It was like giving himself permission to live. In three weeks, Barlow had a draft of the Erotonomicon, and by the end of the summer he had the whole book, including an introduction and footnotes, which he composed gleefully. He typed a fair copy on carbon paper, and only then realized that he had no idea where to send it. Who would publish the scholarly edition of a pulp writer’s diary, which was mostly about men and boys having sex? Once again Barlow despaired. To work as a weapon, his book had to be read. Nor did he dare send the Erotonomicon directly to one of his old friends in fandom; that would alert the people he intended to destroy. Who knew what powers of suppression Derleth and Wandrei still had? He considered various stratagems: He could plant the manuscript somewhere and wait for it to be discovered. He could invent a second persona who would discover the work of the first. He could invent a second persona who would found a publishing house, which would come out with the Erotonomicon only after it had put out certain other works, which would establish its prestige . . . Barlow ground his teeth in his sleep until one of his molars cracked. He went to see the dentist Lucy recommended, Dr. Brady, who had an office on Miller Street. Barlow sat in the waiting room while Dr. Brady performed surgery on some other poor patient. In the stack of Maclean’s and Chatelaines and National Geographics left there almost certainly by mistake, he found a catalog for Boar’s Head Books, which advertised My Sister and I, a recently discovered memoir by Friedrich Nietzsche. A sensual and sensational work, which no other publisher would dare to print, the copy read. There was an address in the catalog: P.O. Box 14110, Cooper Station, New York. Barlow copied it down. Then Dr. Brady was ready; he looked Barlow’s teeth over and told him that he would have to sleep with a night guard.
“I could tell you the rest of the story,” Barlow said to Charlie, “but you know it already. The Erotonomicon did even better than I hoped it would, and the only conclusion I can reach is that the world welcomes lies. Perhaps you’re wondering whether I felt remorse, when I saw the harm I had done? I did not. It was infinitely less than the harm that had been done to me, for which no one apologized, ever. Also, I got a lot of pleasure from my book. Not only from writing it, but from knowing that people were reading it.” “You liked being famous,” Charlie said. Barlow shook his head. “Not that. Not that at all. After more than twenty years of trying, I had finally found a way to make Howard love me.” “One last question,” Charlie said. “Why Spinks?” “Why?” Barlow repeated, as if he didn’t understand. “Why did you use his name? And what happened to the real L. C. Spinks?” “Oh,” Barlow said. “Him. It’s a sad story. Spinks was the previous boarder. A nice young man, heavyset, who fixed radios and washing machines. He came to Parry Sound from North Bay, after the war, and dropped dead one day while shoveling snow. Lucy tried to find his people, but no one knew who they were. Finally, she paid to have him buried, and that was the end of Mr. Spinks, except for the typewriter and those issues of Galaxy. It tickled me to think that he had been a fan, just like I once was. I had the feeling that a kind of fate was playing itself out. Spinks should have been alive, and I was supposed to be dead, and when I put his name on my manuscript, it was as if I had set the universe back in balance. It didn’t occur to me that I would really have to become Spinks, later on. Is something wrong?” “No,” Charlie said, “only that I looked for Spinks’s death certificate, and I couldn’t find it.” Barlow shrugged. “Do you want to know something amazing? When I did become Spinks, I was sure I’d be caught. Someone who had known the real Spinks would point out that I was not him. But no one said anything. There was no father, no mother! Not even a friend! I thought that I had no people, but this Spinks had no one at all.” Barlow coughed. “Now, Mr. Willett,” he asked, “do you have what you need?”
IV.
A MUTATION AND A MADNESS
1.
I remember how serene Charlie was when he came back from Parry Sound. It was as if he had already started to become the person he would be two years later: the person I had always hoped he might become, and whom I would learn to hate. It was late in the evening, late January 2008, when he slipped into our apartment, beaming. He put down his bag with unaccustomed gentleness and hung his coat on a peg. He was skinnier than ever, and somehow luminous, like a Tibetan lama. “Trip was good?” I asked. “So good,” Charlie said. He opened a can of seltzer, which he drank with his hand pressed to the refrigerator, as though to express gratitude for its abundant contents. “Tell me!” I said. Charlie fluttered his fingers at me and belched. “The apartment looks nice,” he said. “Did you do something?” I shook my head. Who was this Charlie who was looking at our apartment as if he hadn’t seen it before? “My absence must become it,” he said, and dropped his can into the recycling. Then he kissed me, and I kissed back. Parry Sound could wait.
For a month or so, Charlie shuttled between our apartment and the public library, fleshing out what Barlow had told him. He wrote a book proposal and found himself a literary agent, an esteemed dinosaur named George Arnold. George wanted sample chapters, so Charlie quit his job at the Voice and worked day and night in his little office, with headphones on, humming to himself. Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and hear him whisper, “Ssh! Write!” as though someone was there with him, and cackle at a joke I didn’t get. I get it now: it’s what Charles Dexter Ward whispers to his resurrected ancestor Joseph Curwen. It frightens me to think that, even then, Charlie knew what part he was playing. He sent the chapters to George at the beginning of March, and a week later George sold The Book of the Law of Love (as Charlie had called it) to HarperCollins for two hundred thousand dollars.
The first installment of Charlie’s advance came in June, and he immediately wrote checks to cover his share of our May expenses. I was annoyed by how theatrical he was about it. Did he think that paying one month’s bills would erase all the years when I had supported him? But my parents, my brothers, and even Grace had given me a lot of grief about supporting Charlie; I was happy to tell them that he was finally pulling his weight. And more. I’m embarrassed to admit how delighted I was when Charlie came home with a new pink-and-white-checked shirt and a pair of brown English shoes, which, he said, he had been coveting for years. He looked good in his new outfit, like an ad for a fancy vodka, or, at the least, like a well-to-do English professor. (Which was what his father had been when he was Charlie’s age: a fact we both agreed to overlook.) That period, from the spring of 2008 through the spring of 2010, was the happiest in our marriage. Not that everything was easy: when Charlie was working, he was distracted and irritable, and when he couldn’t work, on his fishing boat days, as we called them, he was despondent and irritable. But it was all set in a background of hopefulness. I’d had an idea about how to treat severe trauma: basically, I conjectured that the patient’s inability to think about trauma as being past makes it impossible, paradoxically, for the patient to think of trauma as real. Now my supervisor was encouraging me to write a paper. Sometimes Charlie and I lay at opposite ends of the sofa and typed on our laptops, harmoniously, like two parts of the same person. We ate in fancy restaurants and fooled around like new lovers in the back of cabs. We bought a big gilt-edged mirror in an antique store on Atlantic Avenue, and Charlie hung it on the wall opposite our bed. “So I can see you coming and going, Mar,” he said. “Don’t be sleazy,” I said, but I enjoyed it, too. I liked the multiplication, the feeling that we were numerous and at the same time indivisible. It was as if we were living in an enchanted zone; our savings account and our formidable fast-moving energy protected us from anything the world might throw our way.
The Book of the Law of Love came out in June 2010. To celebrate, I took Charlie to a cavernous Japanese restaurant in TriBeCa, where we were almost the only customers. We toasted to the book and kept drinking, while blue porcelain bowls arrived on our table, each holding a sliver of silver fish, or an exquisite fragment of a potato. Charlie was exuberant. “What is this?” he asked. “Did we just pay fift
een dollars for a bowl of bean sprouts?” He poked at them with his chopsticks. “On closer observation,” he said, “I see they aren’t ordinary bean sprouts, though. They were grown by Trappist monks, and educated under the Montessori system.” “How can you tell?” I asked, foolishly. “Because they don’t speak,” Charlie said, “and they took their time showing up.” He was irrepressible. But later that night he said, “Mar, I’m scared.” “Of course you are,” I said. “No,” he said, “really afraid. What if I’m wrong?” “What do you mean?” I asked. Charlie told me that there were parts of Barlow’s story which, for one reason or another, he’d been unable to verify. “You mean, you intuited them?” I asked. “No,” he said. “I got them from Barlow. But I couldn’t back them up with anything.” The documents didn’t exist; the relevant people were dead. For example, the Australian woman, Lucy, who rented Barlow a room in Parry Sound. What was her last name? Barlow didn’t remember and Charlie couldn’t find any trace of her. “That doesn’t sound like a big deal,” I said. “I guess not,” Charlie said. “But my haters might disagree.” Word of his book had reached the community of H. P. Lovecraft fans, and they weren’t all delighted about it. A group called the Knights of the Outer Void, which probably consisted, Charlie said, of five or six teenagers, had threatened to sic Shoggoths on him: those being giant slug-like monsters from a Lovecraft tale. “I’m not worried about the Shoggoths,” he said, “but still. What if I get creamed, like Barlow did for the Erotonomicon?” “Your book’s not a fake,” I said. “They hated him so much,” Charlie said, “just for saying that Lovecraft was gay.” “And guess what?” I said. “That was in the 1950s. Things have changed.” “In some ways,” Charlie said. I took his hands in mine.
And, in fact, when the reviews appeared, praising Charlie for the care with which he had exhumed this old and yet amazingly somehow still living story, when HarperCollins decided belatedly to frog-march Charlie through the bookstores of a dozen American cities, when the French expressed enthusiasm and the Germans came calling, and George Arnold was getting interest from the coast, when all those things happened, it seemed as if Charlie’s fears had been totally unfounded, a last urge toward self-defeat voiced when it was too late to do him any harm. It’s true that not everyone loved the book. Some Lovecraft fans sent emails, telling Charlie that he was a faggot and a real Shub-Niggurath.* The Knights of the Outer Void made a fuss on some blogs and found an unsurprising number of immature goons to spread their nonsense around. None of it bothered either of us much. In fact, Charlie created a page on Facebook—which he took to calling The Book of Dead Faces—where he reported ironically on the occult squawkings his story had aroused. The only time I heard him really worry was the night in July when he called me from Cleveland: shaken, he said, by an encounter with a woman who had caught her preteen son tongue-kissing his male best friend in their finished basement. When she asked what in God’s name he thought he was doing, he mumbled something about the Ablo Ritual. “Lucky for me they weren’t really doing Ablo,” Charlie said. “I’d probably be in jail right now. Can you see the headline? Black Pied Pederast Leads Local Youth to Lovecraftian Ruin.” “Relax,” I said, “kids try stuff like that all the time.” “Yeah,” Charlie said, “but now people are going to think it’s my fault.” “Are you indemnified?” I asked. “Am I what?” Charlie said. “Will your publisher cover your legal costs, if it comes to that?” “I don’t know, I have to ask,” Charlie said. “Mar, you know what really bothers me? The Erotonomicon is a fake. I say it over and over in my book. But somehow this kid and his friend just totally ignored that part. And now I feel like I perpetrated a hoax, like I tricked them, somehow.”
But this unpleasantness was more than made up for by the public revival, the resurrection, you could almost say, of Robert Barlow. Critics wrote about his poetry, his weird fiction, his contributions to the history of the Aztecs. Barlow appeared on a Canadian TV program called After the Fact and spoke movingly about his life as a gay man in the 1930s and ’40s. He apologized for the harm he’d done with the Erotonomicon, but that was so long ago, no one held it against him anymore. “Are you glad to have been rediscovered?” asked the program’s host, a gruff woman named April Hoffmann. Barlow coughed. “The truth is, I’m happy just to be alive,” he said. “You may laugh, but I don’t feel in any way that I’ve reached the end of my life. If I could, Ms. Hoffmann, I would go on living and living and living.” “I see,” April Hoffmann said, around the lump in her throat. I assume there was a lump in her throat. There was certainly one in mine. “Charlie,” I said, “you did it!” “Did what?” Charlie asked. “You saved someone,” I said. “Took me long enough,” Charlie said, but I saw that he was really pleased. We had no idea what was coming, or at least, I had no idea.
2.
At the end of August, Charlie was invited to speak at a convention of Lovecraft fans, in Providence. He was nervous about going. What if someone called him the S-N word? “They won’t,” I said. “And if they do, who cares? You’ll stay cool, and it’ll be good publicity for your book.” “Fucking Gilles Baron is giving the keynote address,” Charlie said. “Who’s that?” I asked. Charlie said he was a French writer whose book H. P. Lovecraft: Prophet of the Post-Human had rippled the gloomy waters of contemporary philosophy some years earlier. “He’s internationally famous,” Charlie said. “My mom knows him. What if he comes to my talk?”
Charlie dealt with his anxiety by dragging Eric along. They left for Providence on a Friday morning, and at this point his story becomes two stories: the one Charlie told me when he came home Sunday night, and the one Eric told, under duress, a year later. In both stories, they checked into their rooms at the Biltmore, and Charlie discovered that he hadn’t brought a change of underwear. They walked through the awful August heat to a nearby mall. To their amazement, it was full of goth kids with I CTHULHU pins on the lapels of their frock coats, acolytes in black robes, and eldritch beings with tentacled masks and bat-like satin wings. The really strange thing, Charlie said, was that these people were riding the escalators with shopping bags from CVS and Yankee Candle and so on, as if it were the most ordinary and natural thing for them to do. It was the Cult of Cthulhu! But now it was normal. Charlie and Eric joked about how they should approach the kids and say, You know, I risked my life so you could wear that costume. Charlie bought a three-pack of boxer briefs at Nordstrom’s. (In Eric’s story, a pretty girl with green hair sipped an iced coffee in the food court.) They went back to the Biltmore in time to catch a talk on “The Lengthening Shadow: HPL’s Influence Today.” It did, indeed, seem to be getting longer, Charlie thought, although like other shadows, it grew less dark as it stretched to cover more and more ground.
Charlie’s talk was in the smaller of the hotel’s two meeting rooms, and to his disappointment it was only half full. (But the green-haired girl sat in the second row.) He told the story of Lovecraft and Barlow, and worked up to what had become his customary conclusion: “It’s true,” he said, “that Barlow did some things it’s hard to approve of, just like Lovecraft believed some things that I can’t condone. But I wonder if in the end we maybe need our heroes to have feet of clay, or even of mud. Barlow was able to love Lovecraft, for all his flaws. And I want to tell you something he told me, when he was finished telling his story, which was, that although Barlow saw all the harm he’d done with the Erotonomicon hoax, he didn’t regret it, because he’d made Lovecraft into a person who was capable of love. You don’t have to agree with me, but I wonder if that’s what stories do. I wonder if stories are our way of taking these imperfect humans we’re stuck with on Earth, and making them into people who love us, and whom we can love in return.” It was the line he’d used on Fresh Air, the line he’d given to the guys from This American Life, for their program about miraculous survival. It was a great line, and in Providence it got mildly enthusiastic applause. “I’ll be happy to take questions,” Charlie said, and hands went up all over the room. The Lovecraftia
ns wanted to know more about how Charlie had found Barlow, and what Barlow was like, and whether Barlow might have in his possession unpublished Lovecraft stories, or letters, or anything at all. A gangly older man in a T-shirt that read I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL JUST SCREAM AND SCREAM pointed out that the Indian burial ground where Lovecraft and Barlow had an awkward moment in 1935 was actually a rather well-known place called the Fountain of Youth, and that the skeletons of Native Americans had been on display there until the Timucua tribe demanded that the remains be reburied, in 1991. “If you’re looking for an idea for your next book,” he said, “maybe you should write about Lovecraft and the Native Americans. I’d be happy to point you toward some fascinating material I dug up. So to speak!” “Thanks,” Charlie said. They were out of time. Some people approached the lectern with copies of Charlie’s book, which they wanted him to sign. (The green-haired girl was among them. “I’m so interested in your story,” she said. “I’m looking forward to reading your book.”)
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