The Killing Circle

The second time through I see it. A short story titled “The Subway Driver”. Written by one Evelyn Sanderman.

“San-der-man. Sand-man. See?”

“Are you saying Evelyn wrote this?”

“At the back,” Len says, excited now. “The Contributors’ Notes.”

The journal’s last pages feature short biographies of the volume’s writers, along with a black-andwhite photo. At the entry for Evelyn Sanderman the following paragraph:

Evelyn is a traveller who is fascinated by other people’s lives. “There is no better research for a writer than to get close to a stranger,” she tells us. This is Evelyn’s first published story.

Next to this, a photo of Angela.

“When was this published?”

“Last year.”

“And why do you have it?”

“I subscribe to everything,” he says. “I like to follow who’s getting published and where. It feeds my jealousy, I guess. Some mornings it’s the only thing that gets me out of bed.”

Len is kneeling before me now, looking crazed with the heat, the rare visit of human contact. The sharing of a plot twist.

“Can I borrow this?”

“Go ahead. I kind of want it out of here anyway,” Len says, eyes ablaze with the narcotic rush of fear.

“The Subway Driver” is good. The critic in me insists on getting this said upfront. A totally different voice from the one who told the story in Angela’s journal. This time, the narrative tone is chillingly anesthetized, a man transported through a crowded urban environment, unnoticed and hazy as a phantom. But there are also moments of heartbreaking despair that cut through to the surface. Not Angela’s voice at all, or any other strictly fictional creation. It’s because the voice belongs to someone real. To Ivan.

As the title partly suggests, “The Subway Driver” is a day in the life of an unnamed man who speeds a train through the underground tunnels during the day, and scratches at chronically unfinished stories at night. What really takes me by surprise, though, the revelation that leaves me shaking in the front seat of the Toyota where I’m parked outside Len’s rooming house, isn’t this blatant borrowing from the biography Ivan presented to us during the Kensington Circle’s meetings, but the private backstory, the tragic secret I assumed he had shared only with me.

At points in the main narrative, the Ivancharacter reflects on the accidental (or not) fall of his niece down his sister’s basement stairs. The same event he related to me standing at the urinals in the Zanzibar. Even some of the details, the very phrasings (as best as I recall them) make their way into Angela’s text.

Her name was Pam…I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive…One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth…That’s how a life ends. Two lives. It just happens.

She must have learned Ivan’s secret on her own. He told her.

And she used it. Used him.

The address Angela gave me included a security code number for her condominium in one of the tall but otherwise nondescript towers of grey metal and glass that have weedishly cropped up around the baseball stadium. I would never have known how to ring her otherwise, as her number isn’t listed next to Angela Whitmore, but Pam Turgenov. The name of Ivan’s dead niece.

Once she’s buzzed me in I take the elevator up, each blinking floor number to the twenty-first ratcheting up the rage within me. Flashpoints bursting into flame.

She is a liar.

A threat to me.

To Sam.

And then:

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my book. She has taken my old life away from me.

I’ve never felt this way before. This angry. Though anger seems to have little to do with what I’m feeling now. It’s too soft, a mood among moods. This is physical: an electric charge crackling out from my chest. A clean division between a thinking self and an acting self.

Angela left her door open. I know because when I take a running kick at it, the handle crunches into the plaster of the interior wall.

The acting part of me lunges at her.

The thinking part takes note of the cheap furniture, the curtainless picture windows looking west over the lake, the rail lines, the city’s sprawl to the horizon. The day’s heat hanging over everything.

Angela might have said something before I slammed into her but it made no impression. No words escape her lips now, in any case. It’s because I’ve taken her by the throat. My thumbs pressing down. Beneath her skin, something soft gives way.

Then I’m lifting her up and throwing her on to the sofa. Straddling her hips. Putting all my weight on to my locked arms so that they stop any sound coming from her.

Screaming into her with a voice not my own.

I don’t know what you want. I don’t know who you are. It doesn’t matter. Because if I see whoever you’ve got tailing me anywhere near my house or my son again, I’ll fucking kill you.

Her body spasms.

You getting this? I’ll fucking kill you.

I keep my grip on her throat and feel Angela’s body yield beneath me. I already am killing her. There is a curiosity in seeing how the end will show itself. A final seizure? A stillness?

It’s you.

I’m letting her go. That is, I must have let her go, as she appears to be making an attempt to say something.

“I thought you were too…simple. But that’s the kind of person who does this sort of thing, isn’t it? The blank slate.”

“It’s not me.”

“You didn’t know what you were doing just now. You were a different person. Maybe that person is the one who killed Petra.”

Angela struggles to stand. Moves away from me without taking her eyes off my hands.

“I’m the one being followed,” I say.

“You nearly strangled me!”

“Because you’re fucking with me. My son.”

“Fuck you!”

The exhaustion hits us both at the same time. Our feet dance uncertainly under us, as though we are standing on a ship’s deck in a storm.

“Just answer me this. If you’re so innocent, why are you hiding behind someone else’s name?”

“To stay away from him.”

She tells me how she’s seen him from time to time. Ever since the Kensington Circle stopped meeting. Someone who would appear across the street from the building where she worked, her different apartments over the years, watching through the window of a restaurant as she ate. Always in shadow. Faceless.

It was the Sandman who forced her into changing her name, her appearance and her job before she learned of Conrad White and Evelyn’s accident. Afterward, it only let her disappear that much more easily.

“Did disappearing involve sending out stories under pseudonyms?”

“Pseudonyms?”