In the Night Room

“What are you talking about?” Tim asked, unsettled by the sudden reappearance on his mental screen of his sister, April.

“If you paid more attention, your real books wouldn’t be all that different from the ones you wrote.”

Kohle seemed wetter than he had been earlier. Greasy moisture covered his sunken cheeks. His filthy sweatshirt was on the verge of disintegration.

“Jasper, I signed your books, and now I’m just about through with this conversation. But if these ‘real’ books exist, how come no one ever showed me one?”

“Authors can’t see them,” Kohle said. “I can’t imagine what the sight of a real book would do to one of you people—total meltdown, I suppose. Most people never get so much as a glimpse at a real book. The collectors manage to scoop ’em up almost as soon as they come out. Once in a blue moon, a reviewer gets a copy. That can be pretty funny. The reviewer flips out over some book that’s a piece of crap, and everyone wonders if he lost his mind. Come to think of it, that happened to one of your books.”

“One of my books was an overpraised piece of crap?”

“Yeah, imagine that.”

Smiling, Jasper Dan Kohle turned his head and watched rain bounce off the roofs of the cars inching down West Broadway.

“You didn’t happen to look through that window and see me eating breakfast in here. You didn’t just want me to sign a couple of books. Are you even a real collector?”

“I collect a lot of things,” Kohle said, amused.

“Why are you here, Jasper? If that’s your name.”

“Don’t worry about my name, Mr. Big-Time Author. Mr. Fifty-five Grand Street.” In his dark, greasy face, the yellow teeth crowded his mouth. “I yam what I yam, and that’s what I yam.” He pushed the books into the bag, pulled the wet hood over his head, and rushed through the door. Tim watched him vanish into the gray street. This hostile being was walking away with samples of his handwriting. Tim felt a flicker of disquiet, as if his signature bore his DNA.

8

The author of In the Night Room was grateful for the medal it had won and the money it had earned, but she had written her third book as an act of rescue, not a means of achieving recognition. Thanks to James’s various life insurance policies, plus the fortune the Baltic Group had paid him in income and bonuses during his lifetime, money, very much a concern during the writing of Fairy Ring and The Golden Mountain, had ceased to be an issue. Her husband’s death payments had underwritten the months she had spent in western Massachusetts under the care of Dr. Bollis and the quiet attendants never less than determined to give their charges what they needed: a comforting book, a comforting hug, or a comforting jab in the upper arm with a needle. Back then, nothing but bloody shreds seemed to remain of the once-familiar Willy. The bloody shreds were usually too limp and wounded to think about reassembling themselves. Her conscious life, the life of her spirit, had been murdered along with her family. For her first two months at the Institute, Willy had groped in darkness at the bottom of a well, grateful for the absence of light, too depleted to commit suicide. She was not wounded, she was a wound.

In Massachusetts, she had no visitors but visiting phantoms.

One day she walked into the dayroom, saw a familiar shape occupying a folding chair, looked more closely as fear moved toward her empty heart, and froze in shock at the reappearance in her life of Tee Tee Rowley, a flinty, sharp-fisted girl who, as ever, held her ground, scowling at Willy.

She had come from the Millhaven Foundlings’ Shelter, established in 1918 and everywhere referred to as either “the Children’s Home” or, as its familiars knew it, “the Block.” All in all, Willy had spent something like two and a half years “on the Block.”

Tee Tee Rowley, who stood five feet tall and weighed perhaps eighty pounds, responded to challenges by squaring up to them and suggesting her readiness to do anything necessary to instill respect in her challenger. Unlike some of her peers, Tee Tee did not default to crazed violence at the first sign of difficulty, but the willingness to employ craziness and destruction spoke from her posture, her eyes, the set of her mouth.

That of all her acquaintances from the Block the one to pay a phantom call should have been Tee Tee made perfect sense to Willy. It was to Tee Tee that Willy, who had begun to enjoy a small reputation as a storyteller, had told the best story of her young life.

From the first, Willy Bryce half-sensed, half-suspected, and, she hoped, half-understood that she had not fully explored the dimensions of the inner life awakened by the books she devoured in the Block’s library: that it contained some element, some enigmatic quality that was of immense importance to her. Deep within, this unknown element shone.

Willy’s discovery of what the unknown element contained had led Tee Tee’s shade to appear. Willy had discovered how to save her own life.

This was how it happened: one day, tough, ten-year-old Tee Tee Rowley materialized before eight-year-old Willy Bryce in the second-floor lounge and asked her what the fuck she thought she was doing there anyhow, you fucking piece of shit. Instead of backing away and slinking off, Willy said, Listen to this, Tee Tee. And told her a story that almost instantly drew half a dozen other girls to that side of the lounge.

If she had stopped to think about what she was doing, doing it would have been impossible. But she did not have to think about the odd little tale. It spun itself out of the unknown element and gave her the right words, one after the other. She launched into the first real story of her life.

—When Little Howie Small stood before the ancient wizard and wiped the tears from his eyes, the first thing he noticed was that a sharp-eyed bird was peering out at him from within the wizard’s enormous beard.

And an entire adventure followed, a story involving an eagle and a bear and a furious river and a prince who rescued his princess-to-be with the aid of a walnut discovered by the bird who had been hiding in the wizard’s beard. The whole thing just rolled off Willy’s tongue as if it had all been written out in advance. Whenever she needed some new information or a fresh development, the perfect thing arrived at the proper moment to be inserted into a blank space exactly its size and shape.

—That was a real good story, said an astonished Tee Tee. You got any more like that?

—Tomorrow, Willy said.

Tomorrow came, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and on each of them, day after day until she walked out of the Block for good, Willy entertained the Tee Tees and Raylettes and Georginas with episodes from the adventurous life of Little Howie Small. As far as she knew, the little person within her who had come into her own, the secret Willy, always told the truth. She was like Scheherazade, except at the time she was not fighting for her life.

That came twenty-nine years later, after her companion on the Block began calling on her in Massachusetts.

—You’re writing again, Willy? asked Dr. Bollis. I think that’s excellent news. Is it a story, or is it about yourself?

—You don’t know anything about fiction, Willy told him.

Dr. Bollis smiled at her. —I do know how important it is to you. Will this one be like your others, or are you going to try something new?

Dr. Bollis had let her believe that he had read her books. Willy thought he had probably read perhaps half of both of them.

—Something new, she said.

Her doctor gave her a look of careful neutrality.

—It’ll be good for me. It already is.

—Can you tell me what it’s about?

She frowned.