The Killing Circle

Conrad White asks him what he hopes to achieve over the course of the meetings to come, and Ivan considers his answer for a long moment. "When I bring my train into a station, I see the faces of all the people on the platform flash by,” he says. "I just want to try and capture some of them. Turn them into something more than the passengers on the other side of the glass who get on, get off. Make whole people out of them. Something I can hold on to. Someone."

As soon as Ivan finishes speaking, he lowers his head, fearing he’s said too much. I have to resist the impulse to go to him, offer a brotherly hand on his shoulder.

And then I notice his hands. Oversized gloves resting atop his knees. The skin stretched like aged leather over the bones. Something about those hands instantly dissolves the notion of going any closer to Ivan than is necessary.

The portly fellow beside Ivan introduces himself as Len. He looks around at each of us after this, grinning, as though his name alone suggests something naughty. "What I like about reading,” he goes on, "is the way you can be different people. Do different things. Things you’d never do yourself. If you’re good enough at it, it’s like you’re not even imagining any more."

This is why Len wants to write. To be transformed. A big kid who has the look of the stayat-home gamer, the kind whose only friends are virtual, the other shut-ins he posts on-line messages to inquiring how to get to Level Nine on some shoot-the-zombies software. Who can blame him for wanting to become someone else?

The more Len talks about writing, the more physically agitated he becomes, wriggling his hefty hips forward to the edge of his chair, rubbing the armrests as though to dry his hands of sweat. But he only gets really excited once he confesses that his "big thing” is horror. Novels and short stories and movies, but especially comic books. Anything to do with "The undead. Presences. Werewolves, vampires, demons, poltergeists, witches. Especially witches. Don’t ask me why."

Len shows all of us his loopy grin once more. It makes it hard not to like the guy. His passions worn so plainly, so shamelessly, I find myself almost envying him.

Sitting beside Len’s nervous bulk, Angela looks small as a child. Part of this illusion is the result of her happening to occupy the largest chair in the room, a wing-backed lounger set so high the toes of her shoes scratch the floor. Other than this, what’s notable about Angela’s appearance is its lack of distinction. Even as I try to sketch her into my memory I recognize she has the kind of face that would be difficult to describe even a few hours from now. The angles of her features seem to change with the slightest shift, so that she gives the impression of being a living composite, the representative of a general strain of person rather than any person in particular.

Even what she says seems to evaporate as it drifts out into the room. Relatively new in the city, having arrived via "a bunch of different places out west". The only constant in her life is her journal. "Except it’s not really a journal,” she says, and makes an odd sound with her nose that might be a stifled laugh. "Most of it is made up, but some of it isn’t. Which makes it more fiction than, like, a diary, I guess."

With this, she stops. Slides back into the chair and lets it swallow her. I keep watching her after she’s finished. And though she doesn’t meet eyes with anyone else in the circle, I have the notion that she’s recording what everyone says just as deliberately as I am.

Next is Evelyn. The deadpan pixie in a biker jacket. I’m a little surprised to learn that she is a grad student at the University of Toronto. It isn’t her youth. It’s the outfit. She looks more like Courtney Love when she first fell for Kurt than the fellowship winner who can’t decide between Yale, Cornell or Cambridge to do her Ph.D. Then the answer comes: her planned dissertation will be a study of "Dismemberment and Female Vengeance in the 1970s Slasher Film". I remember enough of university to know that such topics are best handled by those in costume.

We’re now all the way around to the latecoming giant. When Evelyn’s finished speaking, there’s a subtle positioning of our bodies to take him in, more an adjustment of antennae to pick up a distant signal than the directness required in making eye contact. Still, all of the circle can steal a look at him except for me. Given his proximity, I would have to turn round and tuck my leg under to see him straight on. And this is something I don’t want to do. It may only be the room’s unfamiliarity, the awkwardness in meeting strangers who share little other than a craving for self-expression. But the man sitting to my left radiates a darkness of a different kind from the night outside. A strange vacancy of sympathy, of readable humanness. Despite his size, it’s as though the space he occupies is only a denser form of nothing.

"And you?” Conrad White prompts him. "What brings you to our circle?"

The giant breathes. A whistling that comes up through his chest and, when exhaled, I can feel against the back of my hand.

"I was called,” he says.

"’Called’ in the sense of pursuing your destiny, I take it? Or perhaps a more literal calling?"

"In my dreams."

"You were summoned here in your dreams?"

"Sometimes—” the man says, and it seems like the beginning of a different thought altogether. "Sometimes I have bad dreams."

"That’s fine. Perhaps you could just share your name with us?"

"William,” he says, his voice rising slightly. "My name is William."

My turn.

I say my name aloud. The sound of those elementary syllables allows me to string together the point form brief on Patrick Rush. Father of a smart little boy lucky enough to take his mother’s looks. A journalist who has always felt that something was missing from his writing. (I almost say "life” instead of "writing", a near-slip that is as telling as one might think). A man who isn’t sure if he has something to say but who now feels he has to find out once and for all.

"Very good,” Conrad White says, a note of relief in his voice. "I appreciate your being so frank. All of you. Under the circumstances, I think it only fair that I share with you who I am as well."

Conrad White tells us that he has recently "returned from exile". A novelist and poet who was publishing in Toronto, back just before the cultural explosion of the late sixties that gave rise to a viable national literature. Or, as Conrad White puts it evenly (though no less bitterly), "The days when writing in this country was practiced by unaffiliated individuals, before it took a turn toward the closed door, the favoured few, the tribalistic." He carried on with his work, increasingly feeling like an outsider while some of his contemporaries did what was unimaginable among Canadian writers up to that point: they became famous. The same hippie poets and novelists that were in his classes at UofT and reading in the same coffee houses were now being published internationally, appearing as "celebrity guests” on CBC quiz shows, receiving government grants.

But not Conrad White. He was working on a different animal altogether. Something he knew would not dovetail neatly with the preferred subject matters and stylistic modes of his successful cohorts. A novel of "ugly revelations” that, once published, proved even more controversial than he’d anticipated. The writing community (as it had begun to regard itself) turned its back on him. Though he responded with critical counter-attacks in any journal or pamphlet that would have him, the rejection left him more brokenhearted than livid. It prompted his decision to live abroad. England, at first, before moving on to India, southeast Asia, Morocco. He had only returned to Toronto in the last year. Now he conducted writing workshops such as these to pay his rent.

"I say ’workshops’, but it would be more accurate to speak of them in the singular,” Conrad White says. "For this is my first."

Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Beneath our feet the bass thud from The Fukhouse’s speakers has begun to rattle the windows in their frames. From somewhere in the streets of the market, a madman screams.

Conrad White passes a bowl around to collect our weekly fee. Then he gives us our assignment for next week. A page of a work-in-progress. It needn’t be polished, it needn’t be the beginning. Just a page of something.

Class dismissed.

I fish around for my boots by the door. None of us speak on the way out. It’s like whatever has passed between us in the preceding hour never happened at all.

When I get to the street I start homeward without a glance back at the others, and in my head, there’s the conviction that I won’t return. And yet, even as I have this thought, I know that I will. Whether the Kensington Circle can help me find my story, or whether the story is the Kensington Circle itself, I have to know how it turns out.

3

Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.

As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.

Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.

"Dad? Can I watch TV?"

"Ten minutes."

Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.

A missing person story. The victim (is one a "victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers "acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner". While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that "activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future".

It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.

"What are you doing, Daddy?"

Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living room’s sliding door.

"I’m locking the door."

"But we never lock that door."

"We don’t?"

I peer through the glass at our snow-covered garden. Checking for footprints.

"Show’s over,” Sam says, pulling on my pant leg and pointing at the TV.

"Ten more minutes."

As Sam runs off, I pull the dictaphone out of my pocket.

"Note to self,” I whisper. "Buy padlock for back gate."

It’s the weekend already, and Tuesday’s deadline requiring a page from my nonexistent workin-progress is fast approaching. I’ve made a couple stabs at something during the week, but the surroundings of either the Crypt at home or the cubicle at work have spooked any inspiration that might be waiting to show itself. I need to find the right space. A laptop of one’s own.

Once Tamara’s out-of-town sister, Stacey, has come by to take Sam and his cousins to see the dinosaurs at the museum, I hit the Starbucks around the corner. It’s a sunny Saturday, which means that, after noon, Queen Street will be clogged with shoppers and gawkers. But it’s only just turned ten, and the line-up isn’t yet out the door. I secure a table, pop the lid on my computer, and stare at a freshly created word-processing file. Except for the blinking cursor, a virgin screen of grey. Its purity stops me from touching the keys. The idea of typing a word on to it seems as crude as stepping outside and pissing into a snowbank. And the dentist office grind of the cappuccino machine is starting to get on my nerves. Not to mention the orders shouted back and forth between the barista kids behind the counter. Who wouldn’t raise their head to see what sort of person orders a venti decaf cap with half skim, half soy and extra whipped cream?

I pack up and walk crosstown to the Reference Library on Yonge. The main floor entrance is crowded, as it always is, with the homeless, the new-in-town, the dwindling souls without a cellphone who need to make a call. Through the turnstiles, the building opens into an atrium that cuts through the five floors above. I choose the least occupied level and find a long work table all to myself. Lean back, and think of a single word that might stride forth to lead others into battle.

Nothing.

All around me are tens of thousands of volumes, each containing tens of thousands of printed words, and not one of them is prepared to come forward when I need it most.

Why?

The thing is, I know why.

I don’t have a story to tell.

But Conrad White did, once upon a time. Seeing as I’m in the Reference Library, I decide to take a break and do a bit of research. On Mr White, ringleader of the Kensington Circle.

It takes a little digging, but some of the memoirs and cultural histories from the time of sixties Toronto make footnoted mention of him. From old money, privately schooled, and author of a debatably promising novel before going into hiding overseas. As one commentator tartly put it, "Mr White, for those who know his name at all, is more likely remembered for his leaving his homeland than any work he published while living here."

What’s intriguing about the incomplete biography of Conrad White are the hints at darker corners. The conventional take has it that he left because of the critical reception given his book, Jarvis and Wellesley, the fractured, interior monologue of a man walking the streets of the city on a quest to find a prostitute who most closely resembles his daughter, recently killed in a car accident. An idealized figure he calls the "perfect girl". To anyone’s knowledge, Conrad White hasn’t written anything since.

But it’s the echoes of the author’s actual life to be found in the storyline of Jarvis and Wellesley that gives bite to his bio. He had lost a daughter, his only child, in the year prior to his embarking on the novel. And there is mention of White’s exile being precipitated by his relationship with a very real teenage girl, and the resulting threats of legal action, both civil and criminal. A literary recluse on the one hand, girl-chasing perv on the other. Thomas Pynchon meets Humbert Humbert.

I go back to my table to find my laptop screen has fallen asleep. It knows as well as I do that there will be no writing today. But that needn’t mean there can’t be reading.

The edition of Jarvis and Wellesley I pull off the shelf hasn’t been signed out in over four years. Its spine creaks when I open it. The pages crisp as potato chips.

Two hours later, I return it to where I found it.

The prose ahead of its time, no doubt. Some explicit sex scenes involving the older protagonist and young streetwalkers lend a certain smutty energy to the proceedings, if only passingly. And throughout, the unspoken grief is palpable, an account of loss made all the more powerful by narrating its effects, not its cause.

But it’s the description of the protagonist’s "perfect girl” that leaves the biggest impression. The way she is conjured so vividly, but using little or no specific details. You know exactly what she looks like, how she behaves, how she feels, though she is nowhere to be found on the page.

What’s stranger still is the certainty that I will one day meet her myself.

4

Tuesday brings a cold snap with it. A low of minus eighteen, with a wind-chill making it feel nearly double that. The talk-radio chatter warns everyone against going outside unless absolutely necessary. It makes me think—not for the first time—that I can be counted among the thirty million who voluntarily live in a country with annual plagues. A black death called winter that descends upon us all.

Down in the Crypt I dash off a column covering two new personal makeover shows, a cosmetic surgeon drama, and five (yes, five) new series in which an interior designer invades people’s homes and turns their living rooms into what look like airport lounges. Once this is behind me, I get to work on my assignment for the evening’s circle. By the end of the day I’ve managed to squeeze out a couple hundred words of shambling introduction—Tuesday brings a cold snap with it, etc. It’ll have to do.

Upstairs, as I heat up leftovers in the microwave, Sam comes to show me something from today’s paper.

"Doesn’t she look like Mommy?"

He points to a photo of Carol Ulrich. The woman who was abducted from our neighbourhood playground. The one snatched away as her child played on the swings.

"You think so?” I say, taking the paper from him and pretending to study the woman’s features. It gives me a chance to hide my face from Sam for a second. He only knows what his mother looks like from pictures, but he’s right. Carol Ulrich and Tamara could be sisters.

"I remember her,” Sam says.

"You do?"

"At the corner store. She was in the line-up at the bank machine once too."

"That so."

Sam pulls the newspaper down from my eyes. Reads me.

"They look the same. Don’t they?"

"Your mother was more beautiful."

The microwave beeps. Both of us ignore it.

"Was that lady…did somebody hurt her?"

"Where’d you hear that?"

"I can read, Dad."

"She’s only missing."

"Why would somebody make her missing?"

I pull the newspaper from Sam’s hands. Fold it into a square and tuck it under my arm. A clumsy magician trying to make the bad news disappear.

Conrad White’s apartment is no brighter, though a good deal colder than the week before. Evelyn has kept her jacket on, and the rest of us glance at the coats we left on the hooks by the door. William is the only one who appears not to notice the chill. Over the sides of his chair his T-shirted arms hang white and straight as cement pipes.

What’s also noticeably different about the circle this time round is that each of us have come armed: a plastic shopping bag, a binder, a sealed envelope, two file folders, a leather-bound journal, and a single paper clip used to contain our first written offerings. Our work trembles on our laps like nervous cats.

Conrad White welcomes us, reminds us of the way the circle will work. As his accentless voice goes on, I try to match the elderly man speaking to us with the literary bad boy of forty years ago. If it was anger that motivated his exile, I can’t detect any of it in his face today. Instead, there’s only a shopworn sadness, which may be what anger becomes eventually, if it shows itself early enough.

Tonight’s game plan calls for each of us to read what we’ve brought with us aloud for no more than fifteen minutes, then the other members will have a chance to comment for another fifteen. Interruption of responses is permitted, but not of the readers themselves. Our minds should be open as wide as possible when listening to others, so that their words are free from comparison to anything that has come before.

"You are the children in the Garden,” Conrad White tells us. "Innocent of experience or history or shame. There is only the story you bring. And we shall hear it as though it is the first ever told."

With that, we’re off.

The first readers are mostly reassuring. With each new voice trying their words out for size, the insecurities I have about my own tortured scribbles are relieved, albeit only slightly. By the halfway point (when Conrad White calls a smoke break) I am emboldened by the confirmation that there are no undiscovered Nabokovs, Fitzgeralds or Munros—nor a Le Carré or Rowling or King—among us. And there are few surprises, in terms of subject matter. Petra has a bit of As the World Turns meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? husband-and-wife dialogue that captures certain verbal cruelties in such detail I assume they are taken straight from a loop of memory. Ivan, the subway driver, tells a tale of a man who awakens to find he’s been transformed into a rat, and must find a way into the sewers beneath the city that he intuitively knows is his new home of pestilence and filth. (When, after his reading, I compliment him on his re-working of Kafka, Ivan looks at me quizzically and says, "I’m sorry. Kafka?"). Though Len feels that only the opening paragraph of a proposed "epic horror trilogy” is ready for presentation, it nevertheless goes on forever, a description of night that is a long walk through the thesaurus entry for "dark". And Evelyn promisingly starts her story with a female grad student being screwed by her thesis advisor on the floor of his office while she daydreams about her father teaching her how to skip stones on the lake at the family cottage.

Over the smoke break, those not slipping on their coats get up to stretch. We shuffle around the room without looking at each other or being the first to start up a conversation. All of us steal glances, however. And note where William stands at all times, so we know what corner to avoid.

It’s over these awkward minutes of feeling others’ eyes on me that I ask myself: How does the rest of the circle see me? Most favourably, how I see myself on the best of days, I suppose: an endearingly rumpled Preppie that Time Forgot. Most unfavourably, how I see myself on the worst of days: a dandruffy channel flipper fast approaching the point of no return. Beyond debate are the wide shoulders that lend the illusion of one-time athleticism. And good teeth. A set of ivory chompers that always impress when encountered in Say Cheese! snaps.

Once the smokers return, we get started on the readers who remain.

And this is where things get a little foggy.

I must have read the page I brought with me, as I remember bits of what the other members said afterwards. (Evelyn found the first-person mode "captures your character’s sense of being trapped in himself", and Petra could detect a "hidden suffering"). William requested a pass on reading his own work, or I think he did, as I only recall the sound of his voice and not its words. A low grinding, like air forced through wet sand.

But all I really preserve from the second half of the meeting is Angela.

My first thought, as she opens the cracked leather journal on her knees and lifts it slowly, even reluctantly to her eyes, is that she appears younger than I’d guessed the week before. What I took to be the indistinct features of an adult may instead be the unblemished, baby fat smoothness of a girl coming out of her teens.

And yet, even as she reads, this impression of girlish youth turns into something else. Her face is difficult to describe, to remember, to see, because it’s not a face at all. It is a mask. One that never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.

These considerations of Angela’s appearance come and go within seconds. Soon, all of my attention is on what she reads. We listen without shifting in our seats, without crossing or uncrossing our legs. Even our breathing is calmed to the smallest sips.