The Killing Type (4 page)

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.”