by Andrew Pyper
At points in the main narrative, the Ivan-character reflects on the accidental (or not) fall of his niece down his sister’s basement stairs. The same event he related to me standing at the urinals in the Zanzibar. Even some of the details, the very phrasings (as best as I recall them) make their way into Angela’s text.
Her name was Pam…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 …One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth…That’s how a life ends. Two lives. It just happens.
She must have learned Ivan’s secret on her own. He told her.
And she used it. Used him.
The address Angela gave me included a security code number for her condominium in one of the tall but otherwise nondescript towers of grey metal and glass that have weedishly cropped up around the baseball stadium. I would never have known how to ring her otherwise, as her number isn’t listed next to Angela Whitmore, but Pam Turgenov. The name of Ivan’s dead niece.
Once she’s buzzed me in I take the elevator up, each blinking floor number to the twenty-first ratcheting up the rage within me. Flashpoints bursting into flame.
She is a liar.
A threat to me.
To Sam.
And then:
It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my book. She has taken my old life away from me.
I’ve never felt this way before. This angry. Though anger seems to have little to do with what I’m feeling now. It’s too soft, a mood among moods. This is physical: an electric charge crackling out from my chest. A clean division between a thinking self and an acting self.
Angela left her door open. I know because when I take a running kick at it, the handle crunches into the plaster of the interior wall.
The acting part of me lunges at her.
The thinking part takes note of the cheap furniture, the curtainless picture windows looking west over the lake, the rail lines, the city’s sprawl to the horizon. The day’s heat hanging over everything.
Angela might have said something before I slammed into her but it made no impression. No words escape her lips now, in any case. It’s because I’ve taken her by the throat. My thumbs pressing down. Beneath her skin, something soft gives way.
Then I’m lifting her up and throwing her on to the sofa. Straddling her hips. Putting all my weight on to my locked arms so that they stop any sound coming from her.
Screaming into her with a voice not my own.
I don’t know what you want. I don’t know who you are. It doesn’t matter. Because if I see whoever you’ve got tailing me anywhere near my house or my son again, I’ll fucking kill you.
Her body spasms.
You getting this? I’ll fucking kill you.
I keep my grip on her throat and feel Angela’s body yield beneath me. I already am killing her. There is a curiosity in seeing how the end will show itself. A final seizure? A stillness?
It’s you.
I’m letting her go. That is, I must have let her go, as she appears to be making an attempt to say something.
“I thought you were too…simple. But that’s the kind of person who does this sort of thing, isn’t it? The blank slate.”
“It’s not me.”
“You didn’t know what you were doing just now. You were a different person. Maybe that person is the one who killed Petra.”
Angela struggles to stand. Moves away from me without taking her eyes off my hands.
“I’m the one being followed,” I say.
“You nearly strangled me!”
“Because you’re fucking with me. My son.”
“Fuck you!”
The exhaustion hits us both at the same time. Our feet dance uncertainly under us, as though we are standing on a ship’s deck in a storm.
“Just answer me this. If you’re so innocent, why are you hiding behind someone else’s name?”
“To stay away from him.”
She tells me how she’s seen him from time to time. Ever since the Kensington Circle stopped meeting. Someone who would appear across the street from the building where she worked, her different apartments over the years, watching through the window of a restaurant as she ate. Always in shadow. Faceless.
It was the Sandman who forced her into changing her name, her appearance and her job before she learned of Conrad White and Evelyn’s accident. Afterward, it only let her disappear that much more easily.
“Did disappearing involve sending out stories under pseudonyms?”
“Pseudonyms?”
“Evelyn Sanderman. Pam Turgenov. Who else have you been?”
Angela crosses her arms. “‘The Subway Driver.’”
“And very fine it is. Though not entirely yours.”
“What you did, you did it to be recognized.”
“That’s not true.”
“No?”
“I did it to have something that was mine.”
“Even if it wasn’t.”
“Yes. Even if it wasn’t.”
“That’s not what interests me.”
“What does?”
“People,” she says. “People are my interest.”
It was Angela’s belief that no matter how many times she changed her life—or sent her writing out under others’ names—he will eventually find her. Most recently, on the same day she had lunch with me, she went to get into her car in an underground parking lot to find a message written on her windshield in lipstick. Her lipstick. Taken from where she left it in her bathroom.
“He’s been in here?”
“And he wants me to know he has. That he can come back whenever he wants.”
“What did it say? On your windshield?”
“You are mine.”
At first, she thought his surveillance was meant only to threaten her. There was, she supposed, a pleasure he took in knowing her life was shrinking into little more than the exercise of nerves, the fidgety survival instincts of vermin. Now, though, she thinks there is also a logical purpose to his reminders: the traces he leaves may one day work to implicate her. Eventually something of his will stick, and it will be taken as hers. Just as I have begun to think of myself as suspect instead of victim, so has she.
As if to confirm this very thought, I look past Angela’s shoulder and notice something on the kitchen counter. Angela turns to look at it too.
“Where’d you get that?” I say.
“It was stuffed in my mailbox this morning.”
“It’s a Yankees cap.”
“Another one of his messages, I guess. Though I can’t figure out what it means. Are you okay? You look like you’re going to pass out.”
I’ve got both my hands clenched to the back of a chair to hold myself up. The room, the city outside the window, all of it teeter-tottering.
“That cap,” I say. “It’s the same one Petra was wearing when she disappeared.”
Angela looks at me. A wordless expression that proves her innocence more certainly than any denial she might make. Even the greatest actors’ performances show signs of artifice at their edges—it’s what makes drama dramatic. A little something extra to reach all the way to the cheap seats. But what Angela shows me is so confused, so without the possibility of consideration that it clears any residue of suspicion I held against her.
“It’s going to be alright,” I say, taking a step closer.
“Who is doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why us?”
“I don’t know.”
Outside, the sky dulls as it begins its fading increments of dusk, and beneath it the city takes on an insistent specificity, the streets and rooftops and signage coming into greater focus. Both of us turn to take it in. And both of us thinking the same thing.
He’s out there.
The grid patterns of skulking traffic, the creeping streetcars, the pedestrians who appear to be standing still.
He’s one of them.
>
I wake in the night to the digital billboards along the lakeshore flashing blues and reds and yellows over the ceiling. Money lights.
Sitting up straight against the headboard, I watch Angela sleep, her body curled and still as a child’s. I haven’t been with another woman since Tamara died, and it’s funny—perhaps the funniest of all the funny revelations of this day—that it is Angela whose hair I stroke back from her face as she sleeps.
I watch her for a time. Not as a lover watches his beloved in the night. I look down on her shape as a non-presence, a netherworld witness. A ghost.
But a ghost that needs to go to the bathroom. I fold back the sheet from my legs and slide to the bottom of the bed. Angela’s bare feet hang over the side. Pale, blue-veined.
I’m about to lift myself from the mattress when something about these feet holds me still. Three missing toes. The littlest piggy and the two next to it nothing more than healed-over vacancies, an unnatural rounding of the foot that sends a shiver of revulsion down to where my own toes touch the floor.
Angela may go by any number of different names, but the absent digits of her foot tie her to an unmistakable identity. The little girl in her story. The one who lost the same toes to frostbite when she slept overnight in the barn when her foster father disappeared into the woods.
That girl, the one with an unspeakable secret.
This girl, sleeping next to me.
This may be hard to believe, to accept as something that a person in a real situation would do (as opposed to what I am unfortunately not: a character in a story), but the reason I don’t ask Angela, having seen her diminished foot, if she is, in fact, the grown-up version of the little girl in her journal of horrors, is that I don’t want her to think I am so unsophisticated a reader. To assume that missing toes prove that whatever happened to the Sandman’s girl was autobiography and not fiction—a fiction that, like all fiction, is necessarily made of stitched-together bits of lived as well as invented experience—would reveal me as that most lowly drooler of the true-crime racks, the literal-minded rube who demands the promise of Based on a True Story! from his paperbacks and popcorn flicks: the unimaginative.
And why do I care if she held this impression? Pride, for one thing. I may be a charlatan author, but I’m still a good reader. Still on the endangered species list of those who know it is only foolish gossip to connect the dots between a writer’s life and the lives she writes.
There is this, along with another reason I keep any questions of frostbitten piggies to myself as I step out of her bedroom to find Angela pouring me a cup of coffee: I’m lonely.
“Sleep all right?” she asks, sliding a World-Class Bitch mug over the counter toward me.
“Fine. Bad dreams, though.”
“How bad?”
“The usual bad.”
“Me too. It’s why I’m up. That, and I have to be at work in less than an hour.”
I’d forgotten she has a job. I’d forgotten anyone has a job. Another of the side effects of the writer’s life. You start to think everybody can professionally justify shuffling around the house all day, waiting for the postman, pretending that staring out the window and wondering what to toss in the microwave for lunch is a form of meditation.
“About last night,” I start. “I wanted to tell you how much–”
“I think you should talk to some of the others.”
“The others?”
“From the circle.”
Angela holds her coffee with both hands, warming them against the bracing chill of condo A/C.
“That’s funny. I was going to say something about us. Something nice.”
“I’m not too good at the morning-after thing, I guess.”
“So you’ve had others. Other mornings.”
“Yes, Patrick. I’ve had other mornings.”
I take a suave gulp of scalding coffee. Once the burning in my throat has dulled to an excruciating throb, I ask why she wants me to speak to the others.
“To find out what they know. If they’ve been…involved the same way we have.”
I nod at this, and keep nodding. It’s the word she’s just used. Involved. Said in the way Conrad White said it when I asked what he thought of Angela’s story. You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.
“How did you come to leave your purse in Conrad’s car?”
“I told you. We were seeing each other a little at the time.”
“Seeing each other? Or seeing each other?”
“He was interested in who I was.”
And who are you? I nearly ask, but stop it in time with another tonsil-scarring sip of coffee.
“Have you read his work?”
“Jarvis and Wellesley? Sure,” she says. “Why?”
“I think he saw in you what the character in his book was looking for.”
“His dead daughter.”
“The perfect girl.”
“He told you that?”
“So I’m right.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Angela tells me that Conrad would drive her home sometimes after their get-togethers. At first, their topics were the usual literary matters such as favourite books (The Trial for Conrad, The Magus for Angela), work habits, writer’s block and how it might be overcome. Soon, though, Conrad would focus their discussion on where Angela’s story came from. Her childhood, her friends growing up, where her parents were now. Something in the pointedness of his queries put Angela on the defensive, so that her replies became more intention ally vague the more he persevered. It made him angry.
“Like he wasn’t just curious, but desperate,” Angela says, slipping her cellphone and keys into her purse.
“Was he in love with you?”
“He might have been, in a way. More like a freaky fan than a lover, you know? But that wasn’t what made him ask all those questions.”
She stops. Not liking where this is taking her.
“I think he was scared,” she says.
“Scared of what?”
“The same thing we’re scared of.”
“And he–”
“He thought it had to do with my story.”
I’m following Angela to the door, slipping on watch and socks and shoes as I go.
“Did he have any contact with the Sandman—someone he thought was the Sandman? There were those killings back then. Maybe he was making connections in ways none of us had thought of.”
“Maybe,” Angela says. “Or maybe he was a messed-up shut-in who was driving himself crazy making something out of nothing.”
In the elevator down, I ask who from the circle she thinks we should try to look up first.
“We?”
“I thought you said it might be useful to know what the others know.”
“But I can’t do the asking.”
“Why not?”
“Who did he deliver the Yankees cap to?”
The elevator doors open. Outside, the heat bends the air into shimmering vapours.
“Can I call you?” I ask.
“Not for a while.”
“Why not?”
“You are mine. Remember?” she says, opening the doors to the burning world. “I don’t think he’d like it if he thought I was yours.”
You wouldn’t expect, being caught in a web of intrigue (who knew I would ever use this phrase so personally, irreplaceably?) that, in between the recorded scenes of revelation and confrontation, one could still have so much spare time. Unemployment can open yawning chasms in the middle of the most mentally preoccupied days, believe me. There are still the self-maintaining banalities to attend to: the belated meals, the bathroom dashes, the long showers. Still the mail, the erupting laundry hamper, the dental appointment. One can be a murder suspect, a serial killer’s prey, and still have time to waste on the last sobbing half-hour of Dr. Phil.
There are a pair of activities over these melting July days, however, that are returned to w
ith too great a frequency to note each time they occur. The first is my journal. I’ve graduated from stolen jottings at bedtime to carrying it around wherever I go, recollecting snatches of conversation, the wheres and whens of things. It is, in the rereading, an increasingly unstructured document. What begins as tidy pages of coherent points soon breaks down into messages to Sam, scribbled drawings of Petra, Detective Ramsay (though I don’t attempt Angela, can’t imagine where the first line would start), even a letter to the Sandman, asking that if he has to take me with him into the Kingdom of Not What It Seems that he leave my son behind. It occurs to me that later, when it’s all over, this journal of mine may be the sort of thing that supports the contention that poor old Patrick had lost his way well before the shadow got him. After all, what is sanity other than guarding the border between the fiction and non-fiction sections?
My other habit is to give Sam a ring and see how he’s doing. Most of the time he’s out in the yard playing with Stacey’s kids (they have a pool, an unthinkable suburban luxury for us city mice), or camping overnight (instead of the artsy-craftsy day school I’ve been sending him to), or one of any other number of healthy summer distractions I have long meant to get around to doing with him, but mostly never have, slipping him books or movie passes instead. In other words, even when I call I don’t get to talk to him. But it gives me a chance to thank Stacey yet again for what she’s doing, to assure her that I’ll collect Sam once I’ve “cleared the deck of a few things,” to ask her to tell him that I called.
There you have it: even a man caught in a web of intrigue still fights against the inevitable with whatever’s left to him. To hang on to the shape life used to take before he became trapped, and now can do little but wait for the spider to feel his struggle and decide enough, that’s enough for this fly. It’s time.