Lunar Park

14. the kids

As I moved slowly up the stairs toward Robby’s room I could hear the muffled sounds of bullets ripping into zombies emanating from what I thought was his computer. At the top of the stairs I paused, confused, because his door was open, which it never was, and then I realized that since Jayne and I had walked into the house without speaking to each other (she just slipped silently away from me, carrying the complimentary stress basket into Marta’s office) Robby hadn’t heard us come in. Moving closer to the open door, I hesitated again, because I didn’t want to surprise him. I peered cautiously into the room and the first thing I noticed was Sarah lying on his bed gazing dully at something while cradling the Terby. Robby sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, his back to me, maneuvering a joystick as he caromed down another darkened corridor in another medieval castle. As I stared into the room my immediate thought: the furniture was aligned as it had been in my boyhood room in Sherman Oaks. The formation was identical—the bed placed next to the wall adjacent to the closet, the desk beneath the window that overlooked the street, the television on a low table next to a shelf containing stereo equipment and books. My room had been much smaller and less elaborate (I didn’t have my own refrigerator) but the beige earth tones of the color scheme were exact, and even the lamps resting on the nightstands on both sides of the bed were distinct replicas of the ones I had, though the kitsch factor of Robby’s was now considered cool, whereas my lamps from the midseventies were the epitome of a now distant and tacky chic. I let go of the decades separating Robby’s room from mine and returned to the present when my gaze fell on his computer. On the screen, surrounded by text, was the face of a boy, and the boy looked familiar (in a few seconds I realize it’s Maer Cohen), and the face caused me to quietly enter the room unobserved until Sarah looked away from the TV and said, “Daddy, you’re home.”

Robby froze and then stood up quickly, dropping the joystick carelessly to the floor. Without looking at me he walked over to the computer and tapped a key, erasing the face of (I was now certain) Maer Cohen. And when Robby turned around his eyes were bright and alert, and I was so disarmed by his smile that I almost backed out of the room. I started to smile back but then realized: he was putting on a performance. He wanted to distract me from what was on that screen and he was now putting on a performance. Any hint of last night’s cry of “I hate you” had vanished, and it was hard not to stare at him with suspicion—but how much of that belonged to me, and how much of it belonged to Robby? There was an expectant silence.

“Hi,” Robby said. “How was it?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was now my father. Robby was now me. I saw my own features mirrored in his—my world was mirrored there: the brownish auburn hair, the high and frowning forehead, the thick lips pursed together always in thought and anticipation, the hazel eyes swirling with barely contained bewilderment. Why hadn’t I noticed him until he was lost to me? I lowered my head. It took a moment to process what he was referring to. I just shrugged and said, “It was . . . fine.” Another pause during which I realized I was still staring at the computer he was now blocking. Robby looked over his shoulder, a pointed gesture that was a reminder for me to end this interruption and leave.

I shrugged again. “Um, I just wanted to check if you guys had, y’know, brushed your teeth yet.” This inquiry was so lame, so unlike me, that I blushed at the inappropriateness of it.

Robby nodded, standing in front of the computer, and said, “Bret, I was watching something about the war tonight, and I need to know something.”

“Yeah?” I wanted him to be genuinely interested in whatever he “needed” to know, but I knew he wasn’t. There was something off about his curiosity, something vengeful. Yet I wanted to make contact so badly that I let myself believe he wasn’t distracting me from something he didn’t want me to know. “What is it, Rob?” I tried to sound concerned but my voice was flat.

“Will I be drafted?” he asked, cocking his head, as if he sincerely wanted an answer from me.

“Um, I really don’t think so, Robby,” I said, moving in slow motion to the bed Sarah was lying on. “I’m not even sure if the draft exists anymore.”

“But they’re talking about bringing it back,” he said. “And what if the war’s still going on when I turn eighteen?”

My mind fumbled around until it reached: “The war won’t last that long.”

“But what if it does?”

He was now the teacher, and I was the student being manipulated, so I had to sit down on the edge of the bed in order to concentrate more fully on how this scene was playing out. This was the first time since I moved in that Robby was engaging me in a conversation of any kind, and when I tried to find a reason my stomach dropped: What if Ashton Allen had gotten in touch with him? What if Ashton had warned him about Nadine finding the alleged e-mails? My eyes were darting around the room looking for clues. I saw the two boxes half-filled with clothes marked SALVATION ARMY and swallowed hard, fighting off the small and rising panic I was becoming used to. I realized that this had been a scene so rehearsed that I could predict the last lines. I looked back at Robby and couldn’t help feeling that behind the indifference was disgust, and beyond the disgust, rage.

He seemed to notice my suspicions when I found myself staring at the boxes, and he asked, more urgently, “But what if it does, Dad?”

My gaze jumped back at him. The “Dad” did not sound right. He was playing a game, and my instinct was to play along, since that was the only way I was going to find any answers. I wanted to crush the phony specifics and get at some larger truth—whatever it was. I didn’t want to accept anything from him under a false pretense; I wanted him to be genuine with me. But even if he was just going through the motions, he had still initiated a conversation and I wanted to keep it moving.

“Well, you don’t want to . . . die for your country,” I said slowly, thoughtfully.

At the word “die” Sarah stopped playing with the doll and looked over at me worriedly.

“Well, then what should I do?” he asked casually, unconcerned. “If I’m drafted into the army?”

A long pause while I formulated my answer. I tried to come up with simple, practical advice, but when I glanced back at the Salvation Army boxes I suddenly hardened and decided not to play the game anymore. I cleared my throat and, staring straight at him, I said, “I’d run away.”

At the moment I said this whatever false light was animating Robby went out in an instant, and before I could reframe my answer he had already shut down.

He knew I was daring him. He kept standing in front of the computer and I wanted to tell him he could step away, that the face of the missing boy was gone and he didn’t need to block what wasn’t there anymore. Helplessly, I looked at Sarah—who was whispering to the doll—and then back at Robby.

“Why is your sister in here?” I asked quietly.

Robby shrugged. He had already lapsed into his usual silence, and his eyes had become speculative and cold.

“I’m scared.” Sarah tightly hugged the Terby.

“Of what, honey?” I asked, about to move closer to her, even though the presence of the Terby kept me at a distance.

“Are there monsters in our house, Daddy?”

This was Robby’s cue to move away from the computer—the moonscape was now pulsing from the screen—and his confidence that I would become locked in a conversation with his sister relaxed him enough that he sat back down on the floor and recrossed his legs and resumed playing the video game.

“No, no . . .” I shivered as my mind flashed on the rush of images I had dreamt since Halloween. “Why do you ask that, honey?”

“I think there are monsters in the house.” She said this in a thick, drugged voice while hugging the doll.

I wasn’t aware I had said “Well, maybe sometimes, honey, but—” until her face crumpled and suddenly she burst into tears.

“Honey, no, no, no, but they’re not real, honey. They’re make-believe. They can’t hurt you.” I said this even as my eyes took in the black doll in her arms and all the things I knew it was capable of, and then I noticed that the doll didn’t have claws anymore. They had grown, and warped; they were talons now, and they were stained brown. I began formulating plans to get rid of the thing as soon as possible.

Sarah somehow knew that there were monsters in the house—because she now lived in the same house that I did—and she knew that there was nothing I could do about it. She understood that I couldn’t protect her. And at that point I realized the grim fact that as hard as you try, you can hide the truth from children for only an indefinite period, and even if you do tell them the truth, and lay out the facts for them honestly and completely, they will still resent you for it. Sarah’s spasm of crying ended as quickly as it began when the Terby suddenly gurgled and rotated its head toward me, almost as if it didn’t want this particular conversation to continue. I knew Sarah had somehow activated the doll but I had to clench my fist to keep from crying out and moving away, because it seemed so intently to be listening to us. Sarah smiled miserably and held the doll’s grotesque beak (the beak that nibbled flowers at midnight and gutted the squirrels that had been found strewn across the deck—but it was just a matrix of sensors and chips, right?) to her ear as if it had asked her to. She cradled the thing tenderly, with such uncommon gentleness that with any other toy it would have moved me, but at the sight of this thing my stomach dropped yet again. And then Sarah looked up and whispered hoarsely, “He says his real name is Martin.”

(“Grandpa talked to me . . .”)

“Oh . . . yeah?” I whispered back, my throat constricted.

“He told me to name him that.” She kept whispering.

I could do nothing but stare at the thing. From outside, as if on cue, we could hear Victor barking, and then he stopped.

“Is Terby alive, Daddy?”

(Go ahead, look at the scab on your palm. It had gone for the wrong hand, Bret. It was aiming for the hand with the gun in it, but it bit the wrong hand.)

“Why?” I asked hesitantly. “Do you think he is?” My voice was quavering.

She held the doll up to her ear and listened carefully to it and then she looked back up at me.

“He says he knows who you are.”

This forced me to speak up quickly. “Terby’s not real, honey. It’s not a real pet. It’s not alive.” I was intensely aware that I was still glaring at the thing, shaking my head slowly back and forth as if consoling myself.

Sarah held the doll up to her ear once again as if it asked her to.

I restrained myself from grabbing it away from her (I could smell its rotten scent) as she sat up to listen more carefully to what the doll was telling her. And then she nodded and looked back up at me.

“Terby says not in a human way but”—and now she giggled—“in a Terby way.”

She clutched the thing, rocking back and forth, delighted.

I said nothing and looked to Robby for help, but he was lost in the video game or pretending to be, and over the sounds of gunfire and groans I could hear Marta’s car pulling out of the driveway.

“Terby knows things,” Sarah whispered.

I kept swallowing. “What . . . things?”

“Everything he wants to know,” she said simply.

“Honey, it’s time for you to go to sleep,” I said, and then, looking over at Robby, “And I want you to turn that off and go to bed too, Robby. It’s late.”

“You don’t need to worry about me getting enough sleep,” he muttered.

“But it’s my job to worry,” I said.

He turned away from the television and glared at me. “About who?”

“Well,” I said in a tender voice. “About you, bud.”

He muttered something else and turned back to the TV screen.

I had heard what he said. And even though I did not want him to repeat it, I couldn’t help myself.

“What did you say, Rob?”

And then he repeated it without difficulty or shame.

“You’re not my father so don’t boss me around.”

“What are you . . . talking about?”

“I said”—and now he spoke very clearly, his back still to me—“you’re not my father, Bret.”

I was so weakened by this admission—something resentful that had been building up for a long time—and the entire day leading up to it that I was rendered silent. I was exhausted. I carefully stood up from the bed when Jayne entered the room and Sarah shouted out “Mommy!” and instead of saying, I am your father, Robby, and I always have been and I always will be I simply floated out of his realm, letting their mother replace me.

I walked down the hallway, the wall sconces flickering as I passed, and went into the master bedroom, closing the door behind me, and then I leaned against it, and for one brief, awful moment I had no idea who I was or where I was living or how I had ended up on Elsinore Lane, and I checked my jacket pocket for the Xanax that was always there and swallowed two, and then, very carefully and with great purpose, began undressing. I pulled a robe over the boxer shorts and T-shirt I was wearing and then I stepped into my bathroom and closed the door and started to weep about what Robby had said to me. After about thirty minutes passed and I came out of the bathroom, I simply said to Jayne, who was standing in front of a full-length mirror inspecting her thighs (cellulite paranoia), “I’m sleeping in here tonight.” She made no response. Rosa had already folded down the sheets and Jayne, wearing a T-shirt and white panties, slipped into bed and hid herself under the covers. I stood in the middle of the vast room, letting the Xanax wash through my system until I felt calm enough to say, “I want Sarah to get rid of that thing.”

Jayne reached for a script that lay on the nightstand and ignored me.

“I want her to get rid of that doll.”

“What?” she asked irritably. “What are you talking about now?”

“There’s something . . . unwholesome about that thing,” I said.

“What are you overreacting to now?” She flipped the script open and stared at it intently. It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember what day she was leaving for Toronto this week.

“She thinks it’s real or something.” My slacks were lying on my side of the bed, and I moved toward them and picked them up and draped them delicately on a wooden hanger—wanting Jayne to notice how careful and deliberate my movements were.

“Sarah’s fine” was all Jayne said when I walked out of the closet.

“But we were told that she doesn’t hold hands with the other kids at school.”

Her jaw tightened.

“I think she needs to be . . . tested again.” I paused. “I think we need to accept that.”

“Why? Just because she has good taste? Because she’s not the kind of kid who cares about winning Miss Popularity? Because judging by what a mistake it was sending the kids to that horrible school—well, good for her, and by the way . . .”—and now Jayne looked up from the script (its title was Fatal Rush)—“why are you suddenly so concerned?”

I realized that what the teachers had told Jayne that night had offended her deeply, beyond what I had even imagined. Either Jayne did not want to believe the truth about her children—that there were problems not even the meds could alter—or she could not accept that they were damaged in some way related to her behavior and the stress in the household. I wanted to connect with Jayne, but really, all I could think about were the awful drawings Sarah had made of the black doll swooping down on the house, and the things that I knew it was capable of.

“Well, it’s a peer culture, Jayne,” I said as gently as possible. “And that’s—”

“She’s just at an awkward age,” Jayne said, her eyes refocused on the script. And then: “She was tested again, and she attended group therapy for three months and the new meds seem to be working and the speech disability has minimized itself—in case you haven’t noticed.” Jayne turned a page in the script, but I could tell she wasn’t reading it.

“But you heard what the teachers were telling us.” I finally sat down on the bed. “They said she doesn’t know where her personal space ends and someone else’s begins and she can’t read facial expressions, and she’s nonresponsive when people are talking directly to her—”

“The ADD was ruled out, Bret,” Jayne said with barely contained fury.

“—and I mean, my God, didn’t you hear all that shit tonight?”

“You’re not her parent,” Jayne said. “I don’t care if she calls you ‘Daddy,’ but you’re not her parent.”

“But I did hear a teacher tonight tell you that your daughter stands too close to people and talks too loudly and she’s unable to put her thoughts into actions and—”

“What are you doing?” Jayne asked. “What in the hell are you doing right now?”

“I’m concerned about her, Jayne—”

“No, no, no, there’s something else.”

“She thinks her doll is alive,” I blurted out.

“She’s six years old, Bret. She’s six. Wrap your head around that. She’s six.” Jayne’s face was flushed, and she practically spat this out at me.

“And let’s not even get into Robby,” I said. My hands were in the air, signifying something. “We were told he walks around like an amnesiac. That was the word they used tonight, Jayne. Amnesiac.”

“I’m taking them out of that school,” Jayne said, placing the script on the nightstand. “And let’s just stick to your ranting about Sarah. You have thirty seconds, and then I’m turning out the lights. You can either stay or go.” The corners of her mouth were turned down, as they so often had been since I arrived last July.

“I’m not ranting,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Calm down—that’s all this is about.”

“Let’s just talk about this tomorrow night, okay?”

“Why can’t we have a private conversation?” I asked. “Jayne, whatever our problems are—”

“I don’t want you here in this room tonight.”

“Jayne, your daughter thinks that doll is alive—”

(And I do too.)

“I don’t want you in here, Bret.”

“Jayne, please.”

“Everything you say and everything you do is so small and predictable—”

“What about new beginnings?” I reached out for her leg. She kicked my hand away.

“You screwed that up sometime last night between your second gallon of sangria and the pot you smoked and then racing around this house with a gun.” A desperate sadness passed over her face before she turned off the lights. “You screwed that up with your big Jack Torrance routine.”

I sat on the bed a little longer and then stood up and looked down at her in the faint darkness of the room. She had turned away from me, on her side, and I could hear her quietly crying. I stepped softly out of the bedroom and closed the door behind me.

The sconces flickered again as I walked down the hallway past Sarah’s closed door and the door Robby always locked, and downstairs in my office I tried reaching Aimee Light on my cell phone but only got her message. On my computer screen was an e-mail from Binky asking if I could meet with Harrison Ford’s people sometime this week, and I was looking at the screen about to type back an answer when another e-mail appeared from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. This one arrived earlier than usual, and I clicked on it to see if the “message” had changed, but there was only the same blank page. I started to call the bank but then realized that no one would pick up because they were closed by now, and I sighed and just stood up from the computer without turning it off, and then I was moving toward the bed I had become so used to when I suddenly heard sounds coming from the media room. I was too tired to be afraid at that point and I listlessly made my way toward the noise.

The giant plasma TV was on. The movie 1941 was playing yet again—John Belushi flying a plane high over Hollywood Boulevard, a cigar clenched between his teeth, a mad gleam in his eye. As I pressed Mute, I assumed this was a DVD we had bought and that maybe the automatic timer had switched it on. Robby had been watching it last night before Jayne and I left for the Allens’ and he probably hadn’t taken the disc out. But when I opened the DVD player, there was no disc in it. I stared at the TV again, puzzled. I picked up the remote and pressed Info and saw that the movie was playing on Channel 64, a local station. But when I looked through the cable guide for that week the movie wasn’t listed, on that channel or any other; and since Robby had watched it last night I checked the schedule to see if it had been listed for that date. According to the listings it had not been on last night either. And then I remembered passing by Robby’s room on the night of the Halloween party, when Ashton Allen had been sleeping while 1941 blared from Robby’s TV. I checked the cable guide for the thirtieth, and again there was no listing for 1941 anywhere. As I sat in front of the TV, desperately searching for any information about why this particular movie continued playing, I suddenly noticed scratching noises.

They were coming from outside the bay window of the media room.

I immediately turned the TV off and sat there, listening.

And then the scratching noises stopped. After a moment they resumed.

I stood up and started toward the kitchen, the ceiling lights in the living room dimming and flaring on again as I walked beneath them (trying—successfully—to ignore the green carpeting and the realigned furniture). This happened again in the hallway leading to the kitchen, which was dark until the moment I stepped inside, when the lights flickered on. When I stepped back out, the lights dimmed.

When I moved back into the kitchen—they flickered on.

I did this twice, with the same result—an experiment that woke me up slightly.

It was as if my presence was activating the lights.

(Or maybe something is following you—a second thought I did not want to consider at that point.)

From the sliding glass door in the kitchen I stared outside. It was drizzling, but Victor was sleeping on the deck, shivering, lost in a dream, baring his teeth at some unknown enemy, and he didn’t wake up when I unlocked the sliding glass door and walked silently toward the side of the house where the scratching sounds were coming from. But I stopped suddenly when the pool lights flickered on, radiating the water a bright aqua blue, and then just as quickly dimmed, easing the water into blackness. I heard the faint hum of jets coming from the Jacuzzi, and when I looked over it was bubbling, and as if I knew they were going to be there, my eyes scanned to a railing where a pair of the same bathing trunks I had found on Halloween—the ones patterned with large red flowers, the ones from Hawaii that my father had owned—were draped. Steam was rising off them into the cool, damp air as if someone had just taken them off after a dip. I was about to retrieve them (to wring them out, to carry them with me back into the house, to touch them and make sure they were real) when the scratching noises shifted in another direction, farther away but amplified. I ignored the trunks and the wet footprints fading on the concrete surrounding the pool and moved with greater purpose toward the side of the house.

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.