Evans raced back to Toronto, and his story ran in the Globe and Mail’s Sunday supplement on April 17. On Monday morning, the eighteenth, Charlie’s agent got a call from the CBC. They wanted Charlie on After the Fact, the TV show. They wanted Barlow, too, but they hadn’t been able to reach him. “You have to do it,” George Arnold said. “Otherwise no one tells your side of the story. By the way, what is your side of the story?” “My side is I don’t know anything about this guy,” Charlie said. “I have to talk to Barlow.” “You haven’t talked to him?” George asked. “I’ve been trying,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t pick up.”
On Wednesday morning, Charlie flew to Toronto, and that afternoon he called me from Parry Sound. “Barlow’s in the hospital,” he said. The doctor said it was pneumonia, not life threatening, but they were keeping him for a few days to monitor the situation. “Did you talk to him?” I asked. “Just for a minute,” Charlie said. “And?” “It’s what I thought,” he said. “He’s never heard of Horace Tudhope. Evans is obviously just trying to get some attention.” “What about the photographs?” “Yeah,” Charlie said, “there’s this thing called Photoshop . . .” “But they’re old, right?” I said. “Who knows?” Charlie said. “It’s easy to make things look old. Mar, whose side are you on?” “Your side,” I said, but I must have said it the wrong way, because Charlie said, “I gotta go. Car’s waiting. Look for me on TV tomorrow at ten.” “You’re not coming back after the taping?” I asked. Charlie said, “Nope. The CBC is putting me up at the Four Seasons, and I got George to negotiate me an extra night. I think I deserve it. Don’t you?”
I watched After the Fact alone on our sofa. And:
Horace Tudhope, a shrimplike man in a blue suit and unbecoming yellow tie, sits rigidly in an easy chair opposite CHARLIE, who looks relaxed and handsome. Next to TUDHOPE, DARIUS EVANS, thirtyish and already balding, fidgets with a CBC coffee mug. April Hoffmann, the presenter, sits between CHARLIE and EVANS. HOFFMANN is wearing a tan skirt suit that might have been fashionable in 1989. A copy of Charlie’s book adorns the glass-topped table, along with three more coffee mugs.
AH: Mr. Willett, let’s start with you. In your book, you claim that the anthropologist and Mexican historian Robert Barlow impersonated Parry Sound resident Leonard Spinks, for somewhat complicated reasons.
CW: That’s right. Spinks had been the previous boarder in the house where Barlow was living. He died of a heart attack, and Barlow borrowed his identity, to publish a book.
AH: Why didn’t he publish it under his own name?
CW: Because he was supposed to be dead. You see, he’d been blackmailed in Mexico, and he faked his own suicide, to escape from what had become pretty intolerable circumstances.
AH: And before that, you say, Barlow was the lover of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, is that correct?
CW: Strange but true.
AH: Really amazing, Mr. Willett. But here we have Mr. Evans, who tells us that Leonard Spinks isn’t dead.
DE: That’s right, April. My story begins with a letter from Mr. Tudhope, here, who told me . . .
HT: Leo’s fine! I saw him just a couple of years ago. It was during Parry Sound Days, you know, where they close down James Street to vehicle traffic, and folks come out to sell you hot dogs and soap and things like that. I came down to see what was what, and there was Leo, talking to a fellow in a clown suit. I talked to him, I mean Leo, for a few minutes. Asked if he’d been fishing over at Blind Bay. I caught half a dozen lakers . . .
DE: Horace, let’s come back to that. Like I was saying, April, I went to see Mr. Tudhope, here, and he told me he’s seen Spinks many times since his supposed death.
AH: Mr. Tudhope, you’re sure the person you saw was Leonard Spinks.
HT: [Laughs.] Who else could it have been? There’s not a lot of people like Leo in Parry Sound.
AH: Mr. Willett, can you explain this?
CW: I certainly can. Either Mr. Tudhope is confused, or he’s not telling the truth.
HT: [Deleted] you, mister. Who the [deleted] do you think you are?
AH: Mr. Tudhope! Please, we’re on television.
HT: He’s calling me a [deleted] liar.
AH: As it happens, Mr. Tudhope, Robert Barlow was a guest on our program, and we have a video clip of him cued up on the screen right behind you. I wonder if you’d mind taking a look at it?
HT: Sure.
The clip plays.
HT: That’s Leo. Looks like he was having some kind of joke on you, eh?
CW: How are your eyes, Mr. Tudhope?
HT: What?
DE: This is ridiculous.
CW: I’m just wondering how Mr. Tudhope can be so sure.
AH: We can replay it . . .
HT: It’s Leo!
CW: April, it’s been shown that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. You’ve got a witness who says, That’s him! And an innocent man goes to jail.
HT: Is Leo going to jail?
CW: I’m sure Mr. Tudhope is very sharp for a ninety-year-old. But people do make mistakes, and other people get hurt. Think about what happened in the States, after 9/11. Or with McCarthy . . .
AH: Mr. Willett, are you saying that Mr. Tudhope doesn’t recognize a man he’s known for fifty years?
CW: April, all I’m saying is, I’m just wondering if Mr. Evans might be using Mr. Tudhope for his own ends.
HT: Say that to my face, you little [deleted].
TUDHOPE stands.
DE: Stay cool, Horace.
AH: Mr. Tudhope, please, have a seat.
CW: I can’t tell if you’re lying, or senile. Or both.
TUDHOPE leaps at CHARLIE, knocks him out of his chair, and straddles his chest. For such an old man, he’s surprisingly quick.
CW: Help!
A scrum of TECHS pull TUDHOPE to his feet. CHARLIE gets up. He holds his cheek.
CW: I stand by what I said.
It was great TV, but no way to contain the story. The next day, the CBC dispatched April Hoffmann to Parry Sound with a photograph of the man who had appeared on After the Fact and spoken so movingly about how he wanted to live. Was he Barlow, or Spinks? Hoffmann stood at the foot of James Street, determined to find out. But none of the people in the street—a German couple, a harried-looking woman on her way to the health food store—had heard of Robert Barlow or Leonard C. Spinks. “Not a lot of After the Fact viewers out today,” Hoffmann said, wryly. She went into a store with the charming name Bearly Used Books, and the red-haired teenager behind the counter said, “Oh, yeah, I know that guy. He comes in all the time.” “What’s his name?” Hoffmann asked. “I have no idea,” the teenager said. “He just buys, like, stacks of books.” “What kind of books?” “Like, old books,” the teenager said. “History and stuff.” “Thanks!” Hoffmann said. The next shot was of Barlow’s house on Waubeek Street. Hoffmann stood on the porch, waiting. “No one home,” she said. “Let’s go talk to the neighbors!”
So they went to the pretty little white house next door and a man in his thirties answered. “Hi, I’m April Hoffmann from the CBC,” Hoffmann said. “Can you tell me who lives next door to you, in that house?” “It’s that old guy,” the neighbor said. “Do you know his name?” “Sorry, no,” the neighbor said. Encouraged by Hoffmann and the camera’s attentive gaze, he went on: “I asked him once if he could do something about his yard. He just looked at me, like I was some kind of insect. It’s not neighborly, eh?” Next Hoffmann went to the across-the-way neighbor’s house and rang the bell. Evidently no one in Parry Sound had anything to do, because this neighbor, too, answered the door right away: a mannish granny in a blue Maple Leafs sweatshirt. “What’s your name?” Hoffmann asked. “Gladys,” the granny said. “Gladys,” Hoffmann said, “can you tell me who lives in that house?” “That’s Leo Spinks’s house,” Gladys said. “And is this Leo Spinks?” Hoffmann held up the
photograph. “Sure is,” Gladys said. “Is that from the TV?” “Do you mean to tell me,” April Hoffmann asked, incredulously, “that you don’t know what Mr. Spinks has been up to?” “What has he been up to?” Gladys asked. “He’s been going around telling people that he is a rather well-known anthropologist named Robert Barlow,” Hoffmann said. Gladys squinted. “What for?” “That is what we are going to find out,” Hoffmann said. She turned to the camera. “I’m April Hoffmann, and we are After the Fact.”
5.
Charlie came home on Saturday afternoon with a black eye. With his wheeled bag still standing at attention in the hall, he got on the phone to his editor at HarperCollins. “I’m back,” he said. “Listen, I was thinking, if we can get a camera crew to the hospital . . . What? But he is Barlow. I know! Let me talk to him again. I can go back up to Parry Sound, I’m sure there’s something at his house. I don’t know. I’ll try. OK, on Monday morning.” He set his phone on the kitchen counter and looked at me, perplexed. “They want to cancel the paperback,” he said. I wasn’t sure how much surprise he needed me to express. “That’s terrible,” I said. “I have to talk to George,” Charlie said. His phone buzzed against the counter. “Hello?” he said. “Yes, speaking. No, I didn’t know. I mean there wasn’t anything to know. Because he’s Robert Barlow! Yes, I’m serious.” He hung up. “Gawker,” he said, and shuddered. He was wearing a beautiful white dress shirt, which was soaked with sweat. “What we’ve got to do,” he said, “is put Barlow on TV. He can tell his story. But no one can tell me when they’ll let him out of the freaking hospital! They have him on antibiotics but apparently there’s something going on with his lungs.” “Charlie,” I said, “have you looked at the Internet?”
In the twenty-four hours since April Hoffmann’s second program, new evidence had turned up: photos of the young L. C. Spinks, a big and actually quite dashing man, who looked very much like the person Charlie had met in Parry Sound, and not at all like the young anthropologist who had once been friends with H. P. Lovecraft. It also came to light that Spinks had legally changed his name to Robert Barlow in 1991, but he hadn’t told anyone in Parry Sound. He was Leo Spinks to the neighbors, Mr. Spinks to the shopkeepers, Leo to the hostess at Wellington’s Pub & Grill. It was, I thought, as if he hadn’t needed to convince anyone but Charlie. “Of course I looked,” Charlie said, irritably. “And?” “I don’t know,” I said, “it just seems like, maybe he’s not Barlow at all.” “Please, Marina,” Charlie said. “Hoffmann got one ID from a blurry photo. And her witness isn’t exactly the sharpest tack in the box.” His phone buzzed. “What? This is he. I don’t know, I don’t have anything for you now.” “That was the New York Times,” he said to me. For a moment he was himself again, a lost, hurt Charlie, his face as open as a child’s. “Oh, Mar,” he said, “I’m so fucked.” Then he went into the little bedroom he used as his study and shut the door.
Charlie got Barlow—got Spinks—on the phone, eventually, and Spinks said not to worry. He had letters that Don Pablo had addressed to him in Montreal: proof that he’d survived his “death” and gone to Canada. “That’s great,” I said, although it seemed like scant evidence to me. Charlie said, “The problem is, he doesn’t know where they are. This is Robert Barlow, the guy who left Lovecraft’s estate in the basements of his friends. Fuck!” He spent the rest of the weekend looking for someone who might have known Barlow after 1951. He tried to find the Canadian consul, John French, and called dozens of Ohio numbers, looking for the descendants of the science fiction collector C. L. Barrett. He wrote to Mexico City College alumni, to librarians at Brown, and to the director of the Martínez del Río family archive. All in vain. Charlie wondered if Barlow might have tried to get in touch with William S. Burroughs, and wrote to the librarians at the University of Kansas, which has some of Burroughs’s papers. On Monday afternoon, he flew to Lawrence to investigate a box of miscellany that had been deemed too unimportant—or was it too revealing?—to be itemized. He called me the next night from his hotel. “Guess what I found, Mar?” he said. “What,” I sighed. It was a receipt from an auto mechanic in Sault Ste. Marie, dated March 11, 1978. “What I think,” Charlie said, “is that Burroughs went to see Barlow. Sault Ste. Marie is on the way to Parry Sound, if you go north around Lake Huron. So, maybe they met by the lake. Kind of a nice scene, right? These two old guys, former lovers, walking on the shore, or sitting on the porch of some cheesy motel. Maybe they went fishing!” “But it’s just a receipt, Charlie,” I said. “OK, it’s a receipt,” Charlie said, “but listen. Burroughs doesn’t write anywhere about going to Sault Ste. Marie in 1978, and nobody writes about him going there, either. I’ve put in a call to his biographer, but I bet he won’t know anything about it. And why? Because, Marina, Burroughs wanted to keep the trip secret.” Charlie’s voice had gone all whispery, a voice from the bottom of the well, and I was afraid. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “I was thinking, I could hire a private investigator,” Charlie said. “Some guy who can be my eyes and ears while I go after other leads. Ugh, Marina, can I call you back? I want to get right on this.” It was ten p.m. “Sure,” I said, sadly. “I’ll be up for a while.”
By the time Charlie came back from Kansas, he had decided the receipt was probably meaningless. He had a new idea: Could it be that the people of Parry Sound were conspiring against him? He’d made fun of Parry Sound in his book: the whole remedial town thing. More to the point, he was an outsider who had discovered something about Parry Sound that its citizens didn’t know. So they had ganged up on Charlie and Barlow, beginning with that crusty old fucker, Horace Tudhope. They were all pretending that the real L. C. Spinks hadn’t died of a heart attack in 1950 or whenever. “But there’s no death certificate,” I pointed out. “It got lost,” Charlie said, testily. “So says L. C. Spinks,” I said. I didn’t care anymore about placating Charlie. I was on his side, but being on his side didn’t mean agreeing with him. “If Barlow was impersonating Spinks,” I said, “why did he change his name back to Barlow?” “He got tired of the charade,” Charlie said. “He wanted to be his real self.” “His real self!” I exclaimed. “Is that what you think? If he wanted to be his real self, why didn’t he tell anyone who he was?” “He told me,” Charlie said. “Yeah,” I said, “and don’t you think that’s weird?” “What do you mean?” Charlie asked. “He was waiting for you, Charlie,” I said. “He sat there in his house, waiting for you to show up. So he could pounce on you like some kind of spider.” “Spiders don’t pounce,” Charlie said. “In Australia, they do,” I said. “Whatever,” Charlie said. “You’re not completely wrong. Barlow was waiting for me. He wanted to tell his story to someone who would understand.” “He wanted to tell his story to someone who would believe it!” I said. “Look at the facts. There’s no record of Spinks ever dying. There’s no record of Barlow ever changing his name to Spinks. What there is, is a record of Spinks turning himself into Barlow, and a lot of people who still know him as Spinks. Who do you think he is? Really?” “He’s Barlow,” Charlie said. “I was there, Marina. I heard his story. I know he was telling the truth.”
I was happy to leave for work the next morning. That afternoon, Charlie left a message on my cell phone: an Ontario TV station was going to air a segment about the Barlow thing at six. I canceled my last two patients and hurried home. Charlie was lying on our bed. He was still wearing the SAVE THE LAST HUMAN FAMILY T-shirt and pajama bottoms he’d had on the day before. I sat on the edge of the bed and squeezed Charlie’s arm. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “For who?” Charlie said. “For us,” I said. Charlie looked at me with so much incredulity, it was almost like hatred. “For the jellyfish,” he said. “For them, this is no problem.” “Hey,” I said, “you know I’m going to love you no matter what happens, right?” “I have to brush my teeth,” Charlie said. He shambled into the bathroom. When he came out, we watched the Ontario news on my laptop. The segment on Barlow—on Spinks—aired halfway throug
h the program. “The strange story of a local literary hoax reaches its conclusion, we guess,” was the lead-in.
The camera is trained on the entrance to the West Parry Sound Health Centre, a big tan brick box. A pudgy TV REPORTER in a blue button-down shirt holds a microphone.
TV REPORTER: We’re waiting for Parry Sound resident Leo Spinks, who has become notorious as the author of a memoir called The Book of the Law of Love, which he apparently made up.
“The author!” Charlie groaned.
An old man comes out of the hospital’s sliding glass doors: L. C. SPINKS. He’s short, old, and frail. He walks with the help of a male NURSE, who holds his arm.
TV REPORTER: Mr. Spinks!
L. C. SPINKS: [Turning.] Eh?
The Night Ocean Page 18