It didn’t want me to find Robby.
I became furious and I smashed my hand into the dog’s face as it kept blindly snapping at me. Fresh blood burst from its snout. I smashed my hand again into its face.
The face kept spouting blood, and the dog continued shrieking.
I started screaming back at the dog.
I was sliding in place as I looked up to see how far I had to go before reaching the landing.
It was about eight steps.
I started pulling myself upward, dragging my mangled leg behind me.
And then I felt the thing leap on my back when it realized where I was going.
I whirled over, knocking the thing off me.
I thrashed around in all the blood, trying to kick it away.
I vomited helplessly onto my chest, and then whispered, “I hear you I hear you I hear you.”
But this promise did not work any longer.
The dog gathered strength and reared up like a horse on its hind legs, looming over me, its wings obscenely outstretched, flapping them, spraying us with more blood.
At that moment I lifted my left leg up and, without thinking, kicked it hard in the chest.
It toppled back, trying to beat its wings to keep in place, but they were still too heavy with blood and flesh and it fell backwards, sliding to the bottom of the staircase and landing on the floor, shrieking, while trying to scramble upright with insectile urgency.
On the landing, I began crawling madly toward Robby’s room at the top of the stairs.
Below me, the thing righted itself and started scrambling up the staircase after me, snapping the horribly uneven rows of fangs that now made up its mouth as it neared.
I lunged forward and slid into Robby’s room, slamming the door shut and locking it with a hand soaked in blood.
The thing threw itself against the door.
It had moved up the staircase that quickly.
I lifted myself up and clumsily hopped on one foot toward the window.
I collapsed in front of it and fumbled with the latch.
I looked behind me because it was suddenly so quiet.
Beyond my trail of blood the door was bulging forward.
And then the thing started shrieking again.
I opened the window, balancing on my left leg, and crawled onto the ledge, blood splattering everywhere.
I remember not caring as I let myself fall.
It wouldn’t be a long drop. It would be escape. It would be peace.
I landed on the lawn. I didn’t feel anything. All the pain was concentrated in my right leg.
I lifted myself up and I began limping toward the Range Rover.
I slid into the driver’s seat and I started the ignition.
(When asked, I answered that I did not know—nor can I supply a reason now—why I hadn’t gone to a neighbor after the attack.)
Moaning to myself, I put the car in reverse and pressed on the accelerator with my left foot.
Once I had backed out of the driveway and was stationary in the middle of Elsinore Lane, I saw the cream-colored 450 SL.
It had turned the corner of Bedford and was now a block away.
Watching it glide closer I saw someone in the driver’s seat: grim-faced, determined, recognizable.
As if he had been sequenced into my dreams, it was Clayton who was driving the car.
When I saw Clayton’s face I let go of the steering wheel and the Range Rover, still in reverse, spun backward and then halfway around so that it was blocking Elsinore.
I tried to regain control of the car as the 450 SL kept moving forward.
It was speeding up.
I braced myself as it slammed into the passenger side of the Range Rover.
The collision pushed the SUV over a curb and into the oak tree that stood in the middle of the Bishops’ front yard, with such force that the windshield exploded.
Everything started falling away from me.
The 450 SL extracted itself from the wreckage and backed away into the middle of Elsinore Lane. The Mercedes was not damaged.
It was daylight, I noticed as I began losing consciousness.
Clayton stepped out of the car and started walking toward me.
His face was a red and indistinct moon.
He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn when I saw him that Halloween day in my office at the college, including the sweater with the eagle on it. The sweater I had once owned when I was his age.
Steam was curling from the Range Rover’s crumpled hood.
I couldn’t move. My entire body was throbbing with pain. My leg was soaked with blood. It kept gushing through the bite marks in my jeans.
“What do you want?” I started to scream.
The Range Rover kept shuddering because my foot was locked against the accelerator.
The boy was floating closer, moving steadily toward me, relaxed.
Through my tears I began to make out his features more clearly.
“Who are you?” I was screaming as I sobbed. “What do you want?”
Behind him I could see the house melting away.
He was now standing by my window.
He was staring at me so starkly it was as if he were sightless.
I tried positioning myself so I could open the door, but I was trapped.
“Who are you?” I kept screaming.
I stopped asking that question as his hands reached out to me.
That was when I realized there was someone else who was more important.
“Robby,” I started moaning. “Robby . . .”
Because Clayton was—and had always been—someone I had known.
He was somebody who had always known me.
He was somebody who had always known us.
Because Clayton and I were always the same person.
The writer whispered, Go to sleep.
Clayton and the writer whispered, Disappear here.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10
30. the awakening
I regained consciousness in a hospital room at Midland Memorial the day after the first surgery to save my leg was completed. The operation had lasted five hours. I had been sleeping for more than twenty-four hours.
When I woke up Jayne was standing over me. Her face was swollen.
My first thought: I am alive.
The relief was short-lived when I saw the two police officers in the room.
My second thought: Robby.
I realized that they had been waiting for me to wake up.
I was asked, “Bret . . . do you know where Robby is?”
The room was cold and empty and I felt something humming beneath the fake calm. There was a horrible insistence to the question that was barely restrained.
I whispered something that caused a disturbance. What I whispered was not what they were hoping for.
Jayne’s exhausted face died. I became blinded by it.
When we were told that Robby Dennis was now officially missing I could not describe the sounds Jayne began making, and neither could the writer.
31. the endings
Questions the writer asked me: How long do you hold on to a child? You have to decide if the world is worth returning to, and in the end, what are your options? I know where Robby went, but do you?
For the first few days after Robby’s disappearance I was still recuperating and underwent four more operations—so substantial was the damage to my right leg—and during this time I was lost in the mercy flow of the morphine drip. Ultimately the leg would be saved, and doctors told me I should be grateful, but the only thing I could think about was Robby. There was nothing else to take the place of that. We were conscious of only that one thing. We could only wait and then, as time passed, we began waiting without hope. But Jayne kept coming out of the cave she would hide herself in and emerge newly determined, even after admitting it was all useless. Why? Because I had offered her something to grasp on to with the deposition I gave when I told the Midland a
uthorities I believed our son was a runaway and that he had not been abducted. When asked why I believed this “theory,” I realized very quickly that there was nothing to sell them. I had not seen the e-mails to—or from?—the other missing boys on the afternoon of November fifth because the computer had died (and when the police searched the house after the attack, the computer was no longer in Robby’s room, even though I told them I was positive I had seen it) and the evidence of a conspiracy (a drunken Nadine Allen, the playful whispers of boys in the courtyard of a mall, the two Salvation Army boxes I’d glimpsed in Robby’s room—no one could ascertain if any clothing was missing or not—and the twelve trips we eventually estimated he made to Mail Boxes Etc. in October alone, the point of which we still could not decipher) was too thin to hang anything on. But again: what did it matter if they ran away or if they had been kidnapped? The boys were gone. All that anyone knew was that Robby and Ashton had been dropped off at the Fortinbras Mall by Nadine Allen on the morning of November ninth (according to Nadine, Robby was wearing a backpack) and had bought tickets for a movie that began at noon. Robby, according to an oddly calm and eerily serene Ashton, had whispered that he needed to use the restroom and left the theater. He never returned. No one saw him wandering the mall. No one saw him anywhere else in Midland County. Only the writer saw him disappearing into his new world.
Jayne could not fathom my lack of fear or anger. She called my despair “rehearsed.” Her resentment toward my acceptance caused us—almost immediately—to separate from each other. Our only consolation: nothing worse can come to us. I didn’t want explanations, because in those, my failure would take shape (your love was a mask, the scale of your lies, the irresponsible adult at loose, all the things you hid, the mindless pull of sex, the father who never paid attention). The case received, at first, substantial media coverage, but because Jayne refused to participate in the parade of grief that was demanded of her, the press slowly lost interest. Plus there were so many fresh horrors—the dirty bomb in Florida, the hijackers who killed the air marshals—that the disappearance of a movie star’s son took a back seat to what was becoming this country’s future. Jayne hired a private investigator to stay on the case. (But what case? Boys leave. He was gone. He had orchestrated this absence himself, as had all the others.) Jayne went into seclusion while Sarah just kept asking, “When is Robby coming back?” until the question conspired against her and additional meds were prescribed so that Sarah became as catatonic as her mother. And even though I knew Robby was never coming back, and that Robby had left us and that he had wanted to leave, I still asked, “Why?” The writer whispered answers to me that I half heard before the Ambien took effect: Because his spirit had been broken. Because you never existed for him. Because—in the end, Bret—you were the ghost.
Regarding the details of the attack, I didn’t tell anyone about them (how could I?) even though I remembered enough of what happened that I relive it daily. People seemed satisfied that the dog had attacked me, and there was too much evidence—my mauled leg, the blood on the staircase leading to Robby’s room, the manager of the kennel at the Four Seasons verifying that Victor had been “unstable and uncomfortable” and “behaving so strangely” that the dog had to be removed—for my story not to make sense. (And it made sense because I never mentioned what the Terby did.) However, when I described what happened on the street concerning the accident with the Range Rover and the 450 SL, I was greeted with skepticism. At that point my recollection was deemed unreliable by everyone, and I was supposed to be comforted by the idea that I had lost too much blood to remember anything clearly. When Ann and Earl Bishop called 911 and ran out to the car smashed against their oak tree, they did not recall seeing another vehicle. The scenario that seemed most viable was that I had swerved out of the driveway, losing consciousness, and careened into the oak in the Bishops’ yard. There was “minimal” evidence (very faint traces of a cream-colored paint) that another car “might” have been involved, but since no cream-colored 450 SL was registered in this or any bordering state, my account of the accident was written off; it was considered a memory lapse due to blood loss. In other words, I had hallucinated the car and the boy walking toward me. (All the writer would say: The boy was you.) Also, “Victor” was not found. Something that the authorities first thought was perhaps a “skinned deer” was located that Sunday afternoon in the woods behind the house. But there was no blood trail leading from the house to the woods where it died, which meant that whatever had attacked me had not dragged itself all the way from the second floor of the house and across the meadow to the bank of trees. (The writer mentioned that something had crawled up the chimney; the writer mentioned that something had “flown” across that field.) The veterinarian who examined the carcass determined it was most likely “a coyote” that somehow had been turned “inside out.” (I never discovered exactly what it actually was, but according to the veterinarian it was not Victor.) The police who surveyed the scene at the house had confirmed the existence of the nests but in the end these were attributed to something “your son” had made, though Robby took no classes at Buckley in which any remotely similar project had been assigned, but did it really matter? What part did the nests play in the “unfortunate incident” with our dog? When I asked about the “objects” in the nests, I was told they were “cracked open” and “empty”—they were just the remnants of shells. “Why did you want to know this, Mr. Ellis?” I was asked with a grave concern bordering on hostility. (The writer whispered so no one could hear him: Tell them they hatched.) Added note: When I was found in the Range Rover, my hair had turned completely white.
I was “allowed” to resign from the college. When I cleaned out the office a week after my release from the hospital, I finally looked at the manuscript that “Clayton” had left on November fourth. Entitled “Minus Numbers,” it seemed almost to the word the rough draft of the novel I had written my freshman term at Camden—the novel that became Less Than Zero. Only one copy existed before I rewrote it (and, like the others, it was on a shelf, in a closet, in the bedroom in Sherman Oaks). But by then I had stopped wondering how “Clayton” had gotten ahold of this. When I went back to L.A., I compared the manuscript to mine and it was a total duplicate—an exact replica. Even the misspellings and typos had been transcribed. The reason I let go of this was that there was no information suggesting that “Clayton” had ever existed. This is the easiest route to take, the writer assured me.
But Aimee Light had existed. And the body that was discovered in the Orsic Motel was, in fact, hers. The man responsible for her murder, Bernard Erlanger, had presented himself to me as Donald Kimball, a man who believed he was, in fact, Patrick Bateman. A man who had become so obsessed with a book and its main character that he fell over the edge. Bernard Erlanger, who had run an unsuccessful detective agency in Pearce (that never had any affiliation with the Midland County Sheriff’s Department), confessed to the killings that “Donald Kimball” had told me about in my home on November first. These admissions were made after Bernard Erlanger was arrested outside a residence in Clear Lake, wearing an Armani linen suit, a cotton shirt and silk tie, leather wingtips from Cole Hahn and a raincoat. He was also carrying an ax. The residence belonged to Paul Owen, sixty-five, a widower who ran an independent bookstore in Stoneboat. At approximately 2:30 a.m. on the Sunday morning of November ninth, Paul Owen heard someone breaking into his home. He dialed 911. He locked himself in his bedroom. He waited. Someone tried to open the door. There was a pause before Bernard Erlanger began swinging the ax at the door repeatedly, until a patrol car arrived. He was arrested and without any questioning simply admitted to the killings of Robert Rabin, Sandy Wu, Victoria Bell and Aimee Light, as well as the attack on Albert Lawrence, the transient he had blinded the previous December. I did not want to know anything more about Bernard Erlanger. I did not want to believe that Bernard Erlanger had anything to do with the murders in Midland County because I wanted to believe the killer never e
xisted. I never disputed the crimes—they actually happened and people had died brutally. But I still wanted to believe that the killer was fictional. That his name was Patrick Bateman (not Bernard Erlanger, or even Donald Kimball), and for a brief time over the course of a year he had become real, as so many fictional characters ultimately are for their creators—and for their readers as well. The reasons I wanted to believe this (and a part of me still does) not only lay in the Amelia Light murder in that unread draft of American Psycho but also because at the exact moment I finished the story at the Bel Air Hotel in which Patrick Bateman dies burning on a pier, the Clear Lake Patrol arrived at Paul Owen’s residence.
Four weeks after Robby was officially declared missing, Ashton Allen disappeared.
Jayne left Midland County and moved to Manhattan, as did I. She wanted a divorce, and there was nothing to negotiate, but I learned a few things. I hadn’t known there was a house in Amagansett that Jayne had recently purchased for the family, or that she had already planned an elaborate Christmas trip to London that was going to be a surprise (and now, of course, was canceled). When I had arrived in Midland County that summer I did not pay attention to the fact that Jayne wanted to build a long future with her husband. She really had wanted things to work out between us. But she should have known that you could look right through me. She should have known that the reason I was there had nothing to do with her, but that I was just trying to locate someplace where I might find the will to live again. The process of the divorce struck me as fairly meaningless since we had hardly seemed married in the first place. But her lawyer insisted. Jayne wanted a complete break and she did not want anything connecting us ever again. I would give her that: no contact whatsoever with her or Sarah. I was distressed but explained to my lawyer that our strategy was one of acceptance. So I met with our respective lawyers (men we were paying six hundred dollars an hour to help terminate everything) on a warm, rainy day the following April in an office in the Empire State Building. I apologized for being late. My reason: “I’ve never been to the Empire State Building before.” An important pause seemed to fill the room after I admitted this. Hands were extended, smiles were forced. It was hard for me to stay awake because of the heroin I was now taking daily. As if in an echo chamber, I heard someone mention that since there had been no prenuptials, would this cause a “difficulty” with the proceedings? No. Our son was lost, so the word “custody” never came up. Jayne waived alimony. My lawyer tiredly went through the rest of the motions. Jayne was thinner and did not say anything to me, which made me flash back to a time when we were so close that we could finish each other’s sentences. I wanted to tell her that I still loved her, but that was not what she wanted to hear. She kept tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture I had never seen her make before but which she constantly repeated during the forty-five minutes in her lawyer’s office. We were so high above the city that I had to focus very hard on the wide oak desk in front of us in order not to drop free-falling into vertigo. What was framed within the window was an aerial photograph. I was considering Europe when I asked myself: Why are Jayne and I taking the easy way out? But then it was over. The papers had been signed. I was the first to leave the office. As I pushed the button for the elevator I had to clench my jaw tightly so I wouldn’t start crying. For reassurance I reached in my raincoat and touched the gun lodged there that I now carried with me everywhere. On Fifth Avenue I could barely raise my arm to hail the cab that would take me back to the condo on 13th Street, the space I had first moved to in the spring of 1987 when I was a young and famous novelist and didn’t know anything except that luck kept sighing over me, a place where it seemed as if I had all kinds of time, a place where fame seemed to be a good idea and the flash from a light meter had been my only source of guidance. By now I was living with a young sculptor named Mike Graves (who was about twelve years younger than I) and sometimes he was in the condo on 13th Street, and sometimes he was in his studio in Williamsburg. I fell into the relationship not knowing what I was doing or whom I needed, and I assumed he felt the same, or at least I hoped he did. He had a grimness, a resolve, that I mildly responded to, and I liked the way he folded himself against me, and how he would trace his fingers over the scars on my leg, and I needed him on the mornings when summer lightning would awake me from nightmares and twisting in bed I would grasp his hand and moan my son’s name.