The Killing Circle

lunch is a form of meditation.

“About last night,” I start. “I wanted to tell you how much—”

“I think you should talk to some of the others.”

“The others?”

“From the circle.”

Angela holds her coffee with both hands, warming them against the bracing chill of condo A/C.

“That’s funny. I was going to say something about us. Something nice.”

“I’m not too good at the morning-after thing, I guess.”

“So you’ve had others. Other mornings.”

“Yes, Patrick. I’ve had other mornings.”

I take a suave gulp of scalding coffee. Once the burning in my throat has dulled to an excruciating throb, I ask why she wants me to speak to the others.

“To find out what they know. If they’ve been…involved the same way we have.”

I nod at this, and keep nodding. It’s the word she’s just used. Involved. Said in the way Conrad White said it when I asked what he thought of Angela’s story. You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.

“How did you come to leave your purse in Conrad’s car?”

“I told you. We were seeing each other a little at the time.”

“Seeing each other? Or seeing each other?”

“He was interested in who I was.”

And who are you? I nearly ask, but stop it in time with another tonsil-scarring sip of coffee.

“Have you read his work?”

“Jarvis and Wellesley? Sure,” she says. “Why?”

“I think he saw in you what the character in his book was looking for.”

“His dead daughter.”

“The perfect girl.”

“He told you that?”

“So I’m right.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Angela tells me that Conrad would drive her home sometimes after their get-togethers. At first, their topics were the usual literary matters such as favourite books (The Trial for Conrad, The Magus for Angela), work habits, writer’s block and how it might be overcome. Soon, though, Conrad would focus their discussion on where Angela’s story came from. Her childhood, her friends growing up, where her parents were now. Something in the pointedness of his queries put Angela on the defensive, so that her replies became more intentionally vague the more he persevered. It made him angry.

“Like he wasn’t just curious, but desperate,” Angela says, slipping her cellphone and keys into her purse.

“Was he in love with you?”

“He might have been, in a way. More like a freaky fan than a lover, you know? But that wasn’t what made him ask all those questions.”

She stops. Not liking where this is taking her.

“I think he was scared,” she says.

“Scared of what?”

“The same thing we’re scared of.”

“And he—”

“He thought it had to do with my story.”

I’m following Angela to the door, slipping on watch and socks and shoes as I go.

“Did he have any contact with the Sandman—someone he thought was the Sandman? There were those killings back then. Maybe he was making connections in ways none of us had thought of.”

“Maybe,” Angela says. “Or maybe he was a messed-up shut-in who was driving himself crazy making something out of nothing.”

In the elevator down, I ask who from the circle she thinks we should try to look up first.

“We?”

“I thought you said it might be useful to know what the others know.”

“But I can’t do the asking.”

“Why not?”

“Who did he deliver the Yankees cap to?”

The elevator doors open. Outside, the heat bends the air into shimmering vapours.

“Can I call you?” I ask.

“Not for a while.”

“Why not?”

“You are mine. Remember?” she says, opening the doors to the burning world. “I don’t think he’d like it if he thought I was yours.”

You wouldn’t expect, being caught in a web of intrigue (who knew I would ever use this phrase so personally, irreplaceably?) that, in between the recorded scenes of revelation and confrontation, one could still have so much spare time. Unemployment can open yawning chasms in the middle of the most mentally preoccupied days, believe me. There are still the self-maintaining banalities to attend to: the belated meals, the bathroom dashes, the long showers. Still the mail, the erupting laundry hamper, the dental appointment. One can be a murder suspect, a serial killer’s prey, and still have time to waste on the last sobbing half-hour of Dr Phil.

There are a pair of activities over these melting July days, however, that are returned to with too great a frequency to note each time they occur. The first is my journal. I’ve graduated from stolen jottings at bedtime to carrying it around wherever I go, recollecting snatches of conversation, the wheres and whens of things. It is, in the rereading, an increasingly unstructured document. What begins as tidy pages of coherent points soon breaks down into messages to Sam, scribbled drawings of Petra, Detective Ramsay (though I don’t attempt Angela, can’t imagine where the first line would start), even a letter to the Sandman, asking that if he has to take me with him into the Kingdom of Not What It Seems that he leave my son behind. It occurs to me that later, when it’s all over, this journal of mine may be the sort of thing that supports the contention that poor old Patrick had lost his way well before the shadow got him. After all, what is sanity other than guarding the border between the fiction and non- fiction sections?

My other habit is to give Sam a ring and see how he’s doing. Most of the time he’s out in the yard playing with Stacey’s kids (they have a pool, an unthinkable suburban luxury for us city mice), or camping overnight (instead of the artsy-craftsy day school I’ve been sending him to), or one of any other number of healthy summer distractions I have long meant to get around to doing with him, but mostly never have, slipping him books or movie passes instead. In other words, even when I call I don’t get to talk to him. But it gives me a chance to thank Stacey yet again for what she’s doing, to assure her that I’ll collect Sam once I’ve “cleared the deck of a few things”, to ask her to tell him that I called.

There you have it: even a man caught in a web of intrigue still fights against the inevitable with whatever’s left to him. To hang on to the shape life used to take before he became trapped, and now can do little but wait for the spider to feel his struggle and decide enough, that’s enough for this fly. It’s time.

Since we parted in her condo’s lobby, and despite her asking me not to, I have put in a handful of calls to Angela, and received some cursory excuses in return (“Work is really crazy this week”, “I