TVR: Why did you do it?
LCS: What?
TVR: Why did you pretend to be [consults notebook] a Mexican anthropologist named Robert Barlow?
LCS: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
TVR: I think you do, Mr. Spinks! You’ve been all over the news. Why did you do it?
Just for a moment, SPINKS looks afraid. Then the fear vanishes. He steps toward the camera.
LCS: I’m not pretending.
TVR: OK, well, you wrote a book about how you’re Robert Barlow, and you’re not him. What would you call that?
LCS: You don’t understand. I used to be Spinks. Now I’m Barlow.
TVR: If you’re going to argue about semantics . . .
LCS: It’s not semantics! I’m talking about souls.
TVR: What?
LCS: Souls moving into new bodies. I’m talking about possession.
TVR: Are you saying that you were possessed, Mr. Spinks?
At this point, the NURSE steps into the frame.
NURSE: [To the REPORTER] Stop upsetting him, eh? It’s OK, Mr. Spinks. Let’s get you in the van.
“Wow,” I said, and shut the laptop. “He’s psychotic.” Charlie looked up at me. His skin had broken out; fresh red bumps rose among the faint purple acne scars on his cheeks and forehead. “But he really was convincing,” I said. “He knew all that stuff. I would have believed him, too, probably.” But I didn’t believe it, and Charlie must have heard that in my voice, because he didn’t answer. “Let’s go out,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink.” “You go,” he said. “I’m just going to sit here and contemplate my downfall.” “This isn’t your downfall,” I said. “How do you know?” Charlie asked, suddenly fiercely angry. “Because it’s not,” I said. “You’re a great writer. You’re going to write another book.” “Leave me alone,” Charlie said. “You’re going to be all right, no matter what happens. You and your rich daddy and his yacht.” I didn’t want to go out, but that quip hurt my feelings so much that I put on my coat. How could Charlie think that I would be all right if he wasn’t? And how could he imagine that my father made me all right? I took my purse and keys, but stopped at the front door. “I’m not leaving you,” I said. Charlie just stared at me. In retrospect, I think he was afraid. He must have had some ideas of his own about what I knew, or suspected. “Forget it,” I said. “I was just trying to help!”
I went out. There wasn’t really anywhere I wanted to go, though, so I walked around Brooklyn Heights for a while, looking in the ground-floor windows of brownstones. People were eating dinner, talking on the phone, watching TV, cuddling, leaving the lights on in empty rooms. Why couldn’t any of them be us? Why couldn’t we step into their lives, and be OK? Of course, I had no way of knowing if any of those strangers were OK. For all I knew, they were heartbroken, terrified, up to their necks in marital problems of their own. Still, I had a violent desire to be someone else, to open a strange front door and call out, “I’m home!” I walked until my feet were sore, and when I returned to my home, Charlie was out. I got into bed and turned out the light, and as I lay there, not sleeping, it occurred to me that for just a moment I might have come close to understanding L. C. Spinks.
• • •
On May 2, the Times ran an article: THE OLD MAN AND THE CBC: QUESTIONS MULTIPLY AS A MEMOIR DISSOLVES INTO MYSTERY. The gist of it being that Charlie’s book was certainly a hoax but no one could decide whose hoax it was. Had Spinks tricked Charlie? Or had Charlie been in on the trick all along? They quoted my husband, who said he wasn’t ready to give an answer because he wanted to talk to Barlow first. Barlow, he said. Surely, the Times’s bemused book reporter asked, you don’t still believe that he’s Robert Barlow? At which point Charlie went all Baronian. What does it mean for someone to be someone? he asked. I mean, how does anyone know who they really are? The reporter must have wondered whether Charlie was insane or obfuscating; because the Times had given Charlie’s book a good review, she chose the latter. Mr. Willett may think he’s playing a deep game, the article concluded, but even he ought to admit that the game is up. As, indeed, it was. HarperCollins canceled Charlie’s paperback. Other news outlets ran considerably less kind stories about the end of the deception. They compared Charlie with Jayson Blair, which infuriated me. Couldn’t they see that Charlie had been fooled? Didn’t they know how hard he had worked, to tell what he thought was the truth? Charlie, for his part, wasn’t even surprised. “This is America, Mar,” he said. “Of course they’re coming after me with that.” He got his old army jacket out of the hall closet and started wearing it, with a wool cap pulled down over his ears. “Homeless Vet Chic,” he said. “New for the spring of 2011.”
On the Internet, pseudonymous strangers accused Charlie of being a liar and a sociopath. They imagined that he had tricked Spinks into impersonating Barlow, which, I suppose, was how it might have looked from a distance. It was hard to believe that the frail old man who’d confessed on TV had thought of the whole scheme, that he had taken Charlie in—even if Spinks was the author of a previous hoax. The trolls supposed that Charlie had done it for the money, or the fame; they decided that all his talk about love and hope had been bunk. In fact, the virtues Charlie had professed to believe in only made people attack him more viciously. There was nothing more satisfying than watching a saint get his comeuppance, or giving it to him. ANOTHER UTOPIAN BULLSHITTER BITES THE DUST was the headline of Gawker’s story about the scandal, and the theme of many ugly comments, on Gawker and Buzzfeed, Salon and Slate. Which was bad enough, but for those places it was just one story among many. For the readers of fantasy and horror, Charlie’s scandal was the story of the summer. The fans who had trusted Charlie howled their outrage at having been tricked, and the ones who had hated Charlie’s book from the beginning trumpeted their correctness. Only a moron could have believed that crap, a person called Tsathoggua wrote on the blog Modern Tentacles. HPL hated sex, and thank Gawd for that. If he’d had a love life, he would be ordinary = boring. To which someone else replied that everyone has a love life, as Freud had “proved.” A person called NoKindredOfMine wrote that the problem with Charlie’s book wasn’t that it gave Lovecraft a sex life; it was that Charlie had failed to condemn Lovecraft’s racism.
Has anyone read Lovecraft’s poem “On the Creation of Niggers”? If not I recommend you take a look. How a black writer could feel sympathy for the author of that poem, much less express it, is beyond my comprehension.
Tsathoggua replied that he didn’t care what the social justice warriors thought. Lovecraft’s work was good.
I get why Willett likes Lovecraft. What I don’t get is how he could be so fucking gullible and arrogant.
And NoKindredOfMine:
Probably because he was trying to please assholes like you.
The fight grew fast and large. Charlie pretended to take it ironically: Kids will be kids, he tweeted, which didn’t help. But I saw that he was furious. He knew that Lovecraft was a racist. He’d tried to understand him anyway. “If I give up on all the racists, there won’t be anyone left!” he said, which made me wince. “No one, Charlie?” He was supposed to respond gracefully but he just mumbled something and turned away. He posted the James Baldwin quotation Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within on his book’s Facebook page and was savaged for it. Either he had failed to take off enough masks with his quote love unquote, the trolls wrote, or he’d been wearing a mask himself, and either way, would he please have the good sense to shut up and die? George and his publisher both urged Charlie to make a public apology. It wouldn’t save The Book of the Law of Love, but it might save him. Charlie refused. What was he supposed to apologize for? Caring too much about someone else’s life? Trying to express a complex point of view? The way he talked about it made me think that, even then, he didn’t entirely believe that Barlow was Spinks. I didn’t disagree with him, because
he needed me to be on his side; but when I thought about Charlie in the privacy of my mind, I was afraid for him, and even a little afraid of him.
Then, in the middle of July, a person called StarseedMom posted a comment on Modern Tentacles:
I don’t know about social justice but I wish my son had never read Willett’s book. It taught him how to kiss a boy.
It was the woman who’d come to Charlie’s reading in Cleveland. She got a quick response from Tsathoggua:
Wait, what?
and told her story to the blog. HideousGelfling, the moderator of a widely read fantasy subreddit, tweeted a link to it:
@charliewillett’s book is a manual for pedophiles? #barlowhoax #inexcusable
At which point the online clamor became something nightmarishly new. It was as if Barlow’s miraculous survival had been a dam behind which a lake of indignation had pooled. Could Charlie really have written a sympathetic book about an adult man in love with a teenage boy? Had people really been obliged to admire it? Well, no one was obliged any longer, and with the word pedophile came a flood of revulsion. Strangers who had never read Charlie’s book, or even heard of it until then, accused Charlie of being a pedophile himself. He ought to be investigated by the police, they said. Was anyone looking into destroying the unsold copies of The Book of the Law of Love? Would someone put pressure on the publisher to surrender them? A petition snaked from in-box to in-box until fifty thousand people had signed, and meanwhile, well-meaning individuals organized support groups for those who had been hurt by Charlie’s book, and other do-gooders investigated Charlie’s previous articles for traces of falsehood—which, of course, they didn’t find. The righteousness of their activity was terrible, like watching a monster do therapy on its victim. But the things written by the unrighteous were worse. I mostly refused to read their spew, but one morning a patient canceled, and I thought I’d see what Twitter had to say about Charlie, so I could be more empathetic toward his situation. Right away, I found WilburWhateley12’s suggestion that
Someone should get child p0rn onto @charliewillett’s hard drive and tip the FBI.
To which RandolphCarterDreams replied:
@WilburWhateley12 Too bad @charliewillett doesn’t have kids. The porn cld be of THEM.
Which gave WilburWhateley12 another idea:
@RandolphCarterDreams Especially if it was snuff p0rn.
I was glad, then, that Charlie and I had never returned to that conversation about having children. It wasn’t just that I would have been afraid for their safety. I didn’t want to bring new people into this world.
When I was starting out in private practice, I treated a patient who convinced herself that I was not the real Dr. Marina Willett. What had I done with the real Dr. Willett? What would I do to her? She made out her checks to “Marina Willett or so she says,” and I deposited them without blinking, but the insane things she wrote on some rate-your-doctor sites have haunted me for years. That was upsetting, but this was different. The quantity and inventiveness of the hatred that came Charlie’s way seemed to have no limit. It was like the torchlight mobs of old, but enormous, shapeless, impossible to defend yourself against. It was, in fact, just what Charlie had been afraid of: a replay of the scandal of the Erotonomicon in the 1950s. It made me wonder what people were, really. Were they individuals to be loved and puzzled over, or were they a species, as Gilles Baron said, bent on its own destruction? At the same time, the outpouring of hatred made me love Charlie more—or, maybe I should say, it made me love him again. He so clearly didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and he was so clearly being destroyed by it. He stopped sleeping and asked me to write him a prescription for Ambien, which I did, but it gave him nightmares, so he went back to drinking. He stayed up late in the little second bedroom, hunched over his laptop with a glass of Scotch, following the news of his downfall. I told him not to read it, but he said it was the only thing he still found interesting. He lost weight. He smoked too much, and had panic attacks. He was afraid to go outside. What if someone recognized him? I couldn’t blame Charlie for being afraid. I knew about doxing, about swatting. My heart rate went up each time someone climbed our building’s stairs.
That summer Charlie and I lived like criminals on the run. We disconnected the landline, and ordered takeout under false names. We went out late at night—Charlie was still wearing his stupid wool hat, despite the heat—and bought groceries at the bodega. I wore big black sunglasses to work and hurried home at the end of the day to make sure nothing awful had happened. For the first time in years, I could count on Charlie to be there. We kept the blinds down and huddled on the bed, watching DVDs of The X-Files. It was awful, but wonderful, too: we were in terror together. We were Scully and Mulder, looking for the truth, which was still out there. We were Bonnie and Clyde, Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. Meanwhile, as the summer wore on, the world lost interest in Charlie’s book. Even fandom was now preoccupied by the larger question of Lovecraft’s racism: Was it OK to read Lovecraft, to celebrate him? What about the trophies given out at the World Fantasy Awards, the grotesque little busts of Lovecraft? With surprising speed, Charlie’s hoax cooled from an outrage to a curiosity.
In August, a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen asked if he could interview Charlie about the literary strategies of his deception, and This American Life invited Charlie back to tell them how it felt to be exposed as a fraud. George urged him to do the radio program. It could be the start of your second act, he said. Charlie refused. He wasn’t ready for a second act. Besides, he was still angry about being compared with Jayson Blair. When he told his story, if he told it, he said, he’d be the one to do the telling. Great, George said, send me a proposal! Charlie didn’t do that, either. He had enough money from foreign sales of The Book of the Law of Love to last a year at least. I’ll make my comeback then, Charlie said. I didn’t point out that a comeback might take time, and that neither of us might be happy to go back to the days when Charlie was living off my income.
What Charlie did do was to start playing Dungeons & Dragons again. Eric had a weekly game night, and he attended it religiously. His character was a thief, he said, a half-elf with a cruel sense of humor and a tragic family history. And the world! They had begun by chipping a gem out of the statue of somebody’s god, and now they were caught up in some big political machination and who knew what was in the balance. “Eric is a dungeon master’s dungeon master,” Charlie said, tugging at his recrudescent beard in a way that made me think of the person I’d met at Grace’s party, years before. I thought: Charlie came through this once, when his father died. He was a kid then and he had fewer resources than he has now. He didn’t have me. I thought: we’re going to make it. I picked up the dirty clothes Charlie left on the bedroom floor, threw his leftovers away, sponged cigarette ash from the windowsill, held Charlie when he wept. Slowly, things got a little better. Charlie drank less and started eating again. Dorothy Sayers had launched him on a mystery kick; he read his way through Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. We went to the Cape for a week in August, and I wanted us to go to Connecticut for Labor Day, to show my parents we were all right, but Charlie begged off. Eric had invited him to Vermont for a gaming weekend, he said. The whole group was going. With the help of some bottles of Lagavulin, they were going to finish their campaign. “We’re fighting gods, at this point,” Charlie said. “You don’t want to deprive me of the opportunity to kill a god, do you?” “No,” I said, “you’d better do that.”
The gamers left on Friday afternoon, and by the time I came home from the office that night, I’d had second thoughts about seeing my family. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a weekend to myself. I called my mother, who expressed disappointment; but disappointment was her ordinary mode of being. I ordered takeout Chinese and sprawled. Northanger Abbey fell asleep in my lap. The next afternoon, I wondered if it might be pleasant to leave the house. I’d heard that there were park
s in Brooklyn, although I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one. I put on running shoes and sunglasses and jogged into the brilliant autumn. The still-green streets of Brooklyn Heights welcomed me eagerly: someone who hadn’t gone away for the weekend! I jogged in the shade, marveling at all the beautiful old houses that had somehow escaped the city’s self-consuming greed. When I passed the building where H. P. Lovecraft had lived, on the corner of Clinton and State, I gave it the finger. Fuck you, Mr. Lovecraft! This city is all right. Your horrors were all in your mind. I crossed Atlantic Avenue and turned left on Pacific, with the vague idea that I’d run to Prospect Park. Where there was, I thought, a farmer’s market! I stopped at a red light to stretch my aching hips. “Hi, Marina!” Grace said. She and Eric were waving from the far corner of Smith Street. Eric held a canvas shopping bag. The light changed and I ran to them. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “We’re having a picnic,” Grace said. “I would have invited you, but I thought you were out of town?” “I thought you were out of town,” I said to Eric. “Um,” he said. “Our plans changed. Last minute.” “Did Charlie go?” I asked. “Go where?” Grace asked. “Uh, yeah, he did,” Eric said. “That’s funny,” I said. “I didn’t know you could play without the dungeon master.” Oh, I knew what I was talking about. I’d been around Charlie so long I was an expert. “Where’s my husband?” I asked.
6.
I ran home and googled Lila, animal shelter, Portland. A puffy-faced girl with a pit bull pup. I read the latest posts on Notes from After the End of the World, looking for the smugness you’d expect from a woman who was fucking another woman’s husband, but there was only the usual Baronian hand-wringing at the folly of all these people who didn’t know they were doomed. I wondered, wildly, whether Lila was having an affair with Charlie in order to make the world more Baronian. To make her little tear in the human fabric, to nudge humanity toward its final disorganization. Then, bring on the jellyfish! They were hermaphroditic and immortal, and adultery meant less than nothing to them. I envied them. I went to the bathroom and tried to throw up, but I couldn’t. With that third-person feeling you have sometimes in dreams, I observed myself in the kitchen, still wearing my stupid running tights, opening a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and arranging Triscuits on a yellow Fiestaware plate. I returned to my laptop, took a sip of wine, and looked at pictures of Lila again. She had a man’s jaw, a muffin-top. Charlie had been reading Baron in our bed because she liked him! I threw a Triscuit at the wall. I contained tears, and let them out. I thought it might be fun to revisit the awful things people had written about Charlie online, so I could agree with them. Rape his wife and make him watch. Cut off her head. Cut off his head. I should have felt honored to be included. They weren’t planning to rape Lila. He better change his name. I can’t wait for his next book. Lynch him—ugh. Very soon, I had the impression that what I was reading was no longer the transcription of human speech or human thought, but just a barking from the bottom of a pit, faceless creatures calling for food. Does anyone know of anyone Willett has raped?
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