The Killing Circle

17

I raise my eyes from the page. Squint into the lights. Dust orbiting like atoms in the white beams. If there are people out there, I can’t see them. Perhaps they have learned that I’m not what I’ve claimed to be, and have left the hall in disgust. Perhaps they are still here, waiting for the police to click the cuffs around my wrists.

But they are only waiting for me. For the words every audience to Angela’s story requires to lift the spell that’s been cast on them.

“Thank you,” I say.

Yellow, flickering movement like the beating of hummingbird wings. Hundreds of hands clapping together.

Sam is there at the side of the stage, smiling at his dad with relief.

I pick him up and kiss him. “It’s over,” I whisper. And even though there’s people watching, he kisses me back.

“We should make our way to the signing table,” the publicist says, taking me by the elbow.

I put Sam down to be driven home in the waiting limo and let the publicist guide me through a side door. A brightly lit room with a table at the far end with nothing but a fountain pen, bottle of water and a single rose in a glass vase on its surface. A pair of young men behind a cash register. Copies of The Sandman piled around them in teetering stacks. A cover design I’ve looked at a thousand times and a name I’ve spelled my whole life, but it still looks unfamiliar, as though I’m confronting both for the first time.

The auditorium doors are already opening as I make my way around the velvet ropes that will organize the autograph seekers into the tidy rows that always make me think of cattle being led to slaughter. In this case, all that will await them at the end is me. My face frozen in a rictus of alarm, or whatever is left of the expression that started out a smile.

And here they come. Not a mob (they are readers, after all, the last floral-skirted and corduroyed, canvas bag-clutching defenders of civilization) but a little anxious nevertheless, elbowing to buy their hardcover, have me do my thing, and get out before the parking lot gets too snarled.

What would this labour feel like if the book were wholly mine? Pretty damn pleasant would be my guess. A meeting of increasingly rare birds, writer and reader, acknowledging a mutual engagement in a kind of secret Resistance. There’s even little side servings of flirtation, encouragement. Instead, all I’m doing now is defacing private property. More vandal than artist.

I’m really going now. Head down, cutting off any conversation before it has a chance to get started. All I want is to go home. Catch Sam before Emmie puts him to bed. There might even be time for a story.

Another book slides over the table at me. I’ve got the cover open, pen poised.

“Whatever you do, just don’t give me the ’Best Wishes’ brush-off.”

A female voice. Cheeky and mocking and something else. Or perhaps missing something. The roundness words have when they are intended to cause no harm.

I look up. The book folds shut with a sigh.

Angela. Standing over me with a carnivorous smile on her face. Angela, but a different Angela. A professional suit, hair expensively clipped. Confident, brisk, sexy. Angela’s older sister. The one who didn’t die in a car crash with a dirty old novelist, and who could never see the big deal about wanting to write novels in the first place.

You’re dead, I almost say.

“What, no ’How’s the writing coming?’” the living Angela says.

“How’s the writing coming?”

“Not as well as yours, by the looks of things.”

The publicist makes an almost imperceptible side-step closer to the table. The woman next in line behind Angela shuffles forward. Coughs more loudly than necessary. Taps the toe of a Birkenstock on the floor.

Angela remains smiling, but something changes in her pose. A stiffening at the corners of her mouth.

“Have you—?” she starts, and seems to lose her thought. She bends closer. “Have you seen any of them?”

“A couple. Here and there.”

Angela ponders this response as though I’d answered in the form of a riddle. The woman behind her takes a full step forward. Her reddening face now just inches from sitting atop Angela’s shoulder.

“Perhaps you’d like to speak to Mr Rush after the signing?” the publicist says, as pleasantly as an obvious warning could be stated.

“I think—” Angela starts again. I wonder if she is steeling herself to launch some kind of attack. Slap me across the face. Serve a court summons. But it’s not that. With her next words she reveals that she isn’t angry. She’s frightened.

“I think something’s…happening.”

The publicist tries to squeeze between Angela and the table. “May I help you?” she asks, reaching toward Angela’s arm. But Angela rears back, as though to be touched by another would burn her skin.

“Sorry. Oh. I’m sorry,” she murmurs, nudging the book another inch closer to me. “I suppose I should have this signed.”

Now the entire line is getting antsy. The woman behind Angela has come around to stand next to her, an act of rebellion that threatens to create a second line. Fearing the chaos that would result, the publicist pulls back the cover for me, holds the book open to the title page.

“Here we are,” she says.

I sign. Just my signature at first. Then, seeing this as too hopelessly impersonal, I scribble a dedication above my name.

To the Living,

Patrick Rush

“Hope you enjoy it,” I say, handing the book back to Angela. She takes it, but remains staring at me.

“I’m sure I will,” she says. “I’m particularly intrigued by the title.”

The Birkenstock woman has heard enough. Drops her copy on to the table from three feet in the air. A single crack on impact that draws gasps from the line.

At the same time, Angela grips the front of the table with her free hand. Whispers something so low I rise out of my chair to hear her.

“I need to talk to you,” she says. Opens the palm of her hand so that I have to reach into it and take the card she’s offered me.

Then all at once she pushes aside the publicist who attempts to usher her toward the exit, makes her way unsteadily around the corner and is gone.

“I liked it,” the Birkenstock woman says when my hands steady enough to open her copy. “Didn’t totally buy the ending, though.”