Lunar Park

The writer wondered if there was a way we might find out.

The writer wondered if Marta knew.

I looked up from the computer and caught my image in a full-length mirror.

I was wearing khakis, a red Polo sweater over a white T-shirt and Vans, and I was hunched over my son’s computer, sweating heavily. I took off the sweater. I still looked ridiculous.

I turned my attention back to the computer.

I began typing in words that I thought might mean something to Robby.

The names of moons: Titan. Miranda. Io. Atlas. Hyperion.

Each word was denied access.

The writer had expected this and scolded the father for being surprised.

I was not aware as I bent over the computer that the door behind me was slowly opening.

The writer assumed that I had closed the door.

The writer even went so far as to suggest that I had locked it.

I held on to the possibility that I had left it ajar.

As I kept uselessly typing in passwords, the door opened itself fully, and something entered Robby’s room.

And just as the writer decided to type in neverland I realized that Nadine Allen had gotten it wrong.

The word wasn’t neverland.

The word was neverneverland.

Neverneverland was where the missing boys were going.

Not neverland but neverneverland.

The writer told me to type it in immediately.

It broke open the password.

And as the screen filled itself with a digital photo of Cleary Miller accompanied by a long letter dated November 3 that began with the words “Hey RD,” another chasm opened in Robby’s room.

(Robert Dennis was RD.)

I froze when I heard clicking noises behind me.

Before I could turn around there was a high-pitched screech.

The Terby was standing in the doorway, its wings outstretched.

It wasn’t a doll anymore. It was now something else.

It stood perfectly still, but something was stirring beneath its feathers.

The presence of the Terby—and all the things it had done—loosened me from my fear, and I rushed toward it.

When I grabbed it with my sweater I expected it to react in some way.

The animatronic lips below its beak parted to reveal a wide, uneven set of fangs that I didn’t know it had.

The black face seized up—its eyes brightly wet—and its feathers started bristling as I threw the sweater over it.

But when I lifted the doll there was no struggle.

Okay, I told myself, Sarah had left it on. It could move around on its own accord. So it walked down a hallway. It entered a room. I hadn’t shut the door. Sarah simply hadn’t turned the thing off before school.

I slowly pulled the sweater off the Terby—it was reeking and felt soft and pliable, and it was vibrating slightly in my hands.

I turned the doll over to switch off the red light in the back of its neck in order to deactivate it.

But when I turned the doll over the red light wasn’t on.

This fact moved me immediately out of the room.

Whatever fear this caused was transformed into energy.

I rushed to my office for my car keys.

I threw the doll into the trunk of the Porsche.

I purposefully started driving to the outskirts of town.

The writer, beside me, was thinking things through, forming his own theories.

The doll wasn’t activated because no one had turned the doll on.

The doll, Bret, had picked up on your scent.

The doll knew you were in Robby’s room and did not want you to find the files.

Just as it had not wanted you to see what was in Robby’s room on Sunday night.

The night it bit you, it had been aiming for the hand the gun was clenched in.

The thing was protecting something.

It didn’t want you to know things.

Something had wanted the doll placed in your house.

You were simply the go-between.

I needed to call Kentucky Pete and find out where he got the doll from.

I told the writer that this would begin to answer all the questions.

Okay: I had bought the thing last August, and August was the month my father died and—

Stop it, the writer interrupted. There is an empire of questions and you will never be able to answer them— there are too many, and they are all cancerous.

Instead, the writer was urging me to head up to the college. The writer wanted me to pick up the copy of “Minus Numbers”—the manuscript Clayton had left in my office. This would provide an answer, the writer assured me. But the answer would only lead ultimately to more questions and those were the questions I did not want answered.

It was too early to get ahold of Pete, but I dialed his cell and left a message.

At some point I simply pulled the Porsche over next to a field on a deserted stretch of the interstate.

Outside the sky was divided in half: part of it was an intense arctic blue slowly being erased by a sheet of black clouds. Trees were becoming leafless now. The field was glazed with dew.

I opened the trunk.

The writer told me to take note of the sweater I had wrapped the doll in.

The red Polo sweater had been torn apart during the twenty-minute drive from Elsinore Lane to the field off the interstate.

As I lifted the Terby out of the trunk by a wing, I averted my eyes as the doll began urinating a thin stream of yellow that arced from its black body and splashed onto the highway’s pavement.

The writer urged me to notice the crows lining the telephone wires above me as I hurled the doll into the field where it landed, immobile.

Leaves began lifting themselves off the field.

I could hear the sound of a river, or was it waves crashing against the coastline?

The Terby was almost immediately enveloped in a cloud of flies.

In the distance a horse was grazing—maybe a hundred feet from where I stood—and the moment the flies converged upon the doll, the horse jerked its head up and galloped even farther into the field as if offended by the presence of the thing.

Kill it, the writer whispered. Kill the thing now.

You no longer need to convince me, I told the writer.

The writer disliked me because I was trying to follow a chart.

I was following an outline. I was calculating the weather. I was predicting events. I wanted answers. I needed clarity. I had to control the world.

The writer yearned for chaos, mystery, death. These were his inspirations. This was the impulse he leaned toward. The writer wanted bombs exploding. The writer wanted the Olympian defeat. The writer craved myth and legend and coincidence and flames. The writer wanted Patrick Bateman back in our lives. The writer was hoping the