I just stared up helplessly at the great mirage of the peeling wall. The entire wall, from the ground to the roof, was now the color of pink stucco, dwarfing me. The scratching sounds weren’t coming from that wall anymore. That wall had completed itself, I realized, and the peeling was now occurring elsewhere, around front. When I moved past the corner of the house and stood on the lawn, the scratching noises stopped, but only for a moment. They resumed the second I located the patch of paint above my office window that was starting to peel off. In the glare of the street lamps I could see the house actually scarring on its own accord. Nothing was helping it. The paint was simply peeling off in a fine white shower, revealing more of the pink stucco underneath. It was doing this without any assistance. I became entranced by the flecks of paint sifting down onto the lawn and I moved closer to the house, in awe of the widening patch of salmon-hued paint that was revealing itself. There was another house beneath this one. And my memory flashed to a summer day from 1975: I was in the pool, and I was looking up at our house in Sherman Oaks while lying on a raft, and the flash got stronger as I reached my hand to the corner above my office window, stretching my arm as high as it would go, and when I touched the wall of the house on Elsinore Lane I finally made the connection, and it was so simple. Why hadn’t I realized this before?
The paint that was revealing itself to me was the same color as the house I grew up in.
It was the same color as the house on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks.
This realization left me blind for a moment, and then the belief returned.
I moved quickly back inside, where I walked to the living room.
The lights didn’t flicker this time. They remained steady and glowing.
I now realized what had been bothering me about the furniture and the carpet: the chairs and tables and sofas and lamps were arranged just as they had been in the living room of the house on Valley Vista.
And the carpet was now the same forest green shag.
I also knew that footprints had embedded ash into the carpet, but it was now so dark that they were no longer visible.
I stared up at the ceiling and realized that the entire layout of the house was exactly the same.
This was why the house had felt so sharply familiar to me.
I had lived in it before.
And then this was interrupted by another flash.
I walked back into the media room and turned on the plasma TV.
1941 was still on Channel 64 with the sound off.
I had seen this movie with my father in December of 1979 at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.
1941 was the year my father was born.
And in a matter of seconds—at the dawning of this realization—I heard the familiar sound of the AOL voice repeating itself, over and over, from the computer in my office: “You’ve got mail, you’ve got mail, you’ve got mail . . .”
As I entered the office I saw that I was receiving an endless scroll of e-mails from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks.
When I stepped in front of the computer the e-mails abruptly stopped flowing.
Through that long night I just sat in my office, numb, waiting for something, while my family slept upstairs. Everything around me was faintly vibrating, and I kept picturing a gray river made of ash flowing backwards. At first I was filled with a sort of wonderment, but when I realized it wasn’t tied to anything in particular, the wonderment crumbled into fear. And this was followed by grief and the piercing echoes from a past I didn’t want to remember, so I concentrated instead on the predictions rippling through me that, because of their dark nature, I then had to ignore. The denial of everything would pull me gently away from reality, but only for a moment, because lines started connecting with other lines, and gradually an entire grid was forming and it became coherent, with a specific meaning, and finally emerging from the void was an image of my father: his face was white, and his eyes were closed in repose, and his mouth was just a line that soon opened up, screaming. My mind kept whispering to itself, and in my memories it all was there—the pink stucco house, the green shag carpeting, the bathing suits from the Mauna Kea, our neighbors Susan and Bill Allen—and I could see my father’s cream-colored 450 SL as it crossed the lanes of an interstate lined with citrus trees, racing toward an off-ramp, not far from here, called Sherman Oaks, and sometimes on the night and early morning of November fourth I laughed with disbelief at the noises roaring in my head and I kept talking to myself, but I was a man trying to have a rational conversation with someone who was losing it, and I cried let it go, let it go, but I could no longer avoid recognizing the fact that I had to accept what was happening: that my father wanted to give me something. And as I kept repeating his name I realized what it was.
A warning.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
15. the attachments
As consciousness returned I felt hungover even though I wasn’t. I wanted a cigarette but it passed. The hours blurred as I sat outside in a chair on the deck. I had wrapped a blanket around myself and walked out of the house and sat in a chair on the deck. When the sky became a huge white screen I finally faced the house with my insomniac glare as its inhabitants began waking up. The blandness of its exterior contradicted what lay within the house and there was no reason to go back inside, even though I felt something pulling me toward it, some kind of force urging me to reenter. The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information—these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning—to restructure the evidence so it made sense—and that is what I failed at. There was a crow hidden somewhere in the barren trees behind me and I could hear the flapping of wings and when I saw it circle above me tirelessly I stared at it since there was nothing else to look at in the blank air and there were things I didn’t want to think about
(and on this deck tonight another squirrel will be turned inside out by a doll you bought for a little girl)
but this was what happened when you didn’t want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you. My father was following me
(but he has been following you forever)
and he wanted to tell me something and it was urgent and this need was now manifesting itself. It was in the peeling of the house and the lights that flickered and dimmed and it was in the rearrangement of the furniture and the wet bathing trunks and the sightings of the cream-colored Mercedes. But why? I strained but my memories weren’t of him: a lit swimming pool, an empty beach at Zuma, an old New Wave song, a deserted stretch of Ventura Boulevard at midnight, palm fronds floating against the dark purple streaks of a late-afternoon sky, the words “I’m not afraid” said as a rebuke to someone. He had been erased from everything. But now he was back, and I understood that there was another world underneath the one we lived in. There was something beneath the surface of things. The leaves in the yard needed raking. A faint and secret argument was coming from next door in the Allens’ house. Suddenly I thought, It will be Christmas soon.
From the chair on the deck I could see into our kitchen, which erupted in bright light at exactly seven o’clock. I was watching a film in a foreign language: Jayne dressed in sweats, already on her cell. Rosa slicing pears (imagine slicing a pear at this moment—I couldn’t). And then Marta brought Sarah downstairs and Sarah was holding a bouquet of violets and Victor weaved slowly in and out of the crowded room and Robby soon appeared in his Buckley uniform (gray slacks, white Polo shirt, red tie, blue blazer with the griffin insignia on the front pocket) and he moved weightlessly, as if submerged in space, through the kitchen. It was all so calm and purposeful. He handed Jayne a piece of paper and she glanced at it and then gave it to Marta for proofreading. Robby’s hair was brushed straight back without a part—was this the first time I noticed? Attention was being paid to a da
y’s worth of packed schedules. The standard negotiations were being agreed upon. Plans were formed and accepted. The quick early-morning decisions were being made. Who was in charge of the first shift? Who would oversee the second? Certain things needed to be sacrificed so there would be a few complaints, some minor whining, but everyone was flexible. The pace quickened slightly as Robby let Marta reknot his tie, and then Jayne, hand on hip, encouraged Sarah to eat from a plate lined with pear slices. The new day was about to begin, and reluctance was not allowed. I wanted to be welcomed into the kitchen. I wanted to be part of that family, and I wanted my voice to sound neutral for them, but I was out of breath and a cold hand pressed lightly against my heart. I imagined Sarah asking how flowers got their names, and I remembered Robby, stone-faced, pointing out a star to Sarah in the night sky and telling us both that the light was coming from a star that was already dead, and his tone of voice suggested to me that the house on Elsinore Lane used to be his house before I arrived, and I needed to remember that.
(That I had this son was astonishing to me on the morning of November fourth, but I had to figure out how I got to this point—and why I was here—in order to take any pleasure in the astonishment.)
Robby frowned at something Jayne said and then looked up at her with a sly grin, but as she walked out of the kitchen the grin faded and I sat up a little (because it was a reproduction of a grin and not the real thing) and his face simplified itself. He stared at the floor for a long time, then efficiently rationalized something—it clicked right away—and he moved on. There was no place for me in his world or in that house. I knew this. Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine?
(But isn’t that what people do?)
If anyone had seen me out on the deck wrapped in a blanket, they pretended not to.
The idea of returning to a bachelor’s life, and the condo I still kept on East 13th Street in Manhattan, was sliding toward me with an acid hiss. But a bachelor’s life was a hard maze. Everyone knew bachelors lost their minds, grew old alone, became hungry specters who could never be sated. Bachelors paid maids to do their laundry. Another Glenfiddich ordered in a nightclub you were far too old for, chatting up ponderous young girls who made you bristle and wince about all the things they didn’t know. But in that chair on that deck I thought: Get out of Midland County, grow a goatee, smoke cigarettes again, seduce women half your age (but successfully), arrange a nice workspace in a sunny corner of the condo, become less maniacal about form, confide all your secret failures to friends. Free Bret. Start over. Get younger. Absorb yourself back into the world of teenage flameout and the curving murals of scorched corpses—the things that had made you a youthful success. Continue your refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. Streamline yourself. Stop shrugging. Eliminate chic. Avoid all fey irony. Erase the jacket cover with the fuchsia lettering you had once desired. Get the full body wax and the spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. Act like you’ve just blown in from nowhere. Push the gangsta attitude with a very straight face. Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful and fake it all was.
Because 307 Elsinore Lane was haunted, and this was the only alternative I could come up with on that Tuesday morning. I needed something—the distraction of another life—to alleviate the fear.
But I didn’t want to travel back to that world. I wanted the idyllic glossiness of our life (more accurately, the fulfilled promise of that life) returned to me. I wanted another chance. But I could express this wish only to myself. What I needed to do was put it into action and prove that I hadn’t dropped out, that I hadn’t killed the buzz, that I could rejuvenate. I needed to prove that somehow I could shift out of the slow lane. I was still young. I was still smart. I was still convinced of things. I hadn’t lost it entirely. I could move through the hassle. I could erase Jayne’s resentment
(What had happened to the way she used to come as soon as I entered her and the nights I watched her face as she slept?)
and I could make Robby love me.
I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man’s vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.
(Though I didn’t know this on November fourth, that morning would be the last time I ever saw my family together again.)
And then—as if it was preordained—all of these thoughts triggered something. An invisible force pushed me toward a destination.
I could actually feel this happening to me physically.
A small implosion occurred.
I was staring at the crow circling above me and in that instant I suddenly realized something.
There were attachments.
Where?
There were attachments on the e-mails coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks.
My chest started aching and I could barely sit still but I waited in that chair on the deck until my family disappeared from the kitchen and I heard the Range Rover pull out of the driveway, and the moment the automated timers activated the sprinklers on the front lawn I hurried into the house.
I nodded to Rosa, who was cleaning the kitchen as I rushed past her, and then I bumped into Marta outside my office—the specifics of the conversation I can’t remember; the only important information was Jayne’s departure for Toronto the next day—and I just nodded at everything Marta said, wrapping the blanket tighter around myself, and then I was in my office, locking the door, dropping the blanket, fumbling with the computer, propping myself in the swivel chair. I could see my reflection in the computer’s black screen. Then I turned it on and my image was erased. I logged on to AOL.
“You’ve got mail,” the metallic voice warned me.
There were seventy-four e-mails.
On each of the seventy-four e-mails that had arrived the night before—the flurry of them materializing the moment I’d been making my connections—there was an attachment.
When I backtracked to the first e-mail—which had arrived on October third, my father’s birthday—there was an attachment on that one as well.
I had never noticed these before, paying attention only to the blank pages that arrived nightly at 2:40 a.m., but now there was something to download.
I started with the first one that arrived on October third.
On the screen: 03/10. My e-mail address. And the subject: (none).
My right hand was shaking when I clicked on Read. I grabbed my wrist with the left hand to control it.
A blank page.
But a video document was attached, labeled “no subject.”
I pressed Download.
A window appeared and asked, “Do you wish to download this file?”
(Wish—what a strange verb choice, I thought idly.)
I pressed Yes.
File name: “no subject.”
I pressed Save.
“The file has been downloaded,” the metallic voice promised.
And then I clicked on Open File.
I breathed in.
The screen went black.
And then a picture slowly emerged onto the screen, revealing itself as a video.
The video focused on a house. It was night and fog had rolled in and was curling around the house but its rooms were brightly lit—in fact the lights seemed too bright; it was as if the lights were meant to ward off loneliness. The house was a modern two-story structure in what looked like an upscale neighborhood. The houses on either side of this one were identical, and the image seemed both familiar and anonymous. The camera was filming this from across the street. My eyes locked on the silver Ferrari parked crookedly in front of the garage, its front wheels resting on the dark lawn that sloped down from the house. And I realized, with a sick amazement, that this was the house my father had moved to in Newport Beach after my parents divorced. I cried out and then clamped a hand over my mouth when I saw him
through the large bay window, sitting in his living room, wearing a white T-shirt and the red, flower-patterned shorts he’d bought at the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii.
A car drove by silently on Claudius Street, its headlights breaking through the fog, and after it passed, the camera started gliding up the granite pathway toward my father’s house, agile yet unhurried, its movement cold and inscrutable.
I could hear the waves of the Pacific crashing and foaming against the shore, and from somewhere else the yapping of a small dog.
The camera carefully honed in through the large pane of glass to where my father sat hunched over in an armchair, surrounded by the polished wood and mirrors of the living room. And there was music—a song I recognized, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” playing inside the house. It had been my grandmother’s favorite song and the fact that the song meant anything to my father surprised and touched me, and this pushed away the terror for a moment. But the terror returned instantly when I realized that my father had no idea this video was being shot.
My father stood up abruptly when the song ended, gripping the chair as if for support, uncertain of where to go next. He had been a swaggering and theatrical man, tall and bulky, but in his solitude he looked tired (and where was Monica? Twenty-two, boots, a pink coat, blond—she had been living with him up until a month before he died, and she was the one who had found his body, though there was no sign in this video that she lived in the house anymore). My father looked exhausted. Gray stubble covered his neck and gaunt cheeks. He was holding an empty glass. He staggered out of the living room. But the camera lingered in front of the window, taking inventory: the lime green carpeting, the lame impressionist paintings (my father being the sole client of a rural French artist represented by the Wally Findlay gallery in Beverly Hills), a massive white sectional couch, the glass coffee table on which he displayed his collection of Steuben bears.