The Killing Circle

teenagers. For Sam, the attraction is seeing what he, despite my repeated corrections, calls “My dad’s movie”.

“North,” Sam says, his nose to the glass, as I turn off the concession road and join the line of traffic inching toward the admission booth.

I didn’t know my son could tell directions from the stars.

“Look,” I tell him, pointing to the back of the screen up the slope. The cowboy riding the bucking bronco atop the marquee, the fields of harvest corn beyond. Sam reads aloud the lettering announcing tonight’s feature presentation.

“The Sandman,” he says.

I’ve already seen it. Sam may not be old enough to handle some of the more “mature” subject matter (this is the opinion of the censor board, whose rating fussily warns of “Violence, and Suggestions of Improper Sexual Interest”). But if the guy in the ticket booth is prepared to take my money for two adults, then for tonight, that’s what we are.

We park off to the side in front of the concession stand, haul folding chairs out of the Toyota’s trunk. Throw a sleeping bag over our knees to guard against the chill.

Although The Sandman is based on my novel, my involvement in its being made has been limited to the guilty acceptance of a production-fee cheque. I was invited to the premiere in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago but declined. The studio publicists called to plead their case that my non-attendance might be misconstrued as my having “creative reservations about the project”. I assured them I had no creativity with which to hold reservations. In return for my assurance of silence, they sent me champagne and an advance copy of the DVD.

Just the other day I popped it in, uncorked the bubbly, and for the next hour and a half sat myself down in the Crypt and drank straight from the bottle. It wasn’t bad. The champagne, I mean. As for the movie, I suppose it possesses a certain propulsiveness, fuelled mainly by chop-chop editing and a techno soundtrack that makes the city in which the film was shot (Toronto, as a matter of fact, though Toronto as intended to look like New York) feel jacked on meth.

What’s funny about the movie, what slightly bothers me about it, isn’t its quality one way or the other, but how divergent it is from the real thing. From Angela. Her voice. That’s what is utterly missing from the Hollywood version, through no fault of its screenwriters and actors and producers. How could they know what it was like to sit in Conrad White’s candlelit apartment, the snow scratching at the windows, and listen to Angela reading from the doodle-margined pages of her journal? Even if they had been there, would it have changed anything? A movie tells a story, but its world is static. Every set and gesture and image carefully determined, the narrative hermetically sealed. A movie doesn’t let you create what you see within yourself. But that’s what Angela’s voice did. It invited you inside.

“It’s starting!” Sam announces as the floodlights cut out.

The rest you know.

You know from where all this started, deep in the middle of things. The story of the Man Who Lost His Son at the Movies. I say “lost” because that’s how the police and newspapers referred to it, as though Sam was a dropped wallet. The media releases are careful to point out that no evidence of foul play was found at the scene. I don’t know whether they said this as a matter of general policy or whether they simply didn’t accept my account of chasing a shadow through the corn rows.

You already know how this Labour Day turns out for me. But when you start in the middle, there are certain angles that are left out, shades of meaning that wouldn’t have made sense the first time around. Consider, for instance, the troubling effect that watching The Sandman on a towering screen under the night’s stars had on me. How something in the oversized action tried to tell me to Take your son and leave. Tried to warn me.

What are you talking about?

The thing that lives under your bed. The eyes in your closet at night, watching you. The dark. Whatever frightens you the most…

I can only watch the screen for a few seconds at a time. The actors delivering their lines directly to me, their faces looking down with ironic masks of “fear”, “determination”, “worry”. I was wrong about movies being fixed worlds. These characters, the action on this screen—all of it wants out.

“You want anything?” I ask Sam. “Tater tots?”

And he takes my hand. Lets it go only when the cashier takes too long to ring us in.

Then I’m running between the lines of parked cars, trying to tell myself what I know is happening isn’t happening. It doesn’t work. Because the Sandman is here. Not William, who is miles away, sitting in a cell. Not Ramsay. Not Len or Conrad White. Not Raymond Mull.

It’s the Sandman who runs into the corn field, letting me catch a glimpse of him so I can follow. This is what he wanted me to do. It gave him the time he needed to disappear, to ensure I was headed in the opposite direction from where Sam was being kept in the trunk of one of the back row cars. Or maybe my son was in the car next to mine the whole time.

I was chasing the Sandman. But he never had Sam to begin with.

By the time I reach the abandoned farmhouse on the far side of the field it’s over. I can only stand there, staring back at the Mustang’s screen in the distance.

The terrible man who does terrible things isn’t William. It isn’t even a man. It’s a girl. The one whose face is on the drive-in screen, the one who read from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment, the one with toes missing from frostbite. A girl who has grown up to assume different names. Steal different lives.

My mistake was to assume that the villain of my story was the same as the villain in hers. But the monster who has taken the only thing left to me isn’t the Sandman. It’s the one who created him.

PART FOUR

The Terrible Man Who Does Terrible Things

30

There is a search. You can imagine. A father loses his son at the movies, the boy snatched away in the time it takes to buy hot dogs and onion rings—it’s a summer weekend news editor’s dream come true. In the early morning of that Sunday—before the dawn of the cancelled dusk-’til-dawn—one of the networks awakens a “missing person expert” and tapes an interview in which we are reminded that “The first twelve hours are crucial in cases of this kind.” Even the police supervisors behind the microphones at the first news conference of the day aren’t immune to the excitement of a race against time, especially where there’s a kid involved. It’s like something on TV. It is on TV.

Look: there’s the Chief of the OPP staring directly into the cameras and vowing to put all available resources into locating “little Sam”, and until they do, “I can tell you there won’t be sleep for any of us.” There’s the shots of local volunteers marching through the Mustang’s neighbouring fields of corn, searching for clues, for body parts. And there’s the father, his skin speckled and spongy as oatmeal, robotically pleading for his boy’s safe return. So, thinks the readership of the Couch Potato, that’s what a novelist looks like.

He looks suspicious. Even to me. An unconvincing performance of parental concern—not enough panic, the voice emptied, as though he’s already made the turn toward grief. I watch a repeated loop of myself on the all-