The Killing Circle (2 page)

VALENTINE
’
S DAY
, 2003

"Love cards!"

This is Sam, my four-year-old son. Running into my room to jump on the bed and rain crayoned Valentines over my face.

"It’s Love Day,” I confirm. Lift his T-shirt to deliver fart kisses to his belly.

"Who’s
your
Valentine, Daddy?"

"I suppose that would have to be Mommy."

"But she’s not
here
."

"That doesn’t matter. You can choose anyone you like."

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

Sam thinks on this. His fingers folding and unfolding a card. The sparkles stirred around in the still wet glue.

"So is Emmie your Valentine?” I ask him. Emmie being our regular nanny. "Maybe someone at daycare?"

And then he surprises me. He often does.

"No,” he says, offering me his paper heart. "It’s you."

Days like these, the unavoidable calendar celebrations—Christmas, New Year’s, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day—are worse than others. They remind me how lonely I am. And how, over time, this loneliness has burrowed deeper, down into tissue and bone. A disease lurking in remission.

But lately, something has changed. An emerging emptiness. The full, vacant weight of loss. I thought that I’d been grieving over the past three and a half years. But maybe I’m only just now coming out of the shock. Maybe the real grief has yet to arrive.

Sam is everything.

This one rule still helps. But in the months immediately following Tamara’s death, it was more than just a focus. It allowed me to survive. No oneway wants, no
me
. Not permitting myself to dream had got me halfway to not feeling—easier conditions to manage than feeling and dreaming too much.

But maybe this has been a mistake. Maybe I was wrong to believe you could get along without something of your own. Eventually, if living requires being nothing, then you’re not even living any more.

Tamara’s last days is something I’m not going to get into. I will confess to all manner of poor behaviour and bad judgment and broken laws. And I am prepared to
explore the nature of memory
(as the cover bumpf on those precious, gazingout-to-sea sort of novels puts it) even when it causes the brightest flashes of regret. But I’m not going to tell you what it was like to watch my wife’s pain. To watch her die.

I will say this, however: losing her opened my eyes. To the thousands of hours spent gnawing on soured ambitions, petty office grievances, the seemingly outrageous everyday injustices. To all the wasted opportunities to not think, but do. Chances to change. To see that I could change.

I had just turned thirty-one when Tamara died. Not even half a life. But when she left, a cruel light was cast on how complete this life could have been. How complete it
was
, had I only seen it that way.

We bought the house on Euclid just off Queen as newlyweds, before the arrival of the yoga outfitters, the hundred-dollar-haircut salons, the erotic boutiques. Then, the only yoga being practiced was by the drunks folded up in store doorways, and the only erotica was a half-hour with one of the ladies pacing in heels at the corner. I could barely manage the downpayment then, and can’t afford to sell now. Not if I want to live anywhere near downtown.

Which I do. If for no other reason than I like to walk to work. Despite the comforts offered by all the new money washing in, Queen Street West still offers plenty of drama for the pedestrian. Punks cheering on a pair of snarling mastiffs outside the Big Bop. A chorus of self-talkers off their meds. The guy who follows me for a block every morning, asking me to buy him a prosciutto sandwich (he’s very specific about this) and inexplicably calling me Steve-o. Not to mention the ambulances hauling off whoever missed the last bed in the shelter the night before.

It is a time in the city’s history when everyone is pointing out the ways that Toronto is changing. More construction, more new arrivals, more ways to make it and spend it. And more to fear. The stories of random violence, home invasions, drivebys, motiveless attacks. But it’s not just that. It’s not the threat that has always come from the
them
of our imaginations, but from potentially anyone, even ourselves.

There’s a tension in the streets now, the aggression that comes with insatiable desires. Because there is more on offer than there was before, there is more to want. This kind of change, happening as it’s happening here, fast and unmanageable, makes people see others in ways they hadn’t before. As a market. A demographic. Points of access.

What all of us share is our wishing for more. But wishing has a dark side. It can turn those who were once merely strangers into the competition.

I follow Queen all the way to Spadina, then lakeward to the offices of the
National Star
—"
The New York Times
of Toronto” as one especially illconceived ad campaign called it. This is where I started out. An angry young man with no real grounds to be angry, quickly ascending from copyeditor to the paper’s youngest ever in-house book critic. My unforgiving standards buttressed by the conviction that one day all those tall poppies I had scythed to earth would see I had a right to my declarations. One day, I would produce a book of my own.

From as far back as I can remember I felt I had something within me that would find its way out. This was likely the result of a solitary, only-child childhood, throughout which books were often my only friends. Weekends spent avoiding the outof-doors, curled up like a cat on the rug’s sunny squares, ripping into Greene, Leonard, Christie, mulling over the out-of-reach James, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky. Wondering how they did it. The making of
worlds
.

What was never in doubt was that I would be among them when I grew up. Not their equal necessarily, but participating in the same noble activity. I accepted that I might not be good at it. At first. But I could sense the hard work that had gone into my favourite works, and was prepared to devote myself to slow improvement.

Looking back on it, I must have seen writing as a sort of religious practice. A total commitment to
craft and honest disclosure no less holy for its godlessness. There was the promise of salvation, after all. The possibility of creating a story that spoke for me, would be
better
than me. More compelling, more mysterious, more wise. I suppose, when they were still alive, I believed that writing a book would somehow keep my parents with me. And after they were gone, I simply changed my articles of faith: If I wrote a good enough book, it might bring them back.

But no book came.

Instead, after university, I started typing my way up the ladder of small-town weeklies and specialty magazine freelancing ("The New Dog, The New You” for
Puppy Love!
and "Carrots vs Beets?: The Root of the Problem” for
Sustenance Gardening
being two prizewinners in their fields). After I got married and was hired at the
National Star
, I thought about my book less, and about a flesh-and-blood future more. Children. Travel. But the niggling idea that I was thwarting my destiny with domestic comforts couldn’t be wholly escaped. In some private corner of my soul, I was still waiting. For the opening line. For a
way in
.

But no line came.

Two things happened next, oddly related, and at the same time: Tamara became pregnant, and I cancelled my Sunday-only subscription to
The New York Times
. The articulated reason for the latter decision was that I barely found the time to
peel apart its many sections and supplements, never mind read any of them. And now, with a baby on the way—it was a
waste
.

The truth had nothing to do with saving time or trees, however. It had to do with my coming to the point where I could no longer open the Book Review of the Sunday
Times
without causing physical pain to myself. The
publishers
. The
authors’ names
. The
titles
. All belonging to
books that weren’t mine
.

It hurt. Not emotionally, not a mere spanking of the ego. It hurt in the same way kidney stones or a soccer cleat to the balls hurts—instantly, indescribably, critically. The reviews themselves rarely mattered. In fact, I usually couldn’t finish reading the remotely positive ones. As for the negative ones, they too often proved to be insufficient salves to my suffering. Even the snarkiest vandalism, the baldest runs at career enders, only acted as reminders that their victims had produced something worth pissing on. Oh, to awaken on a rainy Sunday and refuse to get out of bed on account of being savaged in the
Times
! What a sweet agony
that
would be, compared to the slow haemorrhaging in No Man’s Land it was to merely imagine creating words worthy of Newspaper of Record contempt.

Then Sam arrived, and the bad wanting went away.

I was in love—with Tamara, with my son, even with the world, which I hadn’t really liked all that
much before. I stopped trying to write. I was too busy being happy.

Eight months later Tamara was gone.

Sam was a baby. Too young to remember his mother, which left me to do all the remembering for the both of us.

It wasn’t long after this that I started believing all over again. Waiting for a way to tell the one true story that might bring back the dead.

The demotions started some time after my return from bereavement leave. The dawning millennium, we were told, was ushering in a new breed of "user friendly” newspaper, one that could compete with the looming threats of the internet and cable news channels and widespread functional illiteracy. Readers had grown impatient. Words in too great a number only squandered their time. In response, the Arts section became the Entertainment section. Features were shrunk to make room for celebrity "news” and photos of movie stars walking, sunglassed, with a barbell-sized latte. Memos were circulated directing us to fashion our stories so as to no longer appeal to adults seeking information and analysis, but to adolescents with attention-deficit disorder.

Let’s just say they weren’t good days for the Books section.

Not that the ruin of my journalistic career happened overnight. I had slipped down the rungs of respectability one at a time, from literary
columnist (gleeful, sarcastic trashings of almost everything) to entertainment writer-at-large (starlet profiles, tallying up the weekend box-office results), a couple months as "junior obituarist" (the "senior obituarist” being five years younger than me), before the inarguable end of the line, the universal newspaper grease-trap: TV critic. I had tried to talk my section editor into at least putting "Television Feature Writer” under my by-line, but instead, when I opened the
Tube News!
supplement the following weekend, I found that I didn’t even have a name any more, and that I was now, simply, "The Couch Potato".

Which is accurate enough. These past months of professional withering have found me spending more of my time on various recliners and mattresses: my bed, in which I linger later and later every morning, the chair in my therapist’s office, which I leave shining with sweat, as well as the sofa in the basement, where I fast forward through the lobotomized sitcom pilots and crime dramas and reality shows that, put together, act on me as a kind of stupefying drug, the bye-bye pills they slip under the tongues of asylum inmates.

No shame in any of this, of course. Or no more shame than most of the things we do for money, the paid positions for Whale Saver or African Well Digger or Global Warming Activist being so lamentably few.

The problem is that, almost unnoticeably, the same notion from my childhood has returned to
me like a lunatic whisper in my ear. A black magic spell. A devil’s promise.

Maybe, if I could only put the right words in the right order, I would be saved. Maybe I could turn longing into art.

There is something unavoidably embittered in the long-exposure critic. It’s because, at its heart, the practice is a daily reminder of one’s secondary status. None start out wanting to
review
books, but to
write
them. To propose otherwise would be like trying to convince someone that as a child you dreamed of weighing jockeys instead of riding racehorses.

If you require proof, just look at the half-dozen souls keyboard clacking and middle-distance staring in the cubicles around mine. Together, we pick through the flotsam that the waves of pop culture wash in every morning. The CDs, DVDs, game software, movies, mags. Even the book desk. My former domain. Now responsible for assembling a single, ignored page on Saturday. But still a better place than where they’ve put me.

Here we are. Off in the corner, no window within stapler-throwing distance. A desk that my colleagues call the Porn Palace, on account of the teetering stacks of black video cassettes on every surface. And it
is
porn. It’s TV. An addictively shameful pleasure we all seem to want more of.

There’s a box of new arrivals on my chair. I’m pulling out the first offering—a reality show where
Killing Circle (A-Format)-p1.qxp 12/19/08 4:53 PM Page 24 I’m promised contestants in bikinis eating live spiders—when Tim Earheart, one of the paper’s investigative reporters, claps me on the back. You’d never know it, but Tim is my best friend here. It occurs to me now with a blunt surprise that he may be my best friend anywhere.

"You got any
Girls Gone Wild
?” he says, rummaging through the tapes.

"Thought you were more of a documentary guy."

"Wife’s away this week. Actually, she might not be coming back."

"Janice left you?"

"She found out that my source on last week’s Hell’s Angels story was one of the bikers’ old ladies,” Tim says with a sad smile. "Let’s just say I went more undercover with her than Janice was comfortable with."

If it’s true that his most recent wife has taken off, this will be marriage number three down the tubes for Tim. He turns thirty-six next week.

"Sorry to hear that,” I say, but he’s already waving off my sympathy.