by Andrew Pyper
Look: there’s the Chief of the OPP staring directly into the cameras and vowing to put all available resources into locating “little Sam,” and until they do, “I can tell you there won’t be sleep for any of us.” There’s the shots of local volunteers marching through the Mustang’s neighbouring fields of corn, searching for clues, for body parts. And there’s the father, his skin speckled and spongy as oatmeal, robotically pleading for his boy’s safe return. So, thinks the readership of the Couch Potato, that’s what a novelist looks like.
He looks suspicious. Even to me. An unconvincing performance of parental concern—not enough panic, the voice emptied, as though he’s already made the turn toward grief. I watch a repeated loop of myself on the all-news channel down in the Crypt in disbelief. That’s not how I feel. That’s not even me. Here: this fellow sobbing into his hands, throwing a rock glass against the panelled wall to avoid pouring anything into it, and a minute later cutting his feet on the shards when he gets up to check with the police for the fifth time this hour. I’m your man.
It appears the police might think so too. They’re coming around to “go over things” again, and though they once more offer the services of a “family crisis counsellor,” I can tell their initial sympathy is already starting to dry up. There are fewer questions about the figure I’d seen at the back of the drive-in’s lot, and more about my emotional condition over the last few years. First, there was the loss of my wife to cancer. Then the messy business of the William Feld murders, which, as one investigator puts it, “We had you on the longlist for the whole kaboodle.” Plus all the other layers: my son taken at the screening of a movie based on my own book, a book in which a shadowy figure takes the lives of children. “I mean, you can’t write that kind of stuff,” another cop tells me, shaking his head. “But then again, you did.”
By Sunday evening, they’re suggesting I call a lawyer. When I tell them there’s no need, they look at me as though that’s just the sort of thing a guilty bastard would say. Out there in the night a search for my son is still under way, but in here, at the father’s house on Euclid Street, they’ve already found the guy they’re looking for, and all there’s left to do is wait for him to break. In time, the ones like me always do.
With my permission, they’re listening in on every phone call. They say it’s in case a ransom demand comes in, but I can tell it’s more likely evidence collection. A message from an accomplice. A midnight confession.
And I don’t blame them. In such cases, the parent is always the prime suspect. Statistically speaking, shadows are merely shadows. Harm tends to come from the ones you know best.
There are always exceptions, however. There’s always a Sandman. And when he strikes, don’t be surprised when you’re the only one who believes it was him.
For the first twenty-four hours, there isn’t time to suffer. There’s only the same answers to the same questions, showing complete strangers where everything’s kept around the house, letting a nice woman straighten your collar and wipe toothpaste from the corner of your mouth before the press conference.
In the end, however, these distractions only make everything worse. In my case this comes on day two, upon awakening from a sleeping-pill nap and collapsing to the bedroom floor—one pant leg on, the other off—under the weight of facts. Struck by the truth. I’d never realized how literally this cliché could be taken. It’s the truth that leaves me splayed out over the hardwood, blinking at the dust bunnies under the bed, both hands reaching around to the back of my skull to check for blood.
Sam is gone.
They’re not going to find him.
I’m the only one who stands a chance of getting him back.
If it weren’t for this last thought I’m not at all sure if, an hour later, I would have been able to finish getting dressed. A good thing, seeing as there is the press to be dealt with. Take a peek out the curtains: a pair of TV news vans, their hairsprayed correspondents practicing their serious faces, along with a gaggle of beat writers from the papers, sharing dirty jokes and flicking cigarette butts into my neighbour’s garden. If life is to be carried on with—even whatever brittle simulation of a life that might be available to me—they will all have to be satisfied enough to leave me alone at least until their next deadline.
I decide the best way to proceed is to grant an exclusive. It’s a reflex that prompts me to choose the National Star. And who does the police’s media relations person bring in but the kid from Swift Current.
“So you’re in hard news now?” I ask him, and despite the wilfully clenched jaw, he allows a grin at my recognizing him.
“No future in arts.”
“You’re right there.”
“Guess they promoted me.”
“The Editor-in-Chief knows talent when she sees it.”
“This must be a very difficult time,” he starts. It’s how all of them start. The cops, the counsellors, the wellwishers, the hacks. Thank God for TV.
I follow with some televisual dialogue of my own. About remaining optimistic, asking whoever might know something about my son to come forward. Then the Swift Current kid asks the inevitable follow-up.
“What do you make of the overlap between all this and your novel?”
“I don’t make anything of it.”
“But isn’t it striking how–”
“We’re done.”
“Sorry?”
I reach over and click off his recorder. “Interview’s over. And remind the other vultures outside that you’re the only one to get any roadkill today.”
It works. Within a couple of hours, the vans have cleared off along with the shivering journos who will be forced to quote from the National Star’s piece if they want any comment from Patrick Rush. Even the police have honoured my request for a little privacy. They send over a social worker to sit vigil just in case Sam walks in the door. It allows me to go out.
I head up to Dundas Street and turn east on to the ever-lengthening tentacle of Chinatown. Before I know it was where I was headed I end up outside The Fukhouse. Anarchists.
Evelyn told me this is where they met on the night I first saw her. Now it makes me wonder: Can anarchists hold meetings and still be anarchists? Then again, if the lawless can’t be flexible with the rules, who can?
A light goes on in Conrad White’s old apartment. Behind the gauzy curtains a pair of shadows move about in what is likely some domestic chore but, from out here, appears as a ballroom dance. The two figures circling, holding hands for a moment before casting off to the opposite sides of the room.
The bulb flicks off. The room lit for so short a time I doubt the shadows were ever there at all. More ghosts. Evelyn and Conrad glimpsed in an afterlife waltz.
But I’m still alive. My son too. He has to be. There’s no point in seeing ghosts any more. They have nothing to tell me other than what has come before. All that remains for the living is to pick up the mystery where the dead left off.
“So this really is your local,” a voice behind me declares. I turn to find Ramsay grinning at me through The Fukhouse’s gloom. “Would have pegged you for something a bit more tweedy.”
“The drinks are cheap.”
“They ought to be,” he says, surveying the room. “Let me buy you one?”
“Buy me two.”
Ramsay orders bourbon with beer chasers. We get the former inside us as soon as they arrive.
“Just dropped by your house,” he says.
“And I wasn’t there.”
“Went out for a stroll, did you?”
“You would know. You followed me here.”
“I’m a cop,” Ramsay shrugs. “Old habits.”
We sit looking straight ahead for a time. Our heads floating in the greasy mirror behind the gins, whiskies and rums.
“A terrible thing,” Ramsay says finally. “Your boy.”
I try to measure the sincerity in his voice, the regretful shake of his head. Seems real to me. Then again, I’ve gott
en Ramsay wrong before. I may have never gotten him right.
“I’m told your best men are on the case,” I say.
“Then I’m sure they’ll find him.”
“I feel like I should be helping them look.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“They told me to stay at home.”
“That’s a hard order to follow if you think he’s out there.”
“I know he is.”
“You know?”
“Sam is alive. And I’m going to be the one who finds him.”
“Sounds like you’re on to something.”
“If I was, would I tell you?”
“You might. If you wanted to be clear.”
“Clear?”
“A show of goodwill. Without it, people can start down wrong paths.”
He had me. For a second, I thought now that Ramsay had William in his cell, there was a chance he would actually be sympathetic with a father who’d lost his boy. But suspicion is Ramsay’s default position. It’s where he lives.
“I would never hurt Sam.”
“Nobody says you have.”
“Nobody has said so, no. So if they’re not being honest with me, why should I be honest with them?”
“Like I said. You could make this clear.”
“It’s clear enough for me.”
I start toward the exit. A bit off balance from the bourbon, the rush that comes with the speaking of privately held revelations. But when Ramsay opens his mouth to say something as I go, I’m still able to beat him to it.
“You’ve found your Sandman,” I shout as both palms slap the door wide open. “Now it’s my turn.”
Ramsay may still be following me, but I don’t care. I’m not doing anything wrong. Only walking. And whispering questions out loud. Questions that, over a long night’s wander east, lead me out of the fog of shock.
First up is how whoever took Sam knew we were planning to be at the Mustang on that particular night. As far as I can recall, I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Had Sam? Perhaps. An overheard playground boast (“My dad’s taking me to see his movie tonight!”), or something let slip to his friend Joseph. Still, these are unlikely scenarios, as Sam doesn’t usually gossip with his gang of kids at the park, none of them do, all of them boys of an age where their primary communication is the role play of machine-gunning soldiers or robots with laser beams firing out from their eye sockets.
The far greater probability is that we were followed. A black van. Changing lanes to keep me in view as we headed out of the city.
So why not take this to the police? I’ve come close to telling them about Angela a couple of times, but held back for reasons both rational and intuitive. On the rational side, I have no proof that it was her. More than this, “Angela” is dead. I’ve got Petra’s disposal to keep hidden. And I’m currently the prime suspect in Sam’s disappearance. Now that I think of it, Angela likely had something on everyone in the circle that they didn’t want out in the open. It’s how she’s kept under the radar all along.
But what really prevents me from mentioning her name is the gut certainty that I’m not meant to. If Angela—or whoever it is who has my son—gets the idea that I’m telling the police everything I know, it’s over. The only way to Sam is through following the story to the end.
Before I know it the sun is plucking stars from the sky. I’ve made it all the way out to the Beaches, turned down one of its side streets to the boardwalk. No one out but the few pre-dawn joggers and picnic-table snoozers, the lonely and haunted like me. With shoes off, the sand is cool under my feet. Yet when I step into the first timid waves the water is body temperature, having been simmered over the course of a heat-waved summer. It may never freeze again.
Something touches my hand—a fly, a candy wrapper lifted from the beach on a gust of wind—and I look down expecting Sam to be there. The fact that he is missing is always at the front of my mind, and yet the illusion of his presence comes to me several times every waking hour. He’s not here. But he should be. Taking my hand and stepping out into the water. Asking if he can go all the way in. Telling me not to be afraid.
The morning brings an ugly specificity to the flatscreen billboards and construction cranes to the west. It turns my eyes back out over the water. But the lake is just as likely an industrial product, its surface wrinkly and thin as aluminum foil.
Here’s what I’m thinking as I start back: there is nowhere to go any more that has not been modified, re-invented, enhanced. Places don’t exist as they once did, simply and convincingly. Virtual reality is the only reality left.
And so what? If I can just have Sam back, the rest of the world can keep its recycled myths, its well-crafted fakery. I don’t need anything to be real any more. I just need him.
To find Sam, I have to find Angela. But to search for someone who doesn’t exist: not the best task for an out-of-work TV critic. So what would Tim Earheart or Ramsay do in my shoes? Start with what’s on the table. Not much. There’s Angela’s name (false), her age (within a decade range), her published work (lifted from others’ autobiographical accounts). There’s also what I know of her appearance (especially susceptible to the whimsies of shadow and light, so that she was one thing reading from her journal on the opposite side of Conrad White’s rug, and another the night she cupped her hands over my ears to muffle the sounds she made in her bed, as though it was me and not her neighbours she needed to save from distraction). For someone who has come to play such a cruelly important role in my life, Angela has done all the taking and in return left next to nothing of herself behind.
One thread I still have of hers takes me to the condo where, eighteen floors above, I had seen and touched parts of her that now, in recollection, fall in favour of the argument that Angela has never been anything but a creation of fantasy. My effort to return my hands to her skin renders only the most generic impression, a softcore going through the motions. The naked Angela comes to me now from too great a distance, implausibly flawless and blue-lit.
If this is the case—if I never was with Angela on what I thought was our only night together—then perhaps Angela isn’t to blame. Perhaps I’m the psychotic. There is no Angela because there never was an Angela. Which would mean she isn’t the one who has done something terrible to Sam. I am.
Only the building’s superintendent throwing me against the wall puts these dark considerations aside.
“You,” the man says. The same one who’d given me the heave-ho the last time. Now, however, he’s giving me the clinical stare of a physician checking for signs of jaundice. “Tell me. Just between us. Whisper it in my ear if you’d like.”
“Yes?”
“What is your problem?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“You’ve found him.”
“Not you. A tenant.”
“They’re not tenants when they own the unit.”
“What are they then?”
“They’re unit owners.”
“I’m looking for a unit owner.”
“Buzz them.”
“They’re not here. Or not answering.”
“If I’d known it was you down here, I wouldn’t have answered either.”
His hands have loosened their grip on his belt. It’s his calmness that makes it certain he’s going to hit me. In my experience, there’s always a moment before taking a shot to the face when you see it coming, but don’t quite believe it. Here it comes, you think. Then No, he wouldn’t. And then he does.
“She has my son.”
The super looks down at me over pockmarked cheeks. “Divorce?”
“Something like that.”
“Call your lawyer like everyone else.”
“It’s not a lawyer kind of thing. If you know what I mean.”
Apparently he does. One fist returns to his side, and the other fishes in his pockets for his keys.
“I’ll tell you what the building’s records show,” he says, ushering me t
hrough the lobby and into a small office where the Christmas tree is stored. “But I see you in here again and I’ll stuff you down the garbage chute.”
I tell the super to look up the account under the name Pam Turgenov.
“Thought you said her name was Angela.”
“She lies.”
“Most of them do.”
He pulls up the file on Angela/Pam’s financial status with the condominium corporation. The mortgage and purchase agreement solely under Pam Turgenov’s name, though the account has recently come under arrears. Unit 1808 hasn’t paid its maintenance fee for three months, and the bank has frozen the accounts.
“We’re looking for this one,” the super says. “But from what I can tell, she hasn’t been here for a while. Not since the break-in.”
“There was a burglary?”
“Took some crap jewelry, personal stuff. But left the TV.”
Personal stuff. Like Petra’s Yankees cap. So it could find its way to my house.
“I’m changing the locks this week,” the super says.
“It won’t matter. She’s not coming back.”
“All her junk is still up there.”
“Trust me.”
“But she’s got your kid.”
“I’ll find her.”
I must sound convincing. The super gives me a soldierly nod. “When you speak to her,” he says as he walks me to the door, “tell her I’m keeping the TV.”
From the condo I walk straight up Bay Street toward the gold and silver office towers on the far side of the rail tracks. It takes a while. I’m occupied with working through what shouldn’t come as a surprise, but has nevertheless: Angela not only failed to report to the authorities that it was Evelyn behind the wheel of the car she drove into a cliffside with Conrad White, but she likely had a hand in bringing about the crash in the first place. It was Angela who lured them north with breadcrumb clues. More than this, she must have been there. To make sure the job was done. And to replace Evelyn’s purse with her own.