The Killing Circle Read Free Page B

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 thatmuch 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 literarycolumnist (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 tome 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