The Killing Circle

It’s the fourth interview of the last five hours and I’m not sure I’m making sense any more. A New Yorker staffer doing a 2,000-word profile. A documentary crew from Sweden. USA Today wanting a “sneak peek” on what my next book is about.

“I’m retired,” I insist, and the reporter smiles, as though to say Hey, I get it. Us writers like to hold our cards close.

And now a kid from the National Star who I can tell is planning a snark attack from the second he sits across from me and refuses to meet my eyes. A boneless handshake, dewy sweat twinkling over lips and cheeks. I vaguely remember him—a copyeditor who was very touchy about having grown up in Swift Current.

“So,” he says, clicking the Record button on the dictaphone he has placed on the table. “You’ve been on the London Times’ bestseller list since the pub date. Film deal with stars attached. And you’ve hit six weeks on the New York Times list. Was all this your plan from the beginning?”

“Plan?”

“To what extent were you aware of the market factors in advance?”

“I didn’t really think about—”

“It’s okay. There’s no need to be defensive. I believe there should always be a place for pulp fiction.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I mean, your book—it’s not serious or anything.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t know serious if it kissed me on the lips.”

The kid snorts. Flips his notebook closed.

“Do you really think you deserve all this? Do you think what you’ve done—”

He pauses here to toss my book on to the table like a turd he’s only now realized he’s been holding. “Do you actually think this thing is literature?”

His lips keep smacking, but no more words come. I watch as the visible effort of searching for the meanest thing he could say squeezes his forehead into red folds. As for me, I squint, making a show of searching through my memory. Click my fingers when it comes to me.

“Swift Current.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t get the accent at first. But I’m definitely certain now. Swift Current! Must have been such an exciting place to grow up. Exposed to all that culture.”

I’ll give the kid credit. After he storms toward the exit, but is forced to turn back to retrieve the still recording dictaphone that I hold out to him, he has the manners to say thank you.

The thing is, the kid was right to ask if I thought I deserved all this. Because the answer is no. And even as the publicist who’s been shuttling me around in a limo from interview to bookstore to TV chat show fills my glass and Sam’s with more sparkling water, I feel only the hollowness of the vampire, a man who has achieved immortality but at a monstrous cost.

“Are you nervous, Dad?” Sam asks.

More disgraced than anything. Disgraced and sorry.

“A little,” I say.

“But this is your last reading, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d be nervous if I was you.”

The two of us look out at Toronto passing by, at once familiar and new. A North American Everycity. Or Anycity. But this one happens to be home. The limo gliding past the cluster of glass condos and over the railyards toward Harbourfront, where in just a few minutes I, Patrick Rush, am to give a reading from my embarrassingly successful first novel.

It was four years ago that the Kensington Circle gathered for the last time. Then, I was the only aspiring fictioneer among us who was without a story to tell. I never attended another workshop or writing class again. My dream of birthing a novel had been snuffed out once and for all. And I was grateful. Liberated. To be unburdened of an impossible goal is a blessing, believe me, though it admittedly leaves a few scars behind.

Yet here I am. Travel to the foreign nations whose languages my words have been translated into. Dinners and drinks with famous novelists—no, colleagues—I have long read and admired from afar. Invitations to write opinion pieces in publications I had previously received only junk mail from. The kind of breakthrough one is obliged to describe as “surreal” in one’s Vanity Fair write-up, as I did.

And even today, on the occasion of my triumphant homecoming, when nothing I would have dreamed of has been denied me, I know that none of it is real.

“We’re almost there, Mr Rush,” the publicist says.

She looks concerned. More and more I’m lost in what she likely thinks are pensive moments of creativity, an artist’s mulling. Maybe I should tell her. Maybe I should come clean, here in the plush confessional of a limo. And maybe I would, if Sam weren’t here. If I did, I’d tell her that my silences aren’t caused by the churnings of the imagination. The truth is I’m just trying to hold the shame at bay long enough to get through the next smile, the next thank you, the next signature on the title page of a book that bears my name but isn’t really mine.

Backstage I’m given bottled water, a bowl of fruit, a pee break. I’m told it’s a full house, asked if I would answer questions from the audience following my reading. People would love to know what it’s like to have a first book do what mine has done. I agree, I perfectly understand. I’d love to know the same thing.

Then I’m being guided down the hall into the darkened wings. Whispered voices tell me to watch my step. An opening appears in a velvet curtain and I step through, alone. There’s my place in the front row. The publicist is in the seat next to Sam’s, waving at me, as though there is some threat I might turn and walk out.

The director of the reading series appears at the lectern. He begins by thanking the corporate sponsors and moneyed donors who make such things possible. Then he starts on his introduction. A funny anecdote involving an exchange between himself and the featured author backstage just moments ago. I laugh along with everyone else, thinking how nice it would be if the charming guest he’s just described actually existed. If he could be me.

And then I’m into dangerous territory again. Wishing Tamara were here. A wallop of grief that chokes the breath out of my throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to present Toronto’s own Patrick Rush, reading from his sensational first novel, The Sandman!”

Applause. My hands raised against the spotlight in protest at too much love. Along with a private struggle to not be sick all over the front row.

Silence. Clear my throat. Adjust glasses.

Begin.

“There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost…”

14

A plain envelope bearing a Toronto postmark. Inside, a newspaper clipping. No note attached. A piece from the Whitley Register, the local weekly of a northern Ontario town. A pin prick along the rugged, unpeopled spine of Lake Superior.

The story dated Friday, August 24, 2003.