The Killing Type

by Wayne Jones

  “Listen,” I say, sounding more imperious than I intend. “Are you going to be in on Saturday, at the library?”

  She nods.

  “Perhaps after my research we could go get a coffee or something and discuss the case. Not that I know anything in particular, but I think that it might be interesting to exchange thoughts.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  I look at my watch, crudely, I am afraid, and for no particular reason, and she takes the unintended cue.

  “You’re busy, but it’s been nice talking to you and I’ll see you on Saturday. I’m there from nine to four.”

  She walks away resolutely at first, determined, but after about ten metres she turns to see whether I am still there, still watching her. Her eyes go down to the ground then and she turns back around very quickly and makes her way down the street. I sense an odd—what to call it?—victory, as if I have won this particular battle.

  Chapter 4

  I take a break from this necessary but awful research, and walk along that same lake where Ryan and Jack used to walk in more civilized times. It’s early evening and the water is an unnatural shade of steel grey, calm and ominous. Novice jogger with flabby legs and bad technique. A couple whispering to each other on a rock. A family gathered around a woman in a wheelchair, some respite from whatever she is being cared for at the hospital across the street. There’s enough wind blowing to keep those gaggles of flies from gathering, but not enough to make me cold as I stride with some purpose. Not that I really do have anything to do or anywhere to go, but I always feel awkward when I am seen to be strolling alone, when I am obviously not accompanied by anyone (no friends, no girlfriend, no family visiting me) and so appear to be doing this for exercise or for lack of other useful activity to be devoting myself to (“Honey, let’s go to the lake, it’ll kill some time!”).

  Years of work as a student (bachelor, master, and finally doctor), and then even more years teaching, and really a lifetime of critical and attentive reading of everything I’ve set my eyes to since about grade 9—all that time and experience combined with an innate inclination for facts over feelings—all that has made me particularly sensitive and averse to sentimentality of any kind. So as I walk through the darkening night, I have to fight back feelings of self-pity and anger, waves of self-righteous rage at the shoddy treatment I received at TU. I feel like a child, no better than poor little Jack, while I debate with a Maker about whose existence I have long been agnostic, on the topic of my current lot. Why am I not basking in tenure and intensifying my knowledge of my literary specialties instead of writing a sad little book on a sad little topic? I received a long, rambling email from Jeremy (a former fellow student) recently—quite unexpectedly, as I hadn’t heard from him in about ten years—in which he professed to have converted to both Christianity and veganism, and counselled me that I should embrace whatever happenstance falls from God’s firmament into my arms, and not treat digressions as anything other than unplanned gifts.

  I have no patience for claptrap about an ordered universe created by Anyone, but on my better days I have to concede the practical, humanist truth of Jeremy’s reminder. No situation is absolutely better than all others, and so there are in fact many advantages to my current situation. No more petty academic politics. No more questions from earnest first-year students about what the “message” is of this or that core literary work of Western civilization. No more ever-thinner slices of subject matter for articles in peer-reviewed journals, searching for that take on Alexander Pope that hasn’t been written about a thousand times, that tidbit of fact that would revolutionize the way his oeuvre is seen forever after. The murder research avoids all that—as Jeremy put it one night after a drunken, boisterous walk around the commons—all that “bullshit.” Le mot juste.

  It’s dark by the time I reach the end of the path, which takes me aback tonight as it often does: the only choices are even deeper darkness in three directions, or retreat. I stand there and look out over the expanse of the water, lights flickering here and there but generally nothing, and nobody. There’s a near total silence for about half a minute as the traffic relents and the water decides to be calm. I find it hard to imagine that a killer could be hunting in this city, that such a pinpoint of perfection could be sullied by the downing of fellow humans.

  A car horn sounds and for a moment I forget where I am. Here, now, but headed home. I turn around and head back, and as usual the retracing of my steps is slightly depressing. The reason is that it is much darker out now, nearly pitch except for the occasional light, and the path is devoid of other people. It always feels to me as if I am revisiting a once-beautiful vista that has now been despoiled. There was light and sounds when I was here on this very stretch an hour ago, in front of this bench, alongside these rocks, but now there is nothing. I feel like it’s the end of the party, the scene of the crime, the cursèd fate of all things beautiful. (I’m overreacting, yes: I spent a fair portion of the afternoon reading Romantic poetry.)

  The “topper” (an egregious word I heard while eavesdropping on Wellington Street on Saturday) is the arrival back in my room, after wending through City Park and some nice streets just east of the student part of town. Absolute silence and solitude, my landlady long since sunk into the last of the deep sleeps which old age forces on her several times a day now. I have rituals that I generally follow at night, but I just don’t have the heart for them now, at, what, 11:42 pm. I work on the book throughout the day, of course, but I’ve gotten religious about spending an hour on it before I go to bed, too: it is the logical penultimate activity, but I struggle with it tonight.

  Reading is the last thing I do. Nothing research related, at least not directly, and none of that atrocious page-turner stuff that gets trumpeted in the newspapers. I turn down the sheets, adjust the ceiling fan to its second-highest speed, effective but relatively quiet, and settle in for what usually amounts to about an hour of reading. Half reclined on two big pillows, the red-shaded lamp providing just enough light, the fan whooshing comfortably, I choose from the pile on the second shelf of my wicker night stand a book that is part history of printing with movable type, part biography of Gutenberg (the title, perversely, is My Mainz Man).

  Chapter 5

  I go to the King’s University library for some serendipitous fun, scouring the shelves for nothing in particular at first, but then zeroing in on the HV6251 to HV7220.5 sections of the classed books on the shelves. Crimes, book after book on the topic, as if Knosting had been preparing itself all these years for the assaults it has been undergoing, librarians with foresight developing the collection, fortifying the city against attack.

  The place is quiet. I select a single title, slide it out from between the confines of its shelfmates, and confirm that I am all alone before I promptly sit down on the floor and start skimming through. It’s perversely refreshing to be reading about crimes committed in other cities and in other times, far, far away and long ago, as they say in the fairy tales. I like being distracted from the immediate threat.

  A throat clears while I am reading something about Gacy or Gein, and I look up to see a woman standing there.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to block your way.” I begin to struggle to my feet.

  “Please don’t move,” she says, and then pauses and adds: “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “These books here. These murders, men at their worst. And some women, too, all doing all that horrible stuff.”

  It’s disorienting, down here on the floor, the book closing itself up and falling down between my knees, while this beautiful creature talks on, her voice lilting up and down but mysteriously steady, too. I look up, stare for a solid five seconds, and she just smiles back goofily, surveys the shelves and seems to take a book out at random, and then plops down cross-legged on the floor with me.

  “This one,” she says, brandishing the book, “this was the first one I ever read in here. I
remember feeling that I had to sneak around. Sat at one of the tables, but felt too obvious, and then ended up in one of the more isolated cubicles, but kept the covers flattened, plastered to the desk top, and my head close to the pages just in case anybody with a curiosity walked by. Funny to think of that now. Now I come here, lounge in some of the softer chairs, and read about”—she looks around, pantomiming fear—“read about moiduh just as brash as you can imagine.”

  She has that thrown-together style that looks dishevelled on people who aren’t as beautiful as she is. When she laughs, as she is doing now for some reason, her whole body shakes, a level of commitment to the moment that I am able to achieve myself occasionally, but not without considerable effort. It seems natural to her.

  She sits down beside me and we remain like that for a few minutes, she showing me a passage from her book, and I, now encouraged, showing her some from mine. I feel like a student who has accidentally discovered the perfect study mate.

  “Why does this kind of thing interest you?” I ask.

  She shakes her head lightly at the question, whether because it is banal or brash I am not sure.

  “You see a body walking around here, walking around anywhere,” she says. “But, actually, no, you don’t see a body. You see a person being conveyed in a vessel that actually doesn’t attract any attention until it’s been violated. I mean, we’re so socialized, so civilized, that the only time we realize that we’re made of meat is when the flesh has been cut or pierced and blood has flowed and then everything changes.”

  She looks over at me, then up at the shelves. I feel like we are both either trapped between collapsing walls or adrift somewhere: it’s impossible to get off but we’re doomed if we stay put.

  “What do you do?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what do you do in your life that makes you so interested in this—this topic?”

  “I work as a waitress at that new Cambodian place. The one down on Queen. The hours are a little erratic—I think they’re afraid that I’m going to turn out to be incompetent or something—erratic, as in I don’t get many, and so I have time to hang out here and pursue my—what did you call it?—my topic.” She laughs.

  “I wonder ...” and then my voice drifts off somewhere between the stacks and the look on her face, and I have no idea what I wanted to say or what I could possibly say to a creature like this.

  “My name is Tony, by the way.”

  “I’m Andrew.” I smile in spite of myself, and am happy that we are down to these simplicities, and that, in effect, we are starting over.

  “Hi,” she says, and smiles, and then bows her head to her book again. I realize quickly that my efforts at concentration on my work are now doomed. I am able to keep myself from simply staring at her, but as I read text about murder and flip through page after page of photographic detail, all I can think about is who this person is.

  I fake it for fifteen minutes and then shift my legs and clear my throat (of nothing) and stand up. She smiles again and then extends her left hand and at first I am not quite sure what is going on.

  “Help me up.”

  I do, and when we are both at eye level, standing less than a few centimetres apart, I can smell her—not perfume, but a combination of sweat and powder and something vaguely metallic. She dusts herself off as if she has been just thrown by the big prize bull at the rodeo.

  “All that talk of murder has made me hungry,” she says. “Care to join me for some Indian?”

  I stare at her again, and I am a little embarrassed at my propensities, as Johnson put it.

  A half-hour later we are sitting across from each other at the awkwardly named Indian-ana (the owners are from Bloomington), setting out our preferences and hoping for edible overlaps. The place is over-decorated, with white tablecloths on peachy-pink ones, solid wooden chairs, the walls festooned with exotic people in exotic costumes. I look up when she says “vindaloo” and see her still poring down the columns of the menu as if it were an ancient text. She looks up.

  “I have some other ideas,” she says.

  “I don’t mind if you order the whole meal.”

  “Oh, I like a man who can be obedient.” She laughs. “I’d suggest papadum, dahl, pakoras, lamb vindaloo, saag paneer, naan, raeta, and a couple of Kingfisher.”

  “How can I say no?” I ask honestly and rhetorically.

  The beers arrive and the waiter pours them quickly into the glasses without tilting them, forming about three-quarters head and a quarter drinkable fluid. Tony looks over at me with raised eyebrows as the second one is being poured, and she chuckles when the waiter leaves our table.

  “Oh, well,” she says, raising her glass and clinking it against mine. “Cheers.”

  There are about ten or fifteen other customers in the restaurant, and the space is small, so I feel I have to keep my voice down when I ask her about murder.

  “So, what are your thoughts on the killing that is going on in town?” I ask.

  She answers quickly as if this is what she has been thinking about all day.

  “You know, thoughts, I don’t really have any thoughts about it all. I have this weird obsession though, something I can’t shake no matter how hard I try. Like here, for example, here in this restaurant. I think I see killers all around me. It’s sort of like that thing where when you stare at a word for long enough, after a while it doesn’t make any sense. You know, looks and sounds like it’s not even a word? I look at these people here and I see”—she lowers her voice and bends over the table towards me—“like that woman in the corner there, by herself, I imagine her as being some psycho loner freak who’s here just scouting for new victims. Or that couple there, I imagine that the guy is our killer and he’s licking his chops as much over his date, the poor doomed woman, as he is over the food. It’s crazy, I know, but I can’t get these things out of my head.”

  “That’s odd,” I say, sincerely.

  “And it’s not just here. Like I say, it’s everywhere. When I’m in the grocery store, when I’m walking on the street, wherever, whenever, it’s always the same. I know it’s illogical. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I can’t help myself. I keep thinking that all I can see is killers.”

  “It may be some kind of normal overreaction,” I speculate, drawing upon some fund of gibberish I likely osmosed from the head of the Psychology Department at TU. “It may be common to over-extend your fear to objects which do not in fact deserve it. You start from living in an environment in which there are no killers, and then when you know there is at least one killer, you assume there are thousands of them. Just a theory. Do you know that line from Shakespeare, about imagining every bush to be a bear?—it’s something like that, I suppose.”

  She smiles and shakes her head.

  “Well, I don’t know that bit of Shakespeare, but I think I know what you’re getting at. In my lucid moments, such as they are, I do know that I am crazy to think this way, but I can’t help being affected, feeling scared even, when I am being irrational. Sorry, I’m blabbering now and not making any sense.”

  The waiter arrives with our soup just as I am shaking my head to reassure her that she is making sense, or that if she isn’t, it’s quite understandable. I wonder about her motivations as much as about my own. The primal, primeval, primitive, primordial ones, even tip-tapping in alphabetical vowel playfulness like that, do not apply in my case: I have no interest in sexual congress, even the kind that is tempered with what the magazines, the cinema, even apparently real people, like to call love. Wait, wait, wait—it is not bitterness or an aversion to having (or causing) a broken heart, and certainly it is nothing misogynous or otherwise grandly negative. A matter of practicality, really: being disconnected makes it easier to get one’s work done. I also do not have any particular interest in smoking her out (an atrocious colloquialism I heard on television last night, from a seriously overacted crime investigator) about the killings. I don’t have enou
gh evidence to suspect her yet, and I am disinclined to fish around (from the second of the back-to-back episodes: must stop watching that box!) for any right now.

  As for her, well, I don’t think she’s a killer. There’s a certain innocence about her that isn’t compatible with a murderous streak—though, of course, murderous streaks are notoriously unpredictable. Whenever those magnificently coiffed reporters—women with elegant-anvil jawlines, men with overdeveloped trapezius muscles making their sport coats fit funny—whenever they interview the distraught suburban neighbour of the man who has been keeping heads in his freezer for years, or has beaten his wife to death with a hammer for suggesting a divorce, or—well, the killer is always remembered as a quiet guy whose actions come as a complete surprise. Why is it that we never hear that he was always trouble? So, I don’t actually know anything at all about Tony of course, and it’s just a feeling, as prone to being inaccurate as any other—a feeling I have that she couldn’t kill anything.

  The soup is good. Our eyes meet across the table after the first simultaneous sip and we nod at each other vigorously and raise our eyebrows as if we are approving something much more significant. I have to admit that there is the tinge of something in her eyes that I just can’t figure out, a glint like on a well-polished knife blade, a darkness like down the barrel of a gun, and it gives me a chill, even here with my face above the wafting warmth of the dahl. I look down.

  “This is only the second time I’ve been here,” she says, and I look up while she mesmerizes me again. “Yeah, second time. It was almost exactly a year ago now that Mitch and I were here. I don’t know what ever happened to him,” and her voice drifts away while I wait for any bit more of information that she is willing to divulge.