Night Film

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 life. 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.