualities of the non-fatal disease: chronic, progressive, cruely erosive of one's "quality of life." It can go fast or slow. What's certain is that it wil get worse. I could name it now but I'm not in the mood. I hate its falsely personal surnamed quality, the possessive aspect of the capital P. And I hate the way it doesn't kil you. Until it does.

I spoke to a therapist about it. Once.

She was nice— seemed nice, though this may have been only performance, an obligation included in her lawyer-like hourly fee— and was ready to see me "al the way through what's coming." But I couldn't go back. I just sat in her pleasant, fern-filed room and caught a whiff of the coconut exfoliant she'd used that morning to scrub at the liver spots on her arms and knew I would never return. She was the sort of woman in the sort of office giving off the sort of scent designed to provoke confessions. I could have trusted her. And trusting a stranger is against the rules.

(There was something else I didn't like. I didn't like how, when she asked if I had entertained any suicidal thoughts since the diagnosis and I, after a blubbery moment, admitted that I had, she offered nothing more than a businesslike smile and a tidy check mark in her notepad.) One useful suggestion came out of our meeting, nevertheless. For the purposes of recording my thoughts so that they might be figured out later, she recommended I keep a diary chronicling the progress of my disease. Not that she used that word. Instead, she referred to the unstoppable damage being done to me as an "experience,"

as if it were a trip to Paraguay or sex with twins. And it wasn't a journal of sickness I was to keep, but a "Life Diary," her affirmative nods meant to show that I wasn't dying. Yet. That was there too. Remember, Trevor: You're not quite dead yet.

"Your Life Diary is more than a document of events," she explained. "It can, for some of my clients, turn out to be your best friend."

But I already have best friends. And they don't live in my present life so much as in the past. So that's what I've ended up writing down. A recolection of the winter everything changed for us. A pocket-sized journal containing horrors that surprised even me as I returned to them. And then, after the pen refused to stand stil in my hand, it has become a story I tel into a Dictaphone. My voice. Sounding weaker than it does in my own ears, someone else's voice altogether.

I cal it my "Memory Diary."

Randy offered to cal Carl, but we both knew I would do it. Informing a friend that someone they've known al their life has died was more naturaly a Trevor kind of task. Randy would be the one to score dope for a bachelor party, or scratch his key along the side of a Porsche because he took it personaly, and hard, that his own odds of ever owning one were fading fast. But I was definitely better suited to be the bearer of bad tidings.

I try Carl at the last number I have for him, but the cracked voice that answers tels me he hasn't lived there for a while. When I ask to have Carl cal if he stops by, there is a pause of what might be silent acceptance before the line goes dead. Randy has a couple of earlier numbers, and I try those too, though Carl's former roommates don't seem to know where he is now either (and refuse to give me their own names when I ask).

"Not much more we can do," Randy says when I cal him back. "The guy is gone , Trev."

There it is again: Trev. A name not addressed to me in over twenty years, and then I get it twice within the last half-hour.

I had an idea, as soon as Randy told me Ben had died, that the past was about to spend an unwelcome visit in my present. Going from Trevor to Trev is something I don't like, but a nostalgic name change is going to be the least of it. Because if I'm getting on a train for Grimshaw in the morning, it's al coming back.

Heather.

The coach.

The boy.

The house.

The last of these most of al because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away.

For twenty-four years this had been Ben's job. Now it would be ours.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 2

There were four of us.

Ben, Carl, Randy and me. Grimshaw Guardians al. Hockey players on the high-school squad that traveled the county's gravel roads to do battle against the vilainous Cougars of Milverton, cheating Rams of Listowel, cowardly Sugar Kings of Elmira. We were just sixteen years old the one and only season we played with the seniors, but we were decent enough—and the school smal enough—to make the team. The only boys among just-turned men.

Randy:

A featherweight winger looping skilfuly—if a little pointlessly—in front of the other team's net. It always seemed that he liked to skate more than score. Sometimes, Randy would forget that there were others playing against him. Kids who wished to see him fail, to crumple to his knees and never get up again. It was usualy a look of puzzled disappointment, not pain, that I would read on his face when he limped to the bench folowing these punishments.

Why? his eyes would ask as he took his place at the end of the bench, rubbing the charley horse out of his thigh.