Lunar Park

never paid attention). The case received, at first, substantial media coverage, but because Jayne refused to participate in the parade of grief that was demanded of her, the press slowly lost interest. Plus there were so many fresh horrors—the dirty bomb in Florida, the hijackers who killed the air marshals—that the disappearance of a movie star’s son took a back seat to what was becoming this country’s future. Jayne hired a private investigator to stay on the case. (But what case? Boys leave. He was gone. He had orchestrated this absence himself, as had all the others.) Jayne went into seclusion while Sarah just kept asking, “When is Robby coming back?” until the question conspired against her and additional meds were prescribed so that Sarah became as catatonic as her mother. And even though I knew Robby was never coming back, and that Robby had left us and that he had wanted to leave, I still asked, “Why?” The writer whispered answers to me that I half heard before the Ambien took effect: Because his spirit had been broken. Because you never existed for him. Because—in the end, Bret— you were the ghost.

Regarding the details of the attack, I didn’t tell anyone about them (how could I?) even though I remembered enough of what happened that I relive it daily. People seemed satisfied that the dog had attacked me, and there was too much evidence—my mauled leg, the blood on the staircase leading to Robby’s room, the manager of the kennel at the Four Seasons verifying that Victor had been “unstable and uncomfortable” and “behaving so strangely” that the dog had to be removed—for my story not to make sense. (And it made sense because I never mentioned what the Terby did.) However, when I described what happened on the street concerning the accident with the Range Rover and the 450 SL, I was greeted with skepticism. At that point my recollection was deemed unreliable by everyone, and I was supposed to be comforted by the idea that I had lost too much blood to remember anything clearly. When Ann and Earl Bishop called 911 and ran out to the car smashed against their oak tree, they did not recall seeing another vehicle. The scenario that seemed most viable was that I had swerved out of the driveway, losing consciousness, and careened into the oak in the Bishops’ yard. There was “minimal” evidence (very faint traces of a cream-colored paint) that another car “might” have been involved, but since no cream-colored 450 SL was registered in this or any bordering state, my account of the accident was written off; it was considered a memory lapse due to blood loss. In other words, I had hallucinated the car and the boy walking toward me. (All the writer would say: The boy was you.) Also, “Victor” was not found. Something that the authorities first thought was perhaps a “skinned deer” was located that Sunday afternoon in the woods behind the house. But there was no blood trail leading from the house to the woods where it died, which meant that whatever had attacked me had not dragged itself all the way from the second floor of the house and across the meadow to the bank of trees. (The writer mentioned that something had crawled up the chimney; the writer mentioned that something had “flown” across that field.) The veterinarian who examined the carcass determined it was most likely “a coyote” that somehow had been turned “inside out.” (I never discovered exactly what it actually was, but according to the veterinarian it was not Victor.) The police who surveyed the scene at the house had confirmed the existence of the nests but in the end these were attributed to something “your son” had made, though Robby took no classes at Buckley in which any remotely similar project had been assigned, but did it really matter? What part did the nests play in the “unfortunate incident” with our dog? When I asked about the “objects” in the nests, I was told they were “cracked open” and “empty”—they were just the remnants of shells. “Why did you want to know this, Mr. Ellis?” I was asked with a grave concern bordering on hostility. (The writer whispered so no one could hear him: Tell them they hatched.) Added note: When I was found in the Range Rover, my hair had turned completely white.

I was “allowed” to resign from the college. When I cleaned out the office a week after my release from the hospital, I finally looked at the manuscript that “Clayton” had left on November fourth. Entitled “Minus Numbers,” it seemed almost to the word the rough draft of the novel I had written my freshman term at Camden—the novel that became Less Than Zero. Only one copy existed before I rewrote it (and, like the others, it was on a shelf, in a closet, in the bedroom in Sherman Oaks). But by then I had stopped wondering how “Clayton” had gotten ahold of this. When I went back to L.A., I compared the manuscript to mine and it was a total duplicate—an exact replica. Even the misspellings and typos had been transcribed. The reason I let go of this was that there was no information suggesting that “Clayton” had ever existed. This is the easiest route to take, the writer assured me.

But Aimee Light had existed. And the body that was discovered in the Orsic Motel was, in fact, hers. The man responsible for her murder, Bernard Erlanger, had presented himself to me as Donald Kimball, a man who believed he was, in fact, Patrick Bateman. A man who had become so obsessed with a book and its main character that he fell over the edge. Bernard Erlanger, who had run an unsuccessful detective agency in Pearce (that never had any affiliation with the Midland County Sheriff’s Department), confessed to the killings that “Donald Kimball” had told me about in my home on November first. These admissions were made after Bernard Erlanger was arrested outside a residence in Clear Lake, wearing an Armani linen suit, a cotton shirt and silk tie, leather wingtips from Cole Hahn and a raincoat. He was also carrying an ax. The residence belonged to Paul Owen, sixty- five, a widower who ran an independent bookstore in Stoneboat. At approximately 2:30 a.m. on the Sunday morning of November ninth, Paul Owen heard someone breaking into his home. He dialed 911. He locked himself in his bedroom. He waited. Someone tried to open the door. There was a pause before Bernard Erlanger began swinging the ax at the door repeatedly, until a patrol car arrived. He was arrested and without any questioning simply admitted to the killings of Robert Rabin, Sandy Wu, Victoria Bell and Aimee Light, as well as the attack on Albert Lawrence, the transient he had blinded the previous December. I did not want to know anything more about Bernard Erlanger. I did not want to believe that Bernard Erlanger had anything to do with the murders in Midland County because I wanted to believe the killer never existed. I never disputed the crimes—they actually happened and people had died brutally. But I still wanted to believe that the killer was fictional. That his name was Patrick Bateman (not Bernard Erlanger, or even Donald Kimball), and for a brief time over the course of a year he had become real, as so many fictional characters ultimately are for their creators—and for their readers as well. The reasons I wanted to believe this (and a part of me still does) not only lay in the Amelia Light murder in that unread draft of American Psycho but also because at the exact moment I finished the story at the Bel Air Hotel in which Patrick Bateman dies burning on a pier, the Clear Lake Patrol arrived at Paul Owen’s residence.

Four weeks after Robby was officially declared missing, Ashton Allen disappeared.

Jayne left Midland County and moved to Manhattan, as did I. She wanted a divorce, and there was nothing to negotiate, but I learned a few things. I hadn’t known there was a house in Amagansett that Jayne had recently purchased for the family, or that she had already planned an elaborate Christmas trip to London that was going to be a surprise (and now, of course, was canceled). When I had arrived in Midland County that summer I did not pay attention to the fact that Jayne wanted to build a long future with her husband. She really had wanted things to work out between us. But she should have known that you could look right through me. She should have known that the reason I was there had nothing to do with her, but that I was just trying to locate someplace where I might find the will to live again. The process of the divorce struck me as fairly meaningless since we had hardly seemed married in the first place. But her lawyer insisted. Jayne wanted a complete break and she did not want anything connecting us ever again. I would give her that: no contact whatsoever with her or Sarah. I was distressed but explained to my lawyer that our strategy was one of acceptance. So I met with our respective lawyers (men we were paying six hundred dollars an hour to help terminate everything) on a warm, rainy day the following April in an office in the Empire State Building. I apologized for being late. My reason: “I’ve never been to the Empire State Building before.” An important pause seemed to fill the room after I admitted this. Hands were extended, smiles were forced. It was hard for me to stay awake because of the heroin I was now taking daily. As if in an echo chamber, I heard someone mention that since there had been no prenuptials, would this cause a “difficulty” with the proceedings? No. Our son was lost, so the word “custody” never came up. Jayne waived alimony. My lawyer tiredly went through the rest of the motions. Jayne was thinner and did not say anything to me, which made me flash back to a time when we were so close that we could finish each other’s sentences. I wanted to tell her that I still loved her, but that was not what she wanted to hear. She kept tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture I had never seen her make before but which she constantly repeated during the forty-five minutes in her lawyer’s office. We were so high above the city that I had to focus very hard on the wide oak desk in front of us in order not to drop free-falling into vertigo. What was framed within the window was an aerial photograph. I was considering Europe when I asked myself: Why are Jayne and I taking the easy way out? But then it was over. The papers had been signed. I was the first to leave the office. As I pushed the button for the elevator I had to clench my jaw tightly so I wouldn’t start crying. For reassurance I reached in my raincoat and touched the