The Killing Circle (12 page)

It’s only when I’m on the street, trying to light a match with shaking hands, that I allow myself to consider what Len’s disclosures might mean. The first possibility is that he’s nuts. The other option is he’s telling the truth. At best, the Sandman story has got us all jumping at shadows. At worst, he’s real.

These worries are interrupted by the sense that I’m not alone. It’s Petra. Behind me, just around the corner, speaking with some urgency into a cellphone. She went out earlier with the other smokers apparently. A bit odd in itself, as she doesn’t smoke, and now she’s standing outside in the cold she often complains about. Thinking she’s alone.

And then the Lincoln pulls up. One among the city’s fleet of black Continentals that prowl the streets, chauffeuring bank tower barons and executive princes between their corner offices, restaurants, mistresses, the opera, and home again. This one, however, has come for Petra.

She snaps her cellphone shut and the back door is pushed open from within. A glimpse of black leather and capped driver behind the wheel. Petra seems to speak to whoever sits in the back seat for a moment. A reluctance that shows itself in her glance back at the doors to Grossman’s—then she’s spoken to from inside the car again. This time she gets in. The limo speeds away down a Chinatown side street with the assurance of a shark that has swallowed a smaller fish whole.

What stays with me about Petra’s departure is how she left without saying goodbye. This, and how she entered the Lincoln as though she had no choice.

The rest of the Kensington Circle’s final evening together goes on as one would expect. More drinks, more inevitable celebrity gossip, even some recommendations of good books we’d recently read.
One by one the circle dwindles as someone else announces they have to get up in the morning. I, of course, being recently liberated from professional obligation, stay on. Pitchers keep turning up that I manage single-handedly. I must admit that my farewells become so protracted that, by the end, I’m surprised to find Angela and I the last ones here.

“Looks like we’re closing the place,” I say, offering her what’s left in my pitcher. She passes her hand over her glass in refusal.

“I should be getting home.”

“Wait. I wanted to ask you something.”

This is out before I know what’s coming next. The sudden intimacy of sitting next to Angela has left me thrilled, tongue-tied.

“Your story. It’s most…impressive,” I go on. “I mean, I think it’s great. Really great.”

“That’s not a question.”

“I’m just stalling for time. My therapist told me that among the first warning signs for alcoholism is drinking alone. That was my last visit to
him
, naturally.”

“Can I ask you something, Patrick?”

“Fire away.”

“Why do you think you were the only one in the circle not to have a story?”

“Lack of imagination, I guess.”

“There’s always your own life.”

“I know I may
seem
rather fascinating. But, trust me, beneath this mysterious exterior, I’m Mr Boring.”

“Nobody’s boring. Not if they go deep enough.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“How’s that?”

“That journal of yours. Even if only a tenth of it’s true, you’re still miles ahead of me.”

“You make it sound like a competition.”

“Well it
is
, isn’t it?” I hear the squeak of selfpity in my voice that a cleared throat doesn’t make go away. But there’s no stopping me now. “Most great writers have had something
happen
to them. Something out of the ordinary. Not me.
Loss
, yes. Bad luck. But nothing
uncommon
. Which would be fine if you’re just trying to stay out of trouble. But if you want to be an artist? Not so good.”

“Everyone has a secret.”

“There are exceptions.”

“Not a surprise in you, not a single twist. Is that it?”

“That’s it. A hundred per cent What-you-seeis-what-you-get.”

It’s a staring contest. Angela not just meeting my eyes but measuring the depth of what lies behind them.

“I believe you,” she says finally, and drains the last inch of beer in her glass. “So here’s hoping something happens to you sometime.”

It’s late. The band is packing up, the bartender casting impatient glances our way. But there’s something in Angela’s veiled intensity that holds me here, the suggestion of unseen angles she almost dares me to guess at. It reminds me that there is so
much I need to know. Questions I hadn’t realized have been rolling around since the Kensington Circle’s first meeting. In the end, I manage to voice only one.

“The little girl. In your piece. Is she really you?”

The waitress takes our empty glasses away. Sprays vinegar on the table and wipes it clean. Angela rises to her feet.

“Have you ever had a dream where you’re falling?” she says. “Tumbling through space, the ground rushing up at you, but you can’t wake up?”

“Yes.”

“Is that falling person really you?”

Angela nearly smiles.

She slips her coat on and leaves. Walks by the window without turning to look in. From where I sit, she is visible only from the shoulders up, so that she passes against the backdrop of night like an apparition. A girl with her head down against the wind, someone at once plainly visible and hidden, so that after she’s gone, you wouldn’t be entirely certain if she was there at all.

MAY, 2007

Victoria Day Weekend

It’s the fourth interview of the last five hours and I’m not sure I’m making sense any more. A
New Yorker
staffer doing a 2,000-word profile. A documentary crew from Sweden.
USA Today
wanting a “sneak peek” on what my next book is about.

“I’m retired,” I insist, and the reporter smiles, as though to say
Hey, I get it. Us writers like to hold our cards close.

And now a kid from the
National Star
who I can tell is planning a snark attack from the second he sits across from me and refuses to meet my eyes. A boneless handshake, dewy sweat twinkling over lips and cheeks. I vaguely remember him—a copyeditor who was very touchy about having grown up in Swift Current.

“So,” he says, clicking the Record button on the dictaphone he has placed on the table. “You’ve been on the London
Times’
bestseller list since the pub date. Film deal with stars attached. And you’ve hit six weeks on the
New York Times
list. Was all this your plan from the beginning?”

“Plan?”

“To what extent were you aware of the market factors in advance?”

“I didn’t really think about—”

“It’s okay. There’s no need to be defensive. I believe there should always be a place for pulp fiction.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I mean, your book—it’s not
serious
or anything.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t know serious if it kissed me on the lips.”

The kid snorts. Flips his notebook closed.

“Do you really think you
deserve
all this? Do you think what you’ve done—”

He pauses here to toss my book on to the table like a turd he’s only now realized he’s been holding. “Do you actually think this
thing
is
literature
?”

His lips keep smacking, but no more words come. I watch as the visible effort of searching for the meanest thing he could say squeezes his forehead into red folds. As for me, I squint, making a show of searching through my memory. Click my fingers when it comes to me.

“Swift Current.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t get the accent at first. But I’m definitely certain now. Swift Current! Must have been such an exciting place to grow up. Exposed to all that
culture
.”

I’ll give the kid credit. After he storms toward the exit, but is forced to turn back to retrieve the still recording dictaphone that I hold out to him, he has the manners to say thank you.

The thing is, the kid was right to ask if I thought I deserved all this. Because the answer is no. And even as the publicist who’s been shuttling me around in a limo from interview to bookstore to TV chat show fills my glass and Sam’s with more sparkling water, I feel only the hollowness of the vampire, a man who has achieved immortality but at a monstrous cost.

“Are you nervous, Dad?” Sam asks.

More disgraced than anything
.
Disgraced and sorry
.

“A little,” I say.

“But this is your last reading, right?”

“That’s right.”

“
I’d
be nervous if
I
was you.”

The two of us look out at Toronto passing by, at once familiar and new. A North American Everycity. Or Anycity. But this one happens to be home. The limo gliding past the cluster of glass condos and over the railyards toward Harbourfront, where in just a few minutes I, Patrick Rush, am to
give a reading from my embarrassingly successful first novel.

It was four years ago that the Kensington Circle gathered for the last time. Then, I was the only aspiring fictioneer among us who was without a story to tell. I never attended another workshop or writing class again. My dream of birthing a novel had been snuffed out once and for all. And I was grateful. Liberated. To be unburdened of an impossible goal is a blessing, believe me, though it admittedly leaves a few scars behind.

Yet here I am. Travel to the foreign nations whose languages my words have been translated into. Dinners and drinks with famous novelists—no,
colleagues
—I have long read and admired from afar. Invitations to write opinion pieces in publications I had previously received only junk mail from. The kind of breakthrough one is obliged to describe as “surreal” in one’s
Vanity Fair
write-up, as I did.

And even today, on the occasion of my triumphant homecoming, when nothing I would have dreamed of has been denied me, I know that none of it is real.

“We’re almost there, Mr Rush,” the publicist says.

She looks concerned. More and more I’m lost in what she likely thinks are pensive moments of creativity, an artist’s mulling. Maybe I should tell her. Maybe I should come clean, here in the plush confessional of a limo. And maybe I would, if Sam
weren’t here. If I did, I’d tell her that my silences aren’t caused by the churnings of the imagination. The truth is I’m just trying to hold the shame at bay long enough to get through the next smile, the next thank you, the next signature on the title page of a book that bears my name but isn’t really mine.

Backstage I’m given bottled water, a bowl of fruit, a pee break. I’m told it’s a full house, asked if I would answer questions from the audience following my reading. People would love to know what it’s like to have a first book do what mine has done. I agree, I perfectly understand. I’d love to know the same thing.

Then I’m being guided down the hall into the darkened wings. Whispered voices tell me to watch my step. An opening appears in a velvet curtain and I step through, alone. There’s my place in the front row. The publicist is in the seat next to Sam’s, waving at me, as though there is some threat I might turn and walk out.

The director of the reading series appears at the lectern. He begins by thanking the corporate sponsors and moneyed donors who make such things possible. Then he starts on his introduction. A funny anecdote involving an exchange between himself and the featured author backstage just moments ago. I laugh along with everyone else, thinking how nice it would be if the charming guest he’s just described actually existed. If he could be me.

And then I’m into dangerous territory again. Wishing Tamara were here. A wallop of grief that chokes the breath out of my throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to present Toronto’s own Patrick Rush, reading from his sensational first novel,
The Sandman
!”

Applause. My hands raised against the spotlight in protest at too much love. Along with a private struggle to not be sick all over the front row.

Silence. Clear my throat. Adjust glasses.

Begin.

“There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost…”

A plain envelope bearing a Toronto postmark. Inside, a newspaper clipping. No note attached. A piece from the
Whitley Register
, the local weekly of a northern Ontario town. A pin prick along the rugged, unpeopled spine of Lake Superior.

The story dated Friday, August 24, 2003.

CRASH KILLS TWO ON TRANS-CANADA

Author and Companion in ’Puzzling’ Auto Accident

By Carl Luben, Staff Reporter

Whitley, Ont.—An automobile’s crash into a stone cliffside on the Trans-Canada twenty minutes outside Whitley has resulted in the death of both its passengers early Tuesday morning.

Conrad White, 69, and Angela Whitmore (age unknown) are believed to have died on impact between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. when their car left the highway.At press time, Ms Whitmore’s place of residence has yet to be determined, but it
is believed that Mr White’s current address was in Toronto. It is unknown what purpose had brought them to the Whitley area.

Mr White is the author of the novel
Jarvis and Wellesley,
a controversial work at the time of its publication in 1972. He had been living overseas for the last few decades, and only recently returned to reside in Canada.

So far, the police have yet to contact Angela Whitmore’s immediate family, as available identification did not contain next-of-kin information. Readers who are able to provide more information on Ms Whitmore’s relations are asked to contact the Ontario Provincial Police, Whitley Detachment.

Police are still at work determining the precise cause of the accident. “It’s a little puzzling,” commented Constable Dennis Peet at the scene. “There were no other cars involved, and no skid marks, so the chances they went off the road to avoid colliding with an oncoming vehicle or animal crossing seems unlikely.”

Investigators have estimated the car’s speed on impact in excess of 140 km/hr. This velocity, taken together with the accident occurring along a relatively straight stretch of highway, reduces the possibility of the driver, Ms Whitmore, falling asleep at the wheel.

“Sometimes, with incidents like these, all you know is that you’ll never know,” Constable Peet concluded.

My first thoughts after learning of the accident weren’t for the loss of the two lives involved, but who might have sent me the clipping. I was pretty sure it had to be someone in the circle, as my connection to Angela and Conrad White would have been known to few outside of its members. But, if one of them, why the anonymity? Perhaps whoever sent the envelope wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings and nothing more. Petra, maybe, who would feel obliged to share what she had learned, but didn’t want visitors showing up at her door. Or Evelyn, who would be too cool to write a dorky note. And then there was the odds-on favourite: Len. He’d have the time to scour whatever obscure database allowed him to learn of such things, and would appreciate how leaving his name off the envelope would lend the message a mysterious edginess.

Yet these practical explanations inevitably gave way—as all speculations about the circle eventually did—to more fanciful theories. Namely, to William. Once he entered my mind, the secondary questions posed by the article came rushing to the forefront. What were Conrad White and Angela doing travelling together through the bush outside Whitley in the first place? And why did Angela drive off the highway sixty kilometres over the speed limit? By factoring William into these queries, the notion that he was not only the sender of the clipping, but somehow the author of the crash itself, became a leading, if unlikely, hypothesis.

It was only sometime later, sitting on my own in the Crypt, that the fact Conrad and Angela were dead struck me with unexpected force. I lowered the three-month-old
Time
I’d been pretending to read to find my heart drumrolling against my ribs, an instant sweat collaring the back of my neck. Panic. Out-of-nowhere, suffocating. The sort of attack I’d succumbed to on more than a few occasions since Tamara died. But this time it was different. This time, my shock was at the loss of two people I hardly knew.

Hold on. That last bit’s not quite true.

It was the thought of Angela alone that stole all the air from the room. The girl with a story I would now never get to the end of.

After the night at Grossman’s Tavern, the murderer I’d come to think of as the Sandman stopped killing. The police never arrested anyone for the deaths of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the Vancouver woman eventually identified as Jane Whirter. Though a $50,000 reward was offered for information leading to a conviction and occasional police press releases were issued insisting they were working on the case with unprecedented diligence, the authorities were forced to admit they had no real leads, never mind suspects. It was proposed that the killer had moved on. A drifter with no links to family or friends who would probably continue his work somewhere else down the line.

For a time, though, I couldn’t stop feeling that the Pevencey, Ulrich and Whirter deaths were somehow connected to the circle. This is only a side effect of coincidence, of course. It’s the egocentric seduction of coincidence that personalizes larger tragedies, so that we feel what we were doing when the twin towers came down or when JFK was shot or when a serial killer butchered someone in the playground around the corner is, ultimately,
our
story.

I know all this, and yet even after the Sandman was declared to be retired I never believed he was finished. The dark shape I would sometimes catch in my peripheral vision could never simply be nothing, but was always the
something
of coincidence. The lingering trace of fate.

I spotted Ivan on Yonge Street once. Standing on the sidewalk and looking northward, then southward, as though uncertain which way to go. I crossed the street to say hello, and he had turned to look at me, blank-faced. Behind him, the lurid marquee of the Zanzibar strip club blinked and strobed.

“Ivan,” I said, touching my hand to his elbow. He looked at me like I was an undercover cop. One he’d been expecting to take him down for some time. “It’s Patrick.”

“Patrick.”

“From the circle. The
writing
circle?”

Ivan glanced over my shoulder. At the doors to the Zanzibar.

“Up for a drink?” he said.

We put the daylight behind us and took a table in the corner. The afternoon girls rehearsing their pole work on the stage. Adjusting their implants in the smoked mirrors. Smearing on the baby oil.

I did the talking. Asked after his writing (he’d been “sitting on” some ideas) and work (“Same tracks, same tunnels”). There was a long silence after that, during which I was waiting for Ivan to ask similar questions of me. But he didn’t. At first I assumed this was a symptom of strip-bar shyness. Yet now, looking back on it, I was wrong to think that. It was only the same awkwardness I’d felt the first time I spoke with Ivan, when he’d confessed to having been accused of hurting someone. His loneliness was stealing his voice from him. Driving the underground trains, staring at the walls in his basement flat, paying for a table dance. None of it required speech.

I excused myself to the men’s room, and to my discomfort, Ivan followed me. It was only standing side by side at the urinals that he spoke.

Usually, exchanges that take place with another fellow in such a context, dicks in hand, requires strict limits of the subject matter. The barmaid’s assets or the game on the big screen are safe bets. But not Ivan’s admission that he’s been afraid to get close to anyone since he was accused of killing his niece fourteen years ago.

“Her name was Pam. My sister’s first born,” he started. “Five years old. The father’d left the year
before. Scumbag. So my sister, Julie, she’s working days, and because I’m driving trains at night, she asks me to stay at her place sometimes to look after Pam. Happy to do it. The kind of kid I’d like to have if I ever had kids. Which I
won’t
. Anyways, I was over at Julie’s this one time and Pam asks if she can go down to the basement to get some toy of hers. I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought
That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive
. I mean, when you look after kids, you have these thoughts all the time. Yet this time I think
Well, that’s it, little Pam is gone
, and it stuck with me a couple seconds longer than usual. Long enough to hear her miss a step. I go to the top of the stairs and turn on the light. And there she is on the floor. Blood. Because she came down on something. A rake somebody’d left on the floor. One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth.
Pointing up
. But that’s not where it ends. Because Julie thinks I did it. The only family I got. So the police look into it, can’t make any conclusions, they’re suspicious but they’ve got to let it slide. But Julie hasn’t spoken to me since. I don’t even know where she lives any more. That’s how a life ends.
Two
lives. It just happens. Except I’m still here.”

He shakes. Zips. Leaves without washing his hands.

By the time I made it back to our table, Ivan is ordering another round. I told the waitress one was enough for me.

“I’ll see you around then,” I said to him. But Ivan’s eyes remained fixed on the slippery doings onstage.

A few strides on I turned to wave (a gesture I hoped would communicate my need to rush on to some other appointment) but he was still sitting there, looking not, I noticed, at the dancer, but at the ceiling, at nothing at all. His hands hanging cold and white at his sides.

Len, the only one I’d given my home number to, called once. Asked if I wanted to get together to “talk shop”, and for some reason I accepted. Perhaps I was lonelier than I thought.

I arranged to meet him at the Starbucks around the corner. As soon as the lumbering kid pushed his way through the doors I knew it was a mistake. Not that things went badly. We spoke of his efforts to give up on horror and “go legit” with his writing. He’d been sending his stories to university journals and magazines, and was heartened by “some pretty good rejection letters”.

It was over the same coffee that Len shared the gossip about Petra. Her ex-husband, Leonard Dunn, had been arrested for a whack of fraud schemes, blackmail, and extortion. More than this, reports had suggested that Mr Dunn had close connections to organized crime. Len and I joked about Petra’s Rosedale mansion standing on the foundations of laundered money, but I kept to myself my last glimpse of Petra outside
Grossman’s, stepping into a black Lincoln she seemed reluctant to enter.

That was about it. Neither of us mentioned William or Angela or any of the others (I had not yet learned of the car accident outside Whitley). Even the apparent end to the Sandman’s career was mentioned only in passing. It struck me that Len was as unsure of the police’s presumption that we would never hear of him again as I was.

Afterwards, standing outside, Len and I agreed to get together again sometime soon. I think both of us recognized this as a promise best unkept. And as it turned out, it was only some years later, and under circumstances that had nothing to do with fostering a tentative friendship, that we saw each other again.

In interviews, I have repeatedly stated that I only started writing
The Sandman
after my severance pay from the
National Star
had run out, but this is not exactly true. If writing is at least partly a task undertaken in the mind alone, well away from pens or keyboards, then I had started filling in the spaces in Angela’s story from the last night I saw her.

Even after the circle and the long, worried days that followed, even as the bank started sending its notices of arrears followed by their lawyers’ announcements of foreclosure, some part of my mind was occupied in teasing out possible pasts and futures for the orphan girl, Jacob, Edra, and the terrible man who does terrible things.

It wasn’t that these considerations were a comfort. It would be more accurate to say that I returned to Angela’s story because I needed it to survive. To be present for my son, I required a fictional tale of horror to visit as an alternative to the real horrors that kept coming at us. I had Sam—but I was
alone
. We’d already lost Tamara. Now here goes the house. Here go Daddy’s marbles. And I couldn’t tell Sam about any of it.

This is how I thought
The Sandman
could save me. It gave me somewhere to go, something that was mine.

But I was wrong. It was never mine. And it could never save me.

The Sandman had plans of its own. All it needed me for was to set it free.