In the Night Room

Mrs. Gross as my second-grade teacher. You did, but I didn’t. What would happen if I tried to call the Institute? It wouldn’t have a number, would it? Because it isn’t there. Just like Dr. Bollis.”

“To look on the bright side, there isn’t any Baltic Group, either.”

“But Giles Coverley and Roman Richard still exist, and I’m sure they’re still trying to find us.”

“I bet they’re running into a lot of problems right about now.”

“I bet they’re scarfing down a lot of sugar right about now. But I guess I don’t have to worry about Mitchell anymore.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not exactly true,” I said.

“Save it. Is this the place?”

A tall, vertical sign outlined in lights spelled out CHICAGO STATION above a long, rectangular building faced with stone. I drove into the lot and parked under the only tree in sight.

“You’re not paying for lunch. I should split everything with you. Do you know how much money is in that bag back there?”

“A hundred thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.”

Her face went soft and confused, almost wounded. I was afraid she would start to weep.

“Did I tell you that? Don’t answer.”

She got out of the car and opened the back door. The long white bag lay across the seat, and she pulled it toward her and unzipped the top. Curious about what all that money looked like, I stood behind her as she reached in and lifted a neat, banded bundle of bills out of the bag. “Let’s just take two of them,” she said. “You carry them.”

Willy tugged two of the hundreds out of the pack and handed them to me. She leaned back into the car to replace the rest of the bundle, and I looked at the topmost bill in my hand. What I saw made me gasp. For a hideous moment it struck me as funny. It was a hundred-dollar bill of the usual size, color, and texture. The numbers were all in the right places. Just left of the center, in the big oval frame where Benjamin Franklin should have been, was what looked like an old-fashioned steel engraving of me, in three-quarter profile, from the top of my head to the base of my neck. I did not look anything like as clever as Franklin, and I appeared to be wearing my old blazer and a button-down shirt with a frayed collar. The little scroll beneath the portrait gave my name as L’Duith.

“Your money’s no good in this town,” I said, settling at the end for a cheap joke. “Take a look.”

Willy stared at the front of the bill, glanced up at me, then back at the bill. “That’s your picture on there.”

“So it seems,” I said.

Now she was so dumbfounded she seemed hypnotized. “How did that happen? How did you do that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Let’s go into the restaurant and get some real food in you.”

Willy took my arm like a wounded child. “Look, do I actually exist?”

26

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

“Of course you exist,” I told her. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

Willy leaned out of our booth and waved to a waitress taking orders at one of the tables in the middle of the room.

“But as you have noticed, you don’t quite exist in the normal way.”

“How come the town I live in and the Institute I went to aren’t real anymore, when they used to be? How come the stuff I remember seems to come from you? What the hell happened, did you make me up or something?”

The waitress appeared at our booth and gave us each a laminated menu. “Oh, aren’t those cute?” she said, pointing at the hundred-dollar bills Willy had left on the table. “They almost look real. Can I pick one up?”

“You can keep it, if you like,” Willy said. “I gather they’re not exactly—what’s the word?—fungible. I want a hamburger, medium. With fries. Make that two hamburgers, with fries.”

The waitress said, “Wow, it even feels real. So your name is L’Duith? What is that, French?” She was a comfortable woman in her mid-forties who looked as though she had been born wearing a hairnet.

“It’s part of an anagram,” I said. Willy was staring at me intently. “I’ll have a medium burger, too. And a Diet Coke.”

The waitress went off to the kitchen, and Willy focused on me in a way I found extravagantly painful.

I looked down at my hands, then back at her. Her eyes concentrated on mine, and I knew she was watching for signs of evasiveness or duplicity. She would have spotted a lie or a deliberate ambiguity before the words left my mouth.

“Right after we sat down, you asked me if I made you up. I don’t suppose you were being completely serious, but you hit the truth right bang on the head. Everything you know and everything that ever happened to you—in fact, everything you ever did before you showed up at that reading—came out of my head. As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be God.”

“You know, when I first saw you, I did think you were kind of godlike. I worshipped you. And you were certainly pretty godlike in bed!”

The waitress chose that moment to place two glasses of water on our table. Her face made it clear that she’d heard Willy’s last remark and had interpreted it to mean that I was a lecherous pig. She wheeled away.

“Oops,” Willy said.

“I worship you, too,” I said. “These simple words, all this deep feeling. I hope this is what God feels for his creatures.”

I moved my hand to the center of the table, and she placed hers in it. We were both on the verge of tears.

“Say more,” Willy said. “This is going to be the bad part, I know, but you have to tell me. Don’t be weak now. How could you make me up?”

She was right. I had to tell her the truth. “Before you showed up, I was writing a book. Its first sentence was something like, ’In a sudden shaft of brightness, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick turned her slightly dinged Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the temptation’— no, it was ‘compulsion’—’having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice,’ I forget what comes next, something about driving a little more than two miles on Union Street, which I also happened to make up.”

“Your first sentence was about me.”

“You didn’t exist until I wrote that sentence. That’s where you were born. Hendersonia was born then, too, and Michigan Produce, and the Baltic Group, and everything else.”

“That’s nuts. I was born in Millhaven.”

“Should we call the Births and Deaths office, or whatever it’s called, and ask them to find your birth certificate?”

She looked uncomfortable.

“Willy, the reason you couldn’t find Hendersonia in the atlases is that Hendersonia only exists in the book I was writing. I named it after a book about Fletcher Henderson.”

“In your book, you named a town after another book?”

“The name of the book is Hendersonia. A man named Walter C. Allen wrote it. It’s a wonderful book, if you’re obsessively interested in Fletcher Henderson. Do you know who he was?”

“A great bandleader and arranger. In the twenties, he hired Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Big influence on Benny Goodman.”

“See? You’re not a geeky jazz fan, Willy. You know that because I know it. Stuff from my head, at least the kind of stuff I think is important, gets into yours. Your memory is really my memory.”

“This is . . . Even with the things that have been happening, it’s still hard for me to believe that . . .” She removed her hand from mine and made a vague shape in the air.