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.
“No, I don’t, actually.”
“There’s been a complaint.”
“From a reader?”
The Managing Editor smiles at this. “No, not a reader. A real complaint. Quite real.”
“How real are we talking?”
She rolls her eyes ceilingward. A signal that she means an office high up the ladder. So high up, she dare not speak its name.
“We have to look out for our properties. Our brands. And when one of those brands is undermined from within one of our own properties…” She lets this thought go unfinished, as though where it leads is too unsavoury to even consider.
“You’re talking about the
MegaStar!
review.”
“It was upsetting. People were upset.”
“You don’t look upset.”
“But I am.”
“So this is serious.”
“There are certain calls from certain offices I don’t like to get.”
“Should I be calling my lawyer?”
“You have a lawyer?”
“No.”
The Managing Editor pushes a stray hair off her forehead. A brief, but distinctly female motion that, I regret to say, makes me like her a little.
“Are we clear on all this then?”
This question would be funny, given the preceding conversation, if my answer weren’t yes. She’s made herself perfectly clear.
I stop by Tim Earheart’s desk on the way back to my own. I’m not really expecting to find him there. He usually prefers to work in the reeking, greasy bunker that goes by the name of the Smoking Room. Tim doesn’t think of himself as a smoker, though he’d eat cigarettes if he couldn’t smoke them when he’s up against a deadline. Which he must be today, given the talk of a potential killer on the loose. Yet here he is. Throwing the reporter’s tools of pen, notepad, dictaphone and digital camera into the knapsack he proudly brought back with him from Afghanistan, complete with bullet hole. A prop he says has got him more “intern action” than he knows what to do with.
“She fire you?” he asks. This is the question first asked of anyone caught walking out of the Managing Editor’s office.
“Not yet. Where you off to?”
“Ward’s Island. They found one of the missing persons.”
“Which one?”
“The Ulrich woman. A dozen or so parts of her, anyway. Spread out over a hundred-foot stretch of beach.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yessir. It’s ugly.”
“They know who did it?”
“Right now all they’re saying is they’re following up on every lead. Which means they don’t have a clue.”
“He
cut her up
?”
“He. She. They.”
“Who would
do
that?”
“Somebody bad.”
“It’s insane.”
“Or not. Just got off the phone with the police profiler guy. He’s thinking there’s a point to the way the body was on display like that. Some sort of announcement.”
“Saying what?”
“How the fuck do I know? ‘I’m here,’ I guess. ‘Come and get me, assholes.”’
Tim slings the knapsack over his shoulders. Even through his aviator sunglasses you can see the excited gleam in his eyes.
“She lived near you, didn’t she?” he says.
“Sam recognized her. She had a kid about his age. They went to the same playground.”
“Creepy.”
“It is.”
“I’m going over there now on the ferry. Wanna come?”
“I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”
“Could be great material for your novel.”
“It’s not that kind of novel,” I say, which makes me wonder what kind of novel I
would
write, if I ever could.
By the time I leave work, shortly after five, the day has already taken its wintry turn toward night. The backed-up traffic along King a red line of brake lights as far as the horizon, the only colour against the dusk. The new restaurants that have moved into the former textile warehouses are already full of besuited diners, each of them plunking down the equivalent of my biweekly mortgage payment to taste the dainty constructions of overnight superstar chefs. And what will the Rush boys be eating this evening? One sag paneer, one butter chicken roti, medium spicy, from Gandhi take-out. Sam’s favourite.
It’s the choice of tonight’s menu, however, that leads to my seeing him.
There is the usual clog of people in Gandhi, either eating from styrofoam containers at one of its two tables, or standing close together, waiting to hear our number called and make the last dash home. The air is steamy from the bubbling pans of curry on the stove, the open pot of boiling potatoes, the breath of everyone in here. It makes the windows that look on to Queen cloud and drip with condensation. Through the glass, the bodies of passers-by merge into a single, mutating form.
My number’s up. Now that I’ve side-stepped my way to the front, claustrophobia tickles a mild panic in my chest. One of those momentary near freak-outs I have a couple times a day negotiating my way through the city. A struggle I almost always win by telling myself to hold on. Just do
the next thing—
pay for food
—and then the next—
grab the bag, turn, squeeze toward the door
—and everything will be okay.
At the door, I pause to pull my gloves out of my jacket pocket. It allows me to take a last look through the clouded glass.
It is only a darkened outline among other darkened outlines. But I know it’s him.
Standing on the far side of the street. Unmoving as the other sidewalkers pass in both directions around him. Taller than any of them.
As I push the door open and the street is brought into sudden focus, William turns his back to me and joins the others heading east.
I don’t get a good look at his face. That’s not how I know. It’s his
presence
. A menacing energy that radiates from him so strongly it knocks me back a few inches, so that I have to lean against the door for balance. Even as he turns the corner at the end of the block and disappears, the density of the space he leaves in his wake holds me where I stand. It’s as though the air is turned to black water, taking on a sludgy, unbreathable weight.
Someone pushes against the door and I step aside, murmuring an apology. All around me the inching traffic and striding pedestrians carry on their homeward journeys, oblivious. William had no effect on them. Perhaps this is because
he wasn’t there
. A hallucination formed out of the day’s gloom, the news of violence, an empty stomach.
But these are only the rationalizations I need to get my feet moving again. Whatever I just saw, just felt, was not a product of the imagination. I’m not sure I even
have
an imagination.
It was William, watching me. Which means it was William, following me.
There is one further possibility, of course.
One day I will look back and recall that tonight, outside Gandhi with a bag of take-out in my hand, was the first step on the road to losing my mind.
Sam and I eat our dinners by candlelight, the good silver and wedding-present wine glasses brought out for the hell of it. Curry on the plate, beer and ginger ale in the crystal. We talk about things. The proto-bullies who terrorize his daycare. A kid who had an allergic reaction at the playground and whose face “got fat and red like a giant zit” before an ambulance took him away.
As for me, I do my best to cushion each of these fears. But even as I do, I wrestle with my own nightmare material. The Managing Editor’s warning shot. The picture of Carol Ulrich on the TV, the lady who looks like Tamara. The parts of her found on the beach. Which leads my private thoughts to the larger, geopolitical worries of the day. The fallen towers. Sleeper cells, alternate targets, promises of more trouble to come issued from Afghan caves. How our corner of the world is less and less safe the richer it becomes.
After a while, what Sam is speaking about and what it makes me think of seem like parts of the same observation.
Even here,
we say.
Even here evil can find you
.
Of course I don’t tell Sam about seeing William across the street on my way home. What occurs to me now is that it’s not just William I’m keeping from him. Since I started going to the meetings at Conrad White’s, I have held the Kensington Circle out of his reach. Sam wouldn’t be interested. These Tuesday evenings when Emmie stayed late and Daddy went out for some grown-up time were so harmless, so dull, they weren’t worth the breath required to explain them.
Yet now I feel the restraint, the mental work required in keeping a certain topic covered over. What goes on in the writing circle has become a secret. And as with most secrets, it is meant to protect as much as conceal.
I arrive early the following Tuesday. I’m hoping for a moment to speak with Conrad White on his own. I begin with the irresistible bait of flattery. At least,
I’ve
always found it irresistible, on the rare occasions it’s come my way.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” the old man says in reply to my praise of
Jarvis and Wellesley
. “It cost me a great deal.”
“The controversy.”
“That, yes,” he says, looking up at me to gauge how much of that I might know. “It would be a lie to say I wasn’t inconvenienced by my banishment. But I was thinking more of the cost of writing the thing in the first place.”
“It’s taxing. The process. I mean, it
must
be taxing.”
“It needn’t be. That book spilled forth with the ease of a sin in the confessional box. Which turned out to be my mistake. I should have held something back. Saved it for later. The total revelation
of our selves in one go does not make for long careers.”
Conrad White pushes the room’s chairs into their circle formation for the meeting. Even this minor task leaves him winded. I try to help him, but he waves me off the moment I step forward.
“I suppose, in a way, you must be grateful to be out of it,” I say, expecting easy agreement. Instead, the old man’s knees stiffen, as though preparing to absorb or deliver a blow.
“Out of what?”
“You know. The whole game, the schoolyard politics. Attention/neglect, praise/attack. The so-called rewards of fame.”
“You’re quite wrong. I would do anything to have it back. Just as you, I suspect, would do anything to have it.”
I’m about to object—how could he know what I want?—when he releases a gusting sigh and falls back into his chair.
“Tell me,” he says, showing a pair of nicotined incisors to signal a change of subject. “Have you found our meetings edifying?”
“It’s been interesting.”
“I understand from what you’ve brought to read that you are a critic by profession.”
“I’m paid to watch television.”
“So. What do your slumming critical faculties make of your classmates?”
Conrad White’s lips part fully into a smile. His question is an amusing parry. But it’s also a test.
“A mixed bag. As one would expect,” I say.
“There are a couple of pieces I think show special merit.”
“A couple?”
“No. Not a couple.”
Conrad White sits forward. The smile drops so quickly I can’t be sure it was ever there.
“You never know who might have it,” he says.
“Have what?”
“That thing that keeps bringing you to this place week after week, even though you have no faith whatsoever that what I or anyone else might say will assist you. The reason you’re sitting here right now.”
“What reason is that?”
“You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.”
“Sorry. Not following you.”
“The only vital currency is story. And yet we spend most of our time blowing flatus about theme or symbol or political context or structural messing about. Why?” The old man’s smile returns. “I believe it’s because it distracts us from the inadequacies of our own narrative. We avoid speaking of stories
as
stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can
hurt.
”
“I think the story Angela’s telling is
about
death.”
“Ghost stories usually are.”
“How much of it do you think is real?”
“Perhaps the better question is how much of it you have
made
real.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s her story, not mine.”
“So you say.”
“We’re talking about Angela.”
“Really? I thought we were talking about you.”
I would be lying if I said that Conrad White correctly guessing my involvement (as he called it) in Angela’s story didn’t catch me a little off guard. I’m not surprised by how intelligent a man he is, but by how much of this intelligence he has applied to me, to us, his raggedy group of bookish refugees. He knows I’ve been bluffing my way along right from the start, just as he knows that Angela is in possession of a “vital currency”. Vital to the people like me and him, anyway. Popcorn crunchers, channel changers, paperback devourers. The hungry audience.
There’s a knock at the door. Conrad White gets to his feet. I can hear Len’s voice excitedly telling him about a breakthrough in his zombie apocalypse (“I’ve set it in a prison, because, after the dead rise, prisoners will be the only ones still alive
inside
the walls, and the society that has judged them left
outside
!”) followed by Ivan, who slips by them both and takes a seat across from me. I nod at him in welcome, but since our conversation outside the subway station he’s pretending he can’t see me. It leaves me to measure the hands capped over
his knees. Too big for the wrists they’re attached to, so that they appear taken from another body altogether, grave-robbed. An impression that reminds me of Ivan telling me what it’s like to be accused of harming someone. Those hands could do harm without much effort. They could do it all on their own.
The rest of the circle arrives in a pack. Petra taking the chair next to Len’s and politely listening to his how-to remarks on decapitating the undead. Angela slips by Evelyn and Conrad White to sit next to me. We smile hello at each other. It allows me the closest look at her yet. In the room’s dimness, a distance of more than a couple feet makes our faces susceptible to distortion, the misreadings of candlelight. Now, however, I can see her more or less as she is. But what strikes me isn’t any aspect of her appearance. It’s the disarming certainty that
she
is seeing
me
with far greater accuracy than what I can only guess about her. She isn’t dreamy or wounded or bashful. She’s
working
.
William arrives last. I force myself to take him in at more than a glance, to confirm or dispel my suspicion that it had been him watching me across the street from the Indian take-out. He’s the right size, that’s for sure. A threat in the very space he occupies, consuming more than his fair share of light, of air. Still, I can’t be sure it was him. His beard even thicker now, so that the true shape of his face is impossible to outline. And unlike Angela, a direct look into his eyes reveals nothing.
Where she is busy, William is lifeless. There is no more outward compassion in him than the zombies of Len’s stories.
William takes his seat. Each of us slide an inch away from him, and each of us notices it. An instinct of the herd that communicates there is a wolf among us.
It is our second to last meeting, and Conrad White wants to get through as many of our pieces today as possible. We begin with Ivan, who takes his rat character into the tunnels beneath the city, where he watches the humans on the train platforms with the same revulsion that he, as a man, once viewed the vermin skittering around the rails. Evelyn returns her prof-bonking grad student to the family cottage, where she goes for a swim alone at night and symbolically ends up on an island, naked, “baptized by moonlight”. Petra’s domestic drama leads to her female character making a courageous call to a divorce lawyer. As for me, I nudge along my account of a frustrated TV critic just far enough to satisfy the rules.
Angela is next. Once I’ve turned on the dictaphone, I
feel
her reading more than anything else. It’s as though I am within her, at once distinct and fused as Siamese twins. And this time there’s something entirely new, a crackling energy in the inches between us that, for the first time, I interpret in purely physical terms. A literal attraction. I want to be closer to her mouth, look down upon the same scribbled pages she reads from, cheek to
cheek. It takes a concerted effort to not let myself drift into her.
When she’s finished, it’s William’s turn. This time, he’s actually brought something with him. We soon wish he hadn’t.
In his flat voice, he begins his account of “the summer when something broke” in the life of a boy, growing up in “the poorest part of a poor town”. Avoiding the house where his father drank and his mother “did what she called her ‘day job’ in her bedroom”, the friendless boy wanders through the dusty streets, bored and furious, like “he was buried under something heavy he couldn’t crawl out from under”.
One day, the boy picked up the neighbour’s cat, took it out to a shed at the far end of an empty lot, and skinned it alive. The animal’s cries are “the sound he would make if he could. But he has never cried in his life. It’s something that’s missing from him. Everything is missing from him.” After burying the cat, the boy listens to the woman next door, calling her pet’s name in the night, and he sees that “this is something he could do. Something he was good at. He could take things away.”
The rest of the story goes on to describe, in the same bland language, the boy’s successive graduation from cats to dogs to the horse in the stable at the edge of town, wanting to see if it “was filled with glue, because that’s what he’d heard they turned dead horses into”.
Eventually, Conrad White breaks his own rule. He interrupts William in the middle of his reading.
“Thank you. I’m sorry, but we have run out of time,” the old man lies. A trembling hand smoothing back his remaining wisps of hair. “Perhaps we can return to William’s piece at our final meeting”.
William folds his papers into a square and returns it to the pocket of his jeans. Looks around at the rest of us, who are now getting up, turning our backs to him. I may be the only one who doesn’t move. And while I cannot say I notice anything change in his expression, I sense something that makes me certain it was William who stared at me across the street the other night. The same cruel aura he had then as now. A calmness that speaks not of contentment, but how, as with the boy in his story, everything is missing.
After the meeting, Len reminds me of our plans to check out the litmag launch and open mic at a bar up on College Street. On the way, as he shuffles a few steps ahead of me, anxious to get good seats, Len asks if I’ve noticed something between Evelyn and Conrad White.
“Something?”
“I don’t know. They’re always whispering to each other. Making eyes.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Who do you think she’s with right now?”
“You mean
with
with?”
“Answer the question.”
“Conrad?”
“It’s kind of
sick
.”
“There’s got to be forty years between them.”
“I told you.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But what’s a writing circle without a little scandal?”
The open mic is on the second floor of a Mexican restaurant, a long, dark-panelled room that smells of sawdust and refried beans. At the door, Len and I buy a copy of the stapled zine on offer,
Brain Pudding,
which entitles us to the beer discount.
“Not much of a turn-out.”
“There’s a serial killer out there somewhere,” Len says. “It can make people stay in and order pizza.”
“What are you talking about?”
Len gives me a hopeless, get-with-the-program look.
“The missing hairdresser,” he says.
“Ronald Pevencey.”
“The police found his body in a dumpster in Chinatown this afternoon. In pieces. Just like that woman on Ward’s Island. So now they’re thinking the same guy did them both. Two is a series. Thus, serial killer. Which is bad for business.”
“We’ll just have to do our best to help,” I say, ordering a round.
The emcee thanks us for coming. But before he opens the floor to all comers, he has a special
announcement. Congratulations for one of
Brain Pudding
’s contributors, Rosalind Canon, a mousy girl sitting with mousy boys in the front. Apparently she learned just this morning that the manuscript for her first novel had been accepted for publication in New York. A bidding war. World rights sold. Film option.
“And as if that wasn’t enough,” he says, “it’s her birthday! Happy twenty-fourth, Rosalind!”
The emcee steps back from the mic, beams down at Rosalind, and starts to clap.
And in the next second, something interesting happens.
A drop in the room’s barometric pressure, the sudden hollowness that precedes a thunderstorm. Aside from the emcee’s two hands clapping, there is no sound other than our collectively held breath. It leaves each of us exposed. Caught on the coruscated edges of the same desire. Despite our differences of age, of costume, of genre, we are here because we all share the longing to be writers. But in this moment, what we more immediately wish is to be Rosalind. A surge of not-yet-rationalized jealousy powerful enough to alter the composition of the very environment we occupy.
And then, when our limbs finally accept the command given them, we join in the applause. A round of whistles and hearty good wishes you’d never suspect of the effort they required.
“That’s great! Wow!” Len says.
“Oh yeah. It’s so wow great I could kill her.”
I wave my arm barward. From here on, my beers are coupled with bourbon shots. It eases things somewhat. The flatulent sound poetry and same-sex erotica and hate-my-parents short stories that follow pass in a benumbed succession. I even
like
some of it. Or at least, I admire that their authors are here, putting their name in the emcee’s hat and, when called upon, ascending the plywood riser and letting it fly. Good or bad, they
made
this stuff. Which is more than I can say for myself.
Some time later, Rosalind Canon’s name is called over the PA. She’s come to these things before. She even knows the right way to approach the stage: with a slouch, as though her real thoughts are elsewhere, puzzling out some far deeper question than
How do I look?
As she murmurs on, I resolve that, once she’s finished, I will start home. The flush of goodwill that came with the first wave of alcohol is already passing, and I know from experience it will soon leave only regret and self-pity behind. Just one more drink in case the killer out there decides I’m to be next. I’d rather not see it coming. What kind of blade would he have to use to do what he does? Something motorized, perhaps. Or perhaps he is just incredibly strong. What had the monster in Angela’s story liked to do? Turn people into fractions.