The Killing Circle

15

I admit to stealing Angela’s story. Even so, it still wasn’t a novel. While I used her characters, premise, setting, mimicked her tone, even copied whole pages from her recorded readings, viewed strictly on the basis of a word count, the bulk of The Sandman could technically be described as mine.

There was much I needed to add to give it the necessary weight of a book. Whatever it took to roll out what I already had with a minimum of actual creating, so that the result had been thinned to cover a couple hundred pages. But what the book still needed was the very thing Angela’s story didn’t provide. An ending.

After long months of scratching ideas on to index cards and dropping most of them into the recycling box, I managed to wring out a few concluding turns of the screw of my own, though there’s little point in going into that here.

Let’s just say I decided to make it a ghost story. I knew it was plagiarism. There wasn’t a moment I thought enough of The Sandman was invented that it could be truly considered my own. What relieved me of the crime was that I was only playing around. It was a distraction and nothing else. A kind of therapy during those hours when Sam was asleep, the TV spewed its usual rot, the sentences of my favourite books swam unreadably before my eyes.

Even when it was done, I still had no plans to present it as though I was its sole author. This was partly because I wasn’t. But there was another reason.

I always saw the writing of the book as a kind of communication, an exchange between Angela and myself. I have read dozens of interviews with real writers who say that, throughout the process, they have in mind an audience of one for their work, an ideal reader who fully understands their intentions. For me, that’s who Angela was. The extra set of eyes looking over my shoulder as the words crept down the screen. As I wrote our ghost story, Angela was the one phantom who was with me the whole time.

And then I started wondering if it might not be good. Our book. Angela’s and mine. Except Angela was dead now.

What would someone else think of what we’d made together?

But even this self-deceiving line of thought wasn’t my undoing. My real mistake was printing it out, buying envelopes to slip it into, and telling myself I’m just curious as I dropped them in the mail addressed to the biggest literary agents in New York.

That was a mistake.