by Andrew Pyper
“A couple?”
“No. Not a couple.”
Conrad White sits forward. The smile drops so quickly I can’t be sure it was ever there.
“You never know who might have it,” he says.
“Have what?”
“That thing that keeps bringing you to this place week after week, even though you have no faith whatsoever that what I or anyone else might say will assist you. The reason you’re sitting here right now.”
“What reason is that?”
“You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.”
“Sorry. Not following you.”
“The only vital currency is story. And yet we spend most of our time blowing flatus about theme or symbol or political context or structural messing about. Why?” The old man’s smile returns. “I believe it’s because it distracts us from the inadequacies of our own narrative. We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.”
“I think the story Angela’s telling is about death.”
“Ghost stories usually are.”
“How much of it do you think is real?”
“Perhaps the better question is how much of it you have made real.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s her story, not mine.”
“So you say.”
“We’re talking about Angela.”
“Really? I thought we were talking about you.”
I would be lying if I said that Conrad White correctly guessing my involvement (as he called it) in Angela’s story didn’t catch me a little off guard. I’m not surprised by how intelligent a man he is, but by how much of this intelligence he has applied to me, to us, his raggedy group of bookish refugees. He knows I’ve been bluffing my way along right from the start, just as he knows that Angela is in possession of a “vital currency”. Vital to the people like me and him, anyway. Popcorn crunchers, channel changers, paperback devourers. The hungry audience.
There’s a knock at the door. Conrad White gets to his feet. I can hear Len’s voice excitedly telling him about a breakthrough in his zombie apocalypse (“I’ve set it in a prison, because, after the dead rise, prisoners will be the only ones still alive inside the walls, and the society that has judged them left outside!”) followed by Ivan, who slips by them both and takes a seat across from me. I nod at him in welcome, but since our conversation outside the subway station he’s pretending he can’t see me. It leaves me to measure the hands capped over his knees. Too big for the wrists they’re attached to, so that they appear taken from another body altogether, grave-robbed. An impression that reminds me of Ivan telling me what it’s like to be accused of harming someone. Those hands could do harm without much effort. They could do it all on their own.
The rest of the circle arrives in a pack. Petra taking the chair next to Len’s and politely listening to his how-to remarks on decapitating the undead. Angela slips by Evelyn and Conrad White to sit next to me. We smile hello at each other. It allows me the closest look at her yet. In the room’s dimness, a distance of more than a couple feet makes our faces susceptible to distortion, the misreadings of candlelight. Now, however, I can see her more or less as she is. But what strikes me isn’t any aspect of her appearance. It’s the disarming certainty that she is seeing me with far greater accuracy than what I can only guess about her. She isn’t dreamy or wounded or bashful. She’s working.
William arrives last. I force myself to take him in at more than a glance, to confirm or dispel my suspicion that it had been him watching me across the street from the Indian take-out. He’s the right size, that’s for sure. A threat in the very space he occupies, consuming more than his fair share of light, of air. Still, I can’t be sure it was him. His beard even thicker now, so that the true shape of his face is impossible to outline. And unlike Angela, a direct look into his eyes reveals nothing. Where she is busy, William is lifeless. There is no more outward compassion in him than the zombies of Len’s stories.
William takes his seat. Each of us slide an inch away from him, and each of us notices it. An instinct of the herd that communicates there is a wolf among us.
It is our second to last meeting, and Conrad White wants to get through as many of our pieces today as possible. We begin with Ivan, who takes his rat character into the tunnels beneath the city, where he watches the humans on the train platforms with the same revulsion that he, as a man, once viewed the vermin skittering around the rails. Evelyn returns her prof-bonking grad student to the family cottage, where she goes for a swim alone at night and symbolically ends up on an island, naked, “baptized by moonlight.” Petra’s domestic drama leads to her female character making a courageous call to a divorce lawyer. As for me, I nudge along my account of a frustrated TV critic just far enough to satisfy the rules.
Angela is next. Once I’ve turned on the dictaphone, I feel her reading more than anything else. It’s as though I am within her, at once distinct and fused as Siamese twins. And this time there’s something entirely new, a crackling energy in the inches between us that, for the first time, I interpret in purely physical terms. A literal attraction. I want to be closer to her mouth, look down upon the same scribbled pages she reads from, cheek to cheek. It takes a concerted effort to not let myself drift into her.
When she’s finished, it’s William’s turn. This time, he’s actually brought something with him. We soon wish he hadn’t.
In his flat voice, he begins his account of “the summer when something broke” in the life of a boy, growing up in “the poorest part of a poor town.” Avoiding the house where his father drank and his mother “did what she called her ‘day job’ in her bedroom,” the friendless boy wanders through the dusty streets, bored and furious, like “he was buried under something heavy he couldn’t crawl out from under.”
One day, the boy picked up the neighbour’s cat, took it out to a shed at the far end of an empty lot, and skinned it alive. The animal’s cries are “the sound he would make if he could. But he has never cried in his life. It’s something that’s missing from him. Everything is missing from him.” After burying the cat, the boy listens to the woman next door, calling her pet’s name in the night, and he sees that “this is something he could do. Something he was good at. He could take things away.”
The rest of the story goes on to describe, in the same bland language, the boy’s successive graduation from cats to dogs to the horse in the stable at the edge of town, wanting to see if it “was filled with glue, because that’s what he’d heard they turned dead horses into.”
Eventually, Conrad White breaks his own rule. He interrupts William in the middle of his reading.
“Thank you. I’m sorry, but we have run out of time,” the old man lies. A trembling hand smoothing back his remaining wisps of hair. “Perhaps we can return to William’s piece at our final meeting.”
William folds his papers into a square and returns it to the pocket of his jeans. Looks around at the rest of us, who are now getting up, turning our backs to him. I may be the only one who doesn’t move. And while I cannot say I notice anything change in his expression, I sense something that makes me certain it was William who stared at me across the street the other night. The same cruel aura he had then as now. A calmness that speaks not of contentment, but how, as with the boy in his story, everything is missing.
After the meeting, Len reminds me of our plans to check out the litmag launch and open mic at a bar up on College Street. On the way, as he shuffles a few steps ahead of me, anxious to get good seats, Len asks if I’ve noticed something between Evelyn and Conrad White.
“Something?”
“I don’t know. They’re always whispering to each other. Making eyes.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Who do you think she’s with right now?”
“You mean with with?
”
“Answer the question.”
“Conrad?”
“It’s kind of sick.”
“There’s got to be forty years between them.”
“I told you.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But what’s a writing circle without a little scandal?”
The open mic is on the second floor of a Mexican restaurant, a long, dark-panelled room that smells of sawdust and refried beans. At the door, Len and I buy a copy of the stapled zine on offer, Brain Pudding, which entitles us to the beer discount.
“Not much of a turn-out.”
“There’s a serial killer out there somewhere,” Len says. “It can make people stay in and order pizza.”
“What are you talking about?”
Len gives me a hopeless, get-with-the-program look.
“The missing hairdresser,” he says.
“Ronald Pevencey.”
“The police found his body in a dumpster in Chinatown this afternoon. In pieces. Just like that woman on Ward’s Island. So now they’re thinking the same guy did them both. Two is a series. Thus, serial killer. Which is bad for business.”
“We’ll just have to do our best to help,” I say, ordering a round.
The emcee thanks us for coming. But before he opens the floor to all comers, he has a special announcement. Congratulations for one of Brain Pudding’s contributors, Rosalind Canon, a mousy girl sitting with mousy boys in the front. Apparently she learned just this morning that the manuscript for her first novel had been accepted for publication in New York. A bidding war. World rights sold. Film option.
“And as if that wasn’t enough,” he says, “it’s her birthday! Happy twenty-fourth, Rosalind!”
The emcee steps back from the mic, beams down at Rosalind, and starts to clap.
And in the next second, something interesting happens.
A drop in the room’s barometric pressure, the sudden hollowness that precedes a thunderstorm. Aside from the emcee’s two hands clapping, there is no sound other than our collectively held breath. It leaves each of us exposed. Caught on the coruscated edges of the same desire. Despite our differences of age, of costume, of genre, we are here because we all share the longing to be writers. But in this moment, what we more immediately wish is to be Rosalind. A surge of not-yet-rationalized jealousy powerful enough to alter the composition of the very environment we occupy.
And then, when our limbs finally accept the command given them, we join in the applause. A round of whistles and hearty good wishes you’d never suspect of the effort they required.
“That’s great! Wow!” Len says.
“Oh yeah. It’s so wow great I could kill her.”
I wave my arm barward. From here on, my beers are coupled with bourbon shots. It eases things somewhat. The flatulent sound poetry and same-sex erotica and hate-my-parents short stories that follow pass in a benumbed succession. I even like some of it. Or at least, I admire that their authors are here, putting their name in the emcee’s hat and, when called upon, ascending the plywood riser and letting it fly. Good or bad, they made this stuff. Which is more than I can say for myself.
Some time later, Rosalind Canon’s name is called over the PA. She’s come to these things before. She even knows the right way to approach the stage: with a slouch, as though her real thoughts are elsewhere, puzzling out some far deeper question than How do I look?
As she murmurs on, I resolve that, once she’s finished, I will start home. The flush of goodwill that came with the first wave of alcohol is already passing, and I know from experience it will soon leave only regret and self-pity behind. Just one more drink in case the killer out there decides I’m to be next. I’d rather not see it coming. What kind of blade would he have to use to do what he does? Something motorized, perhaps. Or perhaps he is just incredibly strong. What had the monster in Angela’s story liked to do? Turn people into fractions.
I’m about to tell Len I’m going to leave when I’m stopped by the realization that half the people in the room have turned in their chairs to look my way.
“Sorry to wake you,” Len is saying, his hand on my arm. “But you were snoring.”
In my cubicle at the National Star the next morning, Tim Earheart stops by to deliver coffee. It will be my fourth of the day, and it’s only just turned ten. But I need all the help I can get. The many beers and only slightly fewer Wild Turkeys of the night before have left me fuzzy-headed and furry-mouthed. I take a couple scalding gulps before I’m able to read Tim’s lips.
“Let’s go down for a smoke,” he’s saying for the second time, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone’s listening.
“I don’t smoke.”
“I’ll give you one.”
“Quit. More or less. Thought you knew–”
Tim raises the back of his hand and for a second I’m sure he’s going to slap me. Instead, he bends close to my ear.
“What I’ve got isn’t for general consumption,” he whispers, and walks away toward the doors to the main stairwell.
The basement of the National Star is the exclusive domain of two species of dinosaur: smokers and historians. It’s down here where the pre-electronic database issues of the paper are stored, as well as some archival bric-à-brac including, I have heard, the shrunken head of the newspaper’s founder. Aside from a few postgrad researchers the only people who come down here are the last of the nicotine wretches. A dwindling number, even among reporters. The kids coming out of journalism school these days are more likely to carry a yoga mat and an Evian bottle than a flask and a pack of smokes.
It leaves the Smoking Room one of the last places in the building where you can hope to have a private conversation. Sure enough, when I close the door behind me and feel my stomach clench at the carcinogenic stink, it’s only Tim Earheart in here with me.
“They’re not running it. They’re not fucking running it,” he says, literally fuming, grey exhaust spilling out his nose.
“What aren’t they running?”
“The note.”
I know that Tim is enough of an obsessive that if he’s this excited, he’s talking about a story. And his story right now is Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey.
“Left it by her body,” he goes on. “A part of her body. Her head, as a matter of grotesque fact. Typed out nice and neat for whoever found her.”
“You have possession of this note?”
“Sadly, no. One of the cops on the scene told me what it said. He shouldn’t have, but he did.”
“And you brought it to the suits.”
“Expecting it to go A1. Because if this isn’t front page, what is? But the police caught wind of it, and they begged us to muzzle it. Ongoing investigation, lives at risk, an eventual arrest could be jeopardized, blah blah blah. Just throw a blanket on it for a few days. So now they’re not running it.”
“Does it say who wrote it?”
“It’s not signed. But I think it’s pretty damn clear.”
Tim finishes his cigarette, grinds the butt under his heel and has another in his mouth in less time than it takes me to speak.
“What did it say?”
“That’s the reason I’m telling you. I was hoping you might have some literary insight.”
“You’re talking about a serial killer’s note, not Finnegans Wake.”
Tim takes a step closer. Smoke rising from his hair.
“It’s a poem,” he says.
The Smoking Room door opens and a lifer from Sports comes in, gives us a distasteful glance and lights up. Tim makes a zipper motion across his lips. I’m about to step outside when he grabs my wrist. Presses something into my palm.
“Call me later about those Leafs tickets,” he says. Winks a secret wink.
A business card. Tim Earheart’s writing squeezed on to the back. I read it over a few times in my cubicle, then tear it into confetti and let it fall into my recycling box.
I am the ground beneath your
feet
The man in dark alleys you don’t want to meet
I live in the Kingdom of Not What It Seems
Close your eyes, you will see me—here in your dreams.
Not much, as poems go. Just a pair of rhyming couplets, a Mother Goose simplicity that gives it the sing-song of nursery doggerel. Perhaps this is the point. Given the grisly context in which the poem was found, the childish tone makes it all the more threatening. The kind of thing you need only read once and it, or some part of it, remains hooked in your mind. A poem meant not to be admired but remembered.
So what does it say about its author? First, whoever did this to Carol Ulrich also wrote these lines. One an act of assembly, the other of dismemberment. Creator and Destroyer in one. Somebody bad, as Tim Earheart had guessed.
Second, he wanted the poem to be read. It could have been kept to himself, but instead it was left by the victim’s corpse. A killer who—like all writers—wants an audience for their work. To make us feel something. To invite the kind of scrutiny I am giving his poem right now. To be understood.
Third, while it is only a four-line ditty, there are indications of some intelligence. That a poem would occur to him at all puts him at a creative level above the everyday backstreet butcher. And the composition itself offers some indication of talent. It rhymes, for one thing. A rhythm that’s not accidental. Good enough that it would likely achieve its macabre effect even if it wasn’t deposited next to a corpse.
And then there are the words themselves.
The first line sets out the poem’s purpose: the poet seeks to introduce himself. He is the ground beneath our feet. That is, he’s everywhere. The next line establishes the character of this presence as menacing, hostile, the “man in dark alleys.” Naturally, the mention of alleys rings especially loud for me, as it was only a few days ago that I ran home through one, fearing something that likely wasn’t there. But “dark alleys” are universally regarded as places to fear. He wants us to know that he is the one who waits for us there.
The third line introduces a note of dark whimsy. The “Kingdom of Not What It Seems” is where he lives, but he is also able to materialize in the ground beneath our feet. At once real and an illusion. A shapeshifter.