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.
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.