Reachering a Mystery
I have spent the last week searching for something I know is always going to be lost. Not a physical object, but a memory. An idea of a face, warped and faded in time. The smell of an old living room, the one across the street from my childhood, where we used to play Mario Kart on his Super Nintendo. The memory of a voice on an answering machine, obsolete tech holding forgotten imprints of a life buried in a landfill, frozen in the ground in the Yukon of my youth. I have spent the last week searching for a ghost. I have spent the last week watching Reacher.
Reacher , a show 3 seasons deep on Amazon Prime starring an increasingly large Alan Ritchson, is based on a series of novels I have never read. Books about a drifter named Jack Reacher. A man with a very focused sense of right and wrong, no desire for a home, and a Kool-Aid Man approach to justice. Burst through everything in your way, only bring harm to those who deserve it, always stay hydrated. In the genre of “mysterious man solves crimes for inept cops”, Reacher thrives in the lineage of men who built the road he barrels along. Monk and the Mentalist walked so Reacher could run, leaving a perfect outline of his body to remind you that he has been here, and nothing will be the same in his wake.
Lysh and I started watching this show because we are tired, and exhaustion is always the best starting line for a sprint that will change your life forever. I have seen rumblings about Reacher online. Every now and then my YouTube algorithm recommends me a video titled Reacher DESTROYS arrogant teens and given no context I have never wanted anything less than this headline. But, in the death spiral of scrolling through shows we had no desire to watch, we fell into the loose plan of “should we just watch this show Reacher?” And only now, on the other side, I have never been more happy to see arrogance destroyed by a man’s giant, tender fists.
Alan Ritchson, Reacher, hasn’t always been so large. He was many men before this one, all different shades of his final form. A graffiti artist with a micro-penis on New Girl, the young sexy version of Scully on Brooklyn 99. He was some guy who looked like a lot of some guys in an era of guys who all look the same. It’s just that on Reacher he became someone more, A mountain of a man, and in my eyes the outline of a memory. In his face I saw lines that felt familiar, in his jaw, loose stubble and stern demeanour I thought of lost days. A rope tied back to the past, that if pulled and followed might return me to a place that is no longer real.
In Reacher’s first season Reacher finds himself framed for murder in Margrave, Georgia. Guilty, despite his own proclaimed innocence. When asked about his reasons for arrival in this fictional town he says he was hoping to learn more about legendary blues musician Blind Blake, an influential artist with his own mysterious past. A story with holes and clues and things to find. But there is something more, and as bodies pile up (including his brother Joe, the version of Reacher who has a first name), it becomes clear that the only man who can solve this is the name in bold in the title card. He has mysteries to solve, and answers to find. He has a brother to mourn who shares the shape of his life, a man built like a thousand mountains all taped together.
Reacher becomes a verb to be wielded in sentences in short order. When he fights the aforementioned 4 arrogant teens, we joke about how they’re going to get So Reachered. “He’s gonna Reacher that guy so hard” I mutter, my comfiest sweatpants protecting my spirit as Lysh and I burrow into the couch. I am burning out at a rapid clip, book promo, book tour, book writing, book everything. I have a book coming out, I am very proud of it, and I hope you will consider pre-ordering it. It is a lot of work to release a thing you have made at the best of times, and if you were to ask me about the best time to be a trans woman from Canada releasing a book through the University of Texas press, it would not be now. But here we are. I burrow to protect my heart, and to reknit the tired bones of a body desperate to survive. Bones I hope no-one would dare ever Reacher.
I am the second screen scourge you have read about, and often when we watch TV I am idly scrolling, or typing and deleting. I am reading emails, I am sending texts to my sister she will take 3 days to respond to because she is busy. I will check in on my mom, and she will tell me a story she forgets she has told me three times before. As Reacher bursts through walls and rescues an abused dog from a man in lineage of terrible men, I am looking for answers in the lines of him.
There are words I have from my dad, phrases he says that hint at his great intellect, love of language, and well-read youth. He will describe a building as being Kittywampus if it is on a diagonal to you, and there was a house on our street kittywampus to our own. I met my childhood best friend there, outside playing pickup basketball with his brother and sister one day in the late lingering summer. Days when the sun in the Yukon sky decided to settle, but only a little. Summer nights that were only ever dusk, and then day again, but never fully dark. We became friends quickly, we played Super Nintendo, read comics, listened to music. He was always bigger than me, a year older than I was but grew as if he was a tree in the oldest forest, a giant built of sturdy things. I, in his shadow, a shrub desperate for soil.
Reacher is big, and everyone talks about it. He is a man like a mountain, or an undercover Hulk. Shirts cling to him like wet paper towel to a brick wall in a wind storm. He is tall and wide and big, and moves like a man who knows it. Confident. Aware of his size. Aware of how and where it is useful. Never quick to act, and when he does it is often in anger. Anger I know in men, you’ll read this in the book (fun!) but this anger feels different. Anger with purpose. When fights happen, they are quick, because how could anyone last long against a man of Reacher’s size. Fights are only against people he deems worthy. But Reacher is more, he is smart, clever, observant. Thoughtful. A fan of the blues. He has angles, and corners, and softness. He is a big man who defies the expectations of size.
My friend, whose name I changed in the book to Tim, was big. Once, when we were walking home from school, we were stopped by a man who asked Tim what his plans were after high school. He looked up and down at the looming tree towering next to me and I might as well have been measured in apples in that moment, and asked if Tim wanted to play football. Tim replied he had never played football, and the man could only laugh and say it did not matter, not even a little. “A kid your size? You’re gonna destroy people.” I could feel that hit his heart and linger like a blade in him. You’ll destroy people.
Reacher is intentionally big, the character created by Lee Child for the series of novels in his name is a reflection of Child's own stature as a Large Child. A self insert of being so impossibly big, and what to do with the power afforded size in a body.
Tim was not inclined to destroy. Together, we hid away from the world. Played Mario Kart, Sim City and Chrono Trigger on his Super Nintendo for hours. He lent me comics, taught me how to use a computer. Introduced me to Mystery Science Theatre 3000. He was soft spoken, but kind and thoughtful. His size showed best when he laughed, like the world was shaking when it landed.
Lysh and I watched all of season 1 of Reacher, and then 2, and then 3. Everyone gets Reachered. We all are Reachered together in our own way. In each season he gets a bit bigger. He solves crimes in Georgia, and also breaks a lot of guys bones and whatnot. Men who always seem to deserve it. Men who feel like the world owes them something, and when it has not been delivered in time they last out at it. He works with his old army unit to take down Robert Patrick from Terminator 2. They’re in New York, but the kind of New York you can tell is just Toronto. Then working for Anthony Michael Hall in coastal Maine, which looks a lot like Newfoundland. Lysh and I recognize streets and neighbourhoods. Streets of my new home, new neighbours, strangers that live kittywampus to our house. While we watch, I look for answers on my phone.
My brain tells me that Reacher looks a lot like Tim, and it becomes a truth I can’t shake. At every angle I see him in his face and stature, and I try and find photos of him to show Lysh. It is hard to find a photo of a man who passed before the internet and formless clouds held onto all our memories or us. His Facebook account is long gone, and searching his name, or his name combined with Whitehorse leads to nothing. His face never appearing when I click on images in Google. I try his name combined with Fort McMurray. I try his name and the highway that took him away. But he is nowhere.
He never did go and play football, but out of school he eventually went and worked in the oil sands in Alberta in the height of the oil boom, and the highway that claimed the lives of so many claimed his as well. One morning in May he lost control of his truck and it flipped, end over end, killing all on board.
Reacher shouldn’t work as a comfort watch. He’s a Big Guy who largely fixes problems by snapping them in half, but there is a kind of cold tenderness to him that feels like a memory. I wonder how familiar he is to me because of who he reminds me of, or if it is the contrast in my memory of Big Guys who have hurt me in my youth. The comfort in seeing violent action only when warranted, never in swift anger, never punching down at someone who did not ask for an answer delivered in a fist. He’s charming and clever, a man who knows who he is and what he desires and never asks for much beyond that. There are women in his life that become dalliances with romance, but it never feels like a James Bond seducing and leaving women in his wake. The women in Reacher’s life choose him, but choose to not remain attached to a man wandering forever, and everyone is granted agency in his orbit. Maybe this is what makes me keep watching. Everyone who asks for something, or states their desire, receives it in their own way. Conversations are open, secrets rarely held, and everyone knows where they stand. There are rarely forgotten farewells.
The last time I saw Tim I was hungover, working in my dad’s glass shop on a Saturday. He came in to get a glass-enclosed lantern repaired for his father. Glass held in place by metal bars. I broke the solder, removed the broken pieces, cut perfect squares and sanded their edges and repaired it while he waited. We had, over the years of our adulthood, moved into different places. Tim left, moved to Alberta, and I had done the same, although was back home in the Yukon now to work with my dad. He laughed when I picked up a sheet of glass with my bare hands, carried it alone to the table and laid it out carefully, not a cut or a scratch on my weathered hands. “Remember that guy who wanted me to play football?” He had said, and we laughed about how he used to be so big in contrast to my tiny frame. “Looks like you caught up to me.” He remarked. I laughed and felt suddenly afraid of my own size, big and tall in all the ways I did not want to be. The repair was free, I said, and then we said goodbye the way you say goodbye to an old friend you are sure you will see again.
I’m not sure if Reacher looks like Tim, or Tim like Reacher, because I found no photos and eventually gave up. What matters, I suppose, is my memory of what Tim looked like, when he was still alive and when he was still kittywampus to me. What matters is that I remember him at all, that he is recalled in places he was never meant to be found.
