The Killing Circle

“No,” he says, exhaling a long, yogic breath. “I can hear the trains.”

Ivan tilts his head back, eyes squeezed shut, as though savouring the melody of a violin concerto, when all there is to hear is the clacking of the subway train emerging out of the tunnel somewhere in the ravine below.

“Follow me,” Ivan says, and starts out toward the nearest doors to the underworld.

On our walk out of Rosedale’s labyrinth of oldmoney chateaux and new-money castles, enveloped in a cold- hardened March darkness, Ivan tells me he’s never hit a jumper. For a subway driver with his years of seniority, this is a rare claim. Not once has one of the bodies standing behind the yellow warning line on the platform made that incongruous leap forward. Yet every time his train bursts out of the tunnel and into the next station lit bright as a surgery theatre, he wonders who it will be to break his good record.

“Every day I see someone who thinks about it,” Ivan says as we cross the bridge over the tracks. “The little moves they make. A half step closer to the edge, or putting their briefcase down at their side, or swinging their arms like they’re at the end of a diving board. Getting ready. Sometimes you can only read it in their faces. They look at the front of the train—at me behind the glass—and there’s this calm that comes over them. How simple it would be. But in the next second, they’re thinking, ‘Why this train? If there’s another just as good coming along, why not wait? Make sure everything’s right.’ I can hear them like they’re whispering in my ear.”

“And then they change their minds.”

“Sometimes,” Ivan says, spitting over the side of the bridge on to the rails below. “And sometimes the next train is the right train.”

We walk on toward Yonge Street where it breaks free of the downtown stretch of head shops and souvenir fly-by-nights, and heads endlessly north. Ivan talks without provocation, laying out his thoughts in organized capsules. Even when we come to stand outside the doors to the station he continues on, never looking at me directly, as though he has memorized this speech by heart and cannot allow himself to be distracted. It leaves me to study his head. Hatless and bald. A vulnerable cap of skin turned the blue-veined white of Roquefort.

And what does Ivan tell me? Things I would have already guessed, more or less. Son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father a steel cutter with a temper, his mother an under-the-table seamstress, mending the clothes of the neighbourhood labourers in their flat over what was then a butcher’s, now an organic tea shop on Roncesvalles. Never married. Lives alone in a basement apartment, where he writes in the off-hours. Meandering stories that follow the imagined lives of those he shuttles here and there under the city.

“This is the first time I’ve been with people in a long time,” he says. It takes a moment to realize he’s talking about the circle. About me.

“It’s hard to meet strangers in this town,” I say.

“It’s not that. It’s that I haven’t allowed myself to be around others.”

“Why not?”

“I was accused of something once,” he says. Looks at me straight. “Have you ever been accused of something?”

A rip of freezing wind comes out of nowhere. A furious howl that leaves me with instant headache.

What I took to be Ivan’s shyness has dropped away. He reads my face, numbed by the cold so that I have no idea what shape my features have taken. What I do know for sure is that, all at once, the fact that nobody has come in or out of the subway in the time we’ve been standing here makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

“I suppose I have,” I say.

“You suppose you have.”

“I mean, I’m not sure what context—”

“The context of being accused of harming someone.”

Ivan steps away from me. He had meant to have a normal conversation with someone who struck him as normal too, but he’d lost his balance on the home stretch. Yet it’s not embarrassment or apology that plays over his face now. It’s anger. At me, at himself. At the whole accusing world.

“Better start home,” he mumbles, leaning his back into the subway’s door. The warmer air from underground moans out through the gap. “I can get you on free if you want.”

“No, thanks. I like to walk.”

“On a night like this?”

“I’m not too far.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Close enough.”

I could tell Ivan where I live, and I almost do. But I just wave vaguely westward instead.

Ivan nods. I can feel him wanting to ask me to keep the last part of our conversation to ourselves. But in the end, he just slips through the door and stands on the descending escalator. His head an empty cartoon thought bubble following him down.

I walk to Bloor and start west, past the funnymoney block of Gucci and Chanel and Cartier, then left at the museum. Entering the university campus at Harbord, the traffic is hushed. I’m alone on the street, which invites the return of a habit I’ve indulged since childhood. Talking to myself. Back then, it was whole conversations carried on with characters from the books I was reading. Now I restrict myself to certain phrases that catch in my mind. Tonight, it’s some things from Angela’s reading.

Dirty hands.

These two words alone frighten me.

Fear made them see the town, the world, in a way they’d never seen it before.

I try to leave these incantations behind in the dissolving fog of my breath. Work to turn my mind to real concerns. No progress on my writing to speak of. The thinning thread that connects me to my job. Dark feelings that have me wondering: Is this it? Is it days like this that start the slide into a hole you can’t climb out of?

A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize.

Last night Sam awoke from a nightmare. I went to him. Stroked the damp hair back from his forehead.

Once I’d settled him down, I asked what his dream was about.

“A man,” he said.

“What kind of man?”

“A bad man.”

“There’s no bad man in here. I wouldn’t let anyone bad in this house.”

“He’s not in this house. He’s in that house.”

With his that, Sam sat straight and pointed out he window. His finger lined up with the neighbour’s house across the street. The window where the shadow had stood a few nights back. Looking out.

“Did you see the bad man who was there?” I asked him, but he heard in my very question the concession that what I’d just assured him didn’t exist may in fact be real, and he turned his back to me. What good were a father’s empty promises against the bogeyman? He would face any further nightmares on his own.

Blood tattooed on the curtains.

It’s on my shortcut through Chinatown that I start to feel less alone. Not because of the few others shuffling homeward on the sidewalks, heads down. It’s because I’m being followed.

Past the karaoke bars along Dundas, then the foolish turn south straight through the housing projects between here and Queen. That’s when I hear the footsteps echoing my own. There are reports in the City pages of frequent shootings on this very block, yet I’m certain that whatever shadows me isn’t interested in my wallet. It wants to see what I will do when I know it is there.

And what do I do?

I run.