The Killing Circle

meetings edifying?”

“It’s been interesting.”

“I understand from what you’ve brought to read that you are a critic by profession.”

“I’m paid to watch television.”

“So. What do your slumming critical faculties make of your classmates?”

Conrad White’s lips part fully into a smile. His question is an amusing parry. But it’s also a test.

“A mixed bag. As one would expect,” I say.

“There are a couple of pieces I think show special merit.”

“A couple?”

“No. Not a couple.”

Conrad White sits forward. The smile drops so quickly I can’t be sure it was ever there.

“You never know who might have it,” he says.

“Have what?”

“That thing that keeps bringing you to this place week after week, even though you have no faith whatsoever that what I or anyone else might say will assist you. The reason you’re sitting here right now.”

“What reason is that?”

“You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.”

“Sorry. Not following you.”

“The only vital currency is story. And yet we spend most of our time blowing flatus about theme or symbol or political context or structural messing about. Why?” The old man’s smile returns. “I believe it’s because it distracts us from the inadequacies of our own narrative. We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.”

“I think the story Angela’s telling is about death.”

“Ghost stories usually are.”

“How much of it do you think is real?”

“Perhaps the better question is how much of it you have made real.”

“That’s not up to me.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s her story, not mine.”

“So you say.”

“We’re talking about Angela.”

“Really? I thought we were talking about you.”

I would be lying if I said that Conrad White correctly guessing my involvement (as he called it) in Angela’s story didn’t catch me a little off guard. I’m not surprised by how intelligent a man he is, but by how much of this intelligence he has applied to me, to us, his raggedy group of bookish refugees. He knows I’ve been bluffing my way along right from the start, just as he knows that Angela is in possession of a “vital currency”. Vital to the people like me and him, anyway. Popcorn crunchers, channel changers, paperback devourers. The hungry audience.

There’s a knock at the door. Conrad White gets to his feet. I can hear Len’s voice excitedly telling him about a breakthrough in his zombie apocalypse (“I’ve set it in a prison, because, after the dead rise, prisoners will be the only ones still alive inside the walls, and the society that has judged them left outside!”) followed by Ivan, who slips by them both and takes a seat across from me. I nod at him in welcome, but since our conversation outside the subway station he’s pretending he can’t see me. It leaves me to measure the hands capped over his knees. Too big for the wrists they’re attached to, so that they appear taken from another body altogether, grave-robbed. An impression that reminds me of Ivan telling me what it’s like to be accused of harming someone. Those hands could do harm without much effort. They could do it all on their own.

The rest of the circle arrives in a pack. Petra taking the chair next to Len’s and politely listening to his how-to remarks on decapitating the undead. Angela slips by Evelyn and Conrad White to sit next to me. We smile hello at each other. It allows me the closest look at her yet. In the room’s dimness, a distance of more than a couple feet makes our faces susceptible to distortion, the misreadings of candlelight. Now, however, I can see her more or less as she is. But what strikes me isn’t any aspect of her appearance. It’s the disarming certainty that she is seeing me with far greater accuracy than what I can only guess about her. She isn’t dreamy or wounded or bashful. She’s working.

William arrives last. I force myself to take him in at more than a glance, to confirm or dispel my suspicion that it had been him watching me across the street from the Indian take-out. He’s the right size, that’s for sure. A threat in the very space he occupies, consuming more than his fair share of light, of air. Still, I can’t be sure it was him. His beard even thicker now, so that the true shape of his face is impossible to outline. And unlike Angela, a direct look into his eyes reveals nothing. Where she is busy, William is lifeless. There is no more outward compassion in him than the zombies of Len’s stories.

William takes his seat. Each of us slide an inch away from him, and each of us notices it. An instinct of the herd that communicates there is a wolf among us.

It is our second to last meeting, and Conrad White wants to get through as many of our pieces today as possible. We begin with Ivan, who takes his rat character into the tunnels beneath the city, where he watches the humans on the train platforms with the same revulsion that he, as a man, once viewed the vermin skittering around the rails. Evelyn returns her prof-bonking grad student to the family cottage, where she goes for a swim alone at night and symbolically ends up on an island, naked, “baptized by moonlight”. Petra’s domestic drama leads to her female character making a courageous call to a divorce lawyer. As for me, I nudge along my account of a frustrated TV critic just far enough to satisfy the rules.

Angela is next. Once I’ve turned on the dictaphone, I feel her reading more than anything else. It’s as though I am within her, at once distinct and fused as Siamese twins. And this time there’s something entirely new, a crackling energy in the inches between us that, for the first time, I interpret in purely physical terms. A literal attraction. I want to be closer to her mouth, look down upon the same scribbled pages she reads from, cheek to cheek. It takes a concerted effort to not let myself drift into her.

When she’s finished, it’s William’s turn. This time, he’s actually brought something with him. We soon wish he hadn’t.

In his flat voice, he begins his account of “the summer when something broke” in the life of a boy, growing up in “the poorest part of a poor town”. Avoiding the house where his father drank and his mother “did what she called her ‘day job’ in her bedroom”, the friendless boy wanders through the dusty streets, bored and furious, like “he was buried under something heavy he couldn’t crawl out from under”.

One day, the boy picked up the neighbour’s cat, took it out to a shed at the far end of an empty lot, and skinned it alive. The animal’s cries are “the sound he would make if he could. But he has never cried in his life. It’s something that’s missing from him. Everything is missing from him.” After burying the cat, the boy listens to the woman next door, calling her pet’s name in the night, and he sees that “this is something he could do. Something he was good at. He could take things away.”

The rest of the story goes on to describe, in the same bland language, the boy’s successive graduation from cats to dogs to the horse in the stable at the edge of town, wanting to see if it “was filled with glue, because that’s what he’d heard they turned dead horses into”.

Eventually, Conrad White breaks his own rule. He interrupts William in the middle of his reading.

“Thank you. I’m sorry, but we have run out of time,” the old man lies. A trembling hand smoothing back his remaining wisps of hair. “Perhaps we can return to William’s piece at our final meeting”.

William folds his papers into a square and returns it to the pocket of his jeans. Looks around at the rest of us, who are now getting up, turning our backs to him. I may be the only one who doesn’t move. And while I cannot say I notice anything change in his expression, I sense something that makes me certain it was William who stared at me across the street the other night. The same cruel aura he had then as now. A calmness that speaks not of contentment, but how, as with the boy in his story, everything is missing.

After the meeting, Len reminds me of our plans to check out the litmag launch and open mic at a bar up on College Street. On the way, as he shuffles a few steps ahead of me, anxious to get good seats, Len asks if I’ve noticed something between Evelyn and Conrad White.