Andrew Pyper - The Killing Circle

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.

"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.