The Killing Circle

16

I say now what all those in my position say in response to the most commonly asked question of the after-reading Q&A: I had always wanted to be a writer. But in my case, this answer is not precisely true. I had wanted to write, yes, but more primary than this, I had always wanted to be an author. Nothing counted unless you were published. I longed to be an embossed name on a spine, to belong to the knighthood of those selected to stand alongside their alphabetical neighbours on bookshop and library shelves. The great and nearly so, the famous and wrongly overlooked. The living and the dead.

But now, all I wanted was to be out of it.

What had seemed so important then now struck me as a contrivance, an invention whose purpose was to complicate that which was, if left alone, cruelly simple. Life’s a bitch and then you die, as the T-shirts used to say.

I would make do with keeping both hands on the wheel of fatherhood, with weekend barbecues and package beach holidays and rented Westerns and Hitchcock. I would no longer feel the need to say something, to stand isolated and furious outside the anesthetized mainstream. Instead I would be among them, my consumer brothers and sisters. The search called off.

There are times I’m walking with Sam, or reading to him, or scrambling an egg for him, and I will be seized mid-step, mid-page-turn, mid-scramble, with paralytic love. For his sake, I try to keep such moments under control. Even at his age he has a keen sensitivity to embarrassment, and me blubbering about what a perfect little fellow he is, how like his mother—well, it’s right off the chart. Not that it stops me. Not every time.

It is these pleasures that The Sandman’s publication has denied me. All the attention afforded the break-out first novelist—the church basement talks, forty-second syndicated morning radio interviews (“So, Pat, loved the book—but, let me ask you, who do you like in the Super Bowl?”), even a few bedroom invitations (politely declined) from book club hostesses and college campus Sylvia Plaths—was poisoned by the fact that I was alone, miles from my son.

“Where are you, Dad?” I remember Sam asking over the phone at one of the campaign’s low points.

“Kansas City.”

“Where’s that?”

“I’m not sure. Kansas, maybe?”

“The Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s right. Dorothy. Toto. Over the rainbow.”

There was a silence for a time after that.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Remember when Dorothy clicked her heels together three times? Remember? Remember what she said?”

That The Sandman wasn’t my own book didn’t help things. Just when a glowing review or snaking bookstore line-up or letter from a high school kid relating how much he thought I was the shit came close to making me forget, Angela’s recorded voice reading from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment would return to me, and any comfort the moment might have brought was instantly stolen away.

There was also the worry I would be found out. Although I hadn’t heard from any of them since The Sandman was published, it was entirely conceivable that one of the Kensington Circle would come across it, recognize its source material, and go to the press. Perhaps worse, Evelyn or Len would come knocking on my door with my book in their hands, demanding hush money. Worse yet, it would be William. And I would pay no matter who it was. I’d done a wrongful thing. I’m not denying it. But if there was ever a victimless crime, this was it. Now, in order to walk quietly away from my fraudulent, non-starter of a writing career as planned, four people had to keep a secret.

When I finally returned to Toronto, I went through the mail piled on my desk in the Crypt expecting at least one of the envelopes to contain a blackmail letter. But there was only the usual bills.

Life returned to normal, or whatever shape normal was going to take for Sam and me. We watched a lot of movies. Ate out at neighbourhood places, sitting side by side at the bar. For a while, it was like a holiday neither of us had asked for.

And the whole time I waited to walk into someone from the circle. Toronto is a big city, but not so big that you could forever avoid the very people you’d most like to never see again. Eventually, I’d be caught.

I started wearing ballcaps and sunglasses everywhere I went. Took side streets. Avoided eye contact. It was like being followed by the Sandman all over again. Every shadow on the city’s pavement a hole in the earth waiting to swallow me down. And what, I couldn’t help wondering, would be waiting for me at the bottom?