Lunar Park (23 page)

My father standing beside me outside the auditorium at my high school graduation. I’m wearing a red cap and gown and am secretly stoned. There is a noticeable space between us. I remember that my girlfriend had taken the picture at my father’s urging. (I flashed on the celebratory dinner at Trumps later that night, when he drunkenly came on to her.)

Another photo of the two of us. I am seventeen—sunglasses, unsmiling, tan. My father is sunburned. We’re standing outside a white church, its plaster cracking, its fountain dry, in Cabo San Lucas. The sun is very bright. On one side is the blue and glimmering enamel of the sea, and on the other are the ruins of a small village. I became almost exhausted by grief. How many times had we fought on that trip? How drunk had he been that week? How many times did I break down during those grueling days? The trip proved so hard to bear that my heart had turned to ice. I had erased everything about it except for the feel of cold sand on my feet and a particular ceiling fan that whirred above me in a hotel room—all else forgotten until now.

And then my eyes drifted to a wall where my father had hung the magazine covers, framed, that I had been on. And another wall featured (even more sadly) photographs of me that he had cut from various newspapers. At that point I surrendered with a moan and had to look away.

My father had become a hermit, someone who either didn’t know his son was lost to him or refused to believe it.

But then the camera—almost as if it realized how drained I was becoming—plunged forward and raced around the side of the house. The camera was bold and covert at the same time.

The camera maneuvered toward a window that looked into a large modern kitchen, where my father reappeared.

Horror kept sweeping over me. Because anything could happen now.

My father opened the stainless steel door of the freezer and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya and clumsily poured a large amount into a highball glass. His gaunt face contemplated the vodka. Then he drank it and began weeping. He took off his T-shirt and drunkenly wiped his face with it. And as he was pouring himself the rest of the vodka, he heard something.

He jerked his head up. He stood motionless in the middle of the kitchen.

He turned and faced the window.

The camera dared him. It didn’t move or try to hide itself.

But my father couldn’t see anything. He gave up. He turned away.

The camera steadily rounded the corner of the house and now offered a view of the small, elegantly landscaped backyard.

The camera followed my father as he walked outside to where the Jacuzzi was churning with steam that the wind swirled around the yard. The moon hung over everything and it was so white that it cut through clouds and illuminated the vines of bougainvillea that covered the walls enclosing this space. My father staggered toward the Jacuzzi, still holding his drink, and tried to slip into it gracefully but instead stumbled, splashing water all over the surrounding Spanish tiles while managing to keep his drink raised high above his head, protecting it. My father submerged himself in the water with only his hand holding the glass of vodka visible above the roiling bubbles.

My eyes kept clinging to the screen. Please, I thought. Please let someone save him.

Once my father downed the vodka he heaved himself out of the Jacuzzi and lurched toward a towel lying on a chaise longue. After drying off he removed the bathing suit and draped it over the chaise. He wrapped the towel around himself and then moved unsteadily into the house, leaving a trail of wet, fading footprints on the concrete patio.

The camera paused and then raced around the corner and did something I was praying it would not.

It went into the house.

It moved through the kitchen. And then down a hallway.

It stopped suddenly when it caught sight of my father dragging himself up the stairs to the second floor.

And when my father turned and kept climbing, his back to the camera, the camera started creeping up the stairs behind him.

My hands were clamped over my ears, and I kept kicking the floor of my office involuntarily.

The camera stopped when it reached the second-story landing. It watched as my father entered the bathroom, a large marble space steeped in light.

I was now crying wildly, pounding my knee as I watched, helplessly transfixed. “What is happening?” I kept moaning.

The camera then crossed the hallway and stopped again. It had a vague and maddening patience.

My father stared at his frail visage in a giant mirror.

And then the camera slowly began moving toward him.

I was aware that it was about to reveal itself to him, and my entire body shuddered with dread.

It was now closer to him than it had ever been. It was directly outside the bathroom door.

And then I noticed something that had been nagging gently at whatever part of myself wasn’t preoccupied with the shock of the video.

At the bottom of the screen, on the right, in digital numbers: 2:38 a.m.

My eyes instinctively darted to the other side of the screen. 08/10/92.

This was the night my father died.

Only the sounds of his sobbing brought me out of the stunned darkness that had instantly covered everything. This was a new dimension now.

Shaking, I refocused on the screen, unable to turn away.

My father gripped the bathroom counter, still sobbing. I wanted to avert my eyes when I saw an empty vodka bottle lying next to the sink.

From somewhere in the house, “The Sunny Side of the Street” began playing again.

The camera kept floating closer. It was now in the bathroom.

It was closing in on my father indifferently.

I stifled a scream when I saw that there was no reflection of the camera or who was behind it in any of the mirrors that walled the bathroom.

And then my father stopped sobbing.

He looked over his shoulder.

And then he straightened up and turned around to fully face the camera.

He stared into its lens.

The camera was an invitation to die.

My father was now looking directly at me.

He smiled sadly. There was no fear.

He said one word.

“Robby.”

And as the camera rushed toward him, he said it again.

The video collapsed into darkness.

The anticlimax of not seeing what happened to my father at the moment of his death forced me to rewind the video to a crucial point that I believed could help me understand what I had just seen and suddenly my movements were calm and purposeful and I was able to concentrate solely on what I needed to do.

Because I did not think there was a camera.

Even now I can’t explain the logic of this, but I did not believe there was a camera in my father’s house that night in August of 1992.

(There had been “certain irregularities,” according to the coroner’s report.)

I found the image of my father standing in the kitchen, with the camera watching him through the window.

And I located immediately what I thought was the answer.

A small, flesh-colored image in the corner of the video, in the lower right-hand quadrant of the screen. It was the reflection of a face in window glass.

It moved in and out of focus even though the image of my father remained steady.

There was no camera videotaping this.

I was seeing something through the eyes of a person.

I enlarged the image.

I pressed Pause and enlarged the image again.

The face became clearer without the overall image being distorted.

I enlarged the image once more and then stopped because I didn’t have to anymore.

At first I thought the face reflected in the window was mine.

For one moment the video showed me that I had been there that night.

But the face wasn’t mine.

His eyes were black, and the face belonged to Clayton.

Years had passed since that night. Almost a decade had passed.

But Clayton’s face wasn’t any younger than the face I had looked into in my office at the college on Halloween, when he held out a book for me to sign.

Clayton couldn’t have been older than nine or ten in 1992.

The face reflected in the windowpane was that of an adult.

I checked the other attachments, and after viewing the next two—October 4 and October 5—I realized it was pointless. They were all the same, except that Clayton’s image became clearer in each one.

Without realizing it I had already reached for my cell phone and was dialing Donald Kimball’s office. He didn’t pick up. I left a message.

An hour passed.

I decided to leave the house and drive to the college and find a boy.

16. the wind

“C
layton who?” the secretary asked. “Is that the last name or the first?”

It was almost three, and after driving aimlessly through town replaying the video in my head, I called Kimball again and left another message asking him to meet me in my office at the college, where I would be “hanging out” for the rest of the afternoon. My plan wasn’t to tell him the specifics of what I had seen—I just wanted to place Clayton in his mind, as someone to watch, the possible suspect, the fictional character, the boy who was rewriting my book. And I kept my tone even and natural, reiterating “hanging out” twice so he wouldn’t think I was losing it. Then I called Alvin Mendolsohn’s extension and was surprised when he answered. He spoke coldly to me as we uselessly defined our territory in a very brief discussion that confirmed Aimee Light had not shown up for either of her two scheduled tutorials and also had failed to notify him of her “absentia,” to which he added, “She’s a very impractical young woman,” and then I countered with, “Why—because she’s not doing her thesis on Chaucer?” to which he replied, “Don’t take yourself so seriously,” and then I said, “That’s not an answer, Mendolsohn,” before we both hung up on each other. Needing to be bolder than I felt, I summoned up the nerve to stand in the admissions office, in front of the desk of a blandly good-humored young secretary perched next to a computer, and asked her to look up a student’s name and any contact information regarding how I could reach him since, I admitted regretfully, I had to cancel an appointment. But even in my distracted state I realized, once I’d croaked the word

(
if there isn’t a person, how can there be a name?
)

“Clayton,” that I didn’t have anything else. He had not supplied a last name. But the campus was small, and I assumed that “Clayton” might be rare enough that he would be easy to track down regardless. The secretary thought it was odd that I didn’t know the last name of one of my students, so I blithely waved a hand around when she inquired about this lapse, the gesture explaining away my absentmindedness, my busy and special life, how unreliable the famous writer was. For some reason, we shared a wooden laugh that momentarily relaxed me. She seemed used to this—the faculty of the college apparently made up of other frantic misfits who forgot the names of their own students. I dazed out, and realized that I was nearing a period in my life when I was seeking assistance from people half my age. I watched the secretary swing toward the computer, her hands sweeping over the keypad.

“Well, I’ll enter the name and we’ll do a search.”

(
“I’m a big fan, Mr. Ellis.”
)

I spelled the name, correcting her (for some reason, she thought it began with a
K,
and who knew if it didn’t?), and she typed it in and then tapped a key and sat back.

I could tell from the expression on her face that the screen might as well have been blank.

I was about to lean over and scan the screen with her when she tapped a few more keys.

I realized things were becoming complicated when I noticed her sighing repeatedly.

(You should have never come to Midland County. You should have stayed in New York. Forever.)

“I’m not finding anything with ‘Clayton’ in it,” she said, scrunching her face up.

(
“I’m a freshman here.”
)

“He said he was a freshman,” I added unhelpfully. “Could you check again?”

“I mean, look, even if you had a last name, Mr. Ellis, nothing would come up in the student directory because there’s no Clayton listed anywhere.”

“This is extremely important.”

“I understand that but there’s no Clayton listed anywhere,” she repeated.

“Please just check one more time.”

The secretary smiled wryly at me—it was actually a sympathetic expression.

“Mr. Ellis . . .”—(and it was maddening that desirable young women were now calling me this)—“the school directory—do you know what that is?—has confirmed that there is no one with the name Clayton—either as a first name or a last name or a middle name—attending this college.”

It wasn’t just the information but her tone that shocked me into silence: I should have known the moment I walked into the admissions office that finding Clayton was a remote and unlikely thing. The secretary’s search had answered something, but another false beginning was opening up. I slowly stepped away from the desk as the secretary continued studying me as if I were dwindling into another world. Since I was not offering any explanation for this waste of time, her face became taut with impatience and then she simply regarded me quizzically and said, “Mr. Ellis, do you feel okay?” But her concern was utterly superficial, even if she genuinely tried to make it seem unintended.

I couldn’t let this challenge diminish me. I had to take this information and do something with it. I now knew—for fact—something about this boy who had called himself Clayton and had appeared in my office and in the front seat of Aimee Light’s car and in my own home and I now knew that he had lied to me, and even worse—I felt with a premonitory shiver—that whatever intentions he had were not fulfilled yet. I was light-headed and my muscles ached from lack of sleep and I hadn’t eaten anything except a cracker smeared with cheese in the Buckley library the night before, and as I walked out of the admissions office I stared at the Commons—the flat center of campus. It had been warm that morning and the air dead and still, but now a breeze caught the rust-colored leaves carpeting the field, revealing the green lawn hidden beneath them. The questions were too myriad (and outlandish) to systematically and rationally contemplate. It was a Tuesday—that was the only fact. I couldn’t stand on the steps of the admissions building—lost and spacing out on a lone, scrawny dog sniffing around the perimeters of Booth House, a kerchief tied around its neck—any longer. I took off in the direction of the student parking lot to see if I could locate either the cream-colored 450 SL or Aimee Light’s BMW. It was the only plan at the moment that could move me out of my stupor. In the distance, the sun glanced off the white dome of the art building and then the sky started darkening. Indian summer vanished rapidly that afternoon.

The student parking lot was situated behind the Barn, and as I walked under the entrance arc of the black ironwood gates a wave of panic-infused nausea flowed through me, then subsided. I recovered and then started scanning the rows of haphazardly parked cars, and the frantic worry returned when I could smell the sea and knew this was the scent of the Pacific thousands of miles away, and clouds were moving swiftly backwards, and crows flew high over the unpaved, dusty parking lot. It seemed as if the temperature was dropping in degrees by the second, and while looking over the roughly two hundred cars that occupied the lot I realized I was suddenly breathing steam. When I thought I saw a flash of white three rows over from where I was standing I started stumbling toward it, my shoes crunching the gravel beneath me.

As I passed a student waxing a Volvo—in that instant—a wind machine was activated.

Freezing air scorched the campus, piercing it.

Piles of dead leaves blanketing everything exploded upward and suddenly formed cones that raced across the ground. My coat flapped wildly behind me as I struggled through the lot. The air rushing forward felt like a knife. The crows were now reeling above me, black and cursing, their shrill cries drowned out by the roar of the wind, and the wind whipped the flag so hard that
thwack
ing sounds echoed out from the pole it was attached to. The wind subsided briefly but then another huge sheet was literally pushing me out of the parking lot, and when I saw students, startled and grimacing, running for cover into buildings, I lowered my head and staggered against the wind, heading for shelter in the campus pub, The Café, and stood beneath the awning, where I grabbed a wooden column to support myself, but then gave up, letting the force of the wind slam me against a wall. The wind lashed out with such force that a vending machine I was standing beside toppled over. When I looked up, squinting, I could see the hands on the clock tower swinging like pendulums. You could actually hear the wind snarling.

(I shut my eyes tightly and wrapped my arms protectively around myself and asked mindlessly: what was the wind? And, just as mindlessly, something answered: the dead screaming.)

And in the moment I decided to stop searching for the cars and retreat to The Barn and the safety of the office located there, the wind paused and silence ringed the campus.

My jumbled thoughts:

(
The wind forced you out of the parking lot
)

(
Because it didn’t want you to find a car
)

(
You learn to move on without the people you love
)

(
My father hadn’t
)

(
But the wind stopped: time for a drink
)

Shivering, I climbed the creaking staircase leading to my office, adjusting to the warm emptiness of the Barn. I unlocked my office and the moment I stepped over the stories that had been pushed under the door, I realized that the last time I had been here was on Halloween: the day Clayton introduced himself to me, and then I moved to my desk and slumped into a chair by the window overlooking the Commons and almost started crying because on that same day Aimee Light had pretended not to know him. Outside, the dark clouds that had been guarding Midland County were dissipating, the view growing so bright that I could see past the Commons and into the valley below the campus. Horses were grazing in a pasture near a canvas tent, and a yellow tractor was maneuvering through the huge oaks and maples that made up a forest leading into town, and then I saw my father, the crows turning in the sky above him, and he was standing at the end of the Commons lawn, and his face was white and his stare was fixed on me and he was holding out his hand and I knew that if I took that hand it would be as cold as mine and his mouth moved and from where I sat I could hear the name he kept repeating, insistently escaping his lips.
Robby. Robby. Robby.

Someone knocked on the door of the office and my father disappeared.

Donald Kimball looked tired and his inquisitive manner had changed since last Saturday; he was now defeated. After I let him in he regarded me casually and gestured at a chair, which he fell into as I nodded. He sighed and sat back, his bloodshot eyes scanning the room. I wanted him to make a comment about the wind—I needed someone to verify it for me so we could share a laugh—but he didn’t. When he spoke his voice was dry.

“I’ve never been up here,” he sighed. “To the college, I mean. Nice place.”

I moved over to my desk and sat behind it. “It’s a nice college.”

“Doesn’t working here interfere with your writing schedule?”

“Well, I only teach here once a week, and I’m canceling tomorrow’s class and—” I realized how careless that made me sound and so I began to make a case for myself. “I mean, I take my job seriously even though it’s not very demanding . . . I mean, it’s fairly routine.” I was just making noise. I just wanted to prolong everything. “It’s pretty easy.” I couldn’t sit still—I was too nervous—and I paced the office instead, pretending to look for something. I bent down to retrieve the stories when I suddenly froze: footprints stamped in ash trailed along the wooden floor.

The same footprints that had once been visible in the darkening carpet on Elsinore Lane.

I swallowed hard.

“Why?” Kimball was asking.

“Why . . . what?” I tore my eyes away from the footprints and stood up and placed the stories on a table that sat off to the side of the window overlooking the Commons.

“Why is it easy?”

“Because they’re impressed by me.” I shrugged. “They sit in a room and try to describe reality and they mostly fail and then I leave.” I paused. “I’m good at professional detachment.” I paused again. “Plus I don’t have tenure to worry about.”

Kimball kept staring at me, waiting for the lame interlude I imposed on us to reach its end.

I kept forcing myself to look away from the footprints.

Finally Kimball cleared his throat. “I got your messages and I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but you didn’t sound too upset and—”

“But I think I may have some news,” I said, sitting down again.

(
but you don’t
)

“Yes, that’s what you said.” Kimball nodded slowly. “But, um . . .” He trailed off, distracted by something.

“Do you want something to drink?” I asked suddenly. “I mean, I think I’ve got a bottle of scotch around here somewhere.”

“No, no—that’s okay.” He stopped. “I’ve got to head back over to Stoneboat.”

“What happened in Stoneboat?” I asked. “Wait, that’s not where Paul Owen is?”

Kimball sighed heavily again. He seemed withdrawn, regretful.

“No, it isn’t where Paul Owen is.”

I paused. “But is Paul Owen . . . okay?”

“Yeah, he is, um . . .” Kimball finally breathed in and stared directly at me. “Look, Mr. Ellis, something happened in Stoneboat last night.” He sighed, deciding whether to continue. “And I think it changed the direction of the investigation that I talked to you about on Saturday.”

I asked, “What happened?”

Kimball looked at me flatly. “There was another murder.”

I took this in and nodded and then forced myself to ask, “Who . . . was it?”

“We don’t know.”

“I don’t . . . understand.”

“There were only body parts.” He unclasped his hands, opening them, revealing his palms. My eyes were drawn to Kimball’s fingernails. He bit them. “It was a woman.” He kept sighing. “I’ve been busy all day with this, and I didn’t want to bother you about it because the crime deviated from the theory we had.”

“Meaning . . .”

“It wasn’t in the book,” he said. “The homicides we investigated in Midland County starting this past summer—we thought—were ultimately connected to the book and, well, this one . . . wasn’t.” He looked over my shoulder and out the window. “This was a serious deviation.”

Immediately: I was cut off. I was on my own. Telling Kimball about Clayton wouldn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter now. It already seemed as if Kimball was dismissing me. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he didn’t trust the story line anymore.