Lunar Park

And every answer is a threat, a new abyss that only sleep can close.

No one would ever say, I will show you what happened and I will make everything perfect by taking you to the vacant places where you won’t need to think of this anymore.

Back at the hotel in Bel Air I slipped Dead Heat on a Merry-Go- Round into the DVD player, simply because it was the first credit on Harrison Ford’s resume and I wanted background noise. It would wash out the distracting silence.

I sat down at the desk and opened my laptop and began writing as the movie played.

Formlessness quickly led to shape.

“Patrick Bateman stands on a burning pier . . .”

I sat motionless during the half hour it took to write the story.

The story was static and artificial and precise.

It wasn’t a dream—which is what a novel should be.

But that was not the purpose of this story.

The purpose of the story was to let myself be carried into the past, advancing backwards and rearranging something.

The story was a denial.

Soon Patrick Bateman’s voice was resonating faintly, whispering and scattered, until he flickered away and was void.

(But he was curious, and he lusted, the writer argued. Was it his fault that he had abandoned his soul?)

Even as he is consumed by flames he says, “I am everywhere.”

At the exact moment I was completing that last sentence, voices from the TV forced me to acknowledge them.

I turned in my chair to face the screen, because coming from the TV, thirty-three minutes into the movie, were the words “Paging Mr. Ellis. Paging Mr. Ellis. Paging Mr. Ellis.”

An impossibly young Harrison Ford in a bellboy’s outfit wanders through the bar of a hotel. He is looking for a guest. He has a message.

James Coburn is sitting at a table in the bar checking out waitresses when he glances over and says, “Boy?”

Harrison Ford walks over to James Coburn’s table.

“Bob Ellis?” James Coburn asks. “Robert Ellis? Room 72?”

I spun around to the computer and clicked Save.

“No sir,” Harrison Ford replies. “Charles Ellis. Room 607.”

“Are you sure?” Coburn asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh.”

And then Harrison Ford wanders deeper into the bar, calling out, “Paging Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis. Paging Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis?” until his voice disappears from the soundtrack.

When I looked at the clock above the TV, it was 2:40 a.m.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9

29. the attack

Robert Miller had begun the cleansing on Thursday, November sixth, starting with the exterminator he always used in such cases, tenting the house at six o’clock that evening. On the following night of November seventh Miller’s team set up their equipment in 307 Elsinore Lane and left, returning on Saturday night— exactly twenty-four hours later—and once it was understood that the space had been cleaned removed their equipment from the house. This was all relayed to me by Robert Miller in a phone call after my plane landed at the Midland Airport at 2:15 on Sunday afternoon as I was driving the Range Rover back into town. Miller felt confident that the house was “safe.” He mentioned “specific changes” that had occurred after his team returned on Saturday. He assured me that I would be pleased with these transformations. The damage that had occurred during the ISR was not “corrected” (the door that flew from its hinges; the hole punctured in the wall) but he insisted I would be gratified by the “physical differences” in the rest of the house. After this conversation, my need to see the house was overpowering. Instead of heading to the Four Seasons I drove to 307 Elsinore Lane.

The first thing I noticed—and I gasped at this as I pulled up to the house—was that the lily white paint had returned, replacing the pink stucco that had infected its exterior. I remember parking the Range Rover in the driveway and walking toward the house in awe, my hand clutching the keys, and the sheer relief washing through me caused my body to feel different. The regret that had been defining me lifted off, and I became someone else. I walked to the side of the house—now the same blank white that had been there in July— and I touched the wall and felt nothing except a sense of peace that, for once, I hadn’t imposed upon myself. It was genuine.

Inside the house, I felt no fear; there was no trepidation anymore. I could sense the change; something had been freed. There was a new scent, a lack of pressure, a difference that was intangible but still able somehow to announce itself forcefully. I was surprised when Victor came loping out of the kitchen to greet me in the foyer. No longer in the basement kennel at the hotel, he was wagging his tail and seemed genuinely excited by my presence. There was none of the usual glowering reluctance emanating from him whenever I entered his line of vision. But I couldn’t concentrate on the dog for long, since the living room had changed miraculously. The green shag had returned to a flat beige sheet, and the curtains from 1976 that were hanging from a window (only days ago) had disappeared, and the furniture was arranged as it had been when I moved in. I closed my eyes and thought: thank you. There was a future (though not in this particular home—I was already planning on moving elsewhere) and I could think about the future because after becoming so used to things not working out I now, for one moment, believed things could change. And the transformation of the house validated this.

Victor’s licking of my hand caused me to reach for the cell phone in my pocket.

I dialed Marta.

(The following exchange was pieced together following a conversation I had with Marta Kauffman on Tuesday, November eighteenth.)

“Marta?”

“Hey—what’s up?” she said. “Are you back?”

“Yeah, I’m actually here at the house. I drove in from the airport to check it out.” I paused as I moved into the kitchen.

“Well, everything’s been pretty good—”

“What’s Victor doing here? I thought I told you not to—”

“Oh yeah,” Marta said. “We just brought him back this morning.”

“Why did you bring him back?”

“He was freaking out in the kennels, and the hotel told me we had to get him out of there. And since you told me the house would be finished by Sunday, we dropped him off a couple hours ago. Is he okay?”

“Yeah . . . he’s okay . . .”

At this point I had moved out of the kitchen and into the foyer.

I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and then, with no hesitation, I started climbing them.

“Well, he was completely unhinged over here,” Marta said. “The cages were small, and he just wasn’t happy and of course Robby and Sarah started getting upset. But once we dropped him off at the house he seemed fine. He totally relaxed and—”

“How are the kids?” I asked, cutting her off, realizing how unimportant Victor seemed to me.

“Well, Sarah’s right here with me—”

“What about Robby?”

(Marta Kauffman later testified that I asked this with an “unnatural urgency.”)

“Robby went to the mall with some friends to see a movie.”

(“Who came back to the house when you dropped Victor off?” I do not recall asking this but according to Marta Kauffman’s deposition on November eighteenth, I had.)