The Killing Circle

“Something?”

“I don’t know. They’re always whispering to each other. Making eyes.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Who do you think she’s with right now?”

“You mean with with?”

“Answer the question.”

“Conrad?”

“It’s kind of sick.”

“There’s got to be forty years between them.”

“I told you.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But what’s a writing circle without a little scandal?”

The open mic is on the second floor of a Mexican restaurant, a long, dark-panelled room that smells of sawdust and refried beans. At the door, Len and I buy a copy of the stapled zine on offer, Brain Pudding, which entitles us to the beer discount.

“Not much of a turn-out.”

“There’s a serial killer out there somewhere,” Len says. “It can make people stay in and order pizza.”

“What are you talking about?”

Len gives me a hopeless, get-with-the-program look.

“The missing hairdresser,” he says.

“Ronald Pevencey.”

“The police found his body in a dumpster in Chinatown this afternoon. In pieces. Just like that woman on Ward’s Island. So now they’re thinking the same guy did them both. Two is a series. Thus, serial killer. Which is bad for business.”

“We’ll just have to do our best to help,” I say, ordering a round.

The emcee thanks us for coming. But before he opens the floor to all comers, he has a special announcement. Congratulations for one of Brain Pudding’s contributors, Rosalind Canon, a mousy girl sitting with mousy boys in the front. Apparently she learned just this morning that the manuscript for her first novel had been accepted for publication in New York. A bidding war. World rights sold. Film option.

“And as if that wasn’t enough,” he says, “it’s her birthday! Happy twenty-fourth, Rosalind!”

The emcee steps back from the mic, beams down at Rosalind, and starts to clap.

And in the next second, something interesting happens.

A drop in the room’s barometric pressure, the sudden hollowness that precedes a thunderstorm. Aside from the emcee’s two hands clapping, there is no sound other than our collectively held breath. It leaves each of us exposed. Caught on the coruscated edges of the same desire. Despite our differences of age, of costume, of genre, we are here because we all share the longing to be writers. But in this moment, what we more immediately wish is to be Rosalind. A surge of not-yet-rationalized jealousy powerful enough to alter the composition of the very environment we occupy.

And then, when our limbs finally accept the command given them, we join in the applause. A round of whistles and hearty good wishes you’d never suspect of the effort they required.

“That’s great! Wow!” Len says.

“Oh yeah. It’s so wow great I could kill her.”

I wave my arm barward. From here on, my beers are coupled with bourbon shots. It eases things somewhat. The flatulent sound poetry and same-sex erotica and hate-my-parents short stories that follow pass in a benumbed succession. I even like some of it. Or at least, I admire that their authors are here, putting their name in the emcee’s hat and, when called upon, ascending the plywood riser and letting it fly. Good or bad, they made this stuff. Which is more than I can say for myself.

Some time later, Rosalind Canon’s name is called over the PA. She’s come to these things before. She even knows the right way to approach the stage: with a slouch, as though her real thoughts are elsewhere, puzzling out some far deeper question than How do I look?

As she murmurs on, I resolve that, once she’s finished, I will start home. The flush of goodwill that came with the first wave of alcohol is already passing, and I know from experience it will soon leave only regret and self- pity behind. Just one more drink in case the killer out there decides I’m to be next. I’d rather not see it coming. What kind of blade would he have to use to do what he does? Something motorized, perhaps. Or perhaps he is just incredibly strong. What had the monster in Angela’s story liked to do? Turn people into fractions.

I’m about to tell Len I’m going to leave when I’m stopped by the realization that half the people in the room have turned in their chairs to look my way.

“Sorry to wake you,” Len is saying, his hand on my arm. “But you were snoring.”

In my cubicle at the National Star the next morning, Tim Earheart stops by to deliver coffee. It will be my fourth of the day, and it’s only just turned ten. But I need all the help I can get. The many beers and only slightly fewer Wild Turkeys of the night before have left me fuzzy-headed and furrymouthed. I take a couple scalding gulps before I’m able to read Tim’s lips.

“Let’s go down for a smoke,” he’s saying for the second time, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone’s listening.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I’ll give you one.”

“Quit. More or less. Thought you knew—” Tim raises the back of his hand and for a second I’m sure he’s going to slap me. Instead, he bends close to my ear.

“What I’ve got isn’t for general consumption,” he whispers, and walks away toward the doors to the main stairwell.

The basement of the National Star is the exclusive domain of two species of dinosaur: smokers and historians. It’s down here where the preelectronic database issues of the paper are stored, as well as some archival bric-a-brac including, I have heard, the shrunken head of the newspaper’s founder. Aside from a few postgrad researchers the only people who come down here are the last of the nicotine wretches. A dwindling number, even among reporters. The kids coming out of journalism school these days are more likely to carry a yoga mat and an Evian bottle than a flask and a pack of smokes.

It leaves the Smoking Room one of the last places in the building where you can hope to have a private conversation. Sure enough, when I close the door behind me and feel my stomach clench at the carcinogenic stink, it’s only Tim Earheart in here with me.

“They’re not running it. They’re not fucking running it,” he says, literally fuming, grey exhaust spilling out his nose.

“What aren’t they running?”

“The note.”

I know that Tim is enough of an obsessive that if he’s this excited, he’s talking about a story. And his story right now is Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey.

“Left it by her body,” he goes on. “A part of her body. Her head, as a matter of grotesque fact. Typed out nice and neat for whoever found her.”

“You have possession of this note?”

“Sadly, no. One of the cops on the scene told me what it said. He shouldn’t have, but he did.”

“And you brought it to the suits.”

“Expecting it to go A1. Because if this isn’t front page, what is? But the police caught wind of it, and they begged us to muzzle it. Ongoing investigation, lives at risk, an eventual arrest could be jeopardized, blah blah blah. Just throw a blanket on it for a few days. So now they’re not running it.”

“Does it say who wrote it?”

“It’s not signed. But I think it’s pretty damn clear.”