Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “I don’t see why it’s so important to you, these details,” she muttered in annoyance.

  “It’s where the devil is. Haven’t you heard?”

  She eyed me disdainfully. “You’ve done a lifetime’s worth of mining, Mr. McGrath. Maybe it’s time to come back to the surface and go home with whatever lumps of coal you’ve managed to dig loose.”

  “And be on my merry way. Like all the others.”

  She shrugged, unperturbed. “Do whatever you like with the information. Of course, now there’s no one in the world to back up your story. You’re alone again with your wild claims.”

  Staring at the woman, I couldn’t help but marvel at her smug meticulousness, the way she’d managed to get rid of each and every witness, one by one.

  “What happened to Ashley’s mother? Astrid?”

  “Gone. Somewhere in Europe. With her precious child now dead, there’s nothing keeping her here. Too many black memories.”

  “But you don’t mind them.”

  She smiled. “My memories are all I have left. And when I’m gone? They’re gone.”

  I frowned, suddenly doubtful again of what she’d been telling me, suddenly struck by something. Maybe it was the last dying whisper of magic—the kirins and devils, the supernatural powers of one startling woman—before it was all laid to rest.

  “But I went up to The Peak,” I said. “I broke in—”

  “Did you?” Gallo interrupted excitedly. “What did you find?”

  Her reaction was puzzling, to say the least. She actually looked thrilled by my admission.

  “A perfect circular clearing in which nothing grows,” I went on. “A maze of underground tunnels. Soundstages. Film sets entirely intact. Everything is overgrown and black. I walked over the devil’s bridge. And I saw …”

  Gallo was hanging on my words so excitedly, waiting for me to continue, I fell silent, bewildered.

  “Who lives there?” I went on. “Who are the watchmen with the dogs?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve no idea.”

  “What—you … you no longer work for the family?” I asked.

  “You really don’t understand. The Peak’s been left to the fans.”

  “What?”

  “The Cordovites. It belongs to them now. They’ve overtaken it. Quite a few squat there year-round. It’s a dangerous theme park, left, free of charge, to his most dedicated. It’s become a secret rite of passage, a cult expedition to be there, wander the work or get swallowed inside it. They can fight over it, tend it, destroy it, rule it as they see fit. He hasn’t set foot there in years. It’s finished for him. His work is done.”

  I wondered if it could actually be true—the men who’d chased me, the mongrels, the spray-painted red birds. I’d been terrorized by fans? I’d hardly managed to get my mind around this, when I had no choice but to reach for the other question she’d just left dangling in front of me.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “I was wondering when you might ask me that.” She turned away, staring somewhere in front of us, her expression like a truck driver looking out at a lonely road twisting interminably in front of her.

  I had a sudden vision of that drunken South African journalist years ago, cautioning me that some stories are infected, that they’re like tapeworms. A tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail. No use going after it. Because there’s no end. All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Inez Gallo smiled warmly at me. And I knew then I had it wrong. Because here it was. The end. The tail.

  I’d found it, after all.

  111

  I was shocked there was no security.

  I expected something miserable. How couldn’t it be? A place where men and women were tucked out of sight so they could bumble around the end of their lives—a place like Terra Hermosa. I thought about phoning Nora for this very reason, asking her to come, but then, sensing she’d say no, left it alone. But once I’d turned off the highway and pulled into the place, following the neatly paved driveway to the series of cream-colored signs and stucco buildings with red tile roofs, I saw Enderlin Estates Retirement Community was trying its best to bring to mind a Spanish hacienda taking a very long siesta. There were plantings and courtyards and chirping birds, a twisting stone path that led promisingly toward the main entrance nestled behind a wrought-iron gate.

  I checked the paper where I’d written the address Gallo had given me.

  Enderlin Estates. Apartment 210.

  I walked into the deserted lobby, took an elevator to the second floor, encountering a redheaded nurse behind a front desk.

  “I’m looking for Apartment Two-ten.”

  “Last room at the end of the hall.”

  I headed down the carpeted hallway, passing a young nurse helping an elderly woman with a walker. The door marked 210 was closed, and the name—the beautifully generic Bill Smith—was mounted on a tiny blue plaque beside the door.

  I knocked and, when there was no answer, turned the knob. It opened into a large sitting room, sparsely furnished, awash with sunlight. There was a bedroom on the left with a single bed, a dresser, a bedside table—entirely bare except for a lamp and a figurine of the Virgin Mary, her hands together in prayer. No photos, no personal items of any kind, but Gallo had doubtlessly seen to this, so there would be total anonymity or, as she put it, no more dark memories. “What he needs now is peace,” she’d said with a look of warning.

  “You looking for Bill?” a cheerful voice asked behind me.

  I turned. A nurse stood in the open doorway.

  “I just took him to the morning room.”

  She explained how to find it. I made my way back down the elevator and along the main hall, passing Activity calendars, an advertisement for Movie Night—Bogart and Bacall together again!—stepping through the double wooden doors into an old-fashioned glass-walled solarium. The room was bright and cheerful, filled with potted palms and flowers, white wicker chairs, a gray stone floor. Classical piano music played feebly from somewhere—an old stereo beside a bookshelf packed with paperbacks.

  It was crowded. Elderly men and women, moving as if they were underwater, hair that looked like a few wisps off a cloud, sat at tables with jigsaw puzzles and checkerboards. A few nurses sat among them, quietly reading aloud, one pinning a pink carnation to an old man’s lapel.

  Yet my eyes were pulled away from the activity to one man.

  He sat alone on the farthest side of the room in the corner, his back to me. He was in front of the windows, staring out. And even though he was in a wheelchair, wearing an old gray sweater and old-man shoes, there was something sturdy about him, something oddly immobile.

  I stepped toward him.

  He gave no indication he was aware of my approach. In fact, he seemed unaware of anything at all in the room. His gaze—stripped of those ink-black circular lenses he’d allegedly worn all his life—remained fixed out the window, where a vast lawn ringed by woods stretched out like an empty lake, its surface gold-green and hard in the afternoon sun. He had a dense head of silver-white hair, which showed no sign of relenting, a sizable stomach, which seemed more imperial, even threatening, rather than fat—as if, like some Greek god with explosive moods and appetites, he had swallowed a boulder and it hadn’t killed him, just kept him brutally secured to the ground. He was sitting back easily in the chair, his hands—massive workman’s hands—loosely hanging off the armrests, the way an exhausted king might relax on his throne. His face was different from how I’d pictured it, less certain somehow, slightly more drooping and crude.

  Yet I was certain it was he.

  Cordova.

  I could even see the faded wheel tattoo on his left hand, exactly where Gallo’s had been. His gaze remained somewhere out on the lawn like an anchor that’d been thrown there. It was as if he was picturing something, a final scene for a film he’d never made—or a scene he’d intended for his l
ife. Maybe he was imagining himself walking across the grass with the sun on his back, the wind pressing against his face. Perhaps he was thinking of his family, of Ashley, wherever and everywhere she was.

  Gallo had warned me he’d be aware of nothing.

  “A day or two after Ashley learned she was sick again, this last time, he went to bed early,” Gallo had told me. “He was always up at four A.M. working, living. But he didn’t come down. Alarmed, I went upstairs. I found him in his bed, propped upright in his pillows as if a ghost had come in the middle of the night to talk something over. His eyes were wide open, staring out at nothing. He was catatonic—a television turned on, but one single channel, only static.” To my shock, Gallo had gone on to explain it all in great detail: His doctors, certain he’d suffered a stroke, transferred him to a nursing facility for the elderly in Westchester—Enderlin Estates, outside of Dobbs Ferry—the decision to use the alias Bill Smith, so he wouldn’t be hounded or hunted, but left to live out his final days in peace.

  I told Gallo it was a wild coincidence, this prevalence of death, two vibrant lives drawing to an abrupt close—first Ashley, now Cordova. Granted, he wasn’t technically dead, but given the kind of life he’d lived, he was—unresponsive, his spirit locked forever inside him, or else, it had already fled.

  “It’s not a coincidence,” Gallo snapped, as if she found the word insulting. “He was finished, don’t you see? Men and women who have fulfilled what they meant to, those who have found answers to a few grave questions about life—not all of the answers, but a few—they end their lives when they choose. They’re ready. And he was. He’d lived exactly as he wanted—wildly, insanely—and now he’s ready for the next. He’s wrung every drop of life out of himself, leaving only dried-up piles of nerves and bones. I know as sure as I know my own name he’ll be dead within a matter of months.”

  I’d found Gallo’s demeanor startlingly efficient and brisk for a woman who’d just lost the focus of her life, the sun that had ordered her days. But then she lifted her head and I saw there were tears in her eyes—waiting for me to leave, so they could slide freely down her sunken cheeks. Silently she led me downstairs to the front door, extended her hand with a brusque “I’ll see you”—a statement we both knew was false. And though I didn’t especially like Inez Gallo and she hadn’t exactly warmed to me, we’d come to a sort of unspoken understanding, found on a surprising patch of common ground: both of us spectators swept up in the wild squall that was Cordova.

  And now here he was, less than two feet away.

  And he was a fragile old man.

  I’d been fighting no one. The crimes, the horrors I’d tried and found Cordova guilty of, seemed laughable now, considering the fact that, all those moments I’d been so certain he was outmaneuvering me, he’d been right here—probably sitting peacefully like this in front of this very window.

  I couldn’t help but be awed by the shock of it.

  Even like this he was having the last word.

  Strange emotion abruptly swelled in my throat. It might have been a laugh or just as easily a sob. Because I realized, staring at this man, that I was actually just staring at myself, at what I’d become much sooner and more suddenly than I’d ever know. Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

  It was so calm standing next to him, so lonely. I swore I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free. It wasn’t the simple lungs of an ordinary man, but the faint howl of a gust of wind as it snagged the rocks of some far-off bluff by the sea. I wondered—another unchecked wave of feeling rising in my chest—what in the hell I was going to say to him after all this, all I’d done and come to see—if I had the nerve to say anything at all.

  Or maybe, like a child encountering the reassembled bones of a dangerous species of dinosaur he’d dreamed about, read about with a flashlight under a comforter for nights and days, maybe I was going to simply reach out and touch his shoulder, wondering if in that touch I could get a sense of what he must have been like when he was alive, in his prime, roaming the Earth, a force of nature, when he wasn’t silent grayed bones on display, but something splendid to behold.

  In the end, all I did was pull up a chair and sit down beside him.

  And together, for what seemed like hours, we did nothing but stare out at that empty lawn, which seemed to hold in its strict boundaries and flawless green, the empty space in which we could pile our memories and questions, what we’d once loved but let go of, taking silent inventory of it all. When I became aware of the music again, piano music, a pale, listless approximation of what Ashley would have played, I realized then that all I was going to say to the man was “thank you.”

  I did. Then I rose and left, not looking back.

  112

  What can I say about the ensuing weeks?

  Marlowe Hughes said it best: “When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams.”

  I drove home from Enderlin Estates, pulled the curtains, and slept for twenty hours, a sleep as blacked-out and resolute as death. I woke up around nightfall the following day, shadows streaked across the ceiling, the dying light outside making the street blush with the elegance of a memory.

  My old life took me back, the old faithful mutt that it was.

  I was somewhat shocked to learn it was December. I spent a few evenings at dinners with friends, most of whom assumed I’d been away, traveling. I let them believe it. In a way it was true.

  “You look good,” quite a few of them remarked, though certain lingering stares seemed to suggest this wasn’t exactly true, that there was something else altered about me, something they sensed best left alone. I wondered, half seriously, if it was residue from the devil’s curse—if, even though it had turned out not to be true, perhaps one never recovered from having once believed. Maybe certain far-flung attic rooms in the brain had been violently broken into—doors bashed in, lamps broken, desks flipped upside down, curtains left dancing strangely by open windows—rooms that would never be reached again or ever reordered.

  But I was thankful for the company, for friends, for light conversation forgotten as soon as it began. I joined in wholeheartedly, I laughed, I ordered wine and duck and dessert, and people slapped me on the back and said they were happy to see me, that I’d been away too long. But occasionally I slipped, unseen, outside all the talk and stared in at it, wondering if I’d stumbled back to the wrong table, the wrong life. I felt at once rested and relieved the investigation was over, but also vague regret, even a dulled longing to go back, to return to something I couldn’t pinpoint—a woman I hadn’t realized had bewitched me until she was gone.

  Lines of laughter on a face, rude waitresses with bony arms, dark figures hurrying along sidewalks eager to get somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird—all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I’d never noticed before.

  Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world—with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.

  Because there could be no doubt about what Gallo told me: I’d phoned Sloan-Kettering Hospital, posing as a health insurance agent from a disorganized HR department. After telling a few half-truths to three different assistant department heads, and giving Ashley’s Social Security number taken from the missing-person’s report—one of the few documents left behind—three different people confirmed it on two different days. Ashley Goncourt had been treated in the pediatric oncology department in 1992 and 1993, 2001 and
2002, and finally in 2004 in conjunction with the University of Texas at Houston, exactly as Gallo had said.

  At night I strolled home on the crooked sidewalks, past silent brownstones with lit-up windows filled with lives. Glasses clinking, the street gasping with laughter as the door of a bar was shoved open—these sounds seemed to follow me longer than they ever had before.

  I hadn’t returned to the Reservoir after seeing Ashley there, but in the aftermath of learning about her sickness, I went back.

  There was no hint of her—not in the water or the green lamplight or the biting wind, the shadows that threw themselves at my feet. I ran, lap after lap, and could think only of how she’d gone to the warehouse and what a lonely walk it must have been, up the steps to the edge of the elevator, which was the edge of her life, staring it down.

  She’d been dying when she’d appeared here. It made sense, given the way she’d walked. She’d been weak, in an especially precarious mental state, according to Inez Gallo.

  Even accepting this, still, something gnawed at me. I’d come to believe Ashley had sought me out because she wanted to tell me something—something crucial and real—her circumstances preventing a direct approach. Now even this had an explanation: Gallo had mentioned Ashley’s fear, that she might cause physical harm to anyone she came in close proximity to—a fear that could very well have begun when she learned what had happened to Olivia Endicott or the tattoo artist, Larry, when they’d been in her presence.

  It had to have been why she stayed away from me.

  In all the stories I’d heard, Ashley stood for the truth. She was the antithesis of weak. Even hunting the Spider, she’d sought him only to forgive. To accept now that it’d been delusions that brought Ashley out here, spinning her straw into gold, a master of manipulation, as Gallo put it, felt off.

  What had Ashley wanted me to know?