Lunar Park (31 page)

“It’s moving toward the staircase . . . it’s gonna head downstairs . . .”

Their excited cries were suddenly replaced by what sounded like a choked awe.

“Holy Christ,” one of them shouted. “What the fuck is it?”

“Bob.” This was Sam, I think. “Bob, it’s coming down the stairs.”

The song stopped midlyric.

Miller and I were facing the grand staircase that flowed into the foyer and the adjacent living room.

There were clicking noises.

(I am not going to defend what I’m about to describe. I am not going to try to make you believe anything. You can choose to believe me, or you can turn away. The same goes for another incident that occurs later on.)

The only reason I witnessed this was because it happened so quickly, and the only reason I did not immediately turn away was because it seemed fake, like something I had seen in a movie—a prank to scare the children. The living room might as well have been a screen and the house a theater.

It was lurching down the staircase, pausing on various steps.

It was tall and had a vaguely human form, and though it was skeletal it had eyes.

Rapidly my father’s face was illuminated in the skull.

And then another face replaced it.

Clayton’s.

I was stunned into rigidity.

My panting could not be heard above the meters or the cameras.

The skeleton-thing was now standing at the bottom of the staircase.

It was making the clicking noises with its teeth.

Within the skull were eyeballs.

Suddenly, it launched itself toward us.

Miller and I quickly backed away and when we did, the thing stopped.

It began raising its arms, extending them upward.

The arms were so long that finger bones scraped the ceiling.

I was moaning.

What were we waiting for? I didn’t understand what we were waiting for it to do.

My father’s face flashed on again, followed by Clayton’s.

As the faces rapidly interchanged, sharing the skull, the resemblance between the two men could not be questioned.

It was the face of a father being replaced by the face of a son.

It kept clicking its teeth, as if chewing something invisible.

Its fingers started trailing across the ceiling as it moved toward us.

When it started lowering its arms, both Miller and I noticed something.

It was carrying a scalpel.

As it lunged toward us I braced myself, my eyes locked open.

“I hear you,”
I whispered.
“I hear you.”

And then the lights in the house flickered for a moment.

When the house was suddenly reborn with light the thing stopped and tilted its head before swirling into a cyclone of ash.

Sam and Dale watched this from the top of the stairs.

The moment the house burst into light they raced toward us.

Miller was asking me, “Did you turn off the fuse box?”

“Yes, yes.”

Miller breathed in. “There are two spirits at work here—”

At the moment Miller said this, the door to my office—visible from where we now stood—flew off its hinges with such force that it sailed across the room and dented a wall.

(I did not see this because I was staring at the ash that had sprayed across the generator. The writer described it to me later on the plane.)

The ceiling above us suddenly cracked open in a long, jagged strip, dusting our hair with plaster.

(I don’t remember seeing this but the writer insisted I had. The writer said,
You were gaping.
)

Paint began to peel and curl in waves off the walls.

No one knew where to look.

And as I watched this in a dream, I saw that underneath the paint was the green-striped wallpaper that had covered the walls of the house in Sherman Oaks.

When I whispered to myself the words
“I hear you”
the house was again plunged into darkness.

Outside, I stood on the lawn, dazed, muttering to myself.

Outside, Dale and Sam were pacing the sidewalk excitedly, talking into cell phones, recounting what they had seen to the rest of Miller’s staff.

Outside, Miller tried to explain a situation to me.

It involved a ghost who wanted to tell me something.

It involved a demon who did not want this information imparted to me.

There were actually two forces opposing each other within the house.

It was fairly simple. Yet what Miller defined as “simple” did not apply to anything in my life.

But I didn’t believe in my life anymore, so I was forced to accept this as if it was standard.

Outside, on the lawn, Miller was chain-smoking.

Miller tried explaining things but you wouldn’t listen.

You just said, “Get rid of it.”

You were standing in one place.

You weren’t aware of anything.

You didn’t admit that the words you’d whispered made the thing dissolve into ash.

You were thinking that you would come back later in the afternoon.

You were thinking of burning the house down.

“The house will need to be fumigated,” Miller was saying.

It would need to be fumigated because the spirits could enter any living thing in the house—and this included any animal or insect life—in order to continue their existence.

After the fumigation it would take twenty-four hours to set up the equipment required to cleanse the house. The entire process should take less than two days.

But what was happening after the fumigation? Had I missed something? Did any of us still exist? What world had I moved to? What was occupying my mind?

“What will happen after the fumigation,” Miller said, lighting another Newport, “is an exorcism.”

I had started making a plan.

“Mr. Ellis, I’m curious about something.”

I did not know that my plan was coinciding with Miller’s.

“Was your father cremated?”

I was going to travel, and I nodded my answer.

“Where are your father’s ashes?”

I was going to fly across the country.

“Did you spread them according to his wishes?”

I was shaking my head silently, because I understood what Miller was saying.

“What were you supposed to do with them?”

I was going to reorganize myself.

“Mr. Ellis? Are you here with us?”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8

28. Los Angeles

A
security guard at the gate checked my name before I drove up the winding road that led to a house the size of a hotel and made entirely from glass at the top of Bel Air. After a valet took my rental car, I stepped into a party where an old girlfriend who was wearing fake eyelashes and had married a billionaire called out, “Hey, gorgeous!” when I entered the room, and we talked about old times and movie people and what she was doing with her life (“I rock” was all I could ascertain), and since guests seemed to be avoiding me because of my battered face I just moved on until I was standing in a library filled with leather-bound scripts and golden retriever puppies were stumbling around everywhere and I found an issue of next week’s
National Enquirer
in a bathroom and there was a framed poster in the eldest son’s room of two words in huge red block lettering (
GET READY
) and there was the actress who had costarred in the movie that Keanu Reeves and Jayne made back in 1992 and we had what I felt was an inappropriate, if innocuous, conversation since we had never met (“Jayne left the set for a couple of days to be with you. Someone in your family had died, right?” “Yeah, my dad”) and then Sarah’s father—the record executive—showed up and seemed shocked to see me (I wasn’t shocked by anything since I wasn’t reacting to anything) but then he asked about Sarah and listened haltingly as I told him how great she was doing and even though the record executive kept promising me that he wanted to see his daughter there would always be another “setback” to keep him away but he added not unhopefully that Sarah was always “free” to visit. Seated at the large dining table were wives from Pacific Palisades with a few key members of the Velvet Mafia and Silver Lake hipsters and couples from Malibu and a good-looking chef with his own reality show. Conversations began as the food was served: the second house in Telluride, the new production company, the frequent trips to the plastic surgeon, the tantrum so violent that the police were called, all the exertion that led nowhere. I listened to it all, or imagined I did. There were too many words I didn’t understand the meaning of anymore (
happy, cake, jingle, preen
), and I was so over this world that it made no impact on me: the number of explosions per scene, the movie that took place in a submarine, the script that lacked a sympathy portal, the S&M dalliance with an underaged hooker, fucking the prom queen recovering from implant surgery, the screaming rockets, the washboard abs, the sex on the air mattress, the Vicodin binge. And then the conversation took a more sober route when talk of a certain movie came up: if it didn’t gross over a billion dollars, the certain movie would lose money for the three studios financing it. After that, the pointlessness of everyone’s enterprise hung placidly over the dinner. And soon you were noticing that the facial surgery had rendered so many of the women and men at the party expressionless, and an actress kept wiping her mouth with a napkin to stem the drooling after too much fat had been injected into her lips. A giant cactus stood blocking a downstairs hallway with the words “
believe the skeptics
” scrawled in black across its green skin, and as storytelling resumed I wondered how you could ever get past the cactus. But then I realized I was concentrating on that only because I wondered who was going to listen to my story? Who was going to believe in the monsters I had encountered and the things I had seen? Who was going to buy the pitch I was making in order to save myself?

A
fter the initial site reading indicated—no, confirmed—that the house was infested, I had been driven back to the Four Seasons, where I wired a transfer into Miller’s account. I was told “the process” would take two days to complete and I did not want to know the specifics of how they planned on cleansing the house. Obviously, I told myself, this was something they knew how to do—they were professionals; they had proved this to me during the ISR—and I would stay out of their way for those two days by traveling to L.A., under the auspices of the Harrison Ford meeting, where I would retrieve my father’s ashes from the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Carrying out this plan was my only focus (I was not going to be waylaid by anything) and so by two o’clock on that Thursday afternoon I had already booked a flight and—after meeting with Marta at the hotel to explain that the house on Elsinore Lane was being fumigated and she would be staying with the children at the Four Seasons until I returned on Sunday—I was driving to the Midland Airport. While steering the Range Rover down the empty interstate, I called ICM and asked them to set up the meeting with Ford’s people for the following day since I was flying in that night and was leaving Sunday morning. Everything went so efficiently that it was almost as if I had willed it. There was no traffic, I was whisked through airport security, the plane left on schedule, it was a smooth flight and we landed before the estimated arrival time at Long Beach (since so much of LAX was under reconstruction). When I spoke to Jayne while driving down the 405 toward Sunset she was “glad” (which I interpreted as “relieved”) that I was doing this for myself. I had opted out on the Chateau Marmont since it was a haunt from the drug days and stayed at the Bel Air Hotel instead; it was close to the dinner party that the producer of the Harrison Ford project had invited me to when he heard I was coming to town, and also to my mother’s house in the Valley. It wasn’t until I was ensconced in my suite at the Bel Air, sorting through a stack of Harrison Ford DVDs the producer had messengered over—along with directions on how to get to his house—that I realized there was one thing I had left undone: saying goodbye to Robby.

O
n Friday afternoon the Harrison Ford meeting occurred without Harrison Ford. The project that Ford and the producer and the two studio executives were interested in me for concerned a father (a tough rancher) and a son (a lonely drug addict) overcoming the obstacles of loving each other in a small town in northeastern Nevada. I sold them whatever I could muster up, which was absolutely nothing since I had no interest in the project. I was told to think about it and promised numbly that I would, and then voices asked about Jayne, and the kids, and the new book, and what happened to my face (“I fell”), and since I was somewhere else during the entire meeting it seemed over in a matter of minutes.

L
ater that afternoon, I drove to the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard to retrieve my father’s ashes. I did not leave the bank with them.

I
had dinner with my mother and two sisters and their various husbands and boyfriends on Saturday night in the house on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks (an exact, if much smaller, replica of the house on Elsinore Lane, with an identical layout). My mother and sisters understood (once the press reported I was the father of Jayne Dennis’s son) that only when I had acquainted myself with Robby to the point at which he felt comfortable enough would my family meet their grandson and nephew. This was the understanding that Jayne and I, and our therapists, had reached—everyone except for Robby (who knew nothing about this arrangement and had never, to my knowledge, inquired about aunts or a grandmother). The saddest moment of the night came when I realized—once they asked—that I carried no photographs of my son. There were questions about Jayne, about life back East in the suburbs, about the damage to my face (“I fell”). My sisters marveled at how much I had begun resembling our father as I moved toward middle age. I just nodded and asked my sisters about their recent triumphs and dramas: one was an assistant to Diane Keaton; the other was just out of rehab. I helped my mother’s boyfriend—a man from Argentina whom she had been living with for the past fifteen years—grill salmon. Dinner was calm, but afterward, out by the pool, while smoking cigarettes with my sisters, a tense debate ensued about what to do with Dad’s ashes (I did not say anything about what I had found in the safe-deposit box earlier that afternoon) and then morphed into various old issues: the girl he was living with at the time of his death had a boyfriend—had I even known about this? I couldn’t remember. Of course I couldn’t remember, my sisters argued, since I had run away and refused to deal with anything. And then, in rapid succession: the invalid will, the lack of an autopsy, the conspiracy theories, the paranoia. I escaped this by heading upstairs to retrieve something from my old bedroom. (This was another reason that I was in L.A.) Plus the backyard was haunting me; the pool, the chaise longues, the deck—they were all identical to the backyard on Elsinore Lane. As I stood up to leave, my sisters commented on how guarded I seemed. I told them I was just tired. I didn’t want to keep our father alive, which is what we did whenever we had these inevitable conversations. I did not tell them anything about what had been happening to me during the last week. There wasn’t enough time. Inside the house I stopped at the top of the stairs and gazed down into the living room. My reaction was dulled.

N
ot only was my bedroom just as I had left it as a teenager but it was also Robby’s room as well. I had stayed here often when I visited L.A., after I made the move to Camden and then to New York, and over the years part of this large space overlooking the San Fernando Valley had slowly transformed itself into an office, where I stored old manuscripts and files on shelves built into a walk-in closet. This was where I was heading. I immediately started rummaging carelessly through stacks of papers—drafts of novels, magazine essays, children’s books—until the floor became littered with them. And then I finally located what I was looking for: the original manuscript copy of
American Psycho,
which had been typed on an electric Olivetti (four drafts in all, which continued to fill me with disbelief). I sat on the futon beneath the framed Elvis Costello poster that still hung on the wall and began flipping through its pages. Without even knowing what I was looking for, I felt a vague desire to touch the book and rid myself of something that Donald Kimball had said. There was a piece of information that had never fit into the pattern revealing itself to us. I wanted to make sure it did not exist. But as I kept turning pages I began knowing what it was.

It made itself apparent the moment I hit page 207 in the original manuscript.

On page 207 was the drawing of a face.

I had drawn a face onto the thin sheet of typing paper (leaving enough space between the chapter breaks to fit it in).

And beneath the face I drew the words, scrawled in red pen: “
I’m B a c k
.”

This image of words scrawled in blood was used later on, but I had cut the scene that preceded this warning.

This chapter had been omitted.

And I had also removed the crude drawing of the face from any subsequent manuscripts.

Something became confirmed.

This was a copy of the manuscript I had shown no one.

This was the copy that had been rewritten before I handed the book to my agent.

This was the copy that no editor or publisher had ever seen.

This was the one chapter I had cut from the very first draft and that no one but me had ever read.

It included details of the murder of a woman called Amelia Light.

I flashed on the phone call I received on November 5.

“What did you do to her?”

“I’d check the text of that dirty little book you wrote again.”

The fictional details—the missing arms and head, the ropes, the blowtorch—were identical to the details of the murder in the Orsic Motel in a place called Stoneboat, according to what Donald Kimball had imparted.

As I kept turning pages, I realized even before I arrived at the next chapter that it would be titled “Paul Owen.”

The murder that followed Amelia Light’s would be Paul Owen’s.

Donald Kimball was wrong.

Someone was tracking the book.

And a man named Paul Owen in Clear Lake would be the next victim.

I reached for a phone to call Donald Kimball.

But something stopped me.

I reminded myself again, this time with more force, that no one except me had ever seen this copy of the manuscript.

This led to: What was I going to say to Kimball?

What was there to say? That I was going insane? That my book was now reality?

I had no reaction—emotional, physical—to any of this. Because I was now at a point at which I accepted anything that presented itself to me.

I had constructed a life, and this is what it now offered me in return.

I pushed the original manuscript away from myself.

I stood up. I was moving toward a wall of bookshelves.

I was flashing on something else now.

I pulled a copy of the Vintage edition of
American Psycho
from a shelf.

I flipped through it until, on page 266, I found a chapter titled “Detective.”

I sat back on the bed and began to read.

May slides into June which slides into July which creeps towards August. Because of the heat I’ve had intense dreams the last four nights about vivisection and I’m doing nothing now, vegetating in my office with a sickening headache and a Walkman with a soothing Kenny G CD playing in it, but the bright midmorning sunlight floods the room, piercing my skull, causing my hangover to throb, and because of this, there’s no workout this morning. Listening to the music I notice the second light on my phone blinking off and on, which means that Jean is buzzing me. I sigh and carefully remove the Walkman.

“What is it?” I ask in monotone.

“Um, Patrick?” she begins.

“Ye-es, Je-an?” I ask condescendingly, spacing the two words out.

“Patrick, a Mr. Donald Kimball is here to see you,” she says nervously.

“Who?” I snap, distracted.

She emits a small sigh of worry, then, as if asking, lowers her voice. “
Detective
Donald Kimball.”

Yes, the room turned sharply at that moment, and yes, my idea about the world changed when I saw the name Donald Kimball printed in a book. I forced myself not to be surprised, because it was only the narrative saving itself.