The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  When the others were gone, a middle-aged South Asian man with wiry hair, who looked like he had been awake for days, came up to Charlie. “I’m S. T. Joshi,” he said. This was Lovecraft’s biographer: Charlie had written to him, years ago, asking for information about Spinks and the Erotonomicon. “That was a nice talk,” Joshi said. “Thanks,” Charlie said. He fumbled for some appreciative words about Joshi’s work, and made a crack about how funny it was that two brown dudes should have ended up writing about H. P. Lovecraft, which Joshi didn’t even smile at. “I hope you don’t think I did the wrong thing, writing about Lovecraft’s sexuality,” Charlie said. “Not at all,” Joshi said. “I’m not a puritan, and anyway, it’s 2010. Lovecraft scholarship has to keep up with the times!” He put his hands into his pockets and looked like he was about to walk away, then he said, “The truth is, your book made me uneasy for a different reason. “Have you been to the Old Burial Hill in Marblehead?” Charlie said he hadn’t. “I’ve been there,” Joshi said, “and you can’t see much of anything from the top.” “Oh,” Charlie said, blushing. “Well, Barlow is ninety-one. He might have been confusing Marblehead with some other place they stopped on that trip.” “He might,” Joshi said, “but Marblehead was such an important place for Lovecraft, you’d think Barlow would remember what happened there. And then there’s the whole business of the two of them looking out to sea, and talking about that island on the horizon. In your book, it leads them to talk about going to Europe. If they couldn’t see any island, what were they talking about?” “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Also,” Joshi said, “I can’t find any evidence that Barlow and Lovecraft went to Belknap’s New Year’s Eve party in 1934, but if they did, I’m one hundred percent sure Don Wollheim wasn’t there, because he didn’t meet Lovecraft until two years later. And that story about the spiked punch bowl has been told over and over. It’s always at a different party, and I don’t think it ever really happened.” “Do you think Barlow was lying?” Charlie asked. “I don’t think it was Barlow,” Joshi said. “I’m not sure who you talked to, but Robert Barlow died in 1951.” “He didn’t,” Charlie said. “And then there’s the Erotonomicon,” Joshi said. “What’s the saying? Fool me once, shame on you? I didn’t want to say it in public, but I think you’ve been tricked.”

  “Fuck!” Charlie said when Joshi was gone. “Don’t worry,” Eric said, “he’s just being territorial. Like, you pissed on his lawn, you know? He’s the H. P. Lovecraft guy.” “I know,” Charlie said, “but I’m worried about what he’s going to tell other people.” The two of them went to a bar on Peck Street, where Charlie ordered a Last Call of Cthulhu: gin, Chartreuse, Lillet, and lime, served up with an absinthe rinse. He drank it quickly, ordered another, and drank that one quickly, too, then he and Eric went to Gilles Baron’s lecture. The Grand Ballroom was packed, not only with Lovecraftians but also with Baronians, who were identifiable by their small black notebooks and expensive shoes. Eventually, Baron, a diminutive man in a black blazer and white open-collar shirt, emerged from a concealed door and tiptoed to the lectern. His talk was about jellyfish, creatures which, he noted, Lovecraft rarely wrote about, possibly because they were so Lovecraftian that the master of horror saw little room for improvement. For a warm, stuffy eternity, Baron lectured the room on the biology of jellyfish, their diet, their habits, their peculiar formal formlessness. “Jellyfish thrive on our self-destructive policies,” Baron said, “to the point where a reasonable person might speculate that humanity is deliberately preparing the world for the coming of the jellyfish.” The line got fewer laughs than you might think, Charlie said. This crowd wanted to prepare the world for something. “Lovecraft wrote,” Baron said, “of the beings that will rise to power when humanity is gone, but if one considers the jellyfish, one might be excused for suspecting that those beings are here already.” From there, by means of deft Cartesian footwork, he brought his lecture around to the point toward which it had always been heading, namely, that the jellyfish were the post-human incarnate; and that if we wanted to see the future of humanity, we had only to study these translucent creatures, which built nothing, plotted nothing, but merely floated, and stung. Then, smiling, Baron bowed, and declined to answer any questions. He would be happy to sign books, however.

  Eric decided to get one of Baron’s books, so Charlie said he’d get one, too. Would it be Existinction or Phenomenology of the Switch? No, in the end, Charlie picked up a second copy of H. P. Lovecraft: Prophet of the Post-Human. The green-haired girl was ahead of him in line. “Hi again,” Charlie said. “Oh, hi,” she said, turning. She really was pretty, in a sturdy, Central European kind of way, although her pale skin wasn’t flattered by her choice of hair dye. She wore a cardigan over a purple T-shirt that suggested large breasts. Between shirt and jeans, a ribbon of white skin. “Are you a Baron fan?” she asked. “Sure,” Charlie said. “Me, too,” the girl said. Her name was Lila. She was from Portland, Maine, where she worked in an animal shelter. She had read all of Baron’s books; in fact, she wrote a Baronian blog, Notes from After the End of the World. Charlie promised to look at it. “Honestly, I think Lovecraft is kind of weird,” Lila said. “But I loved your talk. Thinking about his stories in terms of that ambivalent sexuality . . .” “Thank you,” Charlie said. “By the way, this is my friend Eric.” Eventually the three of them reached the head of the line. Lila held out a worn copy of Existinction for Baron to inscribe. “I admire your work so much,” she said. Baron turned to the stiff-haired publicist who sat beside him, and made a face. “I don’t like this American edition,” he said. “It shows dirt so easily.” “Let me get another,” Lila said, as if he’d spoken to her, but he was already signing the book. “Here you go,” he said. “Thank you,” Lila said. “I’m from Maine. We have a lot of jellyfish up there now, because of global warming.” Baron looked at her blankly. “Well, thanks,” Lila said again, blushing, and hurried off. Baron held out his hand for Charlie’s book, but Charlie walked right past him. He caught up with Lila by the elevator. “What an asshole,” Charlie said. “I guess he meets a lot of people like me,” Lila said. “That doesn’t make him not an asshole,” Charlie said. Lila untangled the double negative and laughed. “Which way are you headed?” Charlie asked. “This is the top floor of the hotel,” Lila said. “Right,” Charlie said. “So, looks like we’re both going down.”

  Eric couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what happened after that. Did Charlie and Lila dine at the Providence Seafood Company, which offered special dishes to the conventioneers: Cthulhu Calamari, Innsmouth Fish Stew? Did they attend the Parade of Elder Gods, and the costume party afterward? Here’s what I am reasonably sure of: Charlie hated being wrong, and Joshi had scared him. But he loved that he’d snubbed Gilles Baron. He loved that Lila was curious about him, and that she seemed to have nothing better to do—except drink iced coffee at the mall. “You had your eye on me at the mall?” Lila asked, laughing. “I’m glad you didn’t notice me staring,” Charlie said. “No,” Lila said, “I did.” They had a few drinks. Charlie had a room at the Biltmore and three fresh pairs of boxer briefs. He called me the next morning and said he’d missed his train. “I feel like I’ve found my people,” he said, and I was so happy for him. I’d always wanted him to have his people.

  3.

  Did Charlie seem furtive when he came home that night? Did he act like a person with something to hide? The awful thing is that he did, but because I didn’t want to be mistrustful, I pretended not to see it. Our fights, when we had them, that fall were about Adderall, which Charlie was still taking—which he couldn’t stop taking, he said, because he had to perform so much. In October, he flew to a book festival in Atlanta and took the train to a symposium in Boston; in November, he spoke at colleges in California and Ohio and Vermont. (I wonder if Lila went with him on any of those trips. Charlie said she didn’t, but by then I had stopped believing anything he said.) When he wasn’t on the road, he went to literary parties, from which he cam
e home drunk and stinking of cigarettes. When I asked if all that going out was really necessary, he got angry at me. “Mar,” he said, “you have your career. Why can’t I have mine?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The embarrassing truth is that I’d never thought of Charlie as having a career. This was, in fact, one of the things I loved about him: in a city of professionals, he was an amateur, in the old sense of the word, a person who did what he did out of love. One bright October morning, when we were eating brunch at a French restaurant on Dean Street, he told me he’d gone drinking with an editor at the New York Review of Books who wanted him to write an essay about James Baldwin. “Was she pretty?” I asked. Charlie looked at me as if I were the one who was acting out. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Just that I know what happens when you drink,” I said. “He’s sixty and bald,” Charlie said, “and by the way, it’s not my fault if a few people in New York enjoy my company. Anyway, it’s not like you don’t drink.” I was so taken aback by that, I didn’t know what to say. In what world was having a glass of wine before bed the same thing as coming home drunk night after night? “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not going to write you any more prescriptions, though.” “OK,” Charlie said. “You’re not the only doctor in New York.” I heard something threatening in his voice. I wasn’t the only a lot of things in New York.

  That fall, Charlie bought a soft wool Italian suit and thick black-framed English glasses; he wore lavender shirts and experimented with pocket squares. His image started to show up in connection with things that weren’t his book: Charlie Willett talking to Salman Rushdie at the National Book Awards after-party; Charlie Willett receiving an awkward kiss from Susan Sarandon outside City Hall. This new Charlie Willett, whom I barely saw, believed that love was more powerful than horror. He believed that in stories there was hope for our fractured nation and our divided souls. At the same time, ironically, he was getting into the work of Gilles Baron. He kept a copy of Existinction by the bed and read it on his infrequent nights at home. Baron, as you might guess from that speech about the jellyfish, was a materialist, who didn’t believe that there was anything particularly interesting or special about human beings. Like Lovecraft, he thought of us as collections of atoms, organized by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, equipped with a consciousness that was mostly there to remind us of our limitations: our mortality, our frailty, our lack of freedom. Futility was our condition—so Baron argued—and extinction our goal. I don’t know whether Charlie believed Baron’s arguments, but he did repeat them to me, to annoy me, I thought. I’d be talking about something one of my patients had done, some sad repetition of an old trauma, and he’d say, “But trauma is our condition, isn’t it?” And I’d have to argue with him, and point out that trauma was by definition something that happened to us and that it was also something we could recover from, which was the point of my whole practice. Charlie would just smirk and say, “Sure, but it doesn’t make much difference in the end, does it?” And I’d say, “Maybe not, but there’s a lot of living to do before you get to the end.” I’d go back to Sense and Sensibility, or just roll over in bed and turn out my light.

  It was hard for me to understand how the private Charlie and the public one fit together. Was Baron a sort of devil’s advocate for him? Or did he really believe that nothing mattered, and was his public show of caring about people’s stories just that, a show? The real answer is probably less profound: Charlie was fucking Lila. He was trying on her ideas, testing them out on me, seeing how they felt. In a small but disgusting way, he was becoming her. Anyway, Charlie didn’t let his Baronian tendencies show in public. There he was all hope: he was biracial, post-racial, plural and undivided, a spokesman for the healing spirit that Obama was supposed to have brought to the United States. And he gloried in being that. He wrote an essay called “The End of Fear” for New York magazine and talked about it on Fresh Air, too. (My grandmother called to say what a nice voice he had. And when were we going to have children?) Vogue photographed him at home in his Italian suit, cradling his Darth Vader doll. Charlie flew to Austin to talk about forgiveness. He flew to Seattle to talk about survival. He was a Game Changer (Wired) and a Young Transformer (Christian Science Monitor). Which of course led him to ask: “Autobot, or Decepticon?”

  With George Arnold’s encouragement, Charlie started going through his old essays with an eye to assembling them into a book. He spent hours manufacturing aperçus (Charlie’s word, alas) for his Twitter feed. He had the idea to collect love stories on Twitter, from ordinary people (his, too) and turn them into a book. Brief Loves, he said he’d call it. He was preoccupied with these and other projects, but reluctant to say much about them. Why did I need to know? Why did it matter that he hadn’t told me photographers were coming to our apartment? I was at work all the time, anyway, and when Charlie did pay attention to me, it was almost worse. He wanted to know how my patients were doing; he was curious about my grandmother. Was she lonely, now that my grandfather was gone? A year earlier I would have been happy that he was taking an interest. Now I was wary. I imagined that Charlie was using me, for an article about an obscure psychotherapist, perhaps. That was a sad thought, and a worse one lay just behind it. What if Charlie had always been this way, and I hadn’t seen it? He wanted to raise people up from obscurity, but, very possibly, the person he wanted to raise up most was himself.

  My paper about severe trauma was published in January 2011. It attracted a lot of attention, and my practice filled up. My new patients were rape survivors, survivors of incest, an Iraq veteran. The world they brought to me was more terrible than anything in Lovecraft: a bleak landscape of cyclical emotions and terrible dreams, like a roundabout in Hell. My job was to take that landscape apart, and I could do it, but it took time, and often the gains we made, my patients and I, were undone by the smallest things: a fire on the subway tracks, a neighbor’s barking dog. My patients had lost the ability to hope, so I had to hope for them. I had to stay with it. I was seeing ten or eleven hours of patients a day; I came home too drained to think about anything except how I was going to pull myself together for the next morning. I didn’t think my new schedule would make much of a difference to Charlie, but it did. That winter, we went from being people who were shaping a life together to being people who shared an apartment and slept in the same bed, often not at the same time. When we did talk, we were like two old storytellers, repeating the lore of our tribe, the same old legends. Remember that time when we went to the Cape? Remember that stupid weekend in Connecticut? We spoke in fossils.

  The nadir of this sad arc came one night in May when we went out to dinner with Grace and Eric at a Thai restaurant on Henry Street. Grace and Eric and I were talking about Lucian Freud when Charlie looked up from his pad thai and said, “You know, I think peanuts are the saddest nuts.” “Why?” Grace asked, curiously. “I don’t think they’re sad,” I said, although really I had no opinion about the emotional life of peanuts. “It’s not that I don’t like them,” Charlie said, “it’s just that they’re so ordinary. It’s like they’re not trying.” “I thought you liked ordinary things,” I said. “I never said that,” Charlie said. “Charlie, you’re writing a book about ordinary people,” I said. “What book?” Grace asked. “They aren’t necessarily ordinary,” Charlie said. “It’s just whoever chooses to respond.” “But you used the word ordinary,” I said. “I don’t remember that,” Charlie said. “You did,” I insisted, even though there was no point. “Go easy, you two,” Eric said. “I like peanuts,” Grace said. “Charlie, do you think I’m an ordinary person?” “No more than anyone else,” Charlie said. Grace glared at him. For a long time, no one spoke. It felt like a final rest: violinists, put down your bows. Then out of desperation I asked, “If you don’t like peanuts, which nuts do you like?” “Seriously?” Charlie said. “Yes,” I said, with inexplicable intensity. “Charlie Willett, what’s your favorite nut?”

  I need to mention somethin
g that I have left out of this story up until now, because it didn’t seem relevant: My grandmother and grandfather, my father’s parents, both survived Auschwitz. The work I did on post-traumatic stress was in their honor; it was, and still is, my attempt to bring kindness to a world that is too often cruel and unjust. When I felt Charlie slipping away, I had to ask myself, What matters? Who needs my help? I chose my patients because they had come to me, whereas Charlie wouldn’t come to me. I chose my patients because, compared with them, Charlie was doing fine. I chose my patients because I had to, because that’s who I am. I am telling all this too quickly because it is hard to tell. Really what I want to say is that I loved Charlie as much as ever.

  4.

  When Charlie’s book came out, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article about it, which mentioned that Barlow had taken the name of the late Leonard C. Spinks, a resident of Parry Sound. In this way news of Spinks’s death reached a Canadian World War II veteran named Horace Tudhope. Tudhope was surprised. He’d seen Spinks just the year before, as alive as ever. He wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail, respectfully suggesting that they had made a mistake, and his letter sat for nearly a year in a pile of unread mail. Then someone read it. On April 4, 2011, a reporter from the Globe and Mail gave Tudhope a call. Was he positive he wasn’t mistaken about Spinks? Tudhope’s answer was unprintable and brief. Leo Spinks was emphatically not dead. At that point, the reporter, whose name was, is, Darius Evans, started looking things up.

  Other people besides S. T. Joshi had remarked on what you could and couldn’t see from the Old Burial Hill at Marblehead, and the spiked-punch story, and some other things that Joshi hadn’t pointed out: for example, there was only ever one post office in Cassia; why Barlow should have said there were two was mysterious. These were quibbles, but when Evans put them together with what Tudhope had said, he felt an inrushing exhilaration. What if Charlie’s book was a fake? What if there was no miraculous Robert Barlow, just a clever, persistent L. C. Spinks? It was a great hypothesis and the kind of story that gets noticed. Evans drove up to Parry Sound, met Tudhope, and got from him a number of stories about Spinks, who, Tudhope said, had served with him in the Algonquin Regiment, at the beginning of the Second World War. Spinks was discharged for reasons Tudhope never learned; he returned to Parry Sound and went into the appliance-repair business. He never had a proper shop but worked out of his house on Waubeek Street. He was a nice guy who liked a beer and a good joke. The kicker was that Tudhope had a shoe box of photographs: Here was Leo Spinks in Thunder Bay, looking very smart in his uniform. He’d been on the regimental hockey team . . . Here he was in Parry Sound around 1960. He’d put on some weight, and his face was blurry, but he was recognizably the Spinks whose picture had been taken outside the CBS studio on a May afternoon in 1954. “Can I copy this?” Evans asked, and Tudhope said, “Sure, what the heck? I bet Leo got a laugh out of you thinking he was dead!”