The Killing Circle

Len is not well. This fact is coming into sharp focus now. He’s not just another comic-bookcollecting oddball, not one of the half-invisibles, the sort of mouth breather you try to ignore peering over your shoulder at a bank machine. He’s ill. Yet, now that we’re here, in a place where more cocktails are available if things get hairy, I figure there’s little harm in nudging him further.

“Then why not me? Why am I not next?”

“You were the only one without a story,” Len answers, finishing his drink and unintentionally slamming the glass down on the bar.

“She said that to you?”

“It was kind of obvious.”

Len puts his hand on my wrist, pressing it against the bar’s varnished surface, and I let him. I also let him come in close once more to whisper into my cheek.

“She isn’t what she appears to be,” he says.

I try to pull my arm away, but he’s got a stronger hold than I thought he was capable of.

“I’m not just saying she’s psychotic,” Len goes on, suddenly louder. Behind me, there’s the chair squeaks and interrupted conversations of other drinkers stopping to hear the agitated guy in the corner. “I’m saying she’s not human.”

“For God’s sake, Len.”

“In medieval legend, there is a name for a female being that incrementally consumes other beings until their eventual exhaustion or death.”

“A succubus.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh Christ.”

“A witch who appears in the form of a temptress.”

“Calm down. Here. Take another sip—”

“Usually the succubus’ purpose is to steal the semen of sleeping men—their life force. But in this case, it’s different. She steals stories.”

“Are you saying we need to put a stake through her heart? Shoot her with a silver bullet?”

“I’m serious. And the sooner you get serious about it too, the longer you might live.”

Len is serious. The whole bar can see it. And it watches him stand, the boldness that had possessed him for these past moments instantly slipping away.

“There are some desires so foul they are never satisfied,” he says, and appears to search his mind for something more. But if there was something, it’s gone now. I’m done, his drooped shoulders and hanging head say as he walks away. That’s all I can manage.

My Friday winding down to its bourbonsoftened end. But even with the assurance that Len’s theories are as twisted as initially advertised, the day closes with an unsettling idea. For as the door closes behind him, I can’t help thinking I will never see Len again.

24

I start out to my meeting with Ivan early enough, but the sun, already high and merciless by nine, ends up making me late. Twice I have to stop and sit in the shade to get a handle on the dizziness that comes with pushing myself through air not made for walking, or for anything really, other than euthanizing the old and promoting sales of asthma inhalers for the young. By the time I shuffle by the old facade of the Royal Ontario Museum I don’t really care if Ivan awaits me underground or not. What I need is to get out of the sun and wait for October to come.

But it’s not much better here. Down the stairs the air is almost as warm, the trains growling and screeching below. So what am I doing here, anyway? Why do I want to know what Ivan means by “an encounter”? The smart thing would be to turn back. And not just from my meeting with Ivan, but from everyone. Someone else can tease out the mystery of the Sandman and be rewarded as Carol Ulrich, Petra and the others were rewarded.

But I don’t do the smart thing. And it’s here, carried down on the sliding escalator stairs, that I figure why: I want to save the day. Dishonoured author, pink-slipped critic, rejected lover—yes to all. Yet there may still be an opportunity for forgiveness, a full pardon that would see me returned from observing the world to the world itself. This is how deep the faulty hopes of fiction have been engrained in me.

It’s in the next moment that I notice the man coming up the escalator opposite me.

Both hands gripping the rubber handrails, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down so that his face is obscured. He would be tall if he were standing straight. But he’s not.

He slides past. And I continue down.

It’s not the look of him that strikes me, but the smell he leaves in the air once he’s passed. A brief taste of compost. The first whiff that meets you upon opening the door of an unplugged fridge.

I have been close enough to that skin to catch its odour before. I have tried to describe it before too.

Wood smoke. Sweat. Boiled meat.

William.

He’s already disappearing around the corner at the top of the escalator when I turn. The door to the outside squeaking open and vacuuming shut.

I make a hopeless run against the descending steps—one down for every two up—and surrender halfway when a mother with a stroller comes to stand at the top, scowling at me. Another lunatic, her organic-only face says. When is somebody going to clean this town up?

It’s at the ticket kiosk, waiting for the attendant to hand over my change, that I notice the first sign that something worse than a William appearance may be going on down here. The sound of incoherent exclamations— Don’t touch it! Somebody…somebody!—coming from the platform at the bottom of the stairs. Children bursting into hysterical, echoing cries. A woman’s scream.

I push my way through the turnstile at the same time the attendant picks up his phone and starts to wave me back. Ignoring him, I carry on walking backwards to see the woman with the stroller being told she can’t enter, and her demanding to know why. The attendant tells her. Whatever it is, it turns her around, her heels tapping out a distress signal on the marble floor.

On the way down to the platform the voices I’d heard earlier have grown in volume. More adult shouts have joined the wailing infants, and there’s one or two official order-givers now too—Stand back! Straight line here, people!—along with the increasingly panicked Ohmygods of mothers who have brought their children to visit the museum, many of them, by the sounds of it, still disembarking from the train. Shoes sliding against shoes. The grunt and gasp of those jostling for position in shrinking space. Human cattle.

I reach the platform and join them. The only one coming down as everyone else takes their first frenzied steps toward the exits.

Then I see why.

The southbound train has stopped two-thirds of the way into the station. Its doors open, the cars now wholly emptied. Men in fluorescent orange vests push through the crowd to open the door to the control cabin at the front. A moment later the driver emerges, hands trembling at the sides of his face, his lips moving but nothing coming out.

An accident. One that’s just happened. Given the way some of the kids break away from their mothers to look over the side of the platform and instantly turn back, it’s obvious what sort. A jumper. And that’s not all I correctly guess before I push sideways to look over the side for myself. I know who jumped.

One of the most common ways of reckoning individual experience is through the number of times a thing has been seen or done: how many people one has slept with, foreign countries visited, diseases suffered and survived. Along with the dead. How many have you viewed outside of open caskets and TV news? Before today, my count