Bruce McDougall
Despair relieves a man of responsibility. He may act in a way that seems uncharacteristic. He
may do things that deviate from the norms of human behaviour. In despair, a man may lose his
perspective on human values like justice, mercy, goodness and charity. The structures that
guide us through our lives without inflicting harm on one another become artificial,
meaningless and as pointless as the rules that children make up when they play an impromptu
game with a ball. In despair, a man like Sam may even commit murder.
After his wife died in January, Sam kept to himself for several months. You’d see him
occasionally walking to the store, dressed in a black ski jacket, black pants and black peaked
cap, worn backwards. They weren’t really clothes of mourning. He just liked black. In late
middle age, tall and skinny, he’d lope along the sidewalk with ponderous steps, head down, like
a French philosopher taking his daily stroll between bouts with life’s more challenging
questions. It was winter in Toronto, so the cold wind penetrated his clothing, and the sky was
usually grey and spitting onto the city that unpleasant combination of snow and rain that
soaked him as it melted and fell to the ground. It was a miserable time to be outdoors, but for
Sam, it was a miserable time, indoors or out, although he didn’t seem to mind the misery. He
strode forth, focused on the ground in front of him, seldom looking up or to his left or right. If
he encountered a neighbour walking the other way, he looked up so quickly that the neighbour
would apologize for disturbing him. Sam would mumble a few words, then continue on his way,
as one does in such inhospitable weather.
Sam’s wife had died suddenly. One day she was here, the next day she was gone, but to look at
Sam, you wouldn’t have thought that anything had happened. He dressed the same way.
Walked the same way. Seemed to follow the same routine as he’d followed every day for years
before his wife died. That routine probably got him through his days. There’s nothing like a
routine to keep our behaviour on track when our minds are elsewhere. Inwardly, Sam must
have evaluated the forces that regulated his behaviour and concluded they had no value.
Though he showed no outward sign of it, he must have felt so angry that he let his anger lead
him down a much darker path than any of us know or would care to follow ourselves.
Sam’s wife died of a brain aneurysm. She was walking out the door of her fitness club, where
she’d just taken a forty-minute pilates class, when she fell, face down, on the concrete apron
outside the door and never got up again. A blood vessel in her brain had simply popped like an
over-inflated balloon, and down she went like a ton of bricks. She died about six hours later. I
make no apologies for describing her death in this way, because it’s the same way as Sam
described it on the phone when he called to tell me that Ruth was about to die. He invited me
and several friends and neighbours to come to the hospital that afternoon. We gathered in the
quiet room where they put people for their final minutes on the planet. Ruth lay under the bed
clothes with her eyes closed and a peaceful look on her face, while the rest of us milled around,
trying not to stare at her to see if we could find a clue to the mystery of life embedded
somewhere on her face, in the way her upper lip curled down or her left eye looked unfocused.
“Like a ton of bricks,” we heard Sam say more than once, as people continued to file into the
room. In the same way as you’d wait for the final curtain before you left a play, no one wanted
to leave the room before she died. We all wanted to see the end. By the time it happened,
there were so many people in the room that the ones at the back against the wall had to crane
their necks or manoeuvre themselves into a better position from where they could see the bed.
Even then, they didn’t see much. You couldn’t even tell that Ruth had died until the nurse
who’d been standing at the head of the bed leaned over Ruth with her stethoscope to check
her heart, felt her pulse, made a few other clinical gestures, and then shook her head and said
that Ruth was dead.
All of us filed out of the room then, some of us touching the white sheet that covered Ruth’s
legs as we walked past, some even touching her toes sticking out from the covers, as if we
intended either to congratulate her for a job well done or bolster her spirits before she entered
the Big Game. And when the last friend or neighbour left the room, Sam stood by himself at the
foot of the bed and realized that the woman to whom he’d been married for twenty-two years,
to whom he’d spoken on the phone only a few hours earlier about scheduling dinner, the
woman whose presence he had relied on in the same way as he’d relied on his eyelid to cover
his eyeball at regular intervals or his intestines to function as they did without his intervention,
had gone away and would never return. In Sam’s mind,it was an unfathomable phenomenon.
Over the next few days Sam kept himself busy attending to all the details that have to be
addressed when someone dies: the commissioning of the transfer service to take the body to a
funeral home or crematorium (in Sam’s case, his wife donated her body to the university’s
medical faculty); the completion of forms required by governments to verify a death and
administer death benefits, pension payments and tax requirements; the cancellation of credit
cards and cell phone service; the closing of bank accounts; the administration of the will. He
arranged for a memorial service to be held a few months in the future, booked a room at the
university where Ruth worked, planned the seating arrangements, reserved the sound
equipment needed for speakers, hired a caterer, selected the wine, the music, the food, the
video display and, of course, made the payments. All these chores required Sam’s continual
attention for a period of many days and distracted him periodically from the despair that
gripped his soul the way water grips the body of a drowning man.
As weeks passed, Sam lost his will to struggle against his despair. Instead, he began to justify it
and take strength from its unwavering presence in his life. Despair informed his thoughts and
his behaviour as he went about his days and gave them a legitimate purpose that he might
otherwise have found difficult to maintain. He became particularly obsessed with the
transience of a person’s life and the delusion under which we all abide that our physical
presence in the world has any permanent significance. With the authority of his despair, he
persuaded himself that the human body is merely a temporary and decaying receptacle for the
soul that confines it within a clumsy apparatus involving flesh that bruises, a skeleton that
breaks, organs that malfunction and a brain that tries and fails to think its way convincingly out
of its own predicament while enduring the indescribable suffering of human existence. Better
to end it, he thought. Better to abandon the confinement of this material world and set the soul
free. What holds us back from liberating our souls other than an irrational fear not only of the
unknown but also of the possibility that we might contravene some absurd rule laid down by a
preposterous God contrived by humans in their egomaniacal obsession with mere survival and
the puny matters that occupy their existence. Anyone with half a brain can figure out the fallacy
in such thinking. And, once they do, people will recognize, as Sam did, that true freedom in this
life comes only with death. With this in mind, Sam decided to make a gesture of unselfish
generosity, a random act of kindness, in honour of his wife. He assembled the necessary
components of his arsenal, the semi-automatic rifle, the bullets, the scope, the sling and looked
for people to kill.
Sam thought about the nature of time, how it carries us from one moment to the next,
tranquilizing us into a sense of continuity, as if we accumulate our moments like a snowball
rolling down a hill, expanding with our uninterrupted experience of life, which we carry with us
in the form of memories, when, in fact, we live in a constant state of decay, like a melting
snowball, losing substance from one moment to the next as our souls struggle to break free
from the corporeal dungeon of human existence, discarding the present one moment at a time,
so that who we are now bears no resemblance to who we were in the past, even a moment
ago. We are nothing more than accumulations of random memories that provide an illusion of
permanence, an illusion that bears little resemblance to the past that we have experienced. In
our remembrance of the past, we are like eyewitnesses to a crime. We might assert without a
doubt that the perpetrator was a tall black man with a beard, wearing a green T-shirt and black
jeans, when in fact the perpetrator, who was apprehended at the scene of the crime and
photographed to confirm his identity, was a chubby white male in a blue track suit. Our
memories are a fiction, fabrications that we use to connect us to the past, mere dreams of a
past that in no way resembles what really happened. Life has no continuity, Sam thought, no
permanence, and no meaning. We make it up as we go along. The only constant in our life is
the thrust of our imprisoned souls yearning to break free.
*****
Throughout their marriage Sam had relied on Ruth to manage their social lives. They didn’t sit
down and plan it that way. They didn’t assign duties to each other like army officers planning a
military exercise. But of the two of them, Ruth spent far more time with other people,
welcomed far more people into her life and derived far more pleasure from other people’s
company than Sam did. It wasn’t so much that Sam was anti-social. He didn’t dislike other
people or hold himself aloof from them. He made friends as he went through his days, kept in
touch with one or two of them from his high-school and university days, had lunch with a
business associate from his days working for a small investment firm after he graduated. But he
preferred his own company. Once he started working for himself from a small office in their
house, he could spend days on his own, studying financial reports, reading trade magazines and
newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, investigating companies that
looked like promising investments, reading books, going for walks, jogging in the afternoon and
sometimes just looking out the window as the days went by, perfectly content to be alone.
Ruth, on the other hand, thrived in the company of other people, a difference that Sam
attributed to their different childhoods. He grew up with one sister and their mother, who was
too poor and preoccupied with raising her children to spend much time socializing. She owned
one good dress, which she wore to funerals. They lived in a small suburban bungalow that
seemed to afford no privacy to Sam. No matter where he went in the house, he could never go
undetected. He was always within range of his mother or sister’s hearing. He could never find
solitude. From the time he was nine years old, he remembered wanting nothing more than to
be alone.
Ruth grew up in a large Armenian family with five brothers, a father who ran a thriving trading
company and a mother who stayed at home and planned social events with her friends while a
maid and a cleaning lady attended to the daily chores. When he started spending time with Ruth and was invited to their gatherings to celebrate weddings and birthdays, he felt swept up in a celebratory crowd in which everyone talked and laughed and drank beer and ate dolma and gata and baklava. These affairs reminded Sam of the intermission of a hockey game, when hordes of partisan fans retreated to the concession areas under the stands to discuss in loud voices the performance that they’d just witnessed on the ice while bumping shoulders and jostling with the each other as they waited in chaotic queues for a beer and a hot dog.
Sam had at first felt intimidated at these events, thinking that Ruth’s brothers and relatives
would watch him, evaluate him and conclude that he fell short of the Armenian standards of
sociable behaviour, whatever they were. Over time, Ruth convinced him that most people
would extend to him the same generosity as he extended to them and that the more they
sensed his acceptance, the more accepting they would be of him. He learned, as well, that most
people cared less about what he said to them than they did about the way he said it: the
passion, pleasure and heartfelt enthusiasm that he expressed as the words tumbled out of his
mouth. He would never make people feel special they way Ruth did. People looked forward to
her company the way a shivering traveller on a cold, dark night looks forward to the comfort
and relief of a warm living room. But he could at least meet people half way, giving to them
through his smiles and inoffensive words as much pleasure and satisfaction as they gave to him.
If he couldn’t provide them with the warmth, comfort and relief of a warm living room, he
could at least deliver the human equivalent of a pair of mittens. Sam admitted to himself that
people would never look forward to spending time with him. They might even forget his name
from one occasion to the next. But as long as he stayed married to Ruth, they wouldn’t mind if
he mingled with them when he appeared in their company with his wife. But now Ruth was
dead, and her influence over his social behaviour died with her. His life with and love for his
wife no longer tempered his reluctance to spend time with other people. He no longer felt that
he should make himself agreeable for her sake and go out for dinner or meet for cocktails or
attend gallery openings with people with whom he had little in common and whom he
encountered only on these contrived occasions. He preferred to remain alone, and now he had
no reason not to indulge his preference and no one to dissuade him from turning down
invitations to lunch, dinner, cocktails or other pow-wows of bourgeois life.
Not that he received many invitations. For a month or two after Ruth died, some of her well-
meaning friends remained attentive to his welfare, dropping off casseroles, pre-cooked dinners
and containers of home-made soup. For a few weeks he had so much food in his refrigerator
that he worried about eating it all before it went bad. He gained ten pounds as he hoovered his
way through the cornucopia, but as time passed and life went on, Ruth’s friends resumed their
normal lives, maintaining their memories of her but losing interest in him, since he had never
played much of a role in their relationship with his wife. Sam was left to fend for himself, and
he was more than happy to do it. He’d begun to resent the obligation he felt to express
gratitude for their kindness, which he had never invited in the first place. He felt relieved to be
on his own again.
In his isolation, Sam soon fell victim to the fallacy of certainty. Without his wife or anyone else
to challenge his thoughts and interpretations of the world, he abandoned his intellectual
flexibility. He still read widely and exposed himself to the ideas of other people and to ways of
seeing the world that differed from his own. But instead of orchestrating these ideas and
perspectives to address his own thoughts like participants in a symposium, giving them an
opportunity to present their reasoning and perhaps persuade him to their point of view, he
applied his own judgment to them, entertaining only those ideas with which he agreed and
dismissing the others out of hand. Without realizing it, and without anyone who might defy his
more objectionable notions, these notions cemented themselves in his mind and became
concrete convictions. Sam became an opinionated, block-headed, pedant who would have
alienated anyone who spent time with him, except of, course, no one did. He was alone to
indulge himself in the truth of his convictions.
Believing in the righteousness of his behaviour, Sam knew in his heart that every person he
killed would feel grateful for the release of his soul from its corporeal bondage. He chose at
random the people whose souls he would release, but he was deliberate in his choice of
locations. He used his car, which he’d seldom driven for any other reason than grocery
shopping, to look for ideal sites. He wanted a place where he could park without drawing
attention to himself and without the risk of detection. He wanted to avoid cameras in the city
focused on storefronts, parking lots and urban intersections, which might record the number
on his licence plate as he drove to and from his destination and that might associate his car
with the execution of his mission. He didn’t want to get caught, not because he was afraid of
punishment, but because he wanted to free as many souls as possible before he released his
own soul from its bondage. More remote places outside the city offered better prospects. He
could park in a picnic area or at the entrance to one of the hiking trails that meandered through
the forests and fields beyond the city limits. On one occasion, he discovered an overgrown
driveway leading to an abandoned farmhouse. Leaving the car, he had only to walk a few paces
to reach an uncollected hay bale, from where he could see clearly a mile-long stretch of road.
Another time, he came upon a deserted gas station that had gone out of business when a new
six-lane freeway had diverted traffic from the country road and deprived the owner of all but a
few customers. In each location, he parked his car in a way that allowed for an easy exit, where
it would not seem unusual for a car to start up and continue on its forward journey, never in a
place where he had to back up or turn around or otherwise draw attention to himself as he
manoeuvered his way out of his hiding place. He never returned to the same place twice.
He made sure that he could kill his chosen victim with a single shot. He planted his feet securely
beneath him. He stood behind a tree, a hay bale, a fence or sometimes the roof of his car,
something solid on which he could rest the barrel of his rifle, preferably sheltered from the
wind and away from any distractions that might disturb his aim. When he finally looked down
the scope of his rifle, centred a person’s head in the crosshairs, then gently squeezed the
trigger, he felt confident that he would accomplish his task with a single bullet. He could then
calmly get back into his car and drive away.
He sometimes wondered if anyone appreciated the gift that he was bestowing upon the people
whom he shot. He didn’t think of them as victims. They were recipients of a gift. He was giving
them the freedom that they had yearned for since birth. He was like Santa Claus delivering
presents at Christmas time, conferring an incalculable reward upon his lucky target.
Who would ever have suspected Sam of such an undertaking? Certainly his neighbours didn’t.
Once in a while, they invited Sam to join them for dinner. They didn’t do it often, but when they
did, Sam usually accepted the invitation, showed up promptly at the specified time with a
bouquet of flowers or a bottle of wine for his hosts, spent his visit engaging in the type of
conversation that people conduct with guests they don’t know very well, most of the topics
gleaned from the news of the day, ranging from crime on the subway to the government’s
policy on foreign aid, challenging enough to make everyone feel intelligent and glad that they
read a daily newspaper but requiring no revelations of a personal nature, no confessions of
parental abuse or grief about the death of a loved one, even though they all knew that Ruth
had recently died, then excused himself at an opportune moment, late enough to confirm that
he’d had a good time, not so late that his hosts wanted to get rid of him, not so early that he
might seem rude or impatient to get away from the company. He appreciated these occasions
for what they were, his neighbours’ obligatory gestures of dutiful kindness that may not have
been heartfelt but at least indicated to Sam that he remained sufficiently intelligent, attentive
and inoffensive to enter temporarily into the thwarted lives of other people. He hadn’t
degenerated into an undesirable presence in the community. He didn’t walk down the sidewalk
muttering to himself. He didn’t chew with his mouth open, make crude or vulgar remarks, insult
anyone’s appearance or rest his elbows on the dinner table. He kept himself reasonably well
groomed, paid cursory attention to his wardrobe and remained informed enough about current
affairs that he could engage in polite chit-chat about topics of the day. But throughout all these
encounters with other people, he thought continually of releasing their souls from the tedious
purgatory of their limited time-bound lives. He imagined the boundless joy upon which a soul
would soar like a bird, freed by the death of the person who held it captive. One bullet was all
that it would take to unlock the cage door. People mistook for compassion Sam’s profound
sympathy with their souls’ predicament and often remarked when he left their company on his
kind and gentle nature.
As time passed and Sam’s execution of his random shootings remained undetected, the
mysterious series of deaths occurring on the outskirts of the city became a topic of
conversation among Sam’s neighbours. They speculated on the person or persons responsible
and on his reasons for choosing his victims. The police remained tight-lipped about the leads
that they were following in their investigation and tried to dispel with vague theories the fear
that arose in the community about a serial killer. And yet they couldn’t deny that each victim
had been shot once by an identical bullet fired from an identical rifle, facts that had been
disclosed before the fourth shooting.
Sam took no pleasure from the escalating alarm that his shootings aroused nor did his ego feed
on the attention that these shooting drew to the city. By the time he freed his ninth soul,
articles about these random killings had appeared in The New York Times, the Sydney Morning
Herald and the Financial Times of London and had been picked up by wire services throughout
the world. Pressure mounted on police investigators to solve the crimes, but they remained as
baffled as the public. The killings seemed to have occurred at random times, in random places,
and the similarities between one victim and another were entirely coincidental. One man had
been shot while riding his bicycle along a concession road about eight miles north of the city; he
lived next door to a woman whose cousin had been shot while buying apples at a roadside fruit
stand on the city’s far western outskirts. The cyclist was fifteen years older than his neighbour,
happily married, with six children, and had never crossed paths with the apple-buying cousin.
Another of Sam’s recipients had worked, in a village east of the city, for a bank where a man
whom Sam had shot during a picnic at a conservation area west of the city had maintained a
savings account. None of these coincidences led investigators any closer to identifying the
person who had fired the lethal bullets.
The bullets that Sam used were unexceptional, taken from a box of fifty that he’d purchased
online from one of several shops that catered to outdoor enthusiasts. He used a Winchester
rifle that he bought online from the wife of a heavy-equipment operator in Fort McMurray,
Alberta, who had died of a heart attack. With that rifle he could hit a target at a range of almost
one thousand yards, more than half a mile, far enough away that no one would notice his
movements as he tucked the rifle away under the dog cage that sat on the floor board in the
back of his compact Subaru station wagon. Amidst the panic that erupted after the dead body
hit the ground, no one paid attention to Sam’s green car parked more than half a mile away and
now slowly moving along a dirt road that led to a well-travelled highway, where Sam could
safely tuck himself into a stream of traffic heading home to the city.
Nine shootings occurred over a period of one year: two of them within five days of each other
in April, the next one in August, two more in October, one, a cross-country skier in a pine forest
in the hills near Newmarket, in January, on the twenty-fourth, a year to the day after Ruth died,
two during a week of unseasonably warm weather in March, and the ninth in April, on Good
Friday, outside a small Catholic church in Schomberg.
Investigators reconstructed these slayings using sophisticated technology to determine the
speed and trajectory of the bullet, the position of the victim and the distance between the
victim and the shooter. They used this information to locate the area where the shooter might
have stood or sat or lay on his stomach to fire the shot, then searched the area for any evidence
that the shooter might have left behind that would offer a clue to the person’s identity. They
examined broken tree branches, picked up gum wrappers and cigarette butts, took impressions
of tire tracks on muddy surfaces, looked for shell casings and talked to anyone who might have
been in a position to see someone firing a high-powered rifle at another person a half-mile
away. They found similarities in tire tracks from three locations, but the tires were so common
that the investigators had no chance of tracing them to Sam’s Subaru. Otherwise, they found
nothing that would lead them to Sam.
Sam was meticulous in his execution of his shootings. He left nothing behind that might identify
him: no broken branches, no footprints, no chewed gum, no shell casings. He even changed his
shoes from one occasion to the next.
Sam never thought about the people he shot, nor did he think about the pain, grief and sorrow
that he caused for the people who had loved them the way he had loved his wife. He didn’t
read newspapers, didn’t watch TV news. Once in a while, he came across an article about his
mysterious activities in one of the weekly news magazines that he read to stay current with
world affairs, but he merely glanced at it before moving on to the next article about climate
change, Israeli diplomacy in the Middle East or concerns about the violation of Taiwanese
airspace by Chinese military fighters. His notoriety didn’t interest him.
Sam had abandoned his sympathy, pity and compassion to his despair. He felt hollow, drained
of all purpose, motivation or hope. He relied on memory and habit to guide him through his
daily movements: preparing his coffee and breakfast in the morning; driving to the supermarket
to buy lettuce, bananas, yoghurt and toilet paper; walking to the drugstore at the end of his
street to fill his prescriptions; attending appointments with his dentist or his cardiologist;
removing his clothes in the evening and putting them in the washing machine with his other
soiled garments accumulated over previous days; showering, shaving, brushing his teeth;
reading a book; watching an episode of Law and Order on television; turning out the lights and
falling asleep. He could do all of this without ever giving a single thought to what he was
actually doing or why he was doing it. He conducted himself throughout his days as if he
remained fully informed by the thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, fantasies, disappointments,
delights, schemes and expectations that a man carries with him through his waking moments.
But his appearance belied Sam’s utter emptiness. As he progressed through his days, instructing
his muscles to move in efficient and predictable ways, he carried nothing with him but despair.
If he felt anything at all about the murders that he’d committed, it was boredom. He
remembered them in the same way as a man might remember nine frames of five-pin bowling
during which he rolled a smooth, round ball down a polished hardwood lane at five white pins
shaped like little toy punching bags, intending to knock them all down with a single throw of
the ball. He knew that he’d performed an invaluable service in releasing the souls of the people
he’d shot, but he also knew from his own experience of his wife’s death that he would never
encounter those souls or recognize them if he did. Once freed from the body that held it
captive, a person’s soul existed beyond our human senses, far beyond the restrictions and
limitations that define our perceptions of the world, give it form, dimension, beauty and love
and deceive us into thinking that, if we try hard enough, we can understand it and feel saved.
Bruce McDougall has lived and worked in Toronto as an airport attendant, bouncer, taxi driver, social worker, newspaper reporter and freelance writer. I’ve published two collections of short stories, a novel, a non-fiction novel about pro hockey, several biographies and a dozen business books.