Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  He paused to take a long sip of scotch.

  “I don’t think he’d ever had anyone be nice to him without him having to blackmail them into it. He wanted me to promise on Jesus Christ—he was from North Carolina, his parents born-again Baptists. He was always mentioning Jesus like he was his next-door neighbor, someone he did a little yard work for. So I said Cool. No problem. Great. I swore in the name of Jesus Christ I’d take him with me. I swore that we were a team. Like Frodo and Sam.”

  He glanced at me. “I had no intention of taking him. I might as well try to escape with an L-shaped couch on my back. He was a total liability.”

  He seemed anxious saying this, brushing his hair out of his eyes, resuming his concentrated stare at the coffee table.

  “Within days, it was the night. We’d set up our camp in the exact location I needed to be. And I remember when everyone went to bed there was a clear night sky and a silence I’ll never forget. Usually there were insects and shit screaming in your ears all night. But on this night it was still, like everything alive had run away. I set my watch to wake up at midnight. Instead, I was woken up by a counselor. The entire group was awake. There was a torrential downpour. The whole campsite was flooded, all of us sleeping in about three inches of rain. It was mayhem. The counselors were yelling at everyone to pack up their tents. We had to move to higher elevation because they were worried about flash floods. Not that they gave a fuck about our well-being, they just didn’t want to end up dead themselves. People were screaming, freaking out. No one could find anything. I realized it was a blessing because in the chaos, it’d be so easy to slip away. I knew where I had to go, where the path was. I helped Orlando pack up the tent, but as I did, I noticed Ashley. She already had her tent together, was waiting for the rest of us. The beam of someone’s flashlight slipped onto her face, and I saw she was across the campsite, just staring at me. The look on her face—it was like she knew what I was about to do. I didn’t have time to think about it. Some of the kids were starting to make their way up the path to the next campsite. I fell in behind them. I held back, and when they were far enough ahead, I turned off my flashlight and stepped off the path, heading down a slope in the rocks, waiting. I could see some of the kids walking along the ridge, others still freaking out over the tents. The rain was coming down so hard in the pitch-black dark you couldn’t see more than a foot in front of you. They wouldn’t notice I was missing until morning. I turned my flashlight back on and took off.”

  He paused to take another drink.

  “I hadn’t walked ten minutes when I turned and saw another flashlight right behind me. It was Orlando. I was pissed. I shouted at him to go back, but he refused. He kept saying, ‘You promised. You promised to take me.’ He wouldn’t stop. I lost it. I said I couldn’t stand him. I told him he was fat, that everyone made fun of him. I said he was pathetic and weak, and even his own mother secretly didn’t love him. I said no one in the world loved him and no one ever would.”

  At this, Hopper began to sob, a tortured choking sound that seemed to tear through him. “I wanted him to hate me. So he’d go back. I didn’t want him to like me. I didn’t want him to look up to me.”

  He took a deep breath and fell silent, his head in his hands. After a minute, he wiped his face in the crook of his arm, hunching forward in the chair, visibly determined to keep talking, fighting his way through the story or he’d get lost in it, drown inside it.

  “I took off. A minute later, when I looked back I could see his flashlight, a tiny white light in the dark behind me, so far away. It looked like it was getting smaller, like he was heading back up the path. But then I actually couldn’t tell if it was moving toward me or away. Maybe he was still coming after me. I continued on. But an hour later, I realized I had no way out. The trail I was supposed to follow was through a canyon called The Narrows, and as I came into it, slipping in the mud, I saw there was a raging river where the trail was supposed to be. There was no way across. I had to turn back. It took forever because the path was pretty much a mudslide. I wasn’t even sure I’d make it, and I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had the map. It felt like I stumbled forever through the dark. Three hours later, I made it to the ridge and the new campsite. It was about five in the morning, still pouring. Everyone was asleep. No one had noticed I was gone. I unrolled my sleeping bag, slipped into one of the other tents, and collapsed. When I woke up the counselors had taken a head count. There was no sign of Orlando. By the afternoon they’d called the National Guard. I remember it was this beautiful day. A huge blue sky, so bright and beautiful.”

  He leaned forward, taking a deep, uneven breath, staring at the floor.

  “They found him eleven miles away, drowned in a river. Everyone thought it was an accident, that he’d gotten lost in the commotion. But I knew the truth. It was because of what I’d said. He was walking and saw the river, and he threw himself in. I did it. I killed that sweet kid who hadn’t done anything except be himself. There was nothing wrong with him. It was me. I was the loser. I was the waste of flesh. I was the one that no one loved. And no one ever would. See, Ashley had saved Orlando,” he whispered. “And I destroyed him.”

  He closed his eyes. He looked so anguished whispering this, it was as if the words cut into him. After a moment, he forced himself to look up, his eyes watery and bloodshot.

  “They helicoptered us out, back to base camp,” he continued. “The outraged parents descended. The counselors faced negligence charges. Two served jail time. Some of their discipline methods came out, and the camp changed its name to, like, Twelve Gold Forests a year later. No one knew I had anything to do with what had happened. Except Ash. She didn’t say anything. I just could tell from the way she looked at me. We were the last two to leave. A black SUV came for her, no parents, just a woman driver wearing a suit. Before she climbed into the backseat, she turned and she looked in at me, where I was watching inside the cabin. It would’ve been impossible for her to actually see me, but somehow she did. She knew everything.”

  He seemed on the verge of crying but wouldn’t let himself, angrily wiping his eyes in the crook of his arm.

  “You were supposed to be checked out by your parents,” he said, his voice hoarse. “My uncle couldn’t make it. But things were nuts with police, the local news, Orlando’s family; finally the cops just turned to me and said, ‘Go.’ I could just walk the fuck out. And that’s what I did.”

  I’d been so absorbed listening to him, I’d hardly noticed Nora had darted across the living room. She retrieved the box of Kleenex off the bookshelf, smiling as she handed it to Hopper, slipping back to the couch.

  “The next five months were a blackout,” he said, pausing to blow his nose. “Or a black hole. I hitchhiked. I went into Oregon and up into Canada. Most the time I didn’t know where I was. I just walked. I spent nights in motels and parking lots, strip malls. I stole money and food. I bought some heroin once and locked myself in a motel room for weeks at a time, floating away in a haze, hoping I’d find the end of the Earth and just float off. When I reached Alaska, I went into this one town, Fritz Creek, and stole a six-pack of Pabst from a convenience store. I didn’t know every mom-’N’-pop shop in Alaska keeps a shotgun behind their register. The owner shot two inches from my ear, right into a display of potato chips, then pointed the barrel right at my head. I asked him to please pull the trigger. He’d be doing me a favor. Only goading him like that, like a madman, I probably scared the shit out of him, because he lowered it and, visibly freaked out, he called the police. A month later, I was at Peterson Long, a military boarding school in Texas. I’d been there about a week, and I remember I was in the library—it had bars on the windows—wondering how the hell I was going to break out, when I got this email out of the blue.”

  He smiled reluctantly, staring off somewhere, as if even now surprised by it.

  “All it said in the subject line was ‘Do I dare?’ I didn’t know what that meant or who the hell sent it. Until
I read the email address. Ashley Brett Cordova. I thought it was a joke.”

  “Do I dare?” I repeated.

  Hopper glanced up at me, his face darkening. “It’s from Prufrock.”

  Of course. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a T. S. Eliot poem, a crushing description of paralysis and unrequited romantic longing in the modern world. I hadn’t read the poem since college, though I still remembered some of the lines as they burned into your head the moment you read them: In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.

  “That’s kind of how our friendship started,” Hopper said simply. “Writing to each other. She didn’t talk about her family. Sometimes she mentioned her brother. Or what she was studying. Or her dogs, a couple of rescued mutts. Her letters were the reason I didn’t break out of there. I worried we’d somehow lose touch if I did. Once she wrote that maybe I should stop running from myself and try standing still. So that’s what I did.” He shook his head. “When spring break came, I was dying to see her. I think a part of me didn’t think it was actually Ashley that I’d been writing to, but some figment of my imagination. I knew she was in the city, so I went online and found a spot in Central Park, the Promenade near the Bandshell. I told her to meet me there, April the second, seven o’clock sharp. Cheesy as fuck. I didn’t care. She didn’t answer my email for two days. And when it came, her response was one word. The best word in the English language.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, when he didn’t immediately go on.

  “Yes.” He smiled sheepishly. “I took three buses to get to New York. I arrived a day early, slept on a park bench. I was so goddamn nervous. Like I’d never been with a girl before. But she wasn’t a girl. She was a wonder. Finally, it was seven o’clock, seven-thirty, eight. She didn’t show. Blew me off. I was friggin’ embarrassed for myself, and I was about to take off when all of a sudden I hear right behind me in her low voice, ‘Hello, Tiger Foot.’ ” He glanced up, wryly shaking his head. “It was my goddamn tribe name from Six Silver Lakes. I turn around and, of course, she was there.”

  He fell silent, thinking about it, amazed.

  “And that was it,” he noted quietly. “We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of a fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you. She was the most incredible person. To be next to her was to have everything. When it was daylight, we’d been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn’t help but love that light, traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.”

  He paused, looking up at me with a penetrating stare. “She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain. She was always demanding of herself, Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? From Prufrock. Her dad revered the poem, I guess, and the entire family lived in answer to it. They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now. Ashley said it was the only way to live.”

  After this feverish outpouring of words, Hopper paused to collect himself, taking a deep breath.

  “It was how she was. Ash not only rode on the waves and dove every day down to where the mermaids sang, she was a mermaid herself. By the time I walked her home, I loved her. Body and soul.”

  He admitted this evenly, his face bare and unafraid. I sensed it was the first time he had truly talked about her. There was a feeling in his unsteady voice, in the words used to describe her, that they’d been submerged inside him for years; they were musty and purpled and fragile, practically dissolving as soon as they hit the air.

  “You walked her back to East Seventy-first Street?” I asked.

  He eyed me. “Where we were last night.”

  “That’s why you knew how to get in,” whispered Nora, astonished. “You’d climbed in before.”

  “After the first night we were together, when she didn’t come home, her parents were furious. They kept a pretty tight rein on her. They insisted she be home by one in the morning or they were going to take her away or something, to their house upstate. So, every night that week, I’d drop Ash off at her house at one, wait for her across the street, where we stood last night. At about one-thirty, Ash would climb out and we’d take off, heading to the docks or the Carlyle or Central Park. At six in the morning, she’d climb back in. She’d cut the wires so the sensors on that window weren’t rigged for the alarm. Her parents never knew about it. They still obviously don’t. When I saw the place last night it looked exactly the same. I half expected to see Ash come climbing out.”

  He dropped his gaze to the floor and drained the glass of scotch.

  “When that week was over,” he went on quietly, “I went back to school and the first thing I did was write a letter to Orlando’s parents, telling them what had happened. She’d given me the courage, even though she never said a word. When I put it in the mail, I felt like a noose had been removed from my neck. It took them a few weeks to write back to me, but the letter, when it finally arrived—it awed me, I guess. They blessed me for coming forward, telling the truth. They asked me to forgive myself, said that they’d pray for me and I’d always have a place in their home.”

  Hopper, still awed by this, shook his head. “For the next couple of weeks, Ash and I wrote every day,” he went on. “In late May, for a week I didn’t hear. I went crazy, worried something had happened. Then I got a phone call. It was Ash. I’ll never forget how she sounded. She was desperate, sobbing. She said she couldn’t live with her parents anymore and wanted to go where they couldn’t find her. She asked if I’d come away with her. And I said—well, I said the best word in the English language.”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He nodded. “I borrowed money from one of my teachers to buy the tickets. June the tenth, 2004. Nine-thirty-five P.M. United, Flight 7057. JFK to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There was a city way in the south on Santa Catarina Island that I’d been to once. Florianópolis. The most beautiful place I’d ever seen, second to her. A buddy of mine ran a bar down there on the beach. He said he’d help us out with work till we knew what our plan was. Summer break arrived, and I traveled on those three Greyhound buses all the way back to the city to see her. The moment I did, I knew it was on. We were going to leave it all behind. Best night of my life was when we got those tattoos. I’d heard about Rising Dragon. But the kirin was her idea.”

  “Did Larry do it?” asked Nora.

  “Yeah. He was a big guy. It was just the three of us in the shop. The design was intricate. You were supposed to do that kind of thing over a month’s time to handle the pain. But our flight was the next day, so it was that night or nothing. When it was over, she threw her arms around me, laughing, like it hadn’t hurt at all, and she said she’d see me tomorrow. Tomorrow it would all begin.”

  Hopper took a deep breath, interlacing his fingers, staring beyond us and out the window, where the rain still whipped against the glass. He seemed suddenly very far away, lost in a bottomless crevice of the past he couldn’t pull himself out of. Or perhaps he was recalling a detail he chose not to disclose to us, words she’d said or something she’d done, that would remain forever between them.

  When he looked back at us, he seemed reluctant to continue.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. He stood up to retrieve his cigarettes from his coat pocket, and I glanced at Nora. She was so mesmerized, she hadn’t moved a muscle in fifteen minutes, elbow on the armrest, chin planted in her hand.

  He sat back down and ta
pped out a cigarette, lighting it fast. There was a long silence, his face dark and pensive, cigarette smoke clinging to the empty space around him.

  “That was the last time I ever saw her,” he said.

  79

  “Next day, we were due to leave,” he went on. “June the tenth. Ash was meeting me at six P.M. at Neil’s Coffee Shop. It’s a diner on Lex, a block from her house. Then, together we’d head to JFK. Six o’clock came and went. There was no word from her. Soon it was seven. Eight. I called her cellphone. No answer. I went to her house and rang the bell. Usually there were lights on. It was dark. I knocked. No one came to the door. I climbed up there, exactly the way Ash did, up the iron bars to the second-floor balcony and in the far-right window. The place was luxurious, a palace, but it’d been packed up. And in a hurry. Like a bunch of criminals had decided to run for their lives. The furniture was covered with sheets, randomly, so they were half on the floor. Beds stripped. Milk and fruit and bread tossed out on the sidewalk in piles of garbage bags. I found Ash’s room on the third floor. There were a few photographs, books, but a lot of her things had obviously been taken, thrown in bags really fast. The lamp was tipped over on her bedside table. But inside her closet, hidden beneath blankets on the top shelf, I found a small leather suitcase. I pulled it down, unzipped it. It was packed with her clothes, sundresses, T-shirts, cash, sheet music, a Lonely Planet guide to Brazil. She was planning to go. I knew then her parents had found out, and they’d taken her away, probably to that estate where she’d been homeschooled her entire life.”