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?”
(
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
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.
