The Killing Circle

“They told me to stay at home.”

“That’s a hard order to follow if you think he’s out there.”

“I know he is.”

“You know?”

“Sam is alive. And I’m going to be the one who finds him.”

“Sounds like you’re on to something.”

“If I was, would I tell you?”

“You might. If you wanted to be clear.”

“Clear?”

“A show of goodwill. Without it, people can start down wrong paths.”

He had me. For a second, I thought now that Ramsay had William in his cell, there was a chance he would actually be sympathetic with a father who’d lost his boy. But suspicion is Ramsay’s default position. It’s where he lives.

“I would never hurt Sam.”

“Nobody says you have.”

“Nobody has said so, no. So if they’re not being honest with me, why should I be honest with them?”

“Like I said. You could make this clear.”

“It’s clear enough for me.”

I start toward the exit. A bit off balance from the bourbon, the rush that comes with the speaking of privately held revelations. But when Ramsay opens his mouth to say something as I go, I’m still able to beat him to it.

“You’ve found your Sandman,” I shout as both palms slap the door wide open. “Now it’s my turn.”

Ramsay may still be following me, but I don’t care. I’m not doing anything wrong. Only walking. And whispering questions out loud. Questions that, over a long night’s wander east, lead me out of the fog of shock.

First up is how whoever took Sam knew we were planning to be at the Mustang on that particular night. As far as I can recall, I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Had Sam? Perhaps. An overheard playground boast (“My dad’s taking me to see his movie tonight!”), or something let slip to his friend Joseph. Still, these are unlikely scenarios, as Sam doesn’t usually gossip with his gang of kids at the park, none of them do, all of them boys of an age where their primary communication is the role play of machine-gunning soldiers or robots with laser beams firing out from their eye sockets.

The far greater probability is that we were followed. A black van. Changing lanes to keep me in view as we headed out of the city.

So why not take this to the police? I’ve come close to telling them about Angela a couple of times, but held back for reasons both rational and intuitive. On the rational side, I have no proof that it was her. More than this, “Angela” is dead. I’ve got Petra’s disposal to keep hidden. And I’m currently the prime suspect in Sam’s disappearance. Now that I think of it, Angela likely had something on everyone in the circle that they didn’t want out in the open. It’s how she’s kept under the radar all along.

But what really prevents me from mentioning her name is the gut certainty that I’m not meant to. If Angela—or whoever it is who has my son—gets the idea that I’m telling the police everything I know, it’s over. The only way to Sam is through following the story to the end.

Before I know it the sun is plucking stars from the sky. I’ve made it all the way out to the Beaches, turned down one of its side streets to the boardwalk. No one out but the few pre-dawn joggers and picnic-table snoozers, the lonely and haunted like me. With shoes off, the sand is cool under my feet. Yet when I step into the first timid waves the water is body temperature, having been simmered over the course of a heatwaved summer. It may never freeze again.

Something touches my hand—a fly, a candy wrapper lifted from the beach on a gust of wind—and I look down expecting Sam to be there. The fact that he is missing is always at the front of my mind, and yet the illusion of his presence comes to me several times every waking hour. He’s not here. But he should be. Taking my hand and stepping out into the water. Asking if he can go all the way in. Telling me not to be afraid.

The morning brings an ugly specificity to the flatscreen billboards and construction cranes to the west. It turns my eyes back out over the water. But the lake is just as likely an industrial product, its surface wrinkly and thin as aluminum foil.

Here’s what I’m thinking as I start back: there is nowhere to go any more that has not been modified, re- invented, enhanced. Places don’t exist as they once did, simply and convincingly. Virtual reality is the only reality left.

And so what? If I can just have Sam back, the rest of the world can keep its recycled myths, its well-crafted fakery. I don’t need anything to be real any more. I just need him.

31

To find Sam, I have to find Angela. But to search for someone who doesn’t exist: not the best task for an out-of-work TV critic. So what would Tim Earheart or Ramsay do in my shoes? Start with what’s on the table. Not much. There’s Angela’s name (false), her age (within a decade range), her published work (lifted from others’ autobiographical accounts). There’s also what I know of her appearance (especially susceptible to the whimsies of shadow and light, so that she was one thing reading from her journal on the opposite side of Conrad White’s rug, and another the night she cupped her hands over my ears to muffle the sounds she made in her bed, as though it was me and not her neighbours she needed to save from distraction). For someone who has come to play such a cruelly important role in my life, Angela has done all the taking and in return left next to nothing of herself behind.

One thread I still have of hers takes me to the condo where, eighteen floors above, I had seen and touched parts of her that now, in recollection, fall in favour of the argument that Angela has never been anything but a creation of fantasy. My effort to return my hands to her skin renders only the most generic impression, a softcore going through the motions. The naked Angela comes to me now from too great a distance, implausibly flawless and blue-lit.

If this is the case—if I never was with Angela on what I thought was our only night together—then perhaps Angela isn’t to blame. Perhaps I’m the psychotic. There is no Angela because there never was an Angela. Which would mean she isn’t the one who has done something terrible to Sam. I am.

Only the building’s superintendent throwing me against the wall puts these dark considerations aside.

“You,” the man says. The same one who’d given me the heave-ho the last time. Now, however, he’s giving me the clinical stare of a physician checking for signs of jaundice. “Tell me. Just between us. Whisper it in my ear if you’d like.”

“Yes?”

“What is your problem?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“You’ve found him.”

“Not you. A tenant.”

“They’re not tenants when they own the unit.”

“What are they then?”

“They’re unit owners.”

“I’m looking for a unit owner.”