Lunar Park

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 day’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.

I enlarged the screen in order to see specifics.

His bookshelves were lined with an array of photographs that had not been there the last time I was in that house: a very brief lunch on Christmas Day, 1991.

There were so many photographs that my eyes started dancing around.

Most of them were of me, and I couldn’t help thinking that they served as some kind of reminder that I had abandoned him.

In a silver frame, the faded Polaroid of a worried little boy wearing suspenders and a red plastic toy fireman’s helmet, innocently holding out an orange to whoever was taking the picture.

Bret, twelve, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt, on a beach in Monterey, behind a house my parents owned in Pajaro Dunes.

My father standing beside me outside the auditorium at my high school graduation. I’m wearing a red cap and gown and am secretly stoned. There is a noticeable space between us. I remember that my girlfriend had taken the picture at my father’s urging. (I flashed on the celebratory dinner at Trumps later that night, when he drunkenly came on to her.)

Another photo of the two of us. I am seventeen—sunglasses, unsmiling, tan. My father is sunburned. We’re standing outside a white church, its plaster cracking, its fountain dry, in Cabo San Lucas. The sun is very bright. On one side is the blue and glimmering enamel of the sea, and on the other are the ruins of a small village. I became almost exhausted by grief. How many times had we fought on that trip? How drunk had he been that week? How many times did I break down during those grueling days? The trip proved so hard to bear that my heart had turned to ice. I had erased everything about it except for the feel of cold sand on my feet and a particular ceiling fan that whirred above me in a hotel room—all else forgotten until now.

And then my eyes drifted to a wall where my father had hung the magazine covers, framed, that I had been on. And another wall featured (even more sadly) photographs of me that he had cut from various newspapers. At that point I surrendered with a moan and had to look away.

My father had become a hermit, someone who either didn’t know his son was lost to him or refused to believe it.

But then the camera—almost as if it realized how drained I was becoming—plunged forward and raced around the side of the house. The camera was bold and covert at the same time.

The camera maneuvered toward a window that looked into a large modern kitchen, where my father reappeared.

Horror kept sweeping over me. Because anything could happen now.

My father opened the stainless steel door of the freezer and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya and clumsily poured a large amount into a highball glass. His gaunt face contemplated the vodka. Then he drank it and began weeping. He took off his T-shirt and drunkenly wiped his face with it. And as he was pouring himself the rest of the vodka, he heard something.

He jerked his head up. He stood motionless in the middle of the kitchen.

He turned and faced the window.

The camera dared him. It didn’t move or try to hide itself.

But my father couldn’t see anything. He gave up. He turned away.

The camera steadily rounded the corner of the house and now offered a view of the small, elegantly landscaped backyard.

The camera followed my father as he walked outside to where the Jacuzzi was churning with steam that the wind swirled around the yard. The moon hung over everything and it was so white that it cut through clouds and illuminated the vines of bougainvillea that covered the walls enclosing this space. My father staggered toward the Jacuzzi, still holding his drink, and tried to slip into it gracefully but instead stumbled, splashing water all over the surrounding Spanish tiles while managing to keep his drink raised high above his head, protecting it. My father submerged himself in the water with only his hand holding the glass of vodka visible above the roiling bubbles.

My eyes kept clinging to the screen. Please, I thought. Please let someone save him.

Once my father downed the vodka he heaved himself out of the Jacuzzi and lurched toward a towel lying on a chaise longue. After drying off he removed the bathing suit and draped it over the chaise. He wrapped the towel around himself and then moved unsteadily into the house, leaving a trail of wet, fading footprints on the concrete patio.

The camera paused and then raced around the corner and did something I was praying it would not.

It went into the house.

It moved through the kitchen. And then down a hallway.

It stopped suddenly when it caught sight of my father dragging himself up the stairs to the second floor.

And when my father turned and kept climbing, his back to the camera, the camera started creeping up the stairs behind him.

My hands were clamped over my ears, and I kept kicking the floor of my office involuntarily.

The camera stopped when it reached the second-story landing. It watched as my father entered the bathroom, a large marble space steeped in light.

I was now crying wildly, pounding my knee as I watched, helplessly transfixed. “What is happening?” I kept moaning.

The camera then crossed the hallway and stopped again. It had a vague and maddening patience.

My father stared at his frail visage in a giant mirror.

And then the camera slowly began moving toward him.

I was aware that it was about to reveal itself to him, and my entire body shuddered with dread.

It was now closer to him than it had ever been. It was directly outside the bathroom door.

And then I noticed something that had been nagging gently at whatever part of myself wasn’t preoccupied with the shock of the video.

At the bottom of the screen, on the right, in digital numbers: 2:38 a.m.

My eyes instinctively darted to the other side of the screen. 08/10/92.

This was the night my father died.

Only the sounds of his sobbing brought me out of the stunned darkness that had instantly covered everything. This was a new dimension now.

Shaking, I refocused on the screen, unable to turn away.

My father gripped the bathroom counter, still sobbing. I wanted to avert my eyes when I saw an empty vodka bottle lying next to the sink.

From somewhere in the house, “The Sunny Side of the Street” began playing again.

The camera kept floating closer. It was now in the bathroom.

It was closing in on my father indifferently.

I stifled a scream when I saw that there was no reflection of the camera or who was behind it in any of the mirrors that walled the bathroom.

And then my father stopped sobbing.

He looked over his shoulder.

And then he straightened up and turned around to fully face the camera.

He stared into its lens.

The camera was an invitation to die.

My father was now looking directly at me.

He smiled sadly. There was no fear.

He said one word.

“Robby.”

And as the camera rushed toward him, he said it again.

The video collapsed into darkness.

The anticlimax of not seeing what happened to my father at the moment of his death forced me to rewind the video to a crucial point that I believed could help me understand what I had just seen and suddenly my movements were calm and purposeful and I was able to concentrate solely on what I needed to do.

Because I did not think there was a camera.

Even now I can’t explain the logic of this, but I did not believe there was a camera in my father’s house that night in August of 1992.

(There had been “certain irregularities,” according to the coroner’s report.)

I found the image of my father standing in the kitchen, with the camera watching him through the window.

And I located immediately what I thought was the answer.

A small, flesh-colored image in the corner of the video, in the lower right-hand quadrant of the screen. It was the reflection of a face in window glass.

It moved in and out of focus even though the image of my father remained steady.

There was no camera videotaping this.

I was seeing something through the eyes of a person.

I enlarged the image.

I pressed Pause and enlarged the image again.

The face became clearer without the overall image being distorted.

I enlarged the image once more and then stopped because I didn’t have to anymore.

At first I thought the face reflected in the window was mine.

For one moment the video showed me that I had been there that night.

But the face wasn’t mine.

His eyes were black, and the face belonged to Clayton.

Years had passed since that night. Almost a decade had passed.

But Clayton’s face wasn’t any younger than the face I had looked into in my office at the college on Halloween, when he held out a book for me to sign.

Clayton couldn’t have been older than nine or ten in 1992.

The face reflected in the windowpane was that of an adult.

I checked the other attachments, and after viewing the next two—October 4 and October 5—I realized it was pointless. They were all the same, except that Clayton’s image became clearer in each one.

Without realizing it I had already reached for my cell phone and was dialing Donald Kimball’s office. He didn’t pick up. I left a message.

An hour passed.

I decided to leave the house and drive to the college and find a boy.