The Killing Circle
ANDREW PYPER

For Heidi

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologues

PART ONE The Kensington Circle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

PART TWO The Sandman

13

14

15

16

17

PART THREE Story Thieves

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

PART FOUR The Terrible Man Who Does Terrible Things

30

31

32

33

34

35

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

LABOUR DAY, 2007

I didn’t know my son could tell directions from the stars.

Corona Austrina. Lyra. Delphinus.

Sam leaves noseprints on the passenger window as we highway out of the city, reciting the constellations and whispering "South” and "East” and "North” with each turn I make.

"Where’d you learn that?"

He gives me the same look as when I came into his room a couple nights ago and found him slingshooting a platoon of plastic Marines, one by one, on to the neighbour’s roof. "I’m a terrorist,” he had answered when asked what he thought he was doing.

"Learn what?"

"The stars."

"Books."

"Which books?"

"Just books."

With Sam I know I’ll get no further than this. It’s because both of us are readers. Not by passion necessarily, but by character. Observers. Critics. Interpreters. Readers of books (most recently the later, furious Philip Roth for me, and Robinson Crusoe, told in bedtime snippets, for Sam). But also comics, travel brochures, bathroom-stall graffiti, owner’s manuals, cereal-box recipes. The material doesn’t matter. Reading is how we translate the world into a language we can at least partly understand.

"North,” Sam says, his nose returned to the glass.

The two of us peer at the slab of shadow at the top of the rise. A square monolith jutting out of an Ontario corn field like the last remnant of an ancient wall.

"Mus-tang Drive-in. End of Sea-son. La-bour Day dusk-’til-dawn,” Sam reads as we pass the sign.

He leans forward to study the neon cowboy on a bucking bronco that is the Mustang’s beacon, directing us in from the night roads.

"I’ve been here before,” he says.

"You remember that?"

"The sign. The man on the horse."

"You were so little then."

"What am I now?"

"Now? Now you’re a book-reading, star-gazing young man."

"No,” he says, grimacing. "I’m eight years old. And I just remember things."

We have come out here, widower and son, to watch the last movie show of the summer at one of the last drive-ins in the country. The last of the lasts.

Tamara—Sam’s mother, my wife—died eight months after Sam was born. Since then, I have found a parental usefulness in moviegoing. In a darkened cinema (or here, in a darkened corn field) Sam and I can find an intimacy without the dangers of talk. There’s something distinctly male about it. The closeness fathers and sons find in passive, mostly silent hobbies, like fly fishing or watching baseball games.

The guy at the admission booth pauses when he spots Sam in the passenger seat. Tonight’s main feature—a spooky Hollywood thriller currently raking in the last of the easy summer dollars—is R-rated. I hand the guy a bill that more than covers full price for two adults. He winks and waves us on, but offers no change.

The place is packed. The best spot left is in front of the concession stand, well off to the side. Sam wanted to try further back, but I know that’s where the high school kids go. Pot and smuggled rye, teenaged boys and girls and all the things they get away with. It’s not concern for Sam’s moral education, but the nostalgic envy that being so close to these crimes would cause in me that makes me stay up here with the rest of the respectables.

"It’s starting!” Sam announces as the floodlights cut out.

It leaves me to pull our chairs and mothballed sleeping bag out of the trunk with only the light of the commercials to see by. I slide along the side of the car keeping my eye on the screen. This, for me, is the best part of the whole drive-in experience: the vintage ad for junk food. A dancing hot dog, leering milkshake, a choir of french fries. And there’s something about the tap-dancing onion ring that always breaks my heart.

I set up Sam’s chair, then my own. Snuggle up next to each other under the sleeping bag.

"En-joy Our Fea-ture Pres-en-ta-tion!” Sam says, reading the screen.

The parked rows await the sky’s final turn from purple to black. A single honk to our right, a minivan rollicking with sugar-freaked little leaguers, brings muffled laughter from the vehicles around us. But there’s something nervous in these sounds—the bleat of alarm, the reply of hollow mirth. To make this impression go away I try at a laugh of my own. A dad laugh. And once it’s out, I inhale the familiar mix of gas fumes, popcorn, burnt hamburger. Along with something else. Something like fear. Faint as the perfume a previous guest leaves on a motel pillow.

The movie starts. A scene of introductory horror: a dark figure pursuing its prey through a field at night. Flashes of desperate movement, swinging arms and boots and jangling keys on a belt. Jump edits between the killer’s certain stride and the other’s panicked run, fall, then sobbing, crab crawl forward. A brief shot of hands dripping with what may be oil, or wet earth, or blood. A close-up scream.

We don’t know who this person is, this certain victim, but we recognize the context of hopeless struggle. It is the dream all of us have had, the one in which our legs refuse to carry us, the ground softened into black syrup, taking us down. And behind us is death. Faceless and sure, suffering no such handicaps.

We’re so close to the screen that to look at anything else forces me to turn all the way around in my chair. An audience of eyes. Looking back at me through bug-spattered windshields.

I sit forward again and tilt my head back. The autumn dome of night, endless and cold, lets me breathe. For a moment. Then even the stars crowd down.

"Dad?"

Sam has turned at all my fidgeting. I force myself to look straight ahead at the actors on the screen. Enormous, inescapable. Their words coming from every direction, as if spoken from within me. Soon the film becomes not just any dream, but a particular one I’ve had a thousand times.

I’m standing before I know I’m out of my chair. The sleeping bag spilling off my knees.

Sam looks up at me. Now, his face half in shadow, I can see his mother in him. It’s what gives him his sweetness, his open vulnerability. Seeing her in his features brings the strange feeling of missing someone who is still here.

"You want anything?” I ask. "Tater tots?"

Sam nods. And when I reach my hand out to him, he takes it.

We shuffle toward the source of the projector’s light. The blue beam and the glimpsed orange of matches lighting cigarettes in back seats—along with the dull glow of the quarter moon—the only illumination to see by. And the same dialogue broadcast from the speakers hooked to every car window.

It’s him.

What are you talking about?

The thing that lives under your bed. The eyes in your closet at night, watching you. The dark. Whatever frightens you the most…

Somebody opens the door to the concession stand and a cone of light plays over our feet. Sam runs to stay within it. Pretending that if he touches the unlit gravel before he gets inside he’ll be sucked into another dimension.

Which we are anyway. The Mustang’s snack bar belongs to neither Sam’s generation nor mine, but to whatever time it was when men wore ties to buy cheeseburgers. Just look at the posters on the walls: beaming sixties families stepping from their fin-tailed Fords to purchase treats for adorably ravenous Beaver Cleaver kids. It’s almost enough to put you off the food.

But not quite.

In fact, we need a tray. On to which I pile cardboard boats of taters, foil-wrapped dogs, rings so greasy you can see through the paper plate they sit on, as well as a jumbo soda, two straws.

But before we can leave, we need to pay. The girl at the till is speaking into the air. "No way," she says, hang-jawed. "No way.” And then I notice the cord coming out of her ear. The little mouthpiece thingy under her chin. "For real?"

"I’ll meet you where we’re sitting,” Sam says, grabbing a hot dog off the tray.

"Just watch for cars."

"They’re parked, Dad."

He gives me a pitying smile before running out the door.

Outside, after I’ve paid, the sudden dark leaves me blind. A tater tot leaps off the tray and squashes under my shoe. Where the hell did I park anyway? The movie tells me. The angle I’d been watching it from. Up a bit more, off to the side.

And there it is. My ancient Toyota. A car I should really think about replacing but can’t yet. It’s the lipstick and eyeliner Tamara left in the glove box. Every time I open it to grab my ownership certificate they spill out into my hand and she is with me. Sitting in the passenger seat, pulling down the visor mirror for a last-minute smearing. When we’d arrive at wherever we were headed to, she would turn to me and ask, "Do I look okay?" Every time I said yes, it was true.

I keep my eyes on the Toyota’s outline and stumble toward it, right next to the van of little leaguers. Quiet now. Their attention held by the movie’s suspense.

Why is he doing this? Why not just kill us when he had the chance?

The tray falls from my hands.

It’s not the movie. It’s what’s in front of my car that does it.

There’s our fold-out chairs. The sleeping bag.

Except the sleeping bag is lying on the ground. And both chairs are empty.

A couple of the minivan kids are sniggering at me, pointing at the unsheathed hot dog on the ground, the dixie cups of extra ketchup splashed gore over my pants. I look their way. And whatever shows on my face makes them slide the door shut.

I drift away from the Toyota, scuffing through the aisles between the cars. Slow, deliberate scans in every direction. Poking my head into the vehicles and noting the hundreds of North American lives in recreational progress—the dope-smoking kids, gluttonous adults, the couples slumped under comforters in the backs of pick-up trucks.

But no Sam.

For the first time the idea of calling the police comes to mind. Yet it remains only an idea. Sam’s been gone three minutes at most. He has to be here. What might be happening is not happening. It can’t be. It can’t.

"Sam!"

My son’s name comes to me from someone else. An alarmed third party.

"Sam!"

I start to run. As fast as I can at first. Then, realizing I won’t make it the length of a single row, slow it to a jog. A pushing-forty man trotting his way through the parked cars in the middle of the main feature, rubbernecking this way and that. It’s the sort of thing people notice. A teenager in his dad’s convertible wolf whistles as I go by, and the girls bunched into the front with him offer an ironic wave. Without thinking, I wave back.

When I finish zigzagging all the rows, I start around the perimeter of the lot. Peering into the shadowed fields. Each line of corn another chance of seeing Sam standing there, hiding, waiting for me to find him. This anticipated image of him becomes so particular that I actually spot him a couple of times. But when I stop for a second look, he’s gone.

I make it to the back of the lot where the light from the screen is dimmest, everything bathed in a deep-sea glow. The corn rows seem wider here, and darker. The roof of a distant farmhouse the only interruption on the horizon. No lights in its windows. I try to blink it into better focus, but my eyes are blurred by tears I hadn’t felt coming.

I thought you were a ghost.

I was a ghost. But ghosts don’t get to do things. It’s much better being the monster. The kind you don’t expect is a monster until it’s too late.

I bend over and put my hands on my knees. Sucking air. A pause that lets the panic in. The horrific imaginings. Who he’s with. What they will do. Are doing. How he will never come back.

I saw someone. Looking in the window.

Did you see who it was?

A man. A shadow.

I have already started to run back toward the concession stand when I see it.

A figure disappearing into the stands of corn. As tall as me, if not taller. There. And then not there.

I try to count the rows between where I was and where the figure entered the field. Seven? Eight? No more than ten. When I’ve passed nine I cut right and start in.

The fibrous leaves thrash against my face, the stalks cracking as I punch my way past. It looked like there was more room in the rows from outside, but now that I’m within them there’s not near enough space for a man my size to move without being grabbed at, tripped, cut. Not so much running as swallowed by a constricting throat.

How is whoever I saw going any faster than me? The question makes me stop. I lie down flat and peer through the stalks. Down here, the only light is a grey, celestial dusting. With my open mouth pressed against the earth, it’s as though the moonlight has assumed a taste. The mineral grit of steel shavings.

I teach my body to be still.

The thought occurs to me that I have gone mad between the time I left Sam and now. Sudden-onset insanity. It would explain crashing through a corn field at night. Chasing something that likely wasn’t there in the first place.

And then it’s there.

A pair of boots rushing toward the far end of the field. A hundred feet ahead and a couple rows to the left.

I scramble to my feet. Moaning at my locked knees, the muscles burning in my hips. I use my hands to pull me ahead. Ripping out ears of corn and tossing them to thud like another’s steps behind me.

Every few strides offers a peek at the farmhouse in the distance, and I cut sideways to stay in line with it. As if I know this is where the figure is going. As if I have a plan.

I lift my head again, scanning for the gabled roof, and catch the figure instead. Rushing rightto-left across the gap. A glimpse of motion through the silk-topped ears. Darker than the night stretched tight over the corn.

I launch forward. Blinking my eyes clear to catch another sight of it down the rows. But what was it? Neither identifiably man nor woman, no notable clothing, no hat, no visible hair. No face. A scarecrow hopped off its post.

Now when I shout I’m no longer addressing Sam but whatever it is that’s out here with me.

"Bring him back! Bring him back!"

There’s no threat in it. No promise of vengeance. It’s little more than a father’s winded gasps shaped into words.

All at once I break through into the farmhouse’s yard. The grass grown high around a rusted swing set. Paint chipping on the shutters. Smashed-out windows.

I go around the back of the place. No car parked anywhere. No sign that anyone has come or gone since whatever bad news ushered out the people who lived here last.

I stop for a second to think of what to do next. That’s when my legs give out. I fall to my knees as though moved by a sudden need to pray. Over the pounding of my heart I listen for retreating footfall. Not even the movie voices can reach me. The only sound the electric buzz of crickets.

And the only thing to see is the Mustang’s screen. An ocean of cornstalks away, but still clearly visible. A silent performance of terror so much more fluid and believable than my own.

It’s as I watch that it comes to me. A truth I could never prove to anyone, but no less certain for that.

I know who has done this. Who has taken my son. I know its name.

I kneel in the high grass of the abandoned farmyard, staring at its face. Forty feet high and towering over the harvest fields, lips moving in silence, directly addressing the night like a god. A monstrous enlargement made of light on a whitewashed screen.

The part all actors say is the best to play. The villain.

PART ONE The Kensington Circle

1

VALENTINE’S DAY, 2003

"Love cards!"

This is Sam, my four-year-old son. Running into my room to jump on the bed and rain crayoned Valentines over my face.

"It’s Love Day,” I confirm. Lift his T-shirt to deliver fart kisses to his belly.

"Who’s your Valentine, Daddy?"

"I suppose that would have to be Mommy."

"But she’s not here."

"That doesn’t matter. You can choose anyone you like."

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

Sam thinks on this. His fingers folding and unfolding a card. The sparkles stirred around in the still wet glue.

"So is Emmie your Valentine?” I ask him. Emmie being our regular nanny. "Maybe someone at daycare?"

And then he surprises me. He often does.

"No,” he says, offering me his paper heart. "It’s you."

Days like these, the unavoidable calendar celebrations—Christmas, New Year’s, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day—are worse than others. They remind me how lonely I am. And how, over time, this loneliness has burrowed deeper, down into tissue and bone. A disease lurking in remission.

But lately, something has changed. An emerging emptiness. The full, vacant weight of loss. I thought that I’d been grieving over the past three and a half years. But maybe I’m only just now coming out of the shock. Maybe the real grief has yet to arrive.

Sam is everything.

This one rule still helps. But in the months immediately following Tamara’s death, it was more than just a focus. It allowed me to survive. No oneway wants, no me. Not permitting myself to dream had got me halfway to not feeling—easier conditions to manage than feeling and dreaming too much.

But maybe this has been a mistake. Maybe I was wrong to believe you could get along without something of your own. Eventually, if living requires being nothing, then you’re not even living any more.

Tamara’s last days is something I’m not going to get into. I will confess to all manner of poor behaviour and bad judgment and broken laws. And I am prepared to explore the nature of memory (as the cover bumpf on those precious, gazingout-to-sea sort of novels puts it) even when it causes the brightest flashes of regret. But I’m not going to tell you what it was like to watch my wife’s pain. To watch her die.

I will say this, however: losing her opened my eyes. To the thousands of hours spent gnawing on soured ambitions, petty office grievances, the seemingly outrageous everyday injustices. To all the wasted opportunities to not think, but do. Chances to change. To see that I could change.

I had just turned thirty-one when Tamara died. Not even half a life. But when she left, a cruel light was cast on how complete this life could have been. How complete it was, had I only seen it that way.

We bought the house on Euclid just off Queen as newlyweds, before the arrival of the yoga outfitters, the hundred-dollar-haircut salons, the erotic boutiques. Then, the only yoga being practiced was by the drunks folded up in store doorways, and the only erotica was a half-hour with one of the ladies pacing in heels at the corner. I could barely manage the downpayment then, and can’t afford to sell now. Not if I want to live anywhere near downtown.

Which I do. If for no other reason than I like to walk to work. Despite the comforts offered by all the new money washing in, Queen Street West still offers plenty of drama for the pedestrian. Punks cheering on a pair of snarling mastiffs outside the Big Bop. A chorus of self-talkers off their meds. The guy who follows me for a block every morning, asking me to buy him a prosciutto sandwich (he’s very specific about this) and inexplicably calling me Steve-o. Not to mention the ambulances hauling off whoever missed the last bed in the shelter the night before.

It is a time in the city’s history when everyone is pointing out the ways that Toronto is changing. More construction, more new arrivals, more ways to make it and spend it. And more to fear. The stories of random violence, home invasions, drivebys, motiveless attacks. But it’s not just that. It’s not the threat that has always come from the them of our imaginations, but from potentially anyone, even ourselves.

There’s a tension in the streets now, the aggression that comes with insatiable desires. Because there is more on offer than there was before, there is more to want. This kind of change, happening as it’s happening here, fast and unmanageable, makes people see others in ways they hadn’t before. As a market. A demographic. Points of access.

What all of us share is our wishing for more. But wishing has a dark side. It can turn those who were once merely strangers into the competition.

I follow Queen all the way to Spadina, then lakeward to the offices of the National Star—"The New York Times of Toronto” as one especially illconceived ad campaign called it. This is where I started out. An angry young man with no real grounds to be angry, quickly ascending from copyeditor to the paper’s youngest ever in-house book critic. My unforgiving standards buttressed by the conviction that one day all those tall poppies I had scythed to earth would see I had a right to my declarations. One day, I would produce a book of my own.

From as far back as I can remember I felt I had something within me that would find its way out. This was likely the result of a solitary, only-child childhood, throughout which books were often my only friends. Weekends spent avoiding the outof-doors, curled up like a cat on the rug’s sunny squares, ripping into Greene, Leonard, Christie, mulling over the out-of-reach James, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky. Wondering how they did it. The making of worlds.

What was never in doubt was that I would be among them when I grew up. Not their equal necessarily, but participating in the same noble activity. I accepted that I might not be good at it. At first. But I could sense the hard work that had gone into my favourite works, and was prepared to devote myself to slow improvement.

Looking back on it, I must have seen writing as a sort of religious practice. A total commitment to craft and honest disclosure no less holy for its godlessness. There was the promise of salvation, after all. The possibility of creating a story that spoke for me, would be better than me. More compelling, more mysterious, more wise. I suppose, when they were still alive, I believed that writing a book would somehow keep my parents with me. And after they were gone, I simply changed my articles of faith: If I wrote a good enough book, it might bring them back.

But no book came.

Instead, after university, I started typing my way up the ladder of small-town weeklies and specialty magazine freelancing ("The New Dog, The New You” for Puppy Love! and "Carrots vs Beets?: The Root of the Problem” for Sustenance Gardening being two prizewinners in their fields). After I got married and was hired at the National Star, I thought about my book less, and about a flesh-and-blood future more. Children. Travel. But the niggling idea that I was thwarting my destiny with domestic comforts couldn’t be wholly escaped. In some private corner of my soul, I was still waiting. For the opening line. For a way in.

But no line came.

Two things happened next, oddly related, and at the same time: Tamara became pregnant, and I cancelled my Sunday-only subscription to The New York Times. The articulated reason for the latter decision was that I barely found the time to peel apart its many sections and supplements, never mind read any of them. And now, with a baby on the way—it was a waste.

The truth had nothing to do with saving time or trees, however. It had to do with my coming to the point where I could no longer open the Book Review of the Sunday Times without causing physical pain to myself. The publishers. The authors’ names. The titles. All belonging to books that weren’t mine.

It hurt. Not emotionally, not a mere spanking of the ego. It hurt in the same way kidney stones or a soccer cleat to the balls hurts—instantly, indescribably, critically. The reviews themselves rarely mattered. In fact, I usually couldn’t finish reading the remotely positive ones. As for the negative ones, they too often proved to be insufficient salves to my suffering. Even the snarkiest vandalism, the baldest runs at career enders, only acted as reminders that their victims had produced something worth pissing on. Oh, to awaken on a rainy Sunday and refuse to get out of bed on account of being savaged in the Times! What a sweet agony that would be, compared to the slow haemorrhaging in No Man’s Land it was to merely imagine creating words worthy of Newspaper of Record contempt.

Then Sam arrived, and the bad wanting went away.

I was in love—with Tamara, with my son, even with the world, which I hadn’t really liked all that much before. I stopped trying to write. I was too busy being happy.

Eight months later Tamara was gone.

Sam was a baby. Too young to remember his mother, which left me to do all the remembering for the both of us.

It wasn’t long after this that I started believing all over again. Waiting for a way to tell the one true story that might bring back the dead.

The demotions started some time after my return from bereavement leave. The dawning millennium, we were told, was ushering in a new breed of "user friendly” newspaper, one that could compete with the looming threats of the internet and cable news channels and widespread functional illiteracy. Readers had grown impatient. Words in too great a number only squandered their time. In response, the Arts section became the Entertainment section. Features were shrunk to make room for celebrity "news” and photos of movie stars walking, sunglassed, with a barbell-sized latte. Memos were circulated directing us to fashion our stories so as to no longer appeal to adults seeking information and analysis, but to adolescents with attention-deficit disorder.

Let’s just say they weren’t good days for the Books section.

Not that the ruin of my journalistic career happened overnight. I had slipped down the rungs of respectability one at a time, from literary columnist (gleeful, sarcastic trashings of almost everything) to entertainment writer-at-large (starlet profiles, tallying up the weekend box-office results), a couple months as "junior obituarist" (the "senior obituarist” being five years younger than me), before the inarguable end of the line, the universal newspaper grease-trap: TV critic. I had tried to talk my section editor into at least putting "Television Feature Writer” under my by-line, but instead, when I opened the Tube News! supplement the following weekend, I found that I didn’t even have a name any more, and that I was now, simply, "The Couch Potato".

Which is accurate enough. These past months of professional withering have found me spending more of my time on various recliners and mattresses: my bed, in which I linger later and later every morning, the chair in my therapist’s office, which I leave shining with sweat, as well as the sofa in the basement, where I fast forward through the lobotomized sitcom pilots and crime dramas and reality shows that, put together, act on me as a kind of stupefying drug, the bye-bye pills they slip under the tongues of asylum inmates.

No shame in any of this, of course. Or no more shame than most of the things we do for money, the paid positions for Whale Saver or African Well Digger or Global Warming Activist being so lamentably few.

The problem is that, almost unnoticeably, the same notion from my childhood has returned to me like a lunatic whisper in my ear. A black magic spell. A devil’s promise.

Maybe, if I could only put the right words in the right order, I would be saved. Maybe I could turn longing into art.

There is something unavoidably embittered in the long-exposure critic. It’s because, at its heart, the practice is a daily reminder of one’s secondary status. None start out wanting to review books, but to write them. To propose otherwise would be like trying to convince someone that as a child you dreamed of weighing jockeys instead of riding racehorses.

If you require proof, just look at the half-dozen souls keyboard clacking and middle-distance staring in the cubicles around mine. Together, we pick through the flotsam that the waves of pop culture wash in every morning. The CDs, DVDs, game software, movies, mags. Even the book desk. My former domain. Now responsible for assembling a single, ignored page on Saturday. But still a better place than where they’ve put me.

Here we are. Off in the corner, no window within stapler-throwing distance. A desk that my colleagues call the Porn Palace, on account of the teetering stacks of black video cassettes on every surface. And it is porn. It’s TV. An addictively shameful pleasure we all seem to want more of.

There’s a box of new arrivals on my chair. I’m pulling out the first offering—a reality show where Killing Circle (A-Format)-p1.qxp 12/19/08 4:53 PM Page 24 I’m promised contestants in bikinis eating live spiders—when Tim Earheart, one of the paper’s investigative reporters, claps me on the back. You’d never know it, but Tim is my best friend here. It occurs to me now with a blunt surprise that he may be my best friend anywhere.

"You got any Girls Gone Wild?” he says, rummaging through the tapes.

"Thought you were more of a documentary guy."

"Wife’s away this week. Actually, she might not be coming back."

"Janice left you?"

"She found out that my source on last week’s Hell’s Angels story was one of the bikers’ old ladies,” Tim says with a sad smile. "Let’s just say I went more undercover with her than Janice was comfortable with."

If it’s true that his most recent wife has taken off, this will be marriage number three down the tubes for Tim. He turns thirty-six next week.

"Sorry to hear that,” I say, but he’s already waving off my sympathy.

"Drinks tonight?” he says, stepping away to re-join the hectic relevance of the news department. "Wait. It’s Valentine’s, isn’t it? You got a date?"

"I don’t date, Tim. I don’t anything."

"It’s been a while."

"Not so long."

"Some would say four years is enough to—"

"Three."

"Three years then. Eventually you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re still here, even if Tamara isn’t."

"Trust me. I face that every day."

Tim nods. He’s been to war zones. He knows a casualty when he sees one.

"Can I ask you something?” he says. "You think it’s too late to ask out that new temp they’ve got down in Human Resources?"

It happened again on the walk home.

More and more these days, I’ll be in the middle of something—dashing to the corner store, pounding out the day’s word count at my desk, lining up for coffee—and the tears will come. So quiet and without warning I hardly notice.

And then today, walking along the sidewalk when I would have said "Nothing” if asked what was on my mind, it started again. Wet streaks freezing on my cheeks.

A rhyme pops into my head. An unconsoling sing-song that carries me home.

I’m not well

I’m not well

But who in the hell

Am I going to tell?

By the time I get through the door, Sam’s already finished his dinner and Emmie, the nanny, is drying him from his bath. Another irretrievable moment missed. I like bathtime with Sam more than any other part of the day. A little music. Epic sea battles waged with rubber ducks and old toothbrushes. All of it leading to bed. To stories.

"I’ll take him,” I tell Emmie, and she opens the towel she has wrapped around him. He rushes out of his cocoon and into my arms. A soapy angel.

I get him into pajamas. Open the book we’re working through. But before I start reading, he studies me for a moment. Places a palm against my forehead.

"What do you think, doc? Am I going to make it?"

"You’ll live,” he says.

"But it’s serious?"

"I’m not sure. Is it?"

"Nothing I can’t handle."

"I don’t want you to be sad."

"I miss your mom sometimes. That’s all. It’s normal."

"Normal."

"More or less."

Sam purses his lips. He’s not sure whether to buy my pinched grin or not. The thing is, he needs me to be okay. And for him, I’ll stay as okay as I can.

He yawns. Squirms in close, his head against my throat so that he can feel the vibrations of the words to come. Jabs his finger at the pages I hold open.

"Where were we?"

Once Sam is asleep it’s down to the basement office. What Tamara used to call the Crypt. Which is a little too accurate to be wholly amusing. A low-ceilinged room that was a winemaking cellar for the previous owner. Even now, I can catch whiffs of fermented grapes. It makes me think of feet.

This is where I watch the tapes. A notebook on my knee, remote control in my hand.

I’m just three minutes into the spider-eating bikini babes when I hit Pause. Dig out of my pocket the ad I clipped from today’s classifieds.

Tell the Story of Your Life

Open your soul. Bring your buried words to the page in this intensive workshop with Conrad White, published poet and novelist. Truly write. Write the truth.

I’ve never heard of Conrad White. Never attended a writers’ workshop, circle, night class or retreat. It’s been years since I’ve tried to write anything other than what I am contractually obliged to. But something about this day—about the taste of the air in this very room—has signalled that something is coming my way. Has already come.

I call the number at the bottom of the ad. When a voice at the other end asks me what he can do for me, I answer without hesitation.

"I want to write a book,” I say.

2

People read less today than they used to. You’ve seen the studies, you’ve got teenagers, you’ve been to the mall—you know this already. But here’s something you may not know:

The less people read, the more they want to write.

Creative writing workshops—within universities, libraries, night schools, mental hospitals, prisons—are the true growth industry in the inkbased sector. Not to mention the ad hoc circles of nervy aspirants, passing round their photocopied bundles. Each member claiming to seek feedback but secretly praying for a collective declaration of brilliance.

And now I’m one of them.

The address the voice on the phone gave me is in Kensington Market. Meetings to be held every Tuesday night for the next five Tuesdays. I was told I was the last to join the group. That is, I called it a group, and the voice corrected me.

"I prefer to think of it as a circle."

"Right. And how many will there be? In the circle?"

"Just seven. Any more, and I fear our focus may be lost."

After I hung up I realized that Conrad White—if that’s who answered the phone—never asked for my name. I also realized I’d forgotten to find out if I should bring anything along to the first meeting—a pen, notebook, cash for the donation plate. But when I dialled the number again, it rang ten times without anyone answering. I suppose that now the circle was complete, Mr White decided there was no point in picking up.

The next Tuesday, I walk up Spadina after work with my scarf turbaned around my ears. Despite the cold, most of the Chinatown grocers still have produce tables outside their doors. Frozen bok choy, starfruit, lemongrass. A dry powdering of snow over everything. At Dundas, nightfall arrives all at once. The giant screen atop the Dragon Mall casting a blue glow of advertising over the street.

I carry on another couple blocks north, past NO MSG noodle places and whole roast pigs hanging in butchers’ windows, their mouths gaping in surprise. Then dash across the four lanes of traffic into the narrow lanes of the market.

Kensington means different things to different people, but for me, a walk through its streets always gives rise to the same question: How long can it last? Already some of the buildings are being turned into "live/work loft alternatives", promising a new "urban lifestyle” for people who are seeking "The Kind of Excitement that Comes with Walking on the Edge". I take out the tiny dictaphone recorder I always carry around (to capture any especially biting phrases for the next day’s review) and read these words directly off the hoardings around the latest condo project. Some shoppers have also stopped to read the same come-hithers. But when they see me whispering into a tape recorder, they walk on. Another outpatient to be politely avoided.

On a bit, the old Portuguese fishmongers are lifting the slabs of cod and octopus off their beds of ice and waltzing them to the walk-ins for the night. The street still busy with safety-pinned punks and insane, year-round bicyclists, all dinnertime bargain hunting. Or simply congregating in one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.

And then it strikes me, with an unsettling shiver, that some of the people bustling around me may be here for the same reason I am.

Some of them may be writers.

The address for the meeting brings me to a door next to The Fukhouse, a bar that, as far as I can see through the grimy window, has every wall, table surface, and both floor and ceiling painted in black gloss. Above the sign, on the second floor, stout candles flicker in the windows. If I wrote the number down right, it’s up there that the Kensington Circle is to gather.

"Anarchists,” a voice says behind me.

I turn to find a young woman in an oversized leather biker jacket. Her shoulders armoured with silver spikes. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold, though below the jacket all she wears is a threadbare girls’ school skirt and fishnets. And a raven tattooed over the back of her wrist.

"I’m sorry?"

"Just thought I’d warn you,” she says, gesturing toward The Fukhouse’s door. "That’s kind of an anarchist clubhouse. And anarchists often don’t take well to those not part of the revolution."

"I can imagine."

"Not that it matters. You’re here for the circle. Am I right?"

"How’d you guess?"

"You look nervous."

"I am nervous."

She squints into my face through the looping snow. I have the same feeling I get when the customs officer at the border slides my passport through the computer and I have to wait to see if I’ll be allowed through or placed under arrest.

"Evelyn,” she says finally.

"Patrick Rush. A pleasure to meet you."

"Is it?"

And before I can tell if she’s joking or not, she opens the door and starts up the stairs.

The room is so dark I can only stand at the entrance, hands feeling for walls, a light switch, the leather jacket girl. All I can see for sure are the candles oozing wax over the two distant window sills, the snow outside falling fast as TV static. Though I followed Evelyn up the stairs, she now seems to have disappeared into the void that yawns between the doorway and the windows.

"Glad you could come."

A male voice. I spin around, startled. This sudden movement, and my boots slipping on the puddle of snowmelt over the floorboards, makes me lose my footing. Someone releases a coquettish gasp. In the next instant I realize it was me.

"We’re over here,” the voice says.

The dark figure of a stooped man passes in front of me, drifting toward what I now can see is a circle of chairs in the centre of the room. Boots kicked off, I slide over to one of the two unoccupied places.

"We’re just waiting for one more,” the voice says, and I recognize it only now as the same as the one on the phone. Conrad White. Never-heard-of author and poet, now taking his seat across from mine. The sound of his lullabye voice also brings back the feeling I got when I first spoke my desire to write a book. There had been a pause, as though he was measuring the depth of my yearning. When he spoke again, I wrote down the details he gave me without really hearing them. His words seemed to come from somewhere else, a different time altogether.

All of us wait for the voice to begin again. If there really are six of us sitting here, we are still as dolls. Only the faint tide of our breaths to be heard, taking in the vapours of red wine and incense from the rug beneath our chair legs.

"Ah. Here he is."

Conrad White rises to welcome the last member of the circle to arrive. I don’t turn to see who it is at first. But as a second pair of feet step deliberately forward (and with boots left on), I sense some of the others shrink in their seats around me. Then I see why.

A sloped-shouldered giant steps forward from out of the darkness. At first he appears headless—there’s a ridiculous second when I glance down to his hands to see if he carries his own skull—but it is only the full beard of black wires that obscures most of his face. Not his eyes though. The whites clear, unblinking.

"Thank you all for coming. My name is Conrad White,” the old man says, sitting again. The bearded latecomer chooses the last chair—the one beside mine to the left. Though this saves me from having to look at him, it allows me a whiff of his clothes. A primitive mixture of wood smoke, sweat, boiled meat.

"I will be your facilitator over the next four weeks,” Conrad continues. "Your guide. Perhaps even your friend. But I will not be your teacher. For writing of the truest kind—and that, I’m assuming, is what all of us aspire to—cannot be taught."

Conrad White looks around the circle, as though giving each of us the opportunity to correct him. None do.

He goes on to outline the ground rules for the meetings to come. The basic structure will involve weekly assignments ("Little exercises to help you feel what you see"), with the bulk of time spent on personal readings from each of our works-in-progress, followed by commentary from the other members. Trust is crucial. Special note is made that criticism, as such, will not be tolerated. Instead, there will be "conversations". Not between ourselves, but "between a reader and the words on the page". At this, I feel a couple of heads nodding in agreement off to my right, but I still don’t look to see who it is. Somehow, so long as he’s speaking, I can only look straight ahead at Conrad White. It makes me wonder if it’s not only shyness that holds my stare. Perhaps there is something more deliberately occult in the arrangement of our chairs, the candles, the refusal of electric light. If not enchantment, there is definitely a lightheadedness that accompanies his words. A vertigo I can’t shake.

When I’m able to focus again I pick up that we’re now being told about honesty. It’s the truth of the thing that is our quarry, not mastery of structure, not style. "Story is everything,” the voice says. "It is our religions, our histories, our selves. Only through story can we hope to become acquainted with experiences other than our own."

In a different context—a room with enough light to show the details of faces, the hum of institutional central air, EXIT signs over the doors—this last promise might be overkill. Instead, we are moved. Or I am, anyway.

Now it’s time for the obligatory "Tell us a little bit about yourself” roundabout. I’m terrified that Conrad will start with me. ("Hi. I’m Patrick. Widower, single dad. There was a time I dreamed of writing novels. Now I watch TV for a living.") Worse, he ends up choosing the woman sitting immediately to my right, someone I have so far sniffed (expensive perfume, tailored leather pants) but not fully seen. This means I will be last. The closer.

As each of the members speak, I play with the dictaphone in the outside pocket of my jacket. Push the Record button, Pause, then Record again, so that I create a randomly edited recording. It’s only when they’re halfway round the circle that I realize what I’m doing. Not that this stops me.

The good-smelling woman introduces herself as Petra Dunn. Divorced three years ago, and now that her one child has left for university, she has found herself "mostly alone” in the midtown family home. She names her neighbourhood—Rosedale—meaningfully, even guiltily, as she knows this address speaks of an attribute not lost on any of us: money. Now Mrs Dunn spends her time on self-improvement. Long runs in the ravine. Charity volunteering. Night courses on arbitrary, cherry-picked subjects—Pre-Civil War American History, The Great Paintings of Europe Post-World War II, the 20 Classic Novels of the Twentieth Century. But she became tired of seeing "different versions of myself” in these classrooms, "second or third time around women” not seeking to be edified but asked out by the few men who prowled the Continuing Studies departments, men she calls "cougar hunters". More than this, she has felt the growing need to tell a story concerning the life she might have lived if she hadn’t said yes when the older man who would become her husband offered to take her to dinner while she was working as a bartender at the Weston Country Club. An unlived existence that would have seen her return to her studies, a life of unpredictable freedoms, instead of marrying a man whose free use of his platinum card she’d mistaken for gentlemanly charm. A story concerning "A woman like me but not…"

And here Petra Dunn pauses. Long enough for me to steal a look at her face. I expect to see a woman in her fifties who’s been silenced by her fight with tears. Instead, I’m met with a striking beauty not much older than forty. And it’s not tears, but a choking rage that has stolen her words.

"I want to imagine who I really am,” she says finally.

"Thank you, Petra,” Conrad White says, sounding pleased at this start. "Who’s next?"

That would be Ivan. The bald crown of his head shining faintly pink. Shoulders folded toward his chest, his frame too small for the plaid work shirt he has buttoned to his throat. A subway driver. A man who too rarely sees the light of day ("If I’m not sleeping, either it’s night, or I’m underground"). And lonely. Though he doesn’t confess to this outright, he’s the sort who wears his chronic bachelorhood in the dark circles under his eyes, the tone of defeated apology in his voice. Not to mention the shyness that prevents him from making eye contact with any of the circle’s women.

Conrad White asks him what he hopes to achieve over the course of the meetings to come, and Ivan considers his answer for a long moment. "When I bring my train into a station, I see the faces of all the people on the platform flash by,” he says. "I just want to try and capture some of them. Turn them into something more than the passengers on the other side of the glass who get on, get off. Make whole people out of them. Something I can hold on to. Someone."

As soon as Ivan finishes speaking, he lowers his head, fearing he’s said too much. I have to resist the impulse to go to him, offer a brotherly hand on his shoulder.

And then I notice his hands. Oversized gloves resting atop his knees. The skin stretched like aged leather over the bones. Something about those hands instantly dissolves the notion of going any closer to Ivan than is necessary.

The portly fellow beside Ivan introduces himself as Len. He looks around at each of us after this, grinning, as though his name alone suggests something naughty. "What I like about reading,” he goes on, "is the way you can be different people. Do different things. Things you’d never do yourself. If you’re good enough at it, it’s like you’re not even imagining any more."

This is why Len wants to write. To be transformed. A big kid who has the look of the stayat-home gamer, the kind whose only friends are virtual, the other shut-ins he posts on-line messages to inquiring how to get to Level Nine on some shoot-the-zombies software. Who can blame him for wanting to become someone else?

The more Len talks about writing, the more physically agitated he becomes, wriggling his hefty hips forward to the edge of his chair, rubbing the armrests as though to dry his hands of sweat. But he only gets really excited once he confesses that his "big thing” is horror. Novels and short stories and movies, but especially comic books. Anything to do with "The undead. Presences. Werewolves, vampires, demons, poltergeists, witches. Especially witches. Don’t ask me why."

Len shows all of us his loopy grin once more. It makes it hard not to like the guy. His passions worn so plainly, so shamelessly, I find myself almost envying him.

Sitting beside Len’s nervous bulk, Angela looks small as a child. Part of this illusion is the result of her happening to occupy the largest chair in the room, a wing-backed lounger set so high the toes of her shoes scratch the floor. Other than this, what’s notable about Angela’s appearance is its lack of distinction. Even as I try to sketch her into my memory I recognize she has the kind of face that would be difficult to describe even a few hours from now. The angles of her features seem to change with the slightest shift, so that she gives the impression of being a living composite, the representative of a general strain of person rather than any person in particular.

Even what she says seems to evaporate as it drifts out into the room. Relatively new in the city, having arrived via "a bunch of different places out west". The only constant in her life is her journal. "Except it’s not really a journal,” she says, and makes an odd sound with her nose that might be a stifled laugh. "Most of it is made up, but some of it isn’t. Which makes it more fiction than, like, a diary, I guess."

With this, she stops. Slides back into the chair and lets it swallow her. I keep watching her after she’s finished. And though she doesn’t meet eyes with anyone else in the circle, I have the notion that she’s recording what everyone says just as deliberately as I am.

Next is Evelyn. The deadpan pixie in a biker jacket. I’m a little surprised to learn that she is a grad student at the University of Toronto. It isn’t her youth. It’s the outfit. She looks more like Courtney Love when she first fell for Kurt than the fellowship winner who can’t decide between Yale, Cornell or Cambridge to do her Ph.D. Then the answer comes: her planned dissertation will be a study of "Dismemberment and Female Vengeance in the 1970s Slasher Film". I remember enough of university to know that such topics are best handled by those in costume.

We’re now all the way around to the latecoming giant. When Evelyn’s finished speaking, there’s a subtle positioning of our bodies to take him in, more an adjustment of antennae to pick up a distant signal than the directness required in making eye contact. Still, all of the circle can steal a look at him except for me. Given his proximity, I would have to turn round and tuck my leg under to see him straight on. And this is something I don’t want to do. It may only be the room’s unfamiliarity, the awkwardness in meeting strangers who share little other than a craving for self-expression. But the man sitting to my left radiates a darkness of a different kind from the night outside. A strange vacancy of sympathy, of readable humanness. Despite his size, it’s as though the space he occupies is only a denser form of nothing.

"And you?” Conrad White prompts him. "What brings you to our circle?"

The giant breathes. A whistling that comes up through his chest and, when exhaled, I can feel against the back of my hand.

"I was called,” he says.

"’Called’ in the sense of pursuing your destiny, I take it? Or perhaps a more literal calling?"

"In my dreams."

"You were summoned here in your dreams?"

"Sometimes—” the man says, and it seems like the beginning of a different thought altogether. "Sometimes I have bad dreams."

"That’s fine. Perhaps you could just share your name with us?"

"William,” he says, his voice rising slightly. "My name is William."

My turn.

I say my name aloud. The sound of those elementary syllables allows me to string together the point form brief on Patrick Rush. Father of a smart little boy lucky enough to take his mother’s looks. A journalist who has always felt that something was missing from his writing. (I almost say "life” instead of "writing", a near-slip that is as telling as one might think). A man who isn’t sure if he has something to say but who now feels he has to find out once and for all.

"Very good,” Conrad White says, a note of relief in his voice. "I appreciate your being so frank. All of you. Under the circumstances, I think it only fair that I share with you who I am as well."

Conrad White tells us that he has recently "returned from exile". A novelist and poet who was publishing in Toronto, back just before the cultural explosion of the late sixties that gave rise to a viable national literature. Or, as Conrad White puts it evenly (though no less bitterly), "The days when writing in this country was practiced by unaffiliated individuals, before it took a turn toward the closed door, the favoured few, the tribalistic." He carried on with his work, increasingly feeling like an outsider while some of his contemporaries did what was unimaginable among Canadian writers up to that point: they became famous. The same hippie poets and novelists that were in his classes at UofT and reading in the same coffee houses were now being published internationally, appearing as "celebrity guests” on CBC quiz shows, receiving government grants.

But not Conrad White. He was working on a different animal altogether. Something he knew would not dovetail neatly with the preferred subject matters and stylistic modes of his successful cohorts. A novel of "ugly revelations” that, once published, proved even more controversial than he’d anticipated. The writing community (as it had begun to regard itself) turned its back on him. Though he responded with critical counter-attacks in any journal or pamphlet that would have him, the rejection left him more brokenhearted than livid. It prompted his decision to live abroad. England, at first, before moving on to India, southeast Asia, Morocco. He had only returned to Toronto in the last year. Now he conducted writing workshops such as these to pay his rent.

"I say ’workshops’, but it would be more accurate to speak of them in the singular,” Conrad White says. "For this is my first."

Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Beneath our feet the bass thud from The Fukhouse’s speakers has begun to rattle the windows in their frames. From somewhere in the streets of the market, a madman screams.

Conrad White passes a bowl around to collect our weekly fee. Then he gives us our assignment for next week. A page of a work-in-progress. It needn’t be polished, it needn’t be the beginning. Just a page of something.

Class dismissed.

I fish around for my boots by the door. None of us speak on the way out. It’s like whatever has passed between us in the preceding hour never happened at all.

When I get to the street I start homeward without a glance back at the others, and in my head, there’s the conviction that I won’t return. And yet, even as I have this thought, I know that I will. Whether the Kensington Circle can help me find my story, or whether the story is the Kensington Circle itself, I have to know how it turns out.

3

Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.

As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.

Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.

"Dad? Can I watch TV?"

"Ten minutes."

Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.

A missing person story. The victim (is one a "victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers "acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner". While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that "activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future".

It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.

"What are you doing, Daddy?"

Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living room’s sliding door.

"I’m locking the door."

"But we never lock that door."

"We don’t?"

I peer through the glass at our snow-covered garden. Checking for footprints.

"Show’s over,” Sam says, pulling on my pant leg and pointing at the TV.

"Ten more minutes."

As Sam runs off, I pull the dictaphone out of my pocket.

"Note to self,” I whisper. "Buy padlock for back gate."

It’s the weekend already, and Tuesday’s deadline requiring a page from my nonexistent workin-progress is fast approaching. I’ve made a couple stabs at something during the week, but the surroundings of either the Crypt at home or the cubicle at work have spooked any inspiration that might be waiting to show itself. I need to find the right space. A laptop of one’s own.

Once Tamara’s out-of-town sister, Stacey, has come by to take Sam and his cousins to see the dinosaurs at the museum, I hit the Starbucks around the corner. It’s a sunny Saturday, which means that, after noon, Queen Street will be clogged with shoppers and gawkers. But it’s only just turned ten, and the line-up isn’t yet out the door. I secure a table, pop the lid on my computer, and stare at a freshly created word-processing file. Except for the blinking cursor, a virgin screen of grey. Its purity stops me from touching the keys. The idea of typing a word on to it seems as crude as stepping outside and pissing into a snowbank. And the dentist office grind of the cappuccino machine is starting to get on my nerves. Not to mention the orders shouted back and forth between the barista kids behind the counter. Who wouldn’t raise their head to see what sort of person orders a venti decaf cap with half skim, half soy and extra whipped cream?

I pack up and walk crosstown to the Reference Library on Yonge. The main floor entrance is crowded, as it always is, with the homeless, the new-in-town, the dwindling souls without a cellphone who need to make a call. Through the turnstiles, the building opens into an atrium that cuts through the five floors above. I choose the least occupied level and find a long work table all to myself. Lean back, and think of a single word that might stride forth to lead others into battle.

Nothing.

All around me are tens of thousands of volumes, each containing tens of thousands of printed words, and not one of them is prepared to come forward when I need it most.

Why?

The thing is, I know why.

I don’t have a story to tell.

But Conrad White did, once upon a time. Seeing as I’m in the Reference Library, I decide to take a break and do a bit of research. On Mr White, ringleader of the Kensington Circle.

It takes a little digging, but some of the memoirs and cultural histories from the time of sixties Toronto make footnoted mention of him. From old money, privately schooled, and author of a debatably promising novel before going into hiding overseas. As one commentator tartly put it, "Mr White, for those who know his name at all, is more likely remembered for his leaving his homeland than any work he published while living here."

What’s intriguing about the incomplete biography of Conrad White are the hints at darker corners. The conventional take has it that he left because of the critical reception given his book, Jarvis and Wellesley, the fractured, interior monologue of a man walking the streets of the city on a quest to find a prostitute who most closely resembles his daughter, recently killed in a car accident. An idealized figure he calls the "perfect girl". To anyone’s knowledge, Conrad White hasn’t written anything since.

But it’s the echoes of the author’s actual life to be found in the storyline of Jarvis and Wellesley that gives bite to his bio. He had lost a daughter, his only child, in the year prior to his embarking on the novel. And there is mention of White’s exile being precipitated by his relationship with a very real teenage girl, and the resulting threats of legal action, both civil and criminal. A literary recluse on the one hand, girl-chasing perv on the other. Thomas Pynchon meets Humbert Humbert.

I go back to my table to find my laptop screen has fallen asleep. It knows as well as I do that there will be no writing today. But that needn’t mean there can’t be reading.

The edition of Jarvis and Wellesley I pull off the shelf hasn’t been signed out in over four years. Its spine creaks when I open it. The pages crisp as potato chips.

Two hours later, I return it to where I found it.

The prose ahead of its time, no doubt. Some explicit sex scenes involving the older protagonist and young streetwalkers lend a certain smutty energy to the proceedings, if only passingly. And throughout, the unspoken grief is palpable, an account of loss made all the more powerful by narrating its effects, not its cause.

But it’s the description of the protagonist’s "perfect girl” that leaves the biggest impression. The way she is conjured so vividly, but using little or no specific details. You know exactly what she looks like, how she behaves, how she feels, though she is nowhere to be found on the page.

What’s stranger still is the certainty that I will one day meet her myself.

4

Tuesday brings a cold snap with it. A low of minus eighteen, with a wind-chill making it feel nearly double that. The talk-radio chatter warns everyone against going outside unless absolutely necessary. It makes me think—not for the first time—that I can be counted among the thirty million who voluntarily live in a country with annual plagues. A black death called winter that descends upon us all.

Down in the Crypt I dash off a column covering two new personal makeover shows, a cosmetic surgeon drama, and five (yes, five) new series in which an interior designer invades people’s homes and turns their living rooms into what look like airport lounges. Once this is behind me, I get to work on my assignment for the evening’s circle. By the end of the day I’ve managed to squeeze out a couple hundred words of shambling introduction—Tuesday brings a cold snap with it, etc. It’ll have to do.

Upstairs, as I heat up leftovers in the microwave, Sam comes to show me something from today’s paper.

"Doesn’t she look like Mommy?"

He points to a photo of Carol Ulrich. The woman who was abducted from our neighbourhood playground. The one snatched away as her child played on the swings.

"You think so?” I say, taking the paper from him and pretending to study the woman’s features. It gives me a chance to hide my face from Sam for a second. He only knows what his mother looks like from pictures, but he’s right. Carol Ulrich and Tamara could be sisters.

"I remember her,” Sam says.

"You do?"

"At the corner store. She was in the line-up at the bank machine once too."

"That so."

Sam pulls the newspaper down from my eyes. Reads me.

"They look the same. Don’t they?"

"Your mother was more beautiful."

The microwave beeps. Both of us ignore it.

"Was that lady…did somebody hurt her?"

"Where’d you hear that?"

"I can read, Dad."

"She’s only missing."

"Why would somebody make her missing?"

I pull the newspaper from Sam’s hands. Fold it into a square and tuck it under my arm. A clumsy magician trying to make the bad news disappear.

Conrad White’s apartment is no brighter, though a good deal colder than the week before. Evelyn has kept her jacket on, and the rest of us glance at the coats we left on the hooks by the door. William is the only one who appears not to notice the chill. Over the sides of his chair his T-shirted arms hang white and straight as cement pipes.

What’s also noticeably different about the circle this time round is that each of us have come armed: a plastic shopping bag, a binder, a sealed envelope, two file folders, a leather-bound journal, and a single paper clip used to contain our first written offerings. Our work trembles on our laps like nervous cats.

Conrad White welcomes us, reminds us of the way the circle will work. As his accentless voice goes on, I try to match the elderly man speaking to us with the literary bad boy of forty years ago. If it was anger that motivated his exile, I can’t detect any of it in his face today. Instead, there’s only a shopworn sadness, which may be what anger becomes eventually, if it shows itself early enough.

Tonight’s game plan calls for each of us to read what we’ve brought with us aloud for no more than fifteen minutes, then the other members will have a chance to comment for another fifteen. Interruption of responses is permitted, but not of the readers themselves. Our minds should be open as wide as possible when listening to others, so that their words are free from comparison to anything that has come before.

"You are the children in the Garden,” Conrad White tells us. "Innocent of experience or history or shame. There is only the story you bring. And we shall hear it as though it is the first ever told."

With that, we’re off.

The first readers are mostly reassuring. With each new voice trying their words out for size, the insecurities I have about my own tortured scribbles are relieved, albeit only slightly. By the halfway point (when Conrad White calls a smoke break) I am emboldened by the confirmation that there are no undiscovered Nabokovs, Fitzgeralds or Munros—nor a Le Carré or Rowling or King—among us. And there are few surprises, in terms of subject matter. Petra has a bit of As the World Turns meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? husband-and-wife dialogue that captures certain verbal cruelties in such detail I assume they are taken straight from a loop of memory. Ivan, the subway driver, tells a tale of a man who awakens to find he’s been transformed into a rat, and must find a way into the sewers beneath the city that he intuitively knows is his new home of pestilence and filth. (When, after his reading, I compliment him on his re-working of Kafka, Ivan looks at me quizzically and says, "I’m sorry. Kafka?"). Though Len feels that only the opening paragraph of a proposed "epic horror trilogy” is ready for presentation, it nevertheless goes on forever, a description of night that is a long walk through the thesaurus entry for "dark". And Evelyn promisingly starts her story with a female grad student being screwed by her thesis advisor on the floor of his office while she daydreams about her father teaching her how to skip stones on the lake at the family cottage.

Over the smoke break, those not slipping on their coats get up to stretch. We shuffle around the room without looking at each other or being the first to start up a conversation. All of us steal glances, however. And note where William stands at all times, so we know what corner to avoid.

It’s over these awkward minutes of feeling others’ eyes on me that I ask myself: How does the rest of the circle see me? Most favourably, how I see myself on the best of days, I suppose: an endearingly rumpled Preppie that Time Forgot. Most unfavourably, how I see myself on the worst of days: a dandruffy channel flipper fast approaching the point of no return. Beyond debate are the wide shoulders that lend the illusion of one-time athleticism. And good teeth. A set of ivory chompers that always impress when encountered in Say Cheese! snaps.

Once the smokers return, we get started on the readers who remain.

And this is where things get a little foggy.

I must have read the page I brought with me, as I remember bits of what the other members said afterwards. (Evelyn found the first-person mode "captures your character’s sense of being trapped in himself", and Petra could detect a "hidden suffering"). William requested a pass on reading his own work, or I think he did, as I only recall the sound of his voice and not its words. A low grinding, like air forced through wet sand.

But all I really preserve from the second half of the meeting is Angela.

My first thought, as she opens the cracked leather journal on her knees and lifts it slowly, even reluctantly to her eyes, is that she appears younger than I’d guessed the week before. What I took to be the indistinct features of an adult may instead be the unblemished, baby fat smoothness of a girl coming out of her teens.

And yet, even as she reads, this impression of girlish youth turns into something else. Her face is difficult to describe, to remember, to see, because it’s not a face at all. It is a mask. One that never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.

These considerations of Angela’s appearance come and go within seconds. Soon, all of my attention is on what she reads. We listen without shifting in our seats, without crossing or uncrossing our legs. Even our breathing is calmed to the smallest sips.

It’s not the virtuosity of her writing that dazzles us, as her style is simple as a child’s. Indeed, the overall effect is that of a strange sort of fairy tale. One that lulls for a time, then breaks its spell with the suggestion of an awaiting threat. It is the voice of youth taking its final turn into the world of adult corruption, of foul, grown-up desire.

I have been playing with the dictaphone in my pocket this meeting as I had at the last, clicking the Record button on and off. Unthinkingly, a nervous tic. Now I press it down and leave it running.

Once she begins her reading I have no other thoughts except for one: I will not attempt to write again. There will be what I do for the newspaper, of course. And I can always force out a page here and there, whatever it takes to bluff my way through the next four sessions. But Angela’s story blots out whatever creative light that might have shown itself from within.

It’s not envy that makes me so sure of this. It’s not the poor sport’s refusal to play if he can’t win. I know I won’t try to write for the circle again because until Angela’s journal comes to its end, I am only a reader.

After the meeting, I have a drink with Len at The Fukhouse. That is, I’m the first to nip into the bar below Conrad White’s apartment, and Len follows me a moment later. He takes the stool two over from mine, as if we are going to entertain the pretence of not knowing who the other is. A couple minutes after our facially tattooed bartender delivers our drinks—beer for me, orange juice for Len—the space between us becomes too ridiculous to maintain.

"You enjoying the class so far?” I ask.

"Oh yeah. I think this might turn out to be the best."

"You’ve done a writing workshop before?"

"Plenty. Like, a lot."

"You’re an old pro then."

"Never had anything published, though. Not like you."

This takes me by surprise. It does every time someone recognizes me, before I remember that my Prime Time Picks of the Week column on Fridays has a tiny picture of me next to the by-line. A pixillated smirk.

"There’s published, and then there’s published," I say.

I’m thinking that’s about it. Politeness has been maintained, my beer almost guzzled. I’m about to throw my coat on and steel myself for the cold walk home when Len ventures a question of his own.

"That guy’s pretty weird, don’t you think?"

He could be speaking of Conrad White, or Ivan, or the bartender with a lizard inked into his cheek, or the leader of the free world warning of nerve gas delivered in briefcases on the TV over the bar, but he isn’t.

"William’s quite a character, alright."

"I bet he’s done time. Prison, I mean."

"Looks like the sort."

"He scares me a bit.” Len shifts his gaze from his orange juice to me. "What about you?"

"Me?"

"Doesn’t he give you the creeps?"

I could admit the truth. And with another man, one I knew better or longer, I would. But Len is a little too openly eager for company to be dealt any favours just yet.

"You should use him as material.” I flatten a bill on to the bar sufficient to cover both our drinks. "I thought you liked horror stories."

"Definitely. But there’s a difference between imagining bad things and doing bad things."

"I hope you’re right. Or some of us would be in real trouble,” I say, and give Len a comradely pat on the shoulder as I go. The big kid smiles. And damn if I don’t feel a smile of my own doing its thing too.

5

Angela’s Story

Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 1

There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost. A terrible man who does terrible things who would visit her in her dreams. The girl had never had a friend, but she knew enough to know this wasn’t what he was. No matter how much she prayed or how good she was or how she tried to believe it was true when others would tell her there was no such thing as ghosts, the terrible man would come and prove that all the wishing and prayers in the world could never wish or pray him away. This was why the girl had to keep her ghost to herself.

The only connection, the only intimacy she would allow herself with him was to give him a name.

The Sandman.

Everyone has parents. Knowing this is like knowing that, one day, all of us will die. Two things common to every person in the world.

But there were times when the girl thought she was the singular exception to this supposedly inescapable rule. Times she felt certain she was the only person who’d ever lived who had neither a mother nor a father. She simply appeared in the middle of her own story, just as the terrible man who does terrible things walked into the middle of her dreams. The girl is real, but only in the way that a character in a story is real. If she were a character in a story, it would explain how she had no parents, as characters aren’t born but just are, brought into being on the whim of their authors.

What troubled the girl almost as much as being haunted by the terrible man who does terrible things was that she had no idea who her author might be. If she knew that, she’d at least know who to blame.

Even characters have a past, though they may not have lived it as the living do. The girl, for instance, was an orphan. People never spoke of where she came from, and the girl never asked, and in this way it was never known. She was a mystery to others as much as to herself. She was a problem that needed solving.

There were books the girl had read where orphans such as herself lived in homes with other orphans. And although these homes were often places of longing and cruelty, the girl wished she could live in one, so that she was not the only one like herself. Instead, she was sent to live in foster homes, which are not like the orphanages in books, but just regular homes with people who are paid to look after someone like the girl. When she was ten, she moved four times. When she was eleven, twice more. When she was twelve, she moved once a month for a year. And all along the Sandman followed her. Showing her the things he would do if he were real, and continued to do in her dreams.

And then, when she was thirteen, she was sent to live in an old farmhouse in the dark forests to the north, further north than most farms were ever meant to be. Her foster parents there were the oldest she’d had yet. Edra was the wife’s name, and Jacob the husband’s. They had no children of their own, only their hardscrabble farm, which yielded just enough to feed them through the long winters. Perhaps it was their childlessness that made them so happy when the girl came to them. She was still a mystery, still a problem. But Edra and Jacob loved her before they had any reason to, loved her more than if they’d had a child of their own. It was the suffering the girl had seen that prompted their love, for they were farmers of land that fought them over everything they took from it. Edra and Jacob knew suffering, and had some idea of what it could do to a girl, alone.

For a time, the girl was as happy—or as close to happy—as she’d ever been. There was comfort in the kindness her elderly foster parents showed her. She had a home in which she might live for years instead of weeks. There was a school in the town down the road she took the bus to every day, and where there were books for her to read, and fellow students she dreamed of one day making friends of. It was, for a time, what she’d imagined normal might be like.

Her contentment had been so great and without precedent that she’d almost forgotten about the terrible man who does terrible things. It had been a while since her night thoughts had been interrupted by his appearance. So it is with the most awful kind of surprise when she comes home from school one afternoon in late autumn to overhear Edra and Jacob talking about a little girl who’d disappeared from town.

Thirteen years old. The same age as her. Playing outside in the yard one minute, gone the next. The police and volunteer search parties had looked everywhere for her, but for three days the missing girl remained missing. The authorities were forced to presume foul play. They had no suspect in mind. Their only lead was that some in town had lately noticed a stranger walking the cracked sidewalks at night. A tall, sloped-shouldered man, a figure who kept to the shadows. "A man with no face,” was how one witness put it. Another said it seemed the man was searching for something, though this was an impression and nothing more. Aside from this, no details were known of him.

But they were known to the girl. For she knew who the dark figure was even though she wasn’t there to see him. She knew who had taken a girl in town the same age as her. The Sandman. Except now he’d escaped the constraints of her dream world and entered the real, where he could do all the terrible things he desired to do.

The girl was certain of all this, along with something else. She knew what the Sandman searched for as he walked in the night shadows.

He searched for her.

6

Write What You Know.

This is one of the primary Writers’ Rules, though an unnecessary one, as the initial inclination of most is toward autobiography anyway. The imagination comes later, if it comes at all, after all the pages of the family photo album have been turned, love affairs autopsied, coming-of-age revelations and domestic tragedies rehashed on the page. Usually, people find their own lives sufficiently fascinating to never have to confront the problem of making things up. The Kensington Circle is no exception. Evelyn’s campus sexcapade, Petra’s marital breakdown, Ivan’s sewer-rat metamorphosis. I’m jealous of them. It would make writing so much easier if I never tired of seeing the same face in the mirror.

But what if you don’t particularly find the life you know all that interesting? Real, yes. And marked by its share of loss, redeemed by the love of a son with eyes the colour of his mother’s. It’s just that I don’t see my life as satisfactory material to present as fiction. I find it challenge enough just muddling along as who I am, never mind casting myself as hero.

This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria hamand-cheese, randomly pecking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fictionwriting circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.

“I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”

He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.

Here’s what good Write What You Know has done for me today:

After my wife died I started hearing voices. Just hers at first. And then others I’ve never heard before. Strangers. I can’t know this for sure but I have the feeling that all of them are dead.

They come to me before I go to sleep. This is what frightens me. Not that they’re dead, or that I can hear them. But that I’m awake when I do.

Once this passage of luminous prose has been accomplished, I turn my mind to my Couch Potato column for the weekend edition. This week it’s a gloves-off attack on the Canadian franchise of American MegaStar!, a talent show that is the toprated program in this country, as well as the fourteen others it has colonized. An entire, worldwide generation being led to believe they are entitled to be famous. It’s toxic. A lie. It’s wrong. And it’s also how my frustration with Writing What I Know opens the gates to Writing How the World Has Gone to Crap, which has never been much of a problem for me.

Even though I know that Canadian MegaStar! is owned by the same multinational media behemoth that owns the paper I work for, and even though there have been ominous hints from the section editor to “go easy” on “content” which is produced by said behemoth, I let slip the dogs of war on MegaStar! as if it is single-handedly responsible for carrying out a cultural atrocity. In fact, this last phrase makes it into the lede. From this measured opening, the column goes on to be brutal, hyperbolic and libellous, all leading to the kind of hysterical finish where you’re actually a little concerned about the mental health of the column’s author. It’s personal.

I stay at work late (Thursdays keep me at the office at least until midnight copyediting the Best on the Box listings) and walk home wondering if today will prove to be my last in my current position. Or, come to think of it, my last in any position. It’s almost amusing to wonder what else I might be qualified to do. I’ve always rather liked the idea of running my own business. Something very hands off. Automated, preferably. A laundromat. A spray-it-yourself car wash.

I round the corner on to my street speculating over what kind of pay cut, if any, would be involved in delivering newspapers instead of writing for them, when I notice the yellow police tape around the house across from mine. It is the neighbouring family at 147, and not my own family at 146 that the four police cruisers are parked in front of. But I still run the half-block up Euclid, ring the bell at my front door after twice dropping the keys, and confirm my son is safe with Emmie before going back out to ask the cop turning traffic back toward Queen what’s going on.

“Break and enter,” he says, chewing the inside of his cheek.

“What’d they take?”

“Didn’t touch a thing. The kid was the only one who saw him.”

“Joseph. My boy plays with him sometimes.”

“Yeah? Well, when Joseph woke up tonight some son of a bitch was standing over his bed.”

“Was he able to give a description?”

“All he can say is the guy’s a shadow.”

“A shadow?”

“Went downstairs to the living room with the kid following behind him. Just stood at the front window, staring out at the street. Then, after a while, he walked out the front door as if he owned the place. Turn it around, buddy! Yeah, you!”

The cop steps away to have a word with whoever’s behind the wheel of the SUV that refuses to head back to Queen. It gives me a chance to walk up on to the neighbour’s patch of lawn and stand with my back to their front window. The same view the shadow would have had, standing behind the glass.

Staring at my place.

Where Sam is now. Standing next to Emmie on the porch, squinting over at me.

I read the nanny’s lips—Wave to Daddy!—and Sam raises his chubby arm in salute. And as I wave back I wonder if he can see how bad Daddy’s shaking.

The next circle meeting is at Petra’s house. She had kindly offered to host all of us the week before, though as I step out of my cab at her Rosedale address, I see she was being modest to the point of insult when she described her digs as “Nothing too fancy”. The place is a mansion. Copper roof, terraced landscaping that looks expensive even under a couple inches of snow, matching Mercedes coupés (one red, one black) docked in the carport. It makes me wonder how much the husband had before the divorce if this is Petra’s cut.

Inside the door, my coat is taken by a silverhaired man wearing a better suit than any I have ever owned. A man who serves not only a different class, but a different century. My first honestto-God butler.

“The group is assembling in the Rose Room,” he says, and leads me over marble floors to a sunken lounge of leather chairs, each with their own side table, and a snapping fire in the hearth. At the door, the butler discreetly inquires as to whether I would like a drink. He says it in a way that makes it clear real drinks are included in the offer.

“Scotch?” I say, and he nods, as though my choice had confirmed a suspicion he’d had on first sight.

Most of the other members are already here. Conrad White has chosen a chair near the fire, its orange flickers lending him a devilish air which is only enhanced by the smirk he barely manages to conceal as he notes the room’s incoherent collection of Inuit sculptures, garish abstracts and bookshelves lined with leather-bound “classics”. In this context of stage-set wealth, the rest of us look like hired help sneaking a break, holding our crystal goblets with both hands so nothing might spill on the rug.

Len in particular seems out of place. Or perhaps this is because he’s the only one talking.

“You should come. You all should. How about you, Patrick?”

“How about me what?”

“The open mic. There’s a launch party for a new litmag, and then afterwards they open the floor to anyone who wants to read.”

“I don’t know, Len.”

“C’mon. You can check out what’s going on out there.”

“They have a bar?”

“Half-price beer if you buy the zine.”

“Now you’re talking.”

All of us are here now except for William and Petra, the latter clipping back and forth to the kitchen on high heels, touchingly anxious about burning the shrimp skewers. When our hostess finally sits, Conrad White decides to go ahead without William. There’s a subtle easing in all of our postures at this. I would be surprised if any of us didn’t hope that William has moved on to other creative endeavours, if not a different area code altogether.

I’m first, which is something of a relief, as the sooner I can get through the miserable couple of paragraphs I’ve brought along, the sooner I can get to work on the quadruple single malt Jeeves has poured for me.

Besides, I’m only here for one reason anyway.

Angela.

She doesn’t disappoint. I say this even though I’m not really listening. After I click my dictaphone on, I pay less attention to her words than how she speaks them. I have assumed all along that Angela was using a voice distinct from her own in her readings. Now I realize that I have virtually no idea what her “real” voice is like, or whether it would be different from the one I listen to now. She has said so little in the circle (her responses to the other readers little more than a murmured “I liked it a lot”) that it may be the at once innocent and debauched little girl tone she uses is the same as her everyday speech.

When she’s finished, no one says anything for what may be a minute. The fire hissing like a punctured tire. An ice cube cracks in Len’s tumbler of apple juice. And from the moment Angela closes the cover of her journal to the moment Conrad White invites the circle to comment on what we’ve just heard, she looks at me.

More active than staring. A taking in. Every blink marking some new observation. And I do the same. Or try to. To see inside, sort her truth from the make believe. Figure out whether she can spot anything worthwhile in me. Anything she might like.

“Wonderful, Angela. Truly wonderful,” Conrad White says.

Everyone raises their heads. No one had noticed our silent exchange except for Conrad himself. And Ivan. Both men shifting in their chairs to find relief from an affliction I immediately recognize. A thought that, for the lonely like us, passes more than any other.

Why not me?

After the meeting, we step out into the cold night, none of us knowing which way will lead us out of the enclave’s curving streets and cul-de-sacs that discourage entry or exit. I look around for Angela, but she must have grabbed her coat before us. In any case, there’s no sign of her now.

“So, Patrick, we’re on for Tuesday?” Len asks. I look at him like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Which I don’t. “The open mic?”

“Right. Yes. Absolutely.”

“’Night then,” he says, and scuffs off in the opposite direction I would guess to be the way out of here. Leaving just me and Ivan standing there.

“I know the way,” Ivan says.

“You’re familiar with this neighbourhood?”

“No,” he says, exhaling a long, yogic breath. “I can hear the trains.”

Ivan tilts his head back, eyes squeezed shut, as though savouring the melody of a violin concerto, when all there is to hear is the clacking of the subway train emerging out of the tunnel somewhere in the ravine below.

“Follow me,” Ivan says, and starts out toward the nearest doors to the underworld.

On our walk out of Rosedale’s labyrinth of oldmoney chateaux and new-money castles, enveloped in a cold-hardened March darkness, Ivan tells me he’s never hit a jumper. For a subway driver with his years of seniority, this is a rare claim. Not once has one of the bodies standing behind the yellow warning line on the platform made that incongruous leap forward. Yet every time his train bursts out of the tunnel and into the next station lit bright as a surgery theatre, he wonders who it will be to break his good record.

“Every day I see someone who thinks about it,” Ivan says as we cross the bridge over the tracks. “The little moves they make. A half step closer to the edge, or putting their briefcase down at their side, or swinging their arms like they’re at the end of a diving board. Getting ready. Sometimes you can only read it in their faces. They look at the front of the train—at me behind the glass—and there’s this calm that comes over them. How simple it would be. But in the next second, they’re thinking, ‘Why this train? If there’s another just as good coming along, why not wait? Make sure everything’s right.’ I can hear them like they’re whispering in my ear.”

“And then they change their minds.”

“Sometimes,” Ivan says, spitting over the side of the bridge on to the rails below. “And sometimes the next train is the right train.”

We walk on toward Yonge Street where it breaks free of the downtown stretch of head shops and souvenir fly-by-nights, and heads endlessly north. Ivan talks without provocation, laying out his thoughts in organized capsules. Even when we come to stand outside the doors to the station he continues on, never looking at me directly, as though he has memorized this speech by heart and cannot allow himself to be distracted. It leaves me to study his head. Hatless and bald. A vulnerable cap of skin turned the blue-veined white of Roquefort.

And what does Ivan tell me? Things I would have already guessed, more or less. Son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father a steel cutter with a temper, his mother an under-the-table seamstress, mending the clothes of the neighbourhood labourers in their flat over what was then a butcher’s, now an organic tea shop on Roncesvalles. Never married. Lives alone in a basement apartment, where he writes in the off-hours. Meandering stories that follow the imagined lives of those he shuttles here and there under the city.

“This is the first time I’ve been with people in a long time,” he says. It takes a moment to realize he’s talking about the circle. About me.

“It’s hard to meet strangers in this town,” I say.

“It’s not that. It’s that I haven’t allowed myself to be around others.”

“Why not?”

“I was accused of something once,” he says. Looks at me straight. “Have you ever been accused of something?”

A rip of freezing wind comes out of nowhere. A furious howl that leaves me with instant headache.

What I took to be Ivan’s shyness has dropped away. He reads my face, numbed by the cold so that I have no idea what shape my features have taken. What I do know for sure is that, all at once, the fact that nobody has come in or out of the subway in the time we’ve been standing here makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

“I suppose I have,” I say.

“You suppose you have.”

“I mean, I’m not sure what context—”

“The context of being accused of harming someone.”

Ivan steps away from me. He had meant to have a normal conversation with someone who struck him as normal too, but he’d lost his balance on the home stretch. Yet it’s not embarrassment or apology that plays over his face now. It’s anger. At me, at himself. At the whole accusing world.

“Better start home,” he mumbles, leaning his back into the subway’s door. The warmer air from underground moans out through the gap. “I can get you on free if you want.”

“No, thanks. I like to walk.”

“On a night like this?”

“I’m not too far.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Close enough.”

I could tell Ivan where I live, and I almost do. But I just wave vaguely westward instead.

Ivan nods. I can feel him wanting to ask me to keep the last part of our conversation to ourselves. But in the end, he just slips through the door and stands on the descending escalator. His head an empty cartoon thought bubble following him down.

I walk to Bloor and start west, past the funnymoney block of Gucci and Chanel and Cartier, then left at the museum. Entering the university campus at Harbord, the traffic is hushed. I’m alone on the street, which invites the return of a habit I’ve indulged since childhood. Talking to myself. Back then, it was whole conversations carried on with characters from the books I was reading. Now I restrict myself to certain phrases that catch in my mind. Tonight, it’s some things from Angela’s reading.

Dirty hands.

These two words alone frighten me.

Fear made them see the town, the world, in a way they’d never seen it before.

I try to leave these incantations behind in the dissolving fog of my breath. Work to turn my mind to real concerns. No progress on my writing to speak of. The thinning thread that connects me to my job. Dark feelings that have me wondering: Is this it? Is it days like this that start the slide into a hole you can’t climb out of?

A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize.

Last night Sam awoke from a nightmare. I went to him. Stroked the damp hair back from his forehead.

Once I’d settled him down, I asked what his dream was about.

“A man,” he said.

“What kind of man?”

“A bad man.”

“There’s no bad man in here. I wouldn’t let anyone bad in this house.”

“He’s not in this house. He’s in that house.”

With his that, Sam sat straight and pointed out he window. His finger lined up with the neighbour’s house across the street. The window where the shadow had stood a few nights back. Looking out.

“Did you see the bad man who was there?” I asked him, but he heard in my very question the concession that what I’d just assured him didn’t exist may in fact be real, and he turned his back to me. What good were a father’s empty promises against the bogeyman? He would face any further nightmares on his own.

Blood tattooed on the curtains.

It’s on my shortcut through Chinatown that I start to feel less alone. Not because of the few others shuffling homeward on the sidewalks, heads down. It’s because I’m being followed.

Past the karaoke bars along Dundas, then the foolish turn south straight through the housing projects between here and Queen. That’s when I hear the footsteps echoing my own. There are reports in the City pages of frequent shootings on this very block, yet I’m certain that whatever shadows me isn’t interested in my wallet. It wants to see what I will do when I know it is there.

And what do I do?

I run.

A headlong sprint. I’m wearing the wrong shoes for it, so that within the first block my shins send bolts of pain up to the back of my head. Eyes stinging with wind-burned tears. Lungs crackling like a pair of plastic bags in my chest.

Courage is not a matter of will, but of the body.

I take the alley that runs behind the businesses along Queen. The shortest way to my house. But a dark alley? What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I was running. Past walls and fences built against the rats and crackheads. No light to see by. Just the darker outline of the buildings and the square of black that is the alley opening on to the street at the far end.

I don’t stop. I don’t look back.

Not until I stop and look back.

Standing under the block’s lone working streetlight. My house within snowball-throwing distance. The light on in my son’s room. Sam up late. Sneak reading. And all I want is to sit on the edge of his bed, close his book, turn off the light. Listen to him breathe.

He is my son.

I love my son.

I would die to protect him.

These conclusions come fast and terse as lightning. Along with one other.

The alley is empty.

7

Angela’s Story

Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 2

The girl doesn’t tell anyone what she knows of the Sandman and the terrible thing he’s done. In part, this is because she doesn’t actually know anything about the missing girl, not in a way she could ever prove. Not to mention that a declaration of this kind might just label her as crazy once and for all. She’d be taken away from Edra and Jacob and put in a place far worse than any foster home or orphanage. Someplace she would never come out of again.

But more frightening than even the consideration of being taken away is the idea of hurting Edra and Jacob. Her wellbeing was all they cared about. To show them that she believed in dark figures born in her dreams, a monster who had come from the darkest place to hunt her down, would break both their hearts. The girl resolved to protect them from this no matter what.

For the next few days, ignoring the fact that something was wrong seemed to work. No more children disappeared. No dark figures were spotted in town. The girl’s dreams were the same irrational puzzles that others have, free of any terrible men who do terrible things. It felt like the news of a stranger with no face escaping from the confines of a nightmare was itself a nightmare, and no more real than that.

Then the girl sees him.

Not in a dream, but through the window of her classroom at school. She has been sitting at her desk, working through a math quiz. Multiplying fractions. At one equation more difficult than the others, she raises her head to clear her mind of the numbers atop numbers collapsing into a confused pile. She sees him right away. Standing in the shade of the schoolyard’s solitary elm. As tall as the lowest limb that, the girl knows from trying, is too high to reach, even when one of the boys offered her a boost. The Sandman’s face is obscured by the leaves’ latticework of shadow, though the girl has the impression he is staring directly at her. And that he’s smiling.

She bends over her quiz again. The fractions have doubled in the time she’d taken her eyes from the page, so that the numbers are now a mocking jumble.

He would still be there if she looked. She doesn’t look.

Outside, a lawnmower roars to life. The sound makes the girl gasp. A flare of pain. She feels the lawnmower’s blades cutting into her side, halving her. Turning her into a fraction.

Later, sitting in the back row of the schoolbus on the ride home, the girl tries to remember what the Sandman looked like. How could she see him smile without seeing his face? Was this a detail she’d added after the moment had passed? Was she making him up, just as she sometimes thought she’d been made up? Was she the author of the terrible man who does terrible things?

As if in answer to all of these questions, the girl looks out the schoolbus window and he is there. Sitting on a swing in the playground. His legs held out straight before him, his boots touching the grass border around the sand. A sloped-shouldered man out of scale on the children’s swing set, so that he looks even more enormous.

The girl turns to the other students on the bus, but none of them are looking out their windows. All of them laughing and blowing goobered paper out of straws. For a moment, the girl is knocked breathless by the recognition of how little these other children know. Of what awaits them, watches them. If not the Sandman then some other reshaped darkness.

The bus grinds into gear and lurches forward. Still sitting on the swing, the Sandman turns to watch them go. Even from this distance the girl notices his hands. The fingers swollen and thick as sausages, gripped round the chain. Dirty hands.

Before the bus turns a corner on to the road out of town, the girl squints hard and sees that she was wrong.

It’s not dirt that fills the creases and sticks to the hair on the backs of the Sandman’s hands. It’s blood.

They find the missing girl the next day. Her remains. Down in the trees by the river beyond the graveyard. A place the older kids call the Old Grove, famous for bush parties. Now and forever to be known as the place where a girl, too young for bush parties, was found in pieces, buried in a layer of scattered leaves, as though her murderer had grown bored at the end and cast a handful of deadfall over her just to be done with it.

Because of where they found her, the police turned their suspicions toward the older boys at school who’d gotten in trouble in the past. Perhaps one of them had been in contact with the girl? Had a crush on her, been following her around? But even the most trouble-prone boys at the school had done nothing worse than pocket candy bars or egg windows on Halloween. It was near impossible to imagine any of them had graduated from such crimes to the one in question.

After they found the missing girl, the talk in town shifted from suspicion to fear. It mattered less who had done this terrible thing, and more that a terrible thing not be visited on anyone else. An unofficial curfew was put in place. Lights burned in the houses through the night. Groups of townsmen—doctors and shop owners and tradesmen and drunks, a strange mix that would otherwise be unlikely to associate with each other—patrolled the streets with flashlights and, it was said, shotguns hidden beneath some of their long coats. They had no idea what they might be looking for. Fear made them see the town, the world, in a way they’d never seen it before.

The second girl went missing the same night the first was found. As the men cast their flashlights over lawns and cellar doors and shrub rows, as the lights burned in all the homes, as most stayed up late, unable to sleep, another girl, the same age as the other, was snatched directly out of her bed before dawn. Her ground-floor window left open. Boot prints in the soil by the trampled rose bush. Sheets on the floor. Blood tattooed on the curtains.

They closed the school for the day. Not that the students would be any safer at home. The decision came by way of the instinct to stop whatever had been considered normal, if for no other reason than to match the abnormality of what was happening around them. Edra and Jacob were glad, nevertheless. It was late enough in the season that the crops (however meagre) were already in. There were no church services on Tuesday. And now they’d closed the school. Which meant that the two of them could afford to stay indoors with their adopted daughter, whom they now wanted to protect as much as love.

It was an odd sort of holiday. They baked candied apples. Played cards. Built a fire they didn’t really need just to smell the cherry smoke through the house. The girl’s thoughts turned to the terrible man who does terrible things only a few times over the course of the entire day. She would sneak long looks at Jacob and Edra, and ventured to think the word family as an invisible cord connecting the three of them.

That night she is awakened by the tap of stones against her bedroom window. She hears the first, but only opens her eyes on the second. There is a rule the girl has arrived at through her experience of being haunted. Once could be anything. Two times makes it real.

She’s aware that she’s making a mistake even as she rises from her bed and goes to the window. What compels her isn’t curiosity but duty. She must keep whatever darkness she has brought to this place from touching Edra or Jacob. It isn’t their fault that the girl they’ve shown such kindness to has let her worst dreams free from her head. They mustn’t see what she is about to see.

The girl slides her feet over the bare floorboards and the whole house seems to groan a warning at her movement. Her room is small. But the effort it takes to reach the window exhausts her. Courage, she realizes, is not a matter of will but of the body.

When she reaches the window she has to grip the frame with both hands for balance. There is the sickening stillness that precedes a fainting spell. She makes herself take a breath. As she looks outside, she wonders if her heart has stopped.

The Sandman stands in the yard below. When he sees her, he tosses another stone up at the glass. It is a gesture the girl has seen in old movies. A suitor signalling his arrival for a midnight tryst.

Once he’s sure that she’s watching, he turns and walks toward the barn. There is a scuffing slowness to his gait that one might mistake for regret. But the girl sees it instead as an expression of his self-certainty, the ease with which he sets about his actions. It’s what makes his kind of badness so unpredictable.

He reaches the barn doors and pauses. There’s an opening wide enough for him to enter, but he doesn’t. He only wants her to see that he’s been in there.

The man turns, keeping his back to her. Steps around the side of the barn and is gone.

The girl knows what she must do. That is, what he wants her to do.

She carries her boots down the stairs to quiet her descent. In her haste, she forgets to put her coat on, so that when she steps out the back door and starts into the yard, the cold bites straight through her cotton pajamas. A wind dances dried leaves in figure eights over the dirt. The paper shuffle sound covers her footfall, so that she’s able to half-run to the barn.

A step inside the doors and the thicker darkness stops her. She comes into the barn almost every day (it’s where she’s assigned most of her after-school chores) so she could navigate her way around its stalls and tools hanging on hooks without light. But there is something different about the space she cannot identify at first. It’s because it isn’t something she can see, but something she can smell.

A trace of the Sandman’s scent left hanging in the air. Stronger than the hay and mouldy wood and cow manure, even without him here. It makes her cough. The cough turns into a gag. A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize, but that a girl like her would have no reason to have encountered before.

She fights her revulsion and starts toward the stall at the far end. This is where he wants her to go. She knows this as well as if he’d taken her by the hand to lead her there.

As her eyes become used to the dark, faint threads of moonlight find their way in through the slats. When she opens the gate to the stall, she discovers that it’s enough light to see by.

The girl in the stall looks like her. He’d likely chosen her because of this. She’d known the second missing girl from her class at school, but had never realized the similar colour of her hair, the round face. For a second, she thinks it may be her own body lying in pieces amongst the spattered clumps of straw. Which would make her a ghost now too.

She sets to digging before there is anything like a plan in her mind. Just beyond the edge of the forest that borders Jacob’s unyielding acreage, she goes as deep as the hard earth and time allows her. There’s not even the opportunity to be scared. Though more than once she’s certain the canvas sack she’d dragged here from the barn jostles with movement from within.

Even as she pushes the seeping bag into the hole and begins to throw spadefuls of soil back in the place it came from, it only vaguely occurs to her that she’s doing this to make sure Jacob won’t be blamed. Which of course would be the result if they ever found the second girl in his barn. The terrible man who does terrible things forced her into making this decision, which wasn’t much of a decision at all. She would rather be an accomplice to the Sandman than allow the man who is as close to a father as she’s ever known wrongly go to prison for the rest of his days.

By the time the first pencil line of dawn appears on the horizon, she is patting the mound of the second girl’s grave down firm with the back of the spade.

Later, the horror of this night will revisit her in different forms. The girl has enough experience with dreams to know this much.

What she isn’t certain of yet is what the Sandman wants from her. He has discovered where she lives. He could take her as easily as he’s taken these others any time he felt inclined. But there is a different wish he wishes from her. And though she tries to tell herself that she couldn’t possibly imagine what this might be, the truth is she has an idea.

8

Two days after the circle’s meeting at Petra’s house, the morning paper brings news of another missing person. A man this time. Ronald Pevencey, twenty-four. A hairdresser at one of the avantgarde salons on Queen who hadn’t shown up for work all week. When the police were finally alerted, they discovered that the door to his second-floor apartment was left ajar, though no evidence of forced entry or struggle within could be found. This led investigators to a relatively safe assumption. Whoever had come knocking, Ronald had let in.

The reason authorities are announcing suspicions of foul play at all is not only based on Ronald Pevencey’s unusual absence from work, but disturbing remarks he’d recently shared with co-workers. His belief he was being followed. Here and there over the past weeks a figure seemed to be watching him. While he didn’t say whether he knew who this stalker was, one of his colleagues suspected that Ronald had a theory, and it scared the bejesus out of him. “He wanted to talk about it, but didn’t want to talk about it,” is how his confidante put it.

The rest of the piece, which appears under the by-line of my drinking buddy Tim Earheart, has the police spokesperson bending over backwards to dismiss any speculation that there may be a serial killer at large. First off, there was nothing to indicate that either Carol Ulrich or Ronald Pevencey have been murdered. And while neither had any motive for being a runaway or suicide, there is always the possibility that they just took off for a spontaneous vacation. Postpartum depression. A crystal meth bender. It happened.

It’s further pointed out that there is no connection between the two missing persons. A hairdresser. A stay-at-home mom. Different ages, different social circle. Carol had never set foot in the salon where Ronald worked. The only commonality is their residence within six blocks of each other. Within six blocks of us.

If Ronald Pevencey and Carol Ulrich are both dead, odds are they met their ends by different means. Serial killers work in patterns, as the police were at pains to point out. A psychotic glitch in their software makes them seek out versions of the same victim, over and over. In this case, all the two missing persons shared was the city in which they lived.

Yet for all this, I’m certain that whatever hunted these two was the same in both cases. I’m also certain that neither is still alive. Despite what all the forensic psychiatrists and criminologists say, it seems to me that, at least some of the time, unpredictability must be as likely a motivation for murder as any other. A twist. Maybe this is what whoever is doing this likes. Not any one perversity, but the far more unsettling variance afforded by anonymity. If you don’t know why a killer does what he does, it makes him more of a threat. It also makes him harder to catch.

But it’s not the killer’s hypothetical motivation that has me convinced. It’s that I believe whatever followed me home the other night is the same shadow that followed Ronald Pevencey and Carol Ulrich. The bad man from my son’s nightmares who is now making appearances in my own.

I give Emmie the morning off and walk Sam to daycare myself. Every half-block I turn and scan the street to catch the eyes I feel upon us. Sam doesn’t ask why I stop. He just takes my gloved hand in his mitten and holds it, even as he comes within view of his friends in the fenced-in play area, a point at which he would normally run off to join them.

“See you later,” he says. And though I intend to say the same thing, an “I love you” slips out instead. But even this is permitted today.

“Ditto,” Sam says, with a punch to the elbow before stepping through the daycare’s doors.

There’s a new box of video cassettes sitting on my chair at the office. More cable freakshows and wife swaps and snuff amateur video compilations with titles like Falling from Buildings! and Animals that Kill! But it’s what I find under the box that is truly disturbing. A post-it note from the Managing Editor. Come see me. M. It’s the longest piece of correspondence I’ve ever received from her.

The Managing Editor’s office is a glassed-in box in the opposite corner of the newsroom from where I sit. But this is not why I so rarely have any contact with her. She is more a memo drafter, an executive conference attender, an advertiser luncher than a manager of human beings. She has been so successful in this position, it is rumoured that she is currently being headhunted by American TV networks. She is twenty-eight years old.

For now, however, she’s still the one who does the hiring and firing at the National Star. And I’m fully aware, as I approach her glass cube (bulletproof, it is said), that she is more inclined toward the firing than the hiring.

“Patrick. Sit,” she says when I come in, a canine command that is obeyed. She raises an index finger without looking my way, a gesture that indicates she’s in the middle of a thought that could make or break the sentence she’s halfway through. I watch her type out the words she finally harnesses—symbiotic revenue stream—and tap a button to replace her memo-in-progress with a Tahitian beach screensaver.

“I’m sure you know why you’re here,” she says, turning to face me. Her eyes do a quick scan of my person. I seem to disappoint her, as expected.

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