by Andrew Pyper
Mr. White is the author of the novel Jarvis and Wellesley, a controversial work at the time of its publication in 1972. He had been living overseas for the last few decades, and only recently returned to reside in Canada.
So far, the police have yet to contact Angela Whitmore’s immediate family, as available identification did not contain next-of-kin information. Readers who are able to provide more information on Ms. Whitmore’s relations are asked to contact the Ontario Provincial Police, Whitley Detachment.
Police are still at work determining the precise cause of the accident. “It’s a little puzzling,” commented Constable Dennis Peet at the scene. “There were no other cars involved, and no skid marks, so the chances they went off the road to avoid colliding with an oncoming vehicle or animal crossing seems unlikely.”
Investigators have estimated the car’s speed on impact in excess of 140 km/hr. This velocity, taken together with the accident occurring along a relatively straight stretch of highway, reduces the possibility of the driver, Ms. Whitmore, falling asleep at the wheel.
“Sometimes, with incidents like these, all you know is that you’ll never know,” Constable Peet concluded.
My first thoughts after learning of the accident weren’t for the loss of the two lives involved, but who might have sent me the clipping. I was pretty sure it had to be someone in the circle, as my connection to Angela and Conrad White would have been known to few outside of its members. But, if one of them, why the anonymity? Perhaps whoever sent the envelope wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings and nothing more. Petra, maybe, who would feel obliged to share what she had learned, but didn’t want visitors showing up at her door. Or Evelyn, who would be too cool to write a dorky note. And then there was the odds-on favourite: Len. He’d have the time to scour whatever obscure database allowed him to learn of such things, and would appreciate how leaving his name off the envelope would lend the message a mysterious edginess.
Yet these practical explanations inevitably gave way—as all speculations about the circle eventually did—to more fanciful theories. Namely, to William. Once he entered my mind, the secondary questions posed by the article came rushing to the forefront. What were Conrad White and Angela doing travelling together through the bush outside Whitley in the first place? And why did Angela drive off the highway sixty kilometres over the speed limit? By factoring William into these queries, the notion that he was not only the sender of the clipping, but somehow the author of the crash itself, became a leading, if unlikely, hypothesis.
It was only sometime later, sitting on my own in the Crypt, that the fact Conrad and Angela were dead struck me with unexpected force. I lowered the three-month-old Time I’d been pretending to read to find my heart drumrolling against my ribs, an instant sweat collaring the back of my neck. Panic. Out-of-nowhere, suffocating. The sort of attack I’d succumbed to on more than a few occasions since Tamara died. But this time it was different. This time, my shock was at the loss of two people I hardly knew.
Hold on. That last bit’s not quite true.
It was the thought of Angela alone that stole all the air from the room. The girl with a story I would now never get to the end of.
After the night at Grossman’s Tavern, the murderer I’d come to think of as the Sandman stopped killing. The police never arrested anyone for the deaths of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the Vancouver woman eventually identified as Jane Whirter. Though a $50,000 reward was offered for information leading to a conviction and occasional police press releases were issued insisting they were working on the case with unprecedented diligence, the authorities were forced to admit they had no real leads, never mind suspects. It was proposed that the killer had moved on. A drifter with no links to family or friends who would probably continue his work somewhere else down the line.
For a time, though, I couldn’t stop feeling that the Pevencey, Ulrich and Whirter deaths were somehow connected to the circle. This is only a side effect of coincidence, of course. It’s the egocentric seduction of coincidence that personalizes larger tragedies, so that we feel what we were doing when the twin towers came down or when JFK was shot or when a serial killer butchered someone in the playground around the corner is, ultimately, our story.
I know all this, and yet even after the Sandman was declared to be retired I never believed he was finished. The dark shape I would sometimes catch in my peripheral vision could never simply be nothing, but was always the something of coincidence. The lingering trace of fate.
I spotted Ivan on Yonge Street once. Standing on the sidewalk and looking northward, then southward, as though uncertain which way to go. I crossed the street to say hello, and he had turned to look at me, blank-faced. Behind him, the lurid marquee of the Zanzibar strip club blinked and strobed.
“Ivan,” I said, touching my hand to his elbow. He looked at me like I was an undercover cop. One he’d been expecting to take him down for some time. “It’s Patrick.”
“Patrick.”
“From the circle. The writing circle?”
Ivan glanced over my shoulder. At the doors to the Zanzibar.
“Up for a drink?” he said.
We put the daylight behind us and took a table in the corner. The afternoon girls rehearsing their pole work on the stage. Adjusting their implants in the smoked mirrors. Smearing on the baby oil.
I did the talking. Asked after his writing (he’d been “sitting on” some ideas) and work (“Same tracks, same tunnels”). There was a long silence after that, during which I was waiting for Ivan to ask similar questions of me. But he didn’t. At first I assumed this was a symptom of strip-bar shyness. Yet now, looking back on it, I was wrong to think that. It was only the same awkwardness I’d felt the first time I spoke with Ivan, when he’d confessed to having been accused of hurting someone. His loneliness was stealing his voice from him. Driving the underground trains, staring at the walls in his basement flat, paying for a table dance. None of it required speech.
I excused myself to the men’s room, and to my discomfort, Ivan followed me. It was only standing side by side at the urinals that he spoke.
Usually, exchanges that take place with another fellow in such a context, dicks in hand, requires strict limits of the subject matter. The barmaid’s assets or the game on the big screen are safe bets. But not Ivan’s admission that he’s been afraid to get close to anyone since he was accused of killing his niece fourteen years ago.
“Her name was Pam. My sister’s first born,” he started. “Five years old. The father’d left the year before. Scumbag. So my sister, Julie, she’s working days, and because I’m driving trains at night, she asks me to stay at her place sometimes to look after Pam. Happy to do it. The kind of kid I’d like to have if I ever had kids. Which I won’t. Anyways, I was over at Julie’s this one time and Pam asks if she can go down to the basement to get some toy of hers. I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive. I mean, when you look after kids, you have these thoughts all the time. Yet this time I think Well, that’s it, little Pam is gone, and it stuck with me a couple seconds longer than usual. Long enough to hear her miss a step. I go to the top of the stairs and turn on the light. And there she is on the floor. Blood. Because she came down on something. A rake somebody’d left on the floor. One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth. Pointing up. But that’s not where it ends. Because Julie thinks I did it. The only family I got. So the police look into it, can’t make any conclusions, they’re suspicious but they’ve got to let it slide. But Julie hasn’t spoken to me since. I don’t even know where she lives any more. That’s how a life ends. Two lives. It just happens. Except I’m still here.”
He shakes. Zips. Leaves without washing his hands.
By the time I made it back to our table, Ivan is ordering another round. I told the waitress one was enough for me.
“I’ll see you around then,” I said to him. But
Ivan’s eyes remained fixed on the slippery doings onstage.
A few strides on I turned to wave (a gesture I hoped would communicate my need to rush on to some other appointment) but he was still sitting there, looking not, I noticed, at the dancer, but at the ceiling, at nothing at all. His hands hanging cold and white at his sides.
Len, the only one I’d given my home number to, called once. Asked if I wanted to get together to “talk shop,” and for some reason I accepted. Perhaps I was lonelier than I thought.
I arranged to meet him at the Starbucks around the corner. As soon as the lumbering kid pushed his way through the doors I knew it was a mistake. Not that things went badly. We spoke of his efforts to give up on horror and “go legit” with his writing. He’d been sending his stories to university journals and magazines, and was heartened by “some pretty good rejection letters.”
It was over the same coffee that Len shared the gossip about Petra. Her ex-husband, Leonard Dunn, had been arrested for a whack of fraud schemes, blackmail, and extortion. More than this, reports had suggested that Mr. Dunn had close connections to organized crime. Len and I joked about Petra’s Rosedale mansion standing on the foundations of laundered money, but I kept to myself my last glimpse of Petra outside Grossman’s, stepping into a black Lincoln she seemed reluctant to enter.
That was about it. Neither of us mentioned William or Angela or any of the others (I had not yet learned of the car accident outside Whitley). Even the apparent end to the Sandman’s career was mentioned only in passing. It struck me that Len was as unsure of the police’s presumption that we would never hear of him again as I was.
Afterwards, standing outside, Len and I agreed to get together again sometime soon. I think both of us recognized this as a promise best unkept. And as it turned out, it was only some years later, and under circumstances that had nothing to do with fostering a tentative friendship, that we saw each other again.
In interviews, I have repeatedly stated that I only started writing The Sandman after my severance pay from the National Star had run out, but this is not exactly true. If writing is at least partly a task undertaken in the mind alone, well away from pens or keyboards, then I had started filling in the spaces in Angela’s story from the last night I saw her.
Even after the circle and the long, worried days that followed, even as the bank started sending its notices of arrears followed by their lawyers’ announcements of foreclosure, some part of my mind was occupied in teasing out possible pasts and futures for the orphan girl, Jacob, Edra, and the terrible man who does terrible things.
It wasn’t that these considerations were a comfort. It would be more accurate to say that I returned to Angela’s story because I needed it to survive. To be present for my son, I required a fictional tale of horror to visit as an alternative to the real horrors that kept coming at us. I had Sam—but I was alone. We’d already lost Tamara. Now here goes the house. Here go Daddy’s marbles. And I couldn’t tell Sam about any of it.
This is how I thought The Sandman could save me. It gave me somewhere to go, something that was mine.
But I was wrong. It was never mine. And it could never save me.
The Sandman had plans of its own. All it needed me for was to set it free.
I admit to stealing Angela’s story. Even so, it still wasn’t a novel. While I used her characters, premise, setting, mimicked her tone, even copied whole pages from her recorded readings, viewed strictly on the basis of a word count, the bulk of The Sandman could technically be described as mine.
There was much I needed to add to give it the necessary weight of a book. Whatever it took to roll out what I already had with a minimum of actual creating, so that the result had been thinned to cover a couple hundred pages. But what the book still needed was the very thing Angela’s story didn’t provide. An ending.
After long months of scratching ideas on to index cards and dropping most of them into the recycling box, I managed to wring out a few concluding turns of the screw of my own, though there’s little point in going into that here.
Let’s just say I decided to make it a ghost story.
I knew it was plagiarism. There wasn’t a moment I thought enough of The Sandman was invented that it could be truly considered my own. What relieved me of the crime was that I was only playing around. It was a distraction and nothing else. A kind of therapy during those hours when Sam was asleep, the TV spewed its usual rot, the sentences of my favourite books swam unreadably before my eyes.
Even when it was done, I still had no plans to present it as though I was its sole author. This was partly because I wasn’t. But there was another reason.
I always saw the writing of the book as a kind of communication, an exchange between Angela and myself. I have read dozens of interviews with real writers who say that, throughout the process, they have in mind an audience of one for their work, an ideal reader who fully understands their intentions. For me, that’s who Angela was. The extra set of eyes looking over my shoulder as the words crept down the screen. As I wrote our ghost story, Angela was the one phantom who was with me the whole time.
And then I started wondering if it might not be good. Our book. Angela’s and mine. Except Angela was dead now.
What would someone else think of what we’d made together?
But even this self-deceiving line of thought wasn’t my undoing. My real mistake was printing it out, buying envelopes to slip it into, and telling myself I’m just curious as I dropped them in the mail addressed to the biggest literary agents in New York.
That was a mistake.
I say now what all those in my position say in response to the most commonly asked question of the after-reading Q&A: I had always wanted to be a writer. But in my case, this answer is not precisely true. I had wanted to write, yes, but more primary than this, I had always wanted to be an author. Nothing counted unless you were published. I longed to be an embossed name on a spine, to belong to the knighthood of those selected to stand alongside their alphabetical neighbours on bookshop and library shelves. The great and nearly so, the famous and wrongly overlooked. The living and the dead.
But now, all I wanted was to be out of it.
What had seemed so important then now struck me as a contrivance, an invention whose purpose was to complicate that which was, if left alone, cruelly simple. Life’s a bitch and then you die, as the T-shirts used to say.
I would make do with keeping both hands on the wheel of fatherhood, with weekend barbecues and package beach holidays and rented Westerns and Hitchcock. I would no longer feel the need to say something, to stand isolated and furious outside the anesthetized mainstream. Instead I would be among them, my consumer brothers and sisters. The search called off.
There are times I’m walking with Sam, or reading to him, or scrambling an egg for him, and I will be seized mid-step, mid-page-turn, mid-scramble, with paralytic love. For his sake, I try to keep such moments under control. Even at his age he has a keen sensitivity to embarrassment, and me blubbering about what a perfect little fellow he is, how like his mother—well, it’s right off the chart. Not that it stops me. Not every time.
It is these pleasures that The Sandman’s publication has denied me. All the attention afforded the break-out first novelist—the church basement talks, forty-second syndicated morning radio interviews (“So, Pat, loved the book—but, let me ask you, who do you like in the Super Bowl?”), even a few bedroom invitations (politely declined) from book club hostesses and college campus Sylvia Plaths—was poisoned by the fact that I was alone, miles from my son.
“Where are you, Dad?” I remember Sam asking over the phone at one of the campaign’s low points.
“Kansas City.”
“Where’s that?”
“I’m not sure. Kansas, maybe?”
“The Wizard of Oz.”
“That’s right. Dorothy. Toto. Over the rainbow.”
There was a silence for a time after that.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Remember when Dorothy clicked her heels together three times? Remember? Remember what she said?”
That The Sandman wasn’t my own book didn’t help things. Just when a glowing review or snaking bookstore line-up or letter from a high school kid relating how much he thought I was the shit came close to making me forget, Angela’s recorded voice reading from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment would return to me, and any comfort the moment might have brought was instantly stolen away.
There was also the worry I would be found out. Although I hadn’t heard from any of them since The Sandman was published, it was entirely conceivable that one of the Kensington Circle would come across it, recognize its source material, and go to the press. Perhaps worse, Evelyn or Len would come knocking on my door with my book in their hands, demanding hush money. Worse yet, it would be William. And I would pay no matter who it was. I’d done a wrongful thing. I’m not denying it. But if there was ever a victimless crime, this was it. Now, in order to walk quietly away from my fraudulent, non-starter of a writing career as planned, four people had to keep a secret.
When I finally returned to Toronto, I went through the mail piled on my desk in the Crypt expecting at least one of the envelopes to contain a blackmail letter. But there was only the usual bills.
Life returned to normal, or whatever shape normal was going to take for Sam and me. We watched a lot of movies. Ate out at neighbourhood places, sitting side by side at the bar. For a while, it was like a holiday neither of us had asked for.
And the whole time I waited to walk into someone from the circle. Toronto is a big city, but not so big that you could forever avoid the very people you’d most like to never see again. Eventually, I’d be caught.
I started wearing ballcaps and sunglasses everywhere I went. Took side streets. Avoided eye contact. It was like being followed by the Sandman all over again. Every shadow on the city’s pavement a hole in the earth waiting to swallow me down. And what, I couldn’t help wondering, would be waiting for me at the bottom?