The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  Macfie tried to interest me in his wife’s homemade jam cookies, but I said I wasn’t feeling well. I walked back to the center of town, through the festival, and continued on to Spinks’s house. The front door had locked itself, so I climbed through the kitchen window. The room smelled of dust and cat food, which the cat hadn’t touched. Probably it had gorged itself on birds. I went into Spinks’s study and switched on the light. Three black bookcases lined the room’s far wall, and dozens of books were stacked on the desk and on the floor, next to a ratty green armchair. I looked at the ones on the desk first. Ben Shepard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen 1945. Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp. Leslie Hardman, The Survivors. G. L. Cassidy, Warpath: the Algonquin Regiment from Tilly-la-Campagne to the Kusten Canal. John Macfie, Sons of the Pioneers. Whittaker Chambers, Witness. The books were all there; or, rather, I thought, everything was books. Histories of Greenwich Village and Mexico City and the Futurian Literary Science Society and the First World Science Fiction Convention and the integration of Levittown. Books by and about Wollheim and Pohl and Asimov and Kornbluth and Doc Lowndes and Samuel Roth and William S. Burroughs. S. T. Joshi’s biography of H. P. Lovecraft in two volumes and the five volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters and a thick green volume of his letters to Barlow. The Obras de Robert H. Barlow, eight volumes in Spanish, and a study of Barlow’s weird fiction and poetry, and a half dozen volumes of reminiscences of Lovecraft by friends and fans, and what looked like a complete run of the journal Lovecraft Studies and a few worn volumes of Barlow’s journal Tlalocan. There was even a book about Diego Rivera, and a book about Trotsky in Mexico. The amount of time Spinks must have spent preparing for his roles was staggering. Roles: first Barlow, then L. C. Spinks. Oh, he’d told me a horror story, all right. The horror was that I had believed it. I’d entered into it as if it were real life, and now what I felt was a great dying-off. All the people who had talked and fought and loved in my imagination for the last three days were vanishing back into the pages of the books from which they had been summoned; they were turning to mere bits of black ink on yellowed pages, lifeless and faceless and impossible to keep in mind.

  If Spinks’s only crime had been to bring all those people to life, only to let them die like that, I would never have forgiven him for it. But there was worse. Impelled by a desire for completeness, which, I think, I must have learned from Charlie, I woke up Spinks’s computer. The browser was open on the big old monitor, and it displayed a page I’d seen all too many times: my professional home page. Spinks had visited all my links. He’d read my biography and my publications. He had searched for my grandparents. Creepy, I thought, then I understood what it meant. Spinks had prepared his role with me in mind. He’d told a story that I of all people would be likely to believe, because it touched on things I knew about, and loved. He’d seen Belsen because he knew it would move me; he’d invented Luiza and then married her on my account. I wondered what else he’d done for me. Had he loved Doris Baumgardt because he thought I’d enjoy a love story? Had he gone to New York because I lived there? The more I thought about it, the more everything crumbled to dust: Doris and New York and my grandparents and the entire world. I cried out with horror then, and ran down the hall, out of that evil house, into the street where it was already dark.

  Downtown, the festival was turning into something new, a block party for tourists and cottagers. I found a taxi on the edge of it and went back to the hospital. Visiting hours were over, but I told the floor nurse I’d forgotten something and went into Spinks’s room before she could object. Denise was there, taking his blood pressure. My flowers stood by the black window. “Hey,” Denise said, “you can’t be in here now.” “Yes, I can,” I said, “I’m a doctor!” I sat by Spinks’s bed, and in my calmest and most therapeutic voice, I said, “I talked to John Macfie. He told me there was no such person as Luiza.” “I’m calling security,” Denise said. “He didn’t know her,” Spinks said through the mask. “She kept to herself.” “Leo, I looked in your study,” I said. “I know you made everything up.” “No, I didn’t,” Spinks said. “You never went to Belsen,” I said. “You weren’t married. I’m guessing that you weren’t in love with Doris Baumgardt, either. Why did you tell me all that?” Spinks said something, but it was lost in the noise of Denise consulting with the floor nurse. He looked confused and scared. It was an expression I’d seen before: the one he’d worn when the TV reporter cornered him outside the hospital. It was also, I realized, how he’d looked when Edward Murrow interviewed him sixty years ago. “You don’t have to be afraid,” I said. “You can tell me. I’m listening.” I wanted to scream at Spinks, or just to run away and spend the rest of my life trying to forget that I had ever met him, but I needed his answer: I needed to touch bottom. With the feeling that I would pay for it later in ways I did not yet understand, I took Spinks’s hand. “Here I am,” I said. It was as if something settled in his chest, a scared bird. He whispered into his mask. I took it off. “I hated them,” Spinks said. “Who?” I asked. “Hated them,” Spinks repeated. “I heard you,” I said. “Who did you hate?” Spinks looked at me. His eyes were big and soft. “All of you,” he said. “Everyone in the world.” The security guard put her hand on my shoulder. “You have to go,” she said. “Right now.” “I’m going,” I said, and left.

  VI.

  THE NAVEL OF THE DREAM

  1.

  I don’t know the true story of L. C. Spinks’s life, just the facts about him. Here are a few: He was born to Walter and Charlotte Spinks, of Parry Sound, Ontario, on July 9, 1923. He attended the Parry Sound High School, where he got fairly good marks. He played defense for the Shamrocks, the Parry Sound junior hockey team. He published twenty issues of a fan magazine called Pickman’s Vault. In September 1940, he enlisted in the Algonquin Regiment, and he was dishonorably discharged two years later. He returned to Parry Sound and repaired small appliances. In 1952, Spinks published the Erotonomicon and was briefly famous as an anti-Communist crusader and champion of “wholesome horror.” He lived for a time in New York—not on East Fourth Street, so far as I can tell; more likely he stayed at the Statler Hotel, next to Penn Station. His hoax was unmasked by Don Pablo Martínez del Río in the summer of 1954, and I doubt very much that Spinks had anything to do with it. When I look at the pictures of him from that era, at dinner parties with Roy Cohn and Whittaker Chambers and so on, I see the person Spinks wanted to be: handsome and jovial and sociable; above all, seen. I bet he never wanted to go home. But he did; in the summer of 1954, he was back in the house on Waubeek Street, with Charlotte. For decades nothing happened. Then Charlotte died, and Spinks inherited enough money that he didn’t have to work. He closed up his business. He bought a lot of books. In 1991, he legally changed his name to Robert Barlow, although most people in town still knew him as Leo Spinks. So far as I know, he is still alive.

  I can find no evidence that Spinks and Barlow ever met. They probably knew of each other, through the small world of Lovecraft fandom. Spinks surely heard that Barlow had run off with Lovecraft’s papers, and he probably heard the rumor Samuel Loveman was spreading, that Barlow was gay. It would have been easy for him to find out that Barlow lived in Mexico and what he was doing there. What a dream that must have seemed, to Spinks. Not only did Barlow have lovers, but he was living an adventuresome life in a foreign country, far from his mother. I imagine Spinks on a winter night in Parry Sound, starving for what he thought Barlow had: sun and boys and the world’s respect . . . But I am not going to give Spinks more life than he already took. Back to the facts. It is likely that Spinks met Donald Wollheim, not in New York, but in Toronto, at the Sixth World Science Fiction Convention, in 1948. What happened there, I don’t know. I called up Wollheim’s daughter, Betsy, and asked if her father had ever talked about L. C. Spinks. She told me that her father had, indeed, mentioned him. Decades after it had been forgotten by nearly everyone else, Wollheim was still
angry about the Erotonomicon hoax, which had nearly cost him his job and his health; but in his more philosophical moments, he acknowledged that the FBI would probably have investigated him anyway. He didn’t renounce Communism until the mid-1950s. I asked Betsy if she knew why Spinks might have perpetrated the hoax, but she had no idea. Her father had only ever spoken of Spinks as an idiot and a jerk.

  Donald Wollheim, Betsy said, was remarkably unprejudiced against gay people, but Spinks might not have seen it that way. And, prejudiced or not, Wollheim was notoriously prickly. I imagine Spinks meeting him in Toronto: A pass. A snub. A snicker. Then years of revenge. To make so many people pay such a high price for so little seems inhuman, but Spinks was inhuman. He was a biographical vampire, a person who stole other people’s lives because he had no life of his own. What made him that way? Charlotte’s smothering love, or Walter’s chilly pacifism—if he was, really, a pacifist? I don’t know, and I’m trying very hard not to care.

  2.

  I went back to my practice after Labor Day, but I was haunted by the feeling that nothing was true. My patients talked and talked, but I couldn’t hear the reality in what they said, the ancient rock. They were animated stories that had spun themselves up out of nothing, which might return to nothing at any moment; and I was reading to them from a list of things a psychiatrist might say. The entire world was a story told by L. C. Spinks: a planet-sized hoax, which he’d cobbled together from books, and told, and was telling, for obscure and hateful reasons of his own. The only thing I was certain of was that no story would lead me to my husband. He was gone, sunk in the muck at the bottom of a lake in western Massachusetts. I boxed up his things and put them in storage: I wasn’t ready to give them away, yet.

  I talked to my therapist about my Spinks thoughts, and she suggested I follow them back into the past, where, as we both knew, I’d find the old story: my father vanishes and comes home six months later, and I am left to wonder whether anyone can be trusted. And how did that make me feel? I tried to do as she said, but it didn’t help. My father is not the answer to Spinks’s riddle. Nothing in my life is. I thought it might be helpful to write down all the things Spinks told me in Parry Sound, and I have done so, checking my facts as I go, even though I no longer trust facts, and in a way, I no longer even believe in them; but writing has only made me aware that, beneath my fear of unreality, there lies another, deeper fear. What if Spinks has taken me over? By means of words, I mean. I certainly spent enough time listening to him. What if, by listening, I let Spinks into my mind, into my body—what if he lives on in me? I can’t help noting that in Lovecraft’s novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the character who finally defeats the evil magus Joseph Curwen is a physician named Marinus: Marinus, Marina. Mwahaha. I’ve talked to my therapist about this, of course. She expresses concern. Could my fear of being possessed by Spinks be related to some earlier incident which we haven’t analyzed? Do I want to try an antidepressant? I don’t know, maybe not just yet. For the time being, I am still hoping to defeat Spinks on my own, even if there is no real way to defeat him, and no real Spinks to defeat . . . But ssh, Marina. Write!

  In December, I got an email from Lila. She hadn’t found Charlie’s notebook—nice of her to tell me!—but she did find a strange number in her phone bill, which turned out to belong to Jessica Ng, the woman who picked Charlie up outside the hospital. Lila saw this as a major clue. Charlie must have arranged for Jessica to meet him, maybe with a change of clothes. Then they left Charlie’s old clothes by the shore of Agawam Lake and went off somewhere together: a conclusion that was supported (Lila’s word) by the fact that Jessica wasn’t returning her calls. Lila’s thinking seemed delusional to me. Sure, Charlie might have arranged for Jessica to pick him up, although you couldn’t dismiss the possibility that her appearance that night had been a coincidence. But would the two of them really have run off together, and stayed away for a year, in hiding, in silence? Fool me once, I thought, and I wrote back to say thank you, but please don’t investigate any further on my behalf. Still, out of a desire for completeness, I emailed Eric to ask if he could tell me anything about Jessica Ng. This time it was Grace who replied: Marina, you have to let go. Remember how Charlie was, at the end. Remember that whole thing about William S. Burroughs’s gas station receipt? I wrote back: I know, but can Eric answer my question anyway? Eric sent me a link to Jessica Ng’s page on the Book of Dead Faces, which I could have found on my own in two seconds. She was a pudgy post-teen in bulbous black sunglasses, enjoying some kind of happy life in Santa Fe. Her interests were spirituality and film and nonviolent video games. Not a word about Charlie. I messaged her, but she didn’t reply.

  A couple of days later, my family took its annual vacation. My father booked us rooms in a fancy hotel at the north end of Miami Beach, far from the shops but close to the water. The weather was cool and windy, but my relatives went through the motions of swimming in the hotel pool, running on the footpath by the beach, drinking tropical drinks on the terrace. It had been almost a year since Charlie went into the lake, but they still treated me with more kindness than I wanted or could do anything with. My brothers, ordinarily loud and obnoxious, spoke quietly when I was around, or looked reflectively at their BlackBerrys. My father wanted to take me sailing; fortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. My mother urged me to get a massage, a salt scrub, a back facial. She wanted to take me on a tour of the Art Deco houses of South Beach, but I demurred. My grandmother didn’t do much of anything, which was a relief. She had brought along an enormous hardback thriller, and, day by day, she lay fully dressed on a beach chair by the pool and worked her way through it. I kept her company, me and Daniel Deronda, which I couldn’t read. But I liked being near my grandmother. She held out the possibility that there was happiness, or at least contentment, on the far side of grief.

  So I felt almost betrayed when, one night, as we were finishing our salmon (which we ordered instead of shrimp or lobster out of respect for my grandmother, who, I think, could not have cared less), she, my grandmother, leaned across the table and took my hand. “It’s sad to see you doing so little with your vacation, Marina,” she said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean that we’ve been here for five days, and you haven’t even put on a bathing suit!” my grandmother said. It was true. I’d gained some weight and I felt self-conscious about it; anyway, the weather was too cold for swimming. “Marina can do what she wants,” my mother said, forgetting that she’d had her own designs on my time. “Of course she can,” my grandmother shot back, “but doesn’t she want to meet anybody?” We all stared at her. “Come on, Ma,” my father said. “Give Marina a break.” “Well, I’m sorry,” my grandmother said. “Marina, I love you. I just don’t want you to be lonely.” “I love you, too,” I said. “I’m just not ready to meet anyone new.” “That’s all right,” my grandmother said, “but you don’t want to get to my age and have nobody! Don’t you want children?” The anguish in her voice ignored the fact that I have two brothers who are both likely to reproduce. It came from someplace else, someplace older. It made me think that the difference between me and my grandmother, in terms of anguish, was that she mostly hid it better than I did. “Let’s talk about something else,” my father said. “Who wants to rent a Jet Ski with me tomorrow?” “Nobody,” my mother said. “Don’t shut me down, Ellen,” my father said.

  As soon as the meal was over, I went outside. It was a windy night, and the tops of the palms were hissing around, like they were grabbing for something. The ocean was frothy and faintly luminescent. There weren’t a lot of people out, on account of the weather, just a pair of late-night joggers and a couple of kids who were making something weird out of driftwood. I took off my shoes and walked down to the waterline. I let the white surf cover my still-pale feet. There was a jellyfish-warning flag up by the lifeguard station, and sure enough, there they were, the jellyfish, translucent blobs stranded at the high-water mark, and floating, as I saw, when my
eyes adjusted to the darkness, on the inky blue water. The night ocean, I thought. And the silent, flabby things that will still be here when all of us are gone. Against my will, I thought again about L. C. Spinks. If he had really hated everyone, as he said, how could he have imagined them all so warmly? I wondered if his final words to me were also an act, if he had merely pretended to hate everyone because he thought that was what I wanted to hear. I wondered if there was love underneath his hatred, and underneath the love, a terrible loneliness. He was someone who had never found his kind, possibly because there wasn’t anyone like him. No wonder he’d thought the only place you could find life was in books. But, ugh, there I was, analyzing Spinks again. I told myself, Let him go. He’s just a jellyfish, waiting to sting whoever comes by. Not evil so much as inhuman. I remembered what Charlie had said when we met on the East River promenade: that Spinks had started again from zero, and that it had worked. He’d been partly right, I thought, gloomily. Spinks was zero. He was whatever he made up. I thought again about that September afternoon, the next-to-last time I saw my husband: wind coming off the river, dogs sniffing around, the waves hoisting plastic scraps onto the slimy black rocks of Manhattan. And suddenly I knew, or thought I knew, what Charlie had figured out. Making things up was a way to survive, to give your wrecked life a second act. What if that was why he’d run away from the hospital? Oh, what if. What if he’d faked his death, after all, and come down to Florida with Jessica Ng, or, as I preferred to imagine, without her? What if he’d got a job on a fishing boat? What if he had texted me that photo of the ocean the way Spinks planted the matchbook in the Cassia house, as a clue, to see whether I wanted to find him? What if he knew I would seek Spinks out, what if he wanted me to meet Spinks, so I would go through what he had gone through, and feel what he had felt? Well, I did it. I felt everything. Now what? If I made the right signal, would Charlie come running? I jumped in the air. I waved my arms like a castaway. Of course, no one came. I’d let myself get carried away by a fantasy. Annoyed, I stepped farther into the surf. Waves parted at my shins and soaked my thighs. I hadn’t been swimming since I got to Florida, hadn’t, as my grandmother observed, even put on a bathing suit. Why not have a little fun? I thought. I went out of the water, stripped to my underwear, waded back until the waves came up to my hips, and dived in. The ocean was unpleasantly cold, though not dangerously so. I rolled onto my back and stroked out a little ways from shore. The hotel was lit up yellow and red and green for the holiday; up and down the beach, other hotels shone in similar colors. Condo towers rose to the north, like balconied hives. I swam a little farther, a little farther still. My body was getting used to the water temperature. It would have been easy to keep going. I am a strong swimmer; when I was a kid I scared everyone with the distances I could cover in Long Island Sound. I turned for a few strokes of crawl and wondered what Charlie had felt when he paddled into Agawam Lake. Mostly cold, I thought, then warm, or nothing. How long had he remained conscious? And what did he think about? His father, Spinks, Lila, me, the people who were hounding him on the Internet, Lovecraft, Barlow. Tlalocan was the paradise of the drowned. Who knew what might be down there? Sympathetic maidens, an endless party, a family that never fell apart. Whole streets under the water, a whole development going on, down there. A better world than the one he’d hitchhiked out of. I want to say that I was tempted to swim down and find it for myself, but not really. I’m too cautious, too hopeful, too bent on living. Still, it was peaceful in the ocean, a hundred yards or more past the breakers, and I might have floated there for a long time if two things hadn’t happened more or less simultaneously: my leg brushed a jellyfish and lit up with pain; and I saw someone on the beach, waving his arms, shouting in a familiar voice, calling my name.