She is hiding. She is with him now. She is dead.
No matter which is true, it leaves me to find her on my own.
Later that afternoon I drive out of the city checking the rear view to see if I’m being followed. But speeding west along the QEW in a suicidal crush,
every car fighting and failing to gain an inch on the competition—there is no way
not
to be followed. Still, there is one vehicle that seems to stick to me more doggedly than the others. A black Lincoln Continental that won’t let me steal away whenever a gap opens in the slower lane. Not that this proves anything other than he has the same ideas about getting ahead that I have. And though the slanting light of dusk won’t let me get a look at the driver’s face, the same could be said for almost every other car jostling for position behind me.
But the Continental is still there forty-five minutes later when the first exit for St Catharines comes up. I wait until the last moment before veering off on to the ramp. At first, it seems the black sedan tries to follow, lurching from the passing to the middle lane. But as the ramp curves into the town’s residential streets, I catch sight of the Continental already shrinking down the highway. If I was being followed, the most the driver will know is where I’ve got off, but not where I’m going.
And where I’m going is to see Sam.
He looks good. Tanned, knee scrapes from roughhousing. Somehow he’s aged a year in the past week.
“Am I going back with you?” he asks when we’re on our own in the living room, a Disney movie paused on the jumbo screen.
“Afraid not.”
“Then when?”
“Another week. Maybe two.”
“A
week
?”
“I thought you were having fun here.”
“It’s okay. It’s just—I miss you.”
“Any money says I miss you more.”
“Then why can’t I come home?”
“Because there’s something going on that needs to be settled first. And I want you to be safe.”
“Are
you
safe?”
“You have to trust me. Can you do that for the next little while?”
Sam nods. Just look at him: he
does
trust me. And though this shouldn’t surprise me—I’m his
father
—the weight of it does. It’s a gift when another gives you their trust like this. A gift that can be taken back at any time, and easily too. This is what I read as clearly as the banana bruise freckles across my son’s cheeks: once it’s gone you never get it back. You might think you can. But you can’t.
Later that evening when I’m tucking Sam into his bed, I ask if he would like me to read to him from any of the books he’d brought with him. He shakes his head.
“You want me to get you some new stuff? Next time, we can go to the bookstore and go crazy.”
“No.”
“What’s the problem? You too old to be read to?”
“I don’t read
any
books any more.”
There are a thousand declarations a child can make to a parent more painful than this. But there is a seriousness, even a cruelty in what has just been uttered here in the dark of a spare room that smells of another kid’s smells.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t like them.”
“You don’t like stories?”
“They’re what you’ve left me here for. Right?”
I deny this. Tell him fiction can inform and influence and provoke, but can’t actually hurt anyone. But what we both know, even as I kiss him goodnight and leave the door open an inch, is that he’s right. It’s the unreal that has stepped off the page to cloud our lives. And until it can be made to go back where it belongs Sam must stay here, awake in the nightlight’s glow, preparing to keep his sleep free of all dreams but the one where his father returns to take him home.
After nightfall, I drive back to Toronto. Down here, where the highway hugs the southern shore of the lake, you can look through the gaps between the old motels and fenced-in orchards and catch glimpses of the city’s skyline across the water. In the past, I would see it as glamorous, a sexual invitation in the embracing pillars of light. It was the suggestion of possibility, of danger that I liked, and took pride in being associated with, if only by shared address.
Tonight, the sight of the distant towers has a different effect. They are an alien army, moonglinting beasts rising from a dark sea. Their lights powered by desire alone. Unrequited, insatiable. A terrible wanting that feeds on anything that will submit to being possessed.
I drive on through the winemaking villages, smaller bedroom towns, the conjoined suburbs along the north shore before the final turn into the light. This last framing of the city before you are consumed within it: there was a time I thought it was beautiful, saw in it the beautiful promise of success. And I still do. Though what I know now is that every promise can also be a lie, depending on how it’s kept.
Tim Earheart rings me again for drinks.
“God, I’m sorry,” I tell him, remembering the unanswered emails and phone messages he’d left with me. “Things have been a little messed up the past while. Maybe tomorrow—”
“This isn’t exactly a
social
call, Patrick.”
“What is it then? Business?”
“Yeah. It’s
business.
”
We meet at one of the bank tower bars Tim has been favouring since he’d been given a raise following his appointment to Special Investigative Reporter (“What were you before?” “I don’t know. But definitely not
special
”), not to mention the income that’s been freed up since his second wife “got some other schmuck to pay for all the crap to which she’d become accustomed”. This place is the New Tim Earheart, he tells me. He likes all the leather, the halogen pot lights, the sweep of upward mobility evidenced in the twenty-dollar martinis. And then there’s the pick-up opportunities.
“Just
being
here signals you as successful,” Tim tells me, seductively rolling a bill and dropping it in the coat check girl’s jar.
“Successful at what?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t
matter.
The details can be worked out later.”
As the first round is consumed, Tim tells me a couple tales of women from these premises with whom he
has
worked it out later. It’s vintage Earheart, and it makes me miss him. Companionship. Where had that disappeared to? Nestled in the same basket with a living wife, a job—all of it pushed down the stream and round the bend.
As if to bring this illusion of two friends having a worry-free cocktail to an end, Tim clears his throat at the arrival of the second set of martinis, pulls a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and slides it over the bar toward me.
“What’s this?”
“Read it.”
“You wrote this?”
“Just
read
it.”
It’s a sin, the church says, to do the things that I do
But how can I stop until I’ve done them to you?
Later, in hell, is where my bones will be burned
‘Til then, let it be known: the Sandman’s returned.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was sent to the paper. To
me,
as a matter of fact.”
“You think it’s him?”
“What do you think?”
“The style certainly fits.”
“Not to mention the name.”
Tim watches me. To see how this grim revelation is sinking in. Or to take an accounting of how many years I’ve aged since he last saw me. I know I don’t look
good.
But having my clean-shaven, gym-going friend study me like a coroner studies a corpse—it can’t help but make a fellow a little nervous.
“Are you going to run it?” I ask.
“I’d like to.”
“But they won’t let you.”
“It’s my decision this time.”
“So?”
“So? There’s no story.”
“’The Sandman Returns.’ Sounds like a headline to me.”
“He’s not claiming any particular homicides. Not much point in terrorizing the public if there’s nothing to terrorize them with aside from a shabby limerick.”
“It’s not a limerick.”
“You’re the expert.”
There
are
victims, of course. Conrad and Evelyn. Ivan an apparent suicide under what the crime hacks call “suspicious circumstances”. Not
to mention Petra—and now Angela too—gone missing. But the only thing that connects all of them is the Kensington Circle, and if Tim Earheart hasn’t discovered this yet, I’m not about to tell him.
“You know, there
is
a context in which I’d run the poem,” Tim says, musing aloud. “It would require a reaction, naturally.”
“A reaction?”
“From you. A comment on how an internationally bestselling novelist feels to have inspired copycat psychopaths with a work of fiction.
That
I could I go with.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Just thought it might be fun.”
“Me taking credit for spawning a new generation of serial killers? Yes, that’s definitely amusing. That would be a
giggle.
”
I figure that’s about it. Tim had come for a story, not gotten it, and all that’s left is for the
National Star
to pick up the tab. We bring things to a close with some banter about the latest newsroom outrages and gossip. It’s just killing time. But it makes me nostalgic for the days of journalistic sniping and complaint, when it would have been
me
telling
Tim
about the photo chief’s crossdressing weekends.
As it turns out, however, we’re not quite done with the business that Tim called me here for.
“Off the record,” he says as he raises his finger for the bill, “what do you make of the whole
Sandman thing? Someone using the name of a bad guy in your novel, I mean.”
“I don’t feel responsible for anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what
are
you getting at?”
“What do you know?”
“Just what I read in the papers.”
“Has he contacted you?”
“Nope.”
“I bet you’ve got a theory.”
“You know what, Tim?” I start, slipping off the bar stool and surprised to find myself unsteady on my feet. “Here’s the thing: I wrote a book. And I
regret
it. I truly do.”
Tim puts his hand out to steady me but I take a step back. What I should do now is leave. But seeing how Tim Earheart, my one-time journalistic equal, looks at me with pity in his eyes, makes me stick around for a few more words.
“I’m just trying to survive. Understand? So if you receive any more third-rate verse from psychos, don’t come to me.”
“Jesus, Patrick. I’m sorry.”
“
Sorry?
No, that’s
my
department. Sorry is my
thing.
”
My hands are sliding into the arms of my jacket. The coat check girl, God bless her, appears out of nowhere to dress me against the evening’s chill. Giving me a commiserating look, smoothing my collar against the back of my neck. A moment that
proves there is still comfort in this world, though you may not know where it will come from. I could kiss her for it. Maybe Tim Earheart already has.
I take a cab home but get the driver to drop me off a couple blocks early so I can walk the rest of the way on my own. Continue tipsily homeward feeling my way around a thought: Maybe the shouters and shooters and moon howlers on the streets down here are versions of where all of us are headed. City in Fear.
Yes.
We’ve been right to be more and more afraid—we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing. It won’t be a cataclysmic nasty from Out There that will bring us down, not ozone depletion or impacting comet or dirty bomb, but the advance of madness. Why? There isn’t enough
room
for sanity any more. Eventually, the asylum doors will be forced open. And it will be us who walk out.
Or maybe it will only be me. Because I am once again of the opinion I am being pursued. Somewhere between the sex shop and the other sex shop I pick up the heavy, thick-soled step of someone behind me.
Past the Prague Deli (“Czech Us Out!”) and the used record shops he keeps up without changing the rhythm of his steps. I should start running now. A sudden break for it that might steal the few yards needed to give me a chance. But I’m suddenly too tired.
I round the corner on to the darker stretch of Euclid, straight to the patch of exposed tree roots that is my front yard. When I finally turn it’s with the resignation of prey that cannot retreat any further.
“Got some news,” Ramsay says, wearing a quarter-grin.
“You couldn’t use the phone?”
“People say I’m better in person.”
“Better at what?”
He takes a step forward. The streetlight can’t reach him where he stands, so that all I can see are flashes of teeth.
“Len Innes has been reported missing.”
“Missing? How?”
“That’s the point with missing. You don’t
know
how.”
“Christ.”
“When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“And what was the substance of your conversation?”
“Nothing much.”
“Just a friendly chat then?”
“You think I killed Len?”
“I thought he was only missing.”
“I don’t know
anything.
”
“Sure you do.”
“Is this
fun
for you? This droll, Columbo, catandmouse bullshit?”
“Everyone’s a critic.”
“Not everyone. I’m out of the critic business.”
“Idle hands.”
“Idle would be
nice.
But you keep coming around accusing me of murdering people. It’s the kind of thing that can get in the way of a fellow’s retirement plans.”
“Here’s some news: I don’t give a fuck about your retirement plans.”
“I don’t think you believe I’m a killer, either.”
“You might be wrong there.”
“So arrest me. Do
something.
If not, get off my property.”
Something changes in Detective Ramsay’s face. Not in his expression—which remains jawclenched, bemused—but in his
face.
The skin pulled taut over the bone, showing the animalthing beneath. Here is a creature free from the encumbrances of loyalty, of empathy, of seeing the human race as an enterprise that stands a chance over the long haul. All of which likely makes him a more than capable investigator of man’s darkest actions. It may also enable him to carry out those actions himself.
“How’s Sam?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your
son.
How is he?”
“Fine.”
“Daddy’s out pretty late to leave a little guy like that on his own.”
“You know he’s not inside.”
“I do?”
“Sam’s safe.”
“You sure? Because it’s getting less and less safe everywhere you go.”
I turn away, expecting him to launch a final remark my way, but I unlock the front door, step inside and close it behind me without another word from him.
Not that he’s gone.
I peek out the window without turning on the lights. Ramsay stands under the dark bough of the front yard’s maple. Unmoving as a statue and yet somehow undeniably alive, the air around him passing in and out of his lungs as though to be claimed as much as breathed. He belongs to the night world. The widening chasm between what you know is there and what can’t be.
Ivan belongs to the night world too. And it is the next night that I see him in the food court of the Eaton Centre, making his way toward the entrance to the Dundas subway. All this is odd, as I hate malls, and hate mall food even more. I’m actually thinking this—
It’s odd that I’m here
—when Ivan strolls by my table. Which is odder still, seeing as he’s dead.
When I saw Conrad White thumbing through
The Sandman
in a bookstore when he was also among the no-longer-with-us, it gave me a chill. But as I watch Ivan lope through the crowd of tourists and locals like me with nowhere better to go, I’m instantly, paralytically afraid. It’s because
he’s here for a purpose, and it’s clear that I’m not going to like it. That’s what Ivan tells me in his startling, unphantomly realness, the way he looks back over his shoulder at me, beckoning with hollow drill-holes for eyes. He’s here to show me something.
And I follow him. Jumping the queue at the subway ticket booth, pushing through with understandable
fuck you
s fired at my back. Ivan may be dead, but he moves quicker than I ever saw him move in life. Sliding past the others making their way below. Scampering on to the escalator so that I have to take the stairs down two at a time to have a hope of catching him.
Once on the platform, I’m sure I’ve lost him. That is, I’m sure he wasn’t there to begin with. This is what I try to tell myself: you haven’t been sleeping, you’re under stress, you’re
seeing things.
Ivan steps forward from the crowd at the far end of the platform as the train roars into the station. I start pushing my way toward him even as I expect this moment to play out as his last seconds of life played, with him jumping on to the tracks before the driver has a chance to lock the brakes.
But he doesn’t jump. He looks my way.
His eyes find me instantly over the heads and ballcaps and turbans. An expression of the same sort he wore to all the circle meetings, but now somehow intensified. It lets me see what’s inside him, what may have been inside him all along. Longing. For someone to talk to. To be forgiven.
The train’s doors open. All of us except Ivan step aside to let the passengers off, and they move around the space he takes. It lets him be the first one on. Then the crowd follows him, squeezing in shoulder to shoulder through doors not quite wide enough to accommodate them. By the time I am freed from Ivan’s stare I’m left alone on the platform, the doors already closing. I make a dash to get on—a knocking at the glass that earns sneers from within—but I’m too late.
I step back to see if I can spot Ivan inside. And there he is, sitting face out in a window seat, finding me with a jealous glare. Except now he’s not alone.
Conrad White sits across from him, knee to knee. Petra behind them. Evelyn a couple seats back. All the Kensington Circle’s dead with their noses to the windows. Ovals of malice mixed with the indifferent passengers.
In the next second, as the train releases its brakes and picks up speed, their faces flatten and blur. The car they sit in swallowed into the tunnel’s mouth. The faces of the Kensington Circle along with those of the living commuters, good luck awaiters, furious strivers.
If I didn’t know who was who, I might say all of them were dead.