The Killing Circle

There’s a box of new arrivals on my chair. I’m pulling out the first offering—a reality show where Killing Circle (A-Format)-p1.qxp 12/19/08 4:53 PM Page 24 I’m promised contestants in bikinis eating live spiders—when Tim Earheart, one of the paper’s investigative reporters, claps me on the back. You’d never know it, but Tim is my best friend here. It occurs to me now with a blunt surprise that he may be my best friend anywhere.

"You got any Girls Gone Wild?” he says, rummaging through the tapes.

"Thought you were more of a documentary guy."

"Wife’s away this week. Actually, she might not be coming back."

"Janice left you?"

"She found out that my source on last week’s Hell’s Angels story was one of the bikers’ old ladies,” Tim says with a sad smile. "Let’s just say I went more undercover with her than Janice was comfortable with."

If it’s true that his most recent wife has taken off, this will be marriage number three down the tubes for Tim. He turns thirty-six next week.

"Sorry to hear that,” I say, but he’s already waving off my sympathy.

"Drinks tonight?” he says, stepping away to re-join the hectic relevance of the news department. "Wait. It’s Valentine’s, isn’t it? You got a date?"

"I don’t date, Tim. I don’t anything."

"It’s been a while."

"Not so long."

"Some would say four years is enough to—"

"Three."

"Three years then. Eventually you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re still here, even if Tamara isn’t."

"Trust me. I face that every day."

Tim nods. He’s been to war zones. He knows a casualty when he sees one.

"Can I ask you something?” he says. "You think it’s too late to ask out that new temp they’ve got down in Human Resources?"

It happened again on the walk home.

More and more these days, I’ll be in the middle of something—dashing to the corner store, pounding out the day’s word count at my desk, lining up for coffee—and the tears will come. So quiet and without warning I hardly notice.

And then today, walking along the sidewalk when I would have said "Nothing” if asked what was on my mind, it started again. Wet streaks freezing on my cheeks.

A rhyme pops into my head. An unconsoling sing-song that carries me home.

I’m not well

I’m not well

But who in the hell

Am I going to tell?

By the time I get through the door, Sam’s already finished his dinner and Emmie, the nanny, is drying him from his bath. Another irretrievable moment missed. I like bathtime with Sam more than any other part of the day. A little music. Epic sea battles waged with rubber ducks and old toothbrushes. All of it leading to bed. To stories.

"I’ll take him,” I tell Emmie, and she opens the towel she has wrapped around him. He rushes out of his cocoon and into my arms. A soapy angel.

I get him into pajamas. Open the book we’re working through. But before I start reading, he studies me for a moment. Places a palm against my forehead.

"What do you think, doc? Am I going to make it?"

"You’ll live,” he says.

"But it’s serious?"

"I’m not sure. Is it?"

"Nothing I can’t handle."

"I don’t want you to be sad."

"I miss your mom sometimes. That’s all. It’s normal."

"Normal."

"More or less."

Sam purses his lips. He’s not sure whether to buy my pinched grin or not. The thing is, he needs me to be okay. And for him, I’ll stay as okay as I can.

He yawns. Squirms in close, his head against my throat so that he can feel the vibrations of the words to come. Jabs his finger at the pages I hold open.

"Where were we?"

Once Sam is asleep it’s down to the basement office. What Tamara used to call the Crypt. Which is a little too accurate to be wholly amusing. A low-ceilinged room that was a winemaking cellar for the previous owner. Even now, I can catch whiffs of fermented grapes. It makes me think of feet.

This is where I watch the tapes. A notebook on my knee, remote control in my hand.

I’m just three minutes into the spider-eating bikini babes when I hit Pause. Dig out of my pocket the ad I clipped from today’s classifieds.

Tell the Story of Your Life

Open your soul. Bring your buried words to the page in this intensive workshop with Conrad White, published poet and novelist. Truly write. Write the truth.

I’ve never heard of Conrad White. Never attended a writers’ workshop, circle, night class or retreat. It’s been years since I’ve tried to write anything other than what I am contractually obliged to. But something about this day—about the taste of the air in this very room—has signalled that something is coming my way. Has already come.

I call the number at the bottom of the ad. When a voice at the other end asks me what he can do for me, I answer without hesitation.

"I want to write a book,” I say.

2

People read less today than they used to. You’ve seen the studies, you’ve got teenagers, you’ve been to the mall—you know this already. But here’s something you may not know:

The less people read, the more they want to write.

Creative writing workshops—within universities, libraries, night schools, mental hospitals, prisons—are the true growth industry in the inkbased sector. Not to mention the ad hoc circles of nervy aspirants, passing round their photocopied bundles. Each member claiming to seek feedback but secretly praying for a collective declaration of brilliance.

And now I’m one of them.

The address the voice on the phone gave me is in Kensington Market. Meetings to be held every Tuesday night for the next five Tuesdays. I was told I was the last to join the group. That is, I called it a group, and the voice corrected me.

"I prefer to think of it as a circle."

"Right. And how many will there be? In the circle?"

"Just seven. Any more, and I fear our focus may be lost."

After I hung up I realized that Conrad White—if that’s who answered the phone—never asked for my name. I also realized I’d forgotten to find out if I should bring anything along to the first meeting—a pen, notebook, cash for the donation plate. But when I dialled the number again, it rang ten times without anyone answering. I suppose that now the circle was complete, Mr White decided there was no point in picking up.

The next Tuesday, I walk up Spadina after work with my scarf turbaned around my ears. Despite the cold, most of the Chinatown grocers still have produce tables outside their doors. Frozen bok choy, starfruit, lemongrass. A dry powdering of snow over everything. At Dundas, nightfall arrives all at once. The giant screen atop the Dragon Mall casting a blue glow of advertising over the street.

I carry on another couple blocks north, past NO MSG noodle places and whole roast pigs hanging in butchers’ windows, their mouths gaping in surprise. Then dash across the four lanes of traffic into the narrow lanes of the market.

Kensington means different things to different people, but for me, a walk through its streets always gives rise to the same question: How long can it last? Already some of the buildings are being turned into "live/work loft alternatives", promising a new "urban lifestyle” for people who are seeking "The Kind of Excitement that Comes with Walking on the Edge". I take out the tiny dictaphone recorder I always carry around (to capture any especially biting phrases for the next day’s review) and read these words directly off the hoardings around the latest condo project. Some shoppers have also stopped to read the same come-hithers. But when they see me whispering into a tape recorder, they walk on. Another outpatient to be politely avoided.

On a bit, the old Portuguese fishmongers are lifting the slabs of cod and octopus off their beds of ice and waltzing them to the walk-ins for the night. The street still busy with safety-pinned punks and insane, year-round bicyclists, all dinnertime bargain hunting. Or simply congregating in one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.

And then it strikes me, with an unsettling shiver, that some of the people bustling around me may be here for the same reason I am.

Some of them may be writers.

The address for the meeting brings me to a door next to The Fukhouse, a bar that, as far as I can see through the grimy window, has every wall, table surface, and both floor and ceiling painted in black gloss. Above the sign, on the second floor, stout candles flicker in the windows. If I wrote the number down right, it’s up there that the Kensington Circle is to gather.

"Anarchists,” a voice says behind me.

I turn to find a young woman in an oversized leather biker jacket. Her shoulders armoured with silver spikes. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold, though below the jacket all she wears is a threadbare girls’ school skirt and fishnets. And a raven tattooed over the back of her wrist.

"I’m sorry?"

"Just thought I’d warn you,” she says, gesturing toward The Fukhouse’s door. "That’s kind of an anarchist clubhouse. And anarchists often don’t take well to those not part of the revolution."

"I can imagine."

"Not that it matters. You’re here for the circle. Am I right?"

"How’d you guess?"

"You look nervous."

"I am nervous."

She squints into my face through the looping snow. I have the same feeling I get when the customs officer at the border slides my passport through the computer and I have to wait to see if I’ll be allowed through or placed under arrest.

"Evelyn,” she says finally.

"Patrick Rush. A pleasure to meet you."

"Is it?"

And before I can tell if she’s joking or not, she opens the door and starts up the stairs.

The room is so dark I can only stand at the entrance, hands feeling for walls, a light switch, the leather jacket girl. All I can see for sure are the candles oozing wax over the two distant window sills, the snow outside falling fast as TV static. Though I followed Evelyn up the stairs, she now seems to have disappeared into the void that yawns between the doorway and the windows.

"Glad you could come."

A male voice. I spin around, startled. This sudden movement, and my boots slipping on the puddle of snowmelt over the floorboards, makes me lose my footing. Someone releases a coquettish gasp. In the next instant I realize it was me.

"We’re over here,” the voice says.

The dark figure of a stooped man passes in front of me, drifting toward what I now can see is a circle of chairs in the centre of the room. Boots kicked off, I slide over to one of the two unoccupied places.

"We’re just waiting for one more,” the voice says, and I recognize it only now as the same as the one on the phone. Conrad White. Never-heard-of author and poet, now taking his seat across from mine. The sound of his lullabye voice also brings back the feeling I got when I first spoke my desire to write a book. There had been a pause, as though he was measuring the depth of my yearning. When he spoke again, I wrote down the details he gave me without really hearing them. His words seemed to come from somewhere else, a different time altogether.

All of us wait for the voice to begin again. If there really are six of us sitting here, we are still as dolls. Only the faint tide of our breaths to be heard, taking in the vapours of red wine and incense from the rug beneath our chair legs.

"Ah. Here he is."

Conrad White rises to welcome the last member of the circle to arrive. I don’t turn to see who it is at first. But as a second pair of feet step deliberately forward (and with boots left on), I sense some of the others shrink in their seats around me. Then I see why.

A sloped-shouldered giant steps forward from out of the darkness. At first he appears headless—there’s a ridiculous second when I glance down to his hands to see if he carries his own skull—but it is only the full beard of black wires that obscures most of his face. Not his eyes though. The whites clear, unblinking.

"Thank you all for coming. My name is Conrad White,” the old man says, sitting again. The bearded latecomer chooses the last chair—the one beside mine to the left. Though this saves me from having to look at him, it allows me a whiff of his clothes. A primitive mixture of wood smoke, sweat, boiled meat.

"I will be your facilitator over the next four weeks,” Conrad continues. "Your guide. Perhaps even your friend. But I will not be your teacher. For writing of the truest kind—and that, I’m assuming, is what all of us aspire to—cannot be taught."

Conrad White looks around the circle, as though giving each of us the opportunity to correct him. None do.

He goes on to outline the ground rules for the meetings to come. The basic structure will involve weekly assignments ("Little exercises to help you feel what you see"), with the bulk of time spent on personal readings from each of our works-in-progress, followed by commentary from the other members. Trust is crucial. Special note is made that criticism, as such, will not be tolerated. Instead, there will be "conversations". Not between ourselves, but "between a reader and the words on the page". At this, I feel a couple of heads nodding in agreement off to my right, but I still don’t look to see who it is. Somehow, so long as he’s speaking, I can only look straight ahead at Conrad White. It makes me wonder if it’s not only shyness that holds my stare. Perhaps there is something more deliberately occult in the arrangement of our chairs, the candles, the refusal of electric light. If not enchantment, there is definitely a lightheadedness that accompanies his words. A vertigo I can’t shake.

When I’m able to focus again I pick up that we’re now being told about honesty. It’s the truth of the thing that is our quarry, not mastery of structure, not style. "Story is everything,” the voice says. "It is our religions, our histories, our selves. Only through story can we hope to become acquainted with experiences other than our own."

In a different context—a room with enough light to show the details of faces, the hum of institutional central air, EXIT signs over the doors—this last promise might be overkill. Instead, we are moved. Or I am, anyway.

Now it’s time for the obligatory "Tell us a little bit about yourself” roundabout. I’m terrified that Conrad will start with me. ("Hi. I’m Patrick. Widower, single dad. There was a time I dreamed of writing novels. Now I watch TV for a living.") Worse, he ends up choosing the woman sitting immediately to my right, someone I have so far sniffed (expensive perfume, tailored leather pants) but not fully seen. This means I will be last. The closer.

As each of the members speak, I play with the dictaphone in the outside pocket of my jacket. Push the Record button, Pause, then Record again, so that I create a randomly edited recording. It’s only when they’re halfway round the circle that I realize what I’m doing. Not that this stops me.

The good-smelling woman introduces herself as Petra Dunn. Divorced three years ago, and now that her one child has left for university, she has found herself "mostly alone” in the midtown family home. She names her neighbourhood—Rosedale—meaningfully, even guiltily, as she knows this address speaks of an attribute not lost on any of us: money. Now Mrs Dunn spends her time on self-improvement. Long runs in the ravine. Charity volunteering. Night courses on arbitrary, cherry-picked subjects—Pre-Civil War American History, The Great Paintings of Europe Post-World War II, the 20 Classic Novels of the Twentieth Century. But she became tired of seeing "different versions of myself” in these classrooms, "second or third time around women” not seeking to be edified but asked out by the few men who prowled the Continuing Studies departments, men she calls "cougar hunters". More than this, she has felt the growing need to tell a story concerning the life she might have lived if she hadn’t said yes when the older man who would become her husband offered to take her to dinner while she was working as a bartender at the Weston Country Club. An unlived existence that would have seen her return to her studies, a life of unpredictable freedoms, instead of marrying a man whose free use of his platinum card she’d mistaken for gentlemanly charm. A story concerning "A woman like me but not…"

And here Petra Dunn pauses. Long enough for me to steal a look at her face. I expect to see a woman in her fifties who’s been silenced by her fight with tears. Instead, I’m met with a striking beauty not much older than forty. And it’s not tears, but a choking rage that has stolen her words.

"I want to imagine who I really am,” she says finally.

"Thank you, Petra,” Conrad White says, sounding pleased at this start. "Who’s next?"

That would be Ivan. The bald crown of his head shining faintly pink. Shoulders folded toward his chest, his frame too small for the plaid work shirt he has buttoned to his throat. A subway driver. A man who too rarely sees the light of day ("If I’m not sleeping, either it’s night, or I’m underground"). And lonely. Though he doesn’t confess to this outright, he’s the sort who wears his chronic bachelorhood in the dark circles under his eyes, the tone of defeated apology in his voice. Not to mention the shyness that prevents him from making eye contact with any of the circle’s women.

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.