The next day he explored St. Augustine and saw the chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Leche; then he returned to Dunrovin. As before, he walked the grounds, taking pictures, but then he decided that he couldn’t leave Florida without making an effort to get into the house, and tried the front door. It was locked. He circled around reluctantly, as if he were daring himself, or even compelling himself, to do something he didn’t want to do. There was a glassed-in porch facing the dry lake; one pane had broken and been replaced with a sheet of clear plastic. From where he stood, Charlie could see that the back door to the house was open, as if someone had just left. With the feeling that he was no longer merely doing something stupid but doing something stupid and dangerous, Charlie went inside. He switched his camera to video mode and started recording, aware, as he did so, that this was just what people do in horror movies. He circled through the downstairs rooms: the kitchen was in poor condition, its floor covered in yellowish linoleum squares that were peeling up at the corners. The stove was rusted and the refrigerator absent. A dead water bug lay on its back in the sink. The next room to the right, or counterclockwise, was a sitting room, with blue walls and a fireplace, completely empty. Then the front hall, the locked front door, and stairs going up, which for some reason gave Charlie a bad feeling. The last, large downstairs room was the living room, Charlie thought; later he would deduce that it had been Mrs. Barlow’s bedroom. It contained the sofa cushions Charlie had seen from the outside, a dining room chair, and a purple long-sleeved T-shirt. People come here, Charlie thought.
He returned to the kitchen, his heart beating rapidly. He wanted to leave the house, but the same force that had impelled him inside asked a question: What’s up those stairs, Charlie? I’m not going up the stairs, Charlie thought. But he went back to the front hall and climbed the stairs, holding his camera in front of him as if it might protect him from whatever was up there. Immediately to the left was Barlow’s bedroom, also light blue. The front of the room was under the house’s eaves, and there were several closets, one of them lined with wooden shelves. This must be Yoh-Vombis, Charlie thought: the closet where Barlow had kept his weird-fiction collection. The amber shelves were empty, but there were pencil marks on the door frame, charting Bobby’s meager youthful growth. One mark was much higher than the others: H.P.L., 6/7/1935. Charlie shuddered. He imagined Lovecraft stooping beside Barlow in the small closet. The two of them so close, they could feel one another’s breath . . . Up until that point, Charlie had been rooting for sex to turn up at the heart of his story. He figured that Lovecraft needed it, and Barlow wanted it, and where was the harm? Those pencil marks changed his mind. He would never know what happened for sure, he said, but after he saw Yoh-Vombis, he was rooting for chastity. He noticed a matchbook far back on one of the shelves, from a café in Montreal. It could not have been an authentic Barlovian artifact, Charlie thought, and, in fact, he had no idea how it had got there, but he pocketed it anyway.
He went back into the bedroom, and just then, something creaked downstairs. Charlie stood very still and held his breath. This was Florida, where they sold tactical weapons. Charlie was unarmed, and totally unthreatening, but he was a black man, upstairs in someone else’s house. For some reason he kept the camera going, pointed at a blank wall. After a long time, he realized that he couldn’t remain motionless in Robert Barlow’s bedroom forever. He took a step toward the stairs. Nothing else moved. Driven by what struck him, at this point, as a completely insane drive toward completeness, Charlie went into the last room of the house, the bedroom that had been Lovecraft’s. It was the counterpart of Mrs. Barlow’s room downstairs, unfurnished except for a small pink bureau that had been pushed into a corner. He walked around to the hallway that connected Barlow’s bedroom to Lovecraft’s, went through Barlow’s room one last time, trying to pull with him whatever ghostly impressions might linger there, and finally glanced at the screened-in sleeping porch, which Lovecraft had mentioned in his letters. Then he hurried downstairs and out of the house without bothering to document anything else on the grounds, got in his car, drove back through DeLand and its now-sinister Art Deco buildings, and on to Daytona Beach, where he found his way to a Chinese restaurant. He ordered a Tsingtao and drank half of it, and only then did he dare to look at the video he’d shot.
It showed an empty house in poor repair; the only strange thing about it was the duration. Charlie had been in the house for twenty minutes at least, but the video was only two and a half minutes long. He wondered if part of it might be missing, and decided that fear must have distorted his sense of time. And yet: that night, when Charlie was typing his notes about Dunrovin, in the safety of his hotel room, the cursor on the screen seemed to lag, as if it weren’t just a pattern of electrically activated crystal dots, but an actual object, a tiny wall, which he was pushing through a resistant medium. Or, he thought, as if the cursor were dragging its feet, as if it didn’t want to tell this story. He imagined Barlow standing there, pale, bespectacled, wearing a jacket and a tie, his dark hair combed straight back, shaking his head and whispering something, No, or Don’t! Then the cursor leaped forward and a string of mistyped letters appeared all at once on Charlie’s screen. CHKL;WWN. Cthulhu? Curwen? The ghost, which had never been there, was gone.
2.
At the beginning of December, Charlie found evidence that Robert Barlow might not have killed himself. It was in a history of science fiction fandom called All Our Yesterdays; the author reported that a collector named C. L. Barrett had run into Barlow in Florida in the early 1960s, years after Barlow’s supposed death. Neither Barrett nor the author of All Our Yesterdays was surprised to find him alive. Science fiction fans had a tradition of faking their own deaths, as a practical joke, or as a way of quitting fandom and its various obligations. There was a word for it in fandom’s argot: pseuicide. “So maybe that was what Barlow did,” Charlie said. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if he were still alive?” “When was Barlow born?” I asked. “In 1918,” Charlie said. “So, right, he probably isn’t alive anymore. But if he was . . . Mar, can you imagine?” I gave Charlie a hug. His excitement was completely out of proportion to the evidence, but his wish for Barlow’s story to have had a happier ending was moving. It made me think of my own work: that fall I’d been reading about the psychoanalytic treatment of severe trauma, which was something I wanted to specialize in. It occurred to me that Charlie and I were both trying to rescue people from the past.
Then Charlie told me that he had bought a plane ticket to Mexico for the Christmas holiday. I was furious. My family vacations in Miami every Christmas, and I relied on Charlie to get me through it, especially that year, because my grandfather wouldn’t be around to keep my grandmother in check. “Why can’t you go some other time?” I asked. “I thought it would be easier to go while you were away,” he said, innocently. “You’ll be with your family, and you won’t miss me.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “First of all, I will miss you, and second, my grandmother is going to think our marriage is in trouble.” “Tell your grandmother I love you madly,” Charlie said. “Madly is right,” I said. “What am I supposed to say? That you went to Mexico to look for a dead guy?” “Tell her I’m writing a book that’s going to make us rich,” Charlie said. “A Book-of-the-Month-Club Main Selection.” I assumed he was kidding, although in retrospect, I’m not so sure.
Charlie flew to Mexico City the day before Christmas and came home on New Year’s Eve. I was in bed with the flu. “How was your trip?” I asked. “Mar,” he said, “have you ever seen fireworks from an airplane? It’s crazy. All those stars and flowers and so on turn out to be three-dimensional. It’s like flying over like the spores of some fantastic plant.” “I meant Mexico,” I said. Charlie said the city was sprawling and dangerous, like Los Angeles in the 1980s crossed with 1970s New York. It seemed to be falling apart and being rebuilt at the same time, sometimes in the same place: the rusted frame of an unfinished skyscraper, or the roots of a tre
e that had broken through the sidewalk in front of a newly renovated villa. The mild, dry air smelled of burning trash. Charlie took a cab to the apartment he had rented online, a modern one-bedroom in the Colonia Roma. Day after day, he rode the Metro from one end of Mexico City to the other, looking for evidence that Robert Barlow had not killed himself. He found nothing. Barlow’s house in Azcapotzalco had been replaced by the press that prints the Mexican edition of The Economist. The old campus of Mexico City College was partly a hospital and partly a parking lot. Charlie did succeed in making an appointment with an American anthropologist who had studied with professors who had known Barlow. He waited in an Italian café for several hours, but the anthropologist didn’t show up. When Charlie went back to his apartment, he found an angry email: the anthropologist had been in the café for hours, he wrote, but Charlie hadn’t showed up. Charlie began to feel like he was in a Bolaño story, or even a story by Borges. What he was looking for existed in a parallel universe, which converged with Charlie’s universe only in the pages of All Our Yesterdays.
He took the bus to the Desierto de los Leones, where Barlow’s friend Pablo Martínez del Río, or Don Pablo, as everyone called him, had supposedly scattered Barlow’s ashes, in the company of Barlow’s mother and brother. Charlie took a tour of the old nunnery, which was impressively austere, except for the profusion of girls who had come there to be photographed in their quinceañera dresses, and their proud families and awkward boyfriends; then he set off into the forest. His guidebook warned him that people had been robbed in the park and that he shouldn’t leave the main trails, but he completely forgot about this advice. He climbed higher and higher, up trails that were less and less well marked, until he was on a track of white scree among high, drab bushes. There he found a pair of men’s olive-green pants, set out on a rock. It wasn’t hard to deduce that there was a person nearby, but for some reason Charlie kept going, until, near the top of the mountain, he found an encampment, a ring of rocks and stumps around a burned-out campfire, with empty bottles littered all around, and a bag of trash hanging from a tree. At this point he started to think seriously about what kind of people might be living at the top of a mountain in a notoriously dangerous national park, miles and miles from the nearest paved road. He took a picture, another useless picture, of Mexico City filling the valley like a lake of smog, and started back down the hill, only he couldn’t go very fast, because the scree kept rolling out from under his feet. When he was half a mile down the hill, in the place where the pants had been, and where the pants, scarily, no longer were, a man called to him from the bushes. He was speaking Spanish, and Charlie had no idea what he was saying, which was good, because the man started shouting, and if Charlie had understood him he probably would have broken into a run and fallen on his face. He walked as fast as he could down that path and all the other paths, and just before he came to the road that led back to the nunnery, he nearly ran into an enormous white bull, which was grazing in the trail. It was like something from a story by Flannery O’Connor. The bull was as nonplussed as Charlie was, and he got home safely. “Still, it was freaky,” Charlie said. “If something had happened to me, it would have been as if I’d vanished into thin air.” “That’s scary,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t told me about it.” “Hold on,” Charlie said. “The story gets better.”
On Charlie’s last full day in Mexico City, he went to the American Embassy, in Cuauhtémoc. Without much hope, he explained to a neatly dressed male secretary in the records section—everyone at the embassy looked like a Mormon, Charlie said—that he was looking for information about a certain R. H. Barlow, an American citizen who had allegedly died in Mexico City on January 1 or 2, 1951. “Allegedly?” the secretary said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Charlie said. “I’ll have someone check the files,” the secretary said. “Can you come back in an hour?” Charlie killed time drinking Tecate at a bar nearby, which turned out to be a gay bar; why the U.S. Embassy should be right across the street from not one but actually several gay bars was, he said, anyone’s guess. Then he went back to the records section, where the secretary was waiting for him. “I found the file,” he said, “and I’m sorry to tell you that your friend is dead.” He produced a faded green folder and showed Charlie the death certificate, which was dated January 9, 1951. It gave Barlow’s cause of death as congestión visceral generalizado, generalized visceral congestion, which struck Charlie as being the kind of thing you might say about a person who wasn’t really dead. He turned over the previous document in the folder, an application for Canadian citizenship, which Barlow had submitted at the end of 1950. The Canadian consulate wanted to know if Barlow was a Communist. “I’m sorry,” the secretary said, “but these files are confidential. You shouldn’t really be looking at this at all.” He closed the folder and took it back. “Why did you show it to me, then?” Charlie asked. “Oh,” the secretary said, “this is Mexico. You’d be surprised how many people come in, wanting to know if people are really dead. We try to put the ghosts to rest.” “Thanks,” Charlie said. “Never say the United States government did nothing for you,” the secretary said.
“Well,” I said, “at least now you know.” “Maybe,” Charlie said. “What I want to know is, why would Barlow apply for citizenship in Canada? His whole life was in Mexico.” “Don’t go there,” I said. “You’re right, Mar,” Charlie said. “I need a drink.” He went to the kitchen and I heard him trying to get ice out of the ice tray. “How was your family?” he asked. “They gave me the flu,” I said. I heard an ice cube skitter across the floor, a curse, the clink of a glass. “You know what’s really insane?” Charlie called to me. “What?” I asked. I hoped he’d tell me that he was giving up his Barlow project, but what he said was, “I keep thinking, L. C. Spinks was Canadian.”
On January 2, Charlie went back to the library, only to find out what he already knew: that Spinks had vanished. Everyone who had known him was dead: Samuel Roth, Walter Winchell, Roy Cohn, even Violet N. Schmidt, of Bismarck, North Dakota. He wished he had met Magnus ten years sooner. As it was, he was rooting around in a graveyard, and he couldn’t even find Spinks’s headstone. But this, he said, was his third clue. After weeks of fruitless searching, it occurred to Charlie that there might be no headstone, for the simple reason that L. C. Spinks was not dead. And yet there was no trace of him—not as L. C. Spinks. With fingers that were suddenly too clumsy for their work, he searched the Canadian phone records for R. H. Barlow. There were many R Barlows in Canada, but only one who lived on Waubeek Street, in Parry Sound, Ontario. Charlie dialed. An old man answered the phone. “Mr. Barlow,” Charlie said, “My name is Charlie Willett, and I want to ask you about the Erotonomicon.” There was a long silence, then Barlow laughed. It sounded like someone shaking a spray-paint can full of sand. “Well,” he said, “I wondered how long that would take.” Charlie asked if he had a minute to talk, and he said, “A minute? No, you’ll have to come up.” “I’m sorry?” Charlie said. “Come up,” Barlow repeated. “OK, when?” Charlie asked, and there was another silence. It took Charlie a while to figure out that Barlow had hung up. Then he called me at my office and left a message telling me that he had to fly to Canada immediately. I called back as soon as I could. “Have fun,” I said. I tried not to sound worried.
Charlie flew to Toronto and drove unsteadily through a snowstorm to Parry Sound, a resort town on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. Climate-wise, it was the opposite of DeLand, although in other ways the two towns were eerily similar. They were about the same size, with little picturesque downtowns that sold used things and handicrafts. Remedial towns, Charlie called them: they’d been held back a grade or two, but were trying to catch up. Waubeek Street ran between the water and the rail viaduct; it was easy to guess which house was Barlow’s, because it was the only one on the block that was falling apart. The yard was a lumpy field of mysterious snow-covered objects, at least two of which appeared to be concrete birdbaths. Several half
-full bird feeders hung from the trees. Charlie climbed the steps to the front porch and rang the bell, and a voice from deep within the house called, “Come in.”
The Night Ocean Page 7