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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.
"Drinks tonight?” he says, stepping away to re-join the hectic relevance of the news department. "Wait. It’s Valentine’s, isn’t it? You got a date?"
"I don’t date, Tim. I don’t anything."
"It’s been a while."
"Not so long."
"Some would say four years is enough to—"
"Three."
"Three years then. Eventually you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re still here, even if Tamara isn’t."
"Trust me. I face that every day."
Tim nods. He’s been to war zones. He knows a casualty when he sees one.
"Can I ask you something?” he says. "You think it’s too late to ask out that new temp they’ve got down in Human Resources?"
It happened again on the walk home.
More and more these days, I’ll be in the middle of something—dashing to the corner store, pounding out the day’s word count at my desk, lining up for coffee—and the tears will come. So quiet and without warning I hardly notice.
And then today, walking along the sidewalk when I would have said "Nothing” if asked what was on my mind, it started again. Wet streaks freezing on my cheeks.
A rhyme pops into my head. An unconsoling sing-song that carries me home.
I’m not well
I’m not well
But who in the hell
Am I going to tell?
By the time I get through the door, Sam’s already finished his dinner and Emmie, the nanny, is drying him from his bath. Another irretrievable moment missed. I like bathtime with Sam more than any other part of the day. A little music. Epic sea battles waged with rubber ducks and old toothbrushes. All of it leading to bed. To stories.
"I’ll take him,” I tell Emmie, and she opens the towel she has wrapped around him. He rushes out of his cocoon and into my arms. A soapy angel.
I get him into pajamas. Open the book we’re working through. But before I start reading, he studies me for a moment. Places a palm against my forehead.
"What do you think, doc? Am I going to make it?"
"You’ll live,” he says.
"But it’s serious?"
"I’m not sure. Is it?"
"Nothing I can’t handle."
"I don’t want you to be sad."
"I miss your mom sometimes. That’s all. It’s normal."
"Normal."
"More or less."
Sam purses his lips. He’s not sure whether to buy my pinched grin or not. The thing is, he needs me to be okay. And for him, I’ll stay as okay as I can.
He yawns. Squirms in close, his head against my throat so that he can feel the vibrations of the words to come. Jabs his finger at the pages I hold open.
"Where were we?"
Once Sam is asleep it’s down to the basement office. What Tamara used to call the Crypt. Which is a little too accurate to be wholly amusing. A low-ceilinged room that was a winemaking cellar for the previous owner. Even now, I can catch whiffs of fermented grapes. It makes me think of feet.
This is where I watch the tapes. A notebook on my knee, remote control in my hand.
I’m just three minutes into the spider-eating bikini babes when I hit Pause. Dig out of my pocket the ad I clipped from today’s classifieds.
Tell the Story of Your Life
Open your soul. Bring your buried words to the page in this intensive workshop with Conrad White, published poet and novelist. Truly write. Write the truth.
I’ve never heard of Conrad White. Never attended a writers’ workshop, circle, night class or retreat. It’s been years since I’ve tried to write anything other than what I am contractually obliged to. But something about this day—about the taste of the air in this very room—has signalled that something is coming my way. Has already come.
I call the number at the bottom of the ad. When a voice at the other end asks me what he can do for me, I answer without hesitation.
"I want to write a book,” I say.
2 (#ulink_a26d280e-5825-558c-971d-4b6c3c1f11b5)
People read less today than they used to. You’ve seen the studies, you’ve got teenagers, you’ve been to the mall—you know this already. But here’s something you may not know:
The less people read, the more they want to write.
Creative writing workshops—within universities, libraries, night schools, mental hospitals, prisons—are the true growth industry in the inkbased sector. Not to mention the ad hoc circles of nervy aspirants, passing round their photocopied bundles. Each member claiming to seek feedback but secretly praying for a collective declaration of brilliance.
And now I’m one of them.
The address the voice on the phone gave me is in Kensington Market. Meetings to be held every Tuesday night for the next five Tuesdays. I was told I was the last to join the group. That is, I called it a group, and the voice corrected me.
"I prefer to think of it as a circle."
"Right. And how many will there be? In the circle?"
"Just seven. Any more, and I fear our focus may be lost."
After I hung up I realized that Conrad White—if that’s who answered the phone—never asked for my name. I also realized I’d forgotten to find out if I should bring anything along to the first meeting—a pen, notebook, cash for the donation plate. But when I dialled the number again, it rang ten times without anyone answering. I suppose that now the circle was complete, Mr White decided there was no point in picking up.
The next Tuesday, I walk up Spadina after work with my scarf turbaned around my ears. Despite the cold, most of the Chinatown grocers still have produce tables outside their doors. Frozen bok choy, starfruit, lemongrass. A dry powdering of snow over everything. At Dundas, nightfall arrives all at once. The giant screen atop the Dragon Mall casting a blue glow of advertising over the street.
I carry on another couple blocks north, past NO MSG noodle places and whole roast pigs hanging in butchers’ windows, their mouths gaping in surprise. Then dash across the four lanes of traffic into the narrow lanes of the market.
Kensington means different things to different people, but for me, a walk through its streets always gives rise to the same question: How long can it last? Already some of the buildings are being turned into "live/work loft alternatives", promising a new "urban lifestyle” for people who are seeking "The Kind of Excitement that Comes with Walking on the Edge". I take out the tiny dictaphone recorder I always carry around (to capture any especially biting phrases for the next day’s review) and read these words directly off the hoardings around the latest condo project. Some shoppers have also stopped to read the same come-hithers. But when they see me whispering into a tape recorder, they walk on. Another outpatient to be politely avoided.
On a bit, the old Portuguese fishmongers are lifting the slabs of cod and octopus off their beds of ice and waltzing them to the walk-ins for the night. The street still busy with safety-pinned punks and insane, year-round bicyclists, all dinnertime bargain hunting. Or simply congregating in one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.
And then it strikes me, with an unsettling shiver, that some of the people bustling around me may be here for the same reason I am.
Some of them may be writers.
The address for the meeting brings me to a door next to The Fukhouse, a bar that, as far as I can see through the grimy window, has every wall, table surface, and both floor and ceiling painted in black gloss. Above the sign, on the second floor, stout candles flicker in the windows. If I wrote the number down right, it’s up there that the Kensington Circle is to gather.
"Anarchists,” a voice says behind me.
I turn to find a young woman in an oversized leather biker jacket. Her shoulders armoured with silver spikes. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold, though below the jacket all she wears is a threadbare girls’ school skirt and fishnets. And a raven tattooed over the back of her wrist.
"I’m sorry?"
"Just thought I’d warn you,” she says, gesturing toward The Fukhouse’s door. "That’s kind of an anarchist clubhouse. And anarchists often don’t take well to those not part of the revolution."
"I can imagine."
"Not that it matters. You’re here for the circle. Am I right?"
"How’d you guess?"
"You look nervous."
"I am nervous."
She squints into my face through the looping snow. I have the same feeling I get when the customs officer at the border slides my passport through the computer and I have to wait to see if I’ll be allowed through or placed under arrest.
"Evelyn,” she says finally.
"Patrick Rush. A pleasure to meet you."
"Is it?"
And before I can tell if she’s joking or not, she opens the door and starts up the stairs.
The room is so dark I can only stand at the entrance, hands feeling for walls, a light switch, the leather jacket girl. All I can see for sure are the candles oozing wax over the two distant window sills, the snow outside falling fast as TV static. Though I followed Evelyn up the stairs, she now seems to have disappeared into the void that yawns between the doorway and the windows.
"Glad you could come."
A male voice. I spin around, startled. This sudden movement, and my boots slipping on the puddle of snowmelt over the floorboards, makes me lose my footing. Someone releases a coquettish gasp. In the next instant I realize it was me.
"We’re over here,” the voice says.
The dark figure of a stooped man passes in front of me, drifting toward what I now can see is a circle of chairs in the centre of the room. Boots kicked off, I slide over to one of the two unoccupied places.
"We’re just waiting for one more,” the voice says, and I recognize it only now as the same as the one on the phone. Conrad White. Never-heard-of author and poet, now taking his seat across from mine. The sound of his lullabye voice also brings back the feeling I got when I first spoke my desire to write a book. There had been a pause, as though he was measuring the depth of my yearning. When he spoke again, I wrote down the details he gave me without really hearing them. His words seemed to come from somewhere else, a different time altogether.
All of us wait for the voice to begin again. If there really are six of us sitting here, we are still as dolls. Only the faint tide of our breaths to be heard, taking in the vapours of red wine and incense from the rug beneath our chair legs.
"Ah. Here he is."
Conrad White rises to welcome the last member of the circle to arrive. I don’t turn to see who it is at first. But as a second pair of feet step deliberately forward (and with boots left on), I sense some of the others shrink in their seats around me. Then I see why.
