by Wayne Jones
“Andrew, are you OK?” It is Rachel, whom I have been impolitely ignoring while I wallow in a travesty of post hoc logic.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, quite sincerely. “My mind was just wandering there for a while, distracted a bit, you know. It’s wonderful of you to have me over, and perhaps we can talk about …” I leave it vague in order to let her have any entrance she is comfortable with.
She sighs and starts. “It’s so good of you to even take the time to talk to me, and, yes, at first I’d wanted to pump you for information about your theories, how your research is going, all of that, and also tell you a bit of what I think myself. But I kind of find the whole topic distressing and depressing from that angle—no offence, of course: I think it’s wonderful what you are doing. I guess now though all I want is someone to talk to about, well, about what’s going to happen to me, and to the town, after this whole thing is over. And I hope to God that it is over soon.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Her mouth screws downward in a peculiar way and for a moment I think she is about to cry. I am reminded in passing of how utterly impossible it is to know what is going on in the true heart of a person, no matter what the dedication to forthright communication. She rights herself, though, and continues.
“I guess my main point, my worry, is how do people recover from this? Do you know what I mean? The guy will be caught and jailed and there won’t be any threat any more, but when will we all feel safe again? I’m not making any sense, I know, but I’ve had these wild desires myself just to move out of town, get a job somewhere else, either now or when the whole damn thing is over.”
There’s a hint of a smile on her face now, or at least something approaching confidence or defiance, and that warms me.
“Listen, Rachel, from the research I’ve done, all of what you are saying are common reactions. The best I can tell you is that ultimately whole towns do recover from this kind of thing, people get on with their lives, and not all of them have to quit their jobs to do so.”
She laughs out loud at this, and I genuinely feel that something has changed in the room and between us. She gets up and replenishes my cup of tea, smiling at me as she sets the pot back down. I sit and look up at her as she remains standing.
“I lied,” she says, and my eyebrows have literally gone up and down before she continues: “I do have alcohol here: let’s have a drink.”
She is not really asking and so I just sit there silently while her eyebrows go up, she smiles, and then she corrals both cups and saucers and the teapot back onto the tray and ferries it all quickly out to the kitchen. I hear what sounds like a clattery avalanche into the sink and then the distinct clack of dish onto floor, followed by “Shit!,” and ending with a shouted instruction to me that I cannot discern.
I go into the kitchen and find her kneeling, picking up the pieces.
“A little accident,” she says, but still smiling.
“May I help?”
“Can you grab me a dishcloth, a clean one, there in the second drawer from the top, by the fridge?”
There is a very orderly stack of them, mostly whites and blues and greens, and I shuffle down to the third one, which I hand to her. It’s just one of the cups which is broken, but it has splashed tea in a wide radius. While Rachel wipes, I go to my knees myself and pick up some of the pieces which she has missed. My former irrational worry sweeps over me briefly, and I conclude that if she really wanted to kill me, this wouldn’t be a bad method: break a dish, lure me into the kitchen, and then have at me with the paring knife she has concealed up her sleeve.
We both stand at the same time. She takes the shards from me, wraps them in the dishcloth, and places the bundle in the sink.
“Now where was I?” she asks rhetorically. “It feels like a gin-and-tonic night to me. Is that OK?”
“Perfect.” I loathe the mediciney stuff, but it feels better to comply.
I cut slices of lime while she measures exact ounces into a shot glass. We each pour tonic to our taste and Rachel then plops a couple of ice cubes into each glass and stirs them with a teaspoon. We resume our positions in the living room, and I am happy that the conversation diverts to something other than killing and feeling and feeling after killing. Rachel has travelled extensively all around the world, Newfoundland last year and Nepal in the fall. She’s a Scrabble fiend apparently, having just last night cleared her tiles with BABYISH. She’s never been married, is wary of dating, would like to have children some day, but is generally very happy.
“I’m afraid I’m just a humble scholar,” I tell her, adding “ex-scholar” when she brightens just a tad too much and I suddenly want to dampen enthusiasm (maybe it’s the drink affecting me).
“What’s your, well, story?” she asks. “You know, what have you done, where are your friends and family?”
“You may regret asking those questions, because I can go on,” I only half-joke, and she shakes her head vigorously but silently, allowing me to go on. “And on.”
A short snorty laugh, and then: “Please do.”
“Seriously, there is not much to tell. I’ve always been a bit introverted, deriving my energy from solitude, and often preferring the company of dependable books to the messiness of personal relationships. I hope you know what I mean—it’s not that I don’t like people, or that I don’t enjoy their company as I am yours right now, but it often makes me a bit nervous and uncomfortable.”
“I understand what you mean. I’m a librarian, you know: we’re not exactly known for being the life of the party.”
The gin is tasting just fine, in spite of myself, and I sense a basic insight coming upon me which reminds me of some of the eureka moments during my research. It is embarrassingly very little this time—simply a realization that this is how friendships begin. An invitation to do X, a switch to Y, a tiny moment of intimacy and mutual comfort over a broken dish, and then it seems unusual that we won’t be seeing each other at least a couple of times a week. The reader should note that no romantic inclinations are desired on either part here: I am sure of my own and I have near-certain confidence of Rachel’s merely—how they always say “merely,” as if friendship is any less because it does not involve sex!—platonic intentions as well.
The evening proceeds like that, frank exchanges of information and interest from both of us. We do have a few more drinks, and end with some accident-free tea again and some chocolate. When I am standing at her front door on my out, she puts a hand on my shoulder and kisses me lightly on the top of my cheek. Her hair smells like peaches and I walk back home fully intending to see her again.
Chapter 16
A sleepless night in a sleepy town. Insomnia is a rare problem for me, and I haven’t suffered through its enforced hyperconsciousness since I moved from Toronto. There the problem was generally some upset at the Department of English, but the advantage of living in such a large city, and relatively close to downtown, was that at any time of night there was always some noise or other, a distraction from pure awareness, from that state of frustration in which falling asleep seems like it requires an effort and you are puzzled that you have ever been able to do it successfully so many other nights before.
In Knosting, there is nothing but silence at three in the morning, not a sound to pierce the blanket of quiet doom which pulls itself over Andrew the insomniac. I lie in the bed and look up at the ceiling, turn my head to the left and see lights outside, turn to the right and see something hulking which eventually reveals itself to be my dresser. The ceiling, the foot of my bed, the headboard if I strain backward: my options for variety of scenery are limited. I envy those people who are able to, as they say, “relax,” either for mere hours before they are scheduled to get up anyway, or for whole days and weeks while they are on vacation. Relaxing means doing absolutely nothing, getting more tanned, reading trash, contemplating nothing more onerous than the variety of meat on the barbecue. I envy that mind-clearing ability right now: ah
, to sit and just wait for the digital minutes to go by and never have to deal with the guilt or the need to do something productive, to do something.
I manage to clear my mind, but it refills itself with images from my last months at Toronto U. A smile, though, a memory about triumph and satisfaction, petty though it might be (or seem). I remember the departmental meetings. The hateful department head held them regularly, chaired them while the secretary nervously took minutes, followed Robert’s Rules of Order, and on and on. I made it my jejune mission to stall things as much as I could, hold up the whole meeting on one agenda item or point of order. My favourite was the call for approval of the minutes of the previous meeting, when I would question the details of the most insignificant occurrence, criticize the usage of words and the punctuation (always bringing my dictionaries and manuals along with me for props as much as for linguistic and syntactic authority), and generally attempt to make my “point,” slender though it might have been, that these meetings were a waste of my time, beneath me and the other scholars who attended. Some days I did secretly bemoan the sad irony that in order to prove that time was wasted I was wasting even more, but on I pressed.
“I believe the recording in the previous minutes of the call for approval of the minutes before those is not accurate as to ...”
I admit it openly here now, whereas then I was barely aware of it, that one of the main frustrations at Toronto U. had nothing to do with the university at all, or at least not directly. It was the extraordinary and mysterious inability to have any of my research published. I had bouts of paranoia now and then, during which I imagined the department head or the entire department destroying my reputation with journal editors and academic book publishers. I dreamt of doors, very literal doors, being shut, abysses swallowing me up, a straitjacket barely able to contain my rage as I screamed about the ill treatment. More often, especially at the beginning, I was just puzzled. I talked to colleagues, perhaps to ones I should not have in retrospect, because I now realize that they disdained me and took enormous pleasure in my squirming—but back then I talked to them about the state of academic publishing, the sham of peer reviewing, the pathetic little productions that clogged the pages of what appeared to be pristine and stately journals.
I have a great deal of confidence that things are different here and now in Knosting. I have not signed any deal with a commercial trade publisher, and I do not have a literary agent who could sell my wares, but I simply cannot believe that this story is not sellable. I hope that the reader will forgive me for being so crass, and understand that of course I have nothing but sepulchral condolence for the victims’ friends and families, and nothing but horrified outrage for the man who is trolling this fair city committing these deeds. I am speaking now only in a very narrow range and though what I say might look quite selfish when taken out of context, yet believe me when I say that I am on the side of right.
“You will not succeed here or not anywhere else,” I remember the department head bellowing at me ungrammatically off the record in my last days at TU. We were squirrelled away in his grubby but meticulously organized office and he was fairly shouting at me at times, so that as an unconscious coping mechanism I found myself scanning his bookcases (a full three shelves of Hardy, with little handmade labels along the exposed particle-board edges to separate Jude and the mayor and Tess) while he raved in his small-minded way, knowing that he was safely ensconced in deniability, officer.
Here is one scenario which I imagine this warm summer night, the first of June, while I lie comfortably on my bed and the ceiling fan whooshes ever so lightly over me. The murders will stop either because the police “get their fucking act together” (thank you, oh raver) or because “this goddamn psycho fucks off out of town or kills himself” (bis). There will be a flood of media coverage for a couple of weeks, including a pull-out section in the Gazette with a timeline, a map of where all of the murders took place (cutie-pie graphics, the whole bloody thing reduced to a sterile order), photos of this protest, photos of that partially fingerprinted weapon. Then, the pause, no special reports, the face-painted kids with ice cream back on the front page during the busker festival. Everything is back to normal. There is the occasional ejaculation of outrage, someone on the late news, perhaps, earnestly reminding us not to get too comfortable again, but eventually he starts to seem like a bit of a quack, and dear dull mediocrity ultimately asserts herself.
I believe I will have hit my perfect stride by then. The research will have been, say, 90 percent finished, and I will just have that tip-of-the-icepick (which murder was that again?) bit to top it all off with. Seriously, though, and with another metaphor: I predict that I will simply have to tie together the disparate threads of violence and depravity that I will have already noted. The piece that I have forthcoming in the Gazette this weekend is but the most obvious of the distillations of the plethora of facts that I have made. I also already have pages of handwritten notes, blue ink on wide-ruled yellow paper. A full nine hours of interviews of everyone from the chief of police on down to the raver and other assorted lunatics from whom I’d hoped to glean at least some insight. 322KB of word-processed words. I am fully confident that it will not take me long to stand back, attack it all, and have it in the form of a highly saleable manuscript for publishers or agents. Forgive this crudity, but I even see a bidding war, five digits easily rolling over to six, and then, well, who knows?
I do have pure motives, though perhaps my insistence on this throws the sincerity of that assertion into question. Of course there is an admixture of something negative, even evil, in all human endeavors, and my writing initiative is no different in this regard. As I have freely admitted already, I do want to prove to certain troglodytes at a certain university at which I was formerly employed that I was—and remain—a scholar of distinction, a master researcher who is able to divert his skills from the academic to the criminal, from keyboards to killers.
“If I have anything to do with it,” my former department head finished off with a pathetic little flourish. I needn’t mention, perhaps, that the relationship had deteriorated to that of angry, barely coherent boys in a playground, or junkyard dogs scrapping over the remains of some bloody sustenance. This dumb, callous dismissal is but one of the panoply of reasons which motivate me, and one of the minor ones, if I may say so. Yes, a desire to prove myself, and to prove an idiot wrong, is part of my enervation, but mostly it is—and my apologies if this sounds a little hokey—a sincere belief in the value of the project. People are killed, the efficacy of the police investigation leaves something to be desired, and the best service that a scholarly writer can provide is, well, writing.
I am not particularly proud of this component of my motivation, but I can say with some integrity that the greater part of it derives from a need to try to help a city track down an evil at its core, or at least to report succinctly on the results, the repercussions, the lessons, yes, the facts when hopefully this whole sorry mess is cleaned up by someone in authority. That brother whom I saw crying on the television news the other night, standing with his mother but now bereft of his sister, he and others animate me in my just but modest cause. I hardly remember his words at all, but there was a kind of confidence and integrity in the way he said what he said. It was brilliantly, sadly obvious that he was so devastated by the death—“my sister, my best friend, my life,” he said—that he cared not a whit about appearances. The tears rolled down and marked the front of his beige shirt, but he talked on and wiped his forearm across his face in the most distracted manner, as if he were operating outside of intention, and it was his practical body doing for him what his debilitated mind was no longer able to.
It is for him and some other suffering victims that I am determined to find this killer.
Chapter 17
I call Tony and try not to sound nervous.
“Hey,” she says, and in my current mode of double- and triple- and multiple-guessing, I am not sure whether she is jus
t that casual, or whether she is pretending to be casual, or—
“Have you ever tried the number 11?” I ask, oh-so-sneaky me, trying to trip her with a little mystery.
“Excuse me?”
“Number 11. The shrimp dish at the Cambodian place.”
“Cambodian? ... Oh, the place off Princess, the restaurant, on Wellington or somewhere around there.”
I feel like I am reeling in a fish (it’s the lake, seducing me to such metaphors), a little aggressive pulling now, and then slackening the line, get her interested and then get her caught.
“Right,” I say.
“So, you called to tell me about a good meal you had?”
“I wouldn’t mind a repeat. I mean, are you free tonight to check it out?”
“Tonight. I, well ... you know, that sounds like a grand idea.”
While I walk toward the restaurant I am planning my strategy. I still haven’t decided that Tony is a suspect in these killings, but she will make an interesting interview for the purposes of the book. I’ve read and re-read enough, done the research, so that I know these killings inside out, and I am eager to try to discover whether she is privy to any details that only the killer could possibly know about. It will take a deft hand to do this without revealing myself (I almost wrote reveling).
Tony is waiting outside. She smiles as I approach, and something inside me is deeply moved and somewhat ashamed that she is obviously so happy to see me. There is no hint of obligation or perfunctoriness in any of her gestures or her behaviour.
“Hi,” she says as she hugs me. I am surprised at the physical contact. I feel myself actually flinching but when she pulls away I try to feign nonchalance, as if I am used to this all the time, as if this is the most natural thing in the world.