The Killing Circle

always is, with the homeless, the new-in-town, the dwindling souls without a cellphone who need to make a call. Through the turnstiles, the building opens into an atrium that cuts through the five floors above. I choose the least occupied level and find a long work table all to myself. Lean back, and think of a single word that might stride forth to lead others into battle.

Nothing.

All around me are tens of thousands of volumes, each containing tens of thousands of printed words, and not one of them is prepared to come forward when I need it most.

Why?

The thing is, I know why.

I don’t have a story to tell.

But Conrad White did, once upon a time. Seeing as I’m in the Reference Library, I decide to take a break and do a bit of research. On Mr White, ringleader of the Kensington Circle.

It takes a little digging, but some of the memoirs and cultural histories from the time of sixties Toronto make footnoted mention of him. From old money, privately schooled, and author of a debatably promising novel before going into hiding overseas. As one commentator tartly put it, 'Mr White, for those who know his name at all, is more likely remembered for his leaving his homeland than any work he published while living here.'

What’s intriguing about the incomplete biography of Conrad White are the hints at darker corners. The conventional take has it that he left because of the critical reception given his book, Jarvis and Wellesley, the fractured, interior monologue of a man walking the streets of the city on a quest to find a prostitute who most closely resembles his daughter, recently killed in a car accident. An idealized figure he calls the 'perfect girl'. To anyone’s knowledge, Conrad White hasn’t written anything since.

But it’s the echoes of the author’s actual life to be found in the storyline of Jarvis and Wellesley that gives bite to his bio. He had lost a daughter, his only child, in the year prior to his embarking on the novel. And there is mention of White’s exile being precipitated by his relationship with a very real teenage girl, and the resulting threats of legal action, both civil and criminal. A literary recluse on the one hand, girl-chasing perv on the other. Thomas Pynchon meets Humbert Humbert.

I go back to my table to find my laptop screen has fallen asleep. It knows as well as I do that there will be no writing today. But that needn’t mean there can’t be reading.

The edition of Jarvis and Wellesley I pull off the shelf hasn’t been signed out in over four years. Its spine creaks when I open it. The pages crisp as potato chips.

Two hours later, I return it to where I found it.

The prose ahead of its time, no doubt. Some explicit sex scenes involving the older protagonist and young streetwalkers lend a certain smutty energy to the proceedings, if only passingly. And throughout, the unspoken grief is palpable, an account of loss made all the more powerful by narrating its effects, not its cause.

But it’s the description of the protagonist’s 'perfect girl” that leaves the biggest impression. The way she is conjured so vividly, but using little or no specific details. You know exactly what she looks like, how she behaves, how she feels, though she is nowhere to be found on the page.

What’s stranger still is the certainty that I will one day meet her myself.

4

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