In the Night Room

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.

“Let me tell you some things about yourself that I couldn’t have learned from Tom Hartland, who was, by the way, another fictional character of mine.”

Willy sat back in the booth, her hands in her lap, looking like a schoolgirl about to enter the principal’s office.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had written about her. The events of the previous two days had made some of the details recede. “You almost broke into a produce warehouse, but the thought of Mitchell Faber snapped you back into the real world. You realized that Mitchell Faber and your daughter couldn’t exist in the same world because your daughter was dead, so she couldn’t possibly be in that building.”

Her eyes widened.

“And it’s a good thing you changed your mind, because shortly after you got back into your car, a young policeman drove up behind you. He didn’t believe how old you were until you showed him your driver’s license. He told you that you couldn’t have too many worries—to look so young, he meant. And when he saw your address on Guilderland Road, he knew your house right away. When you tried to thank him, he told you to thank Mitchell Faber instead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I wrote it. I put that part in to indicate that the police were not going to be very helpful later on, when you escaped into Manhattan. In this book, you were supposed to be hunted by the police as well as Faber’s goons. Which is exactly the situation you’re in now, except I’m with you.”

“What was the name of this book?”

“In the Night Room.”

She absorbed that silently.

“There is a real night room,” I said with a sudden recognition. “It’s in Millhaven.”

“A real night room. I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s a room where it is always night. Because of the terrible things that happened there.” I took a leap into the dark. “To you.”

“When was this supposed to happen?”

“In your early childhood—the years you can’t remember. You don’t really remember anything that happened before you were sent to the Block. All you have of your first six or seven years is the sense that your parents loved you. That is a fantasy, a false memory. You use it to conceal what your life was actually like in those years.”

“That’s a goddamn lie.”

“Willy, none of this happened in real life. I made it all up. It’s fiction, and I know what I wrote—I don’t blame you for not believing me, and I can’t blame you for getting angry, but I know your history better than you do.”

She took that, too, in silence. For the first time in our conversation, I had used the word “fiction.”

“What else can I tell you? When you started to rearrange things in the house on Guilderland Road, sometimes an expression on Coverley’s face reminded you of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.”

She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice the arrival of our waitress, who to get her attention had to say, “Excuse me, miss, your hamburgers are ready.” The woman put the plates on the table, and the glasses, and a bottle of ketchup, and Willy did not take her eyes from me for a second.

When the waitress had left, Willy immediately picked up one of her hamburgers and took an enormous bite out of it. She groaned with pleasure. Then she glanced at me and spoke a mushy, “Sorry.”

I watched her eat for a time, unwilling to make further demands on her attention. It was like watching a wolf devour a lamb. Every now and then she pushed French fries into her mouth; every now and then she sipped at her Coke.

After vaporizing the first hamburger, Willy wiped her mouth with her napkin and said, “You can’t imagine how much I needed that. I need this one, too.”

“How’s the lightness?”

“I don’t think I’m going to start disappearing anytime soon. We’re just talking about hunger now, basic hunger.” She attacked another batch of French fries. “Look. Part of me thinks it’s really creepy that you know these things about me. It’s like you went around peering through the windows and rummaging through the drawers, like you listened to my phone calls. I don’t like it. But another part of me, the part that loves you, is thrilled that you know so much.”

She bit into the second hamburger. Chewing, she said, “You shouldn’t know these things. But your face shouldn’t be on that money, either, and there it is.” She leveled a French fry at my handsome portrait. “What’s this L’Duith business, anyhow? You said it was part of an anagram.”

“The full version is Merlin L’Duith. Can you figure that out? You’re very good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, so it should be easy for you.”

Willy popped the french fry into her mouth and stared at the altered banknote. “Um. Two L’s. An N and a D-E-R. That’s easy. It’s an anagram for Tim Underhill.”

“I started Part Two of my book with a message from Merlin L’Duith, in other words myself, who said that he was the god of your part of the world, plus Millhaven. Merlin, who’s a magician, wanted to speed the plot along, so he summarized the day you met Tom Hartland at the King Cole Bar.”

“Why is your face on that money?”

“Probably because I didn’t bother to say anything about Benjamin Franklin, and when the bills came through, there I was.”

She pondered that.

“Merlin did something a little strange in his section. He let you notice the bits that he dropped out of your life. The lost hours, the transitions that never happened. He’s a god and a magician—he can do anything he likes.”

Willy stopped eating and, in an almost belligerent way, stared at me for a couple of beats. She resumed chewing. She swallowed; she sucked Coke into her system. “That was in your book? You did that? Hiding behind this Merlin anagram.”

“I had you notice the gaps that people in novels can never be aware of, because if they did, they’d begin to realize that they are fictional characters. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it, I just thought it would be interesting. I wanted to see what would happen. As it turned out, that was probably one of the things that let you leave the book and wind up in my life.”

Her stare darkened. She wasn’t blinking now.

“I hated those gaps. They made me feel that I really was losing my mind.”

She shoved her plate away, and the waitress, hoping to get us out of her territory very soon, instantly materialized at our booth and asked if we wanted anything else.

“Pie,” Willy said. “We heard you’re famous for your pies.”

“Today we have cherry and rhubarb,” the waitress said.

“I’ll have two slices of each, please.”

Willy waved her off and pointed a lovely finger at me. “Okay, you, or Merlin L’Duith, deliberately let me notice that these transitions had been left out of my life. But why did you have me leave Hendersonia in the morning and arrive in New York nine hours later? What was the point of that?”

Willy had turned a crucial corner, though she did not know it. She had already bought what I was selling. I wondered how long it would take her acceptance to catch up with her.

“You had to get there at night so that it would be night when Tom Hartland came to your room.”

“Why?”

“So that he could sleep in the same bed with you. At your invitation. It was the quickest solution—make it night instead of day. Whoops, nine hours gone.”

“Do you know how disconcerting that is?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

“You wanted Tom Hartland in bed with me because you wanted to be in bed with me. I’m right, aren’t I? If you invented me, you didn’t understand me very well, and no wonder, because you don’t understand yourself, either.”

“In the way you mean, I do,” I said.

“If you invented me, you did a BAD JOB!”

Before scurrying away, the waitress put two plates in front of Willy and, unasked, a cup of coffee. It was as though she had never been there at all.

“I didn’t want to go to Michigan Produce,” Willy said. “I didn’t want to hear my daughter screaming for help. How could you do that to me?” She levered a big section of cherry pie onto her fork and pushed it into her mouth. “You never understood what kind of person I was. I’m so much better, so much stronger than you thought. All you saw was this weak little woman being pushed around by men.” Her voice wobbled, and she brushed tears away from her eyes. “I suppose I’m not even a writer anymore. I suppose I didn’t have any talent.”

“Not at all. I gave you a beautiful talent, and an imagination so strong that twice you used it to rescue yourself.”

“On the Block and then in the Institute, you mean.” For at least a minute and a half, she ate big forkfuls of pie while crying steadily. Then she wiped her eyes again and looked over at me. “Would you care to know why I’m willing to believe all this bullshit of yours?”

“Please,” I said.

“Do you remember when I went to the bathroom in the Lost Echoes Lodge? After breakfast this morning? It’s nothing out of the ordinary for you, is it? But when I got into the bathroom, it was like I had to tell myself what to do. I couldn’t remember ever using a toilet before in my life. And every time I go to the bathroom now, I marvel at how strange it all seems to me. For the first thirty-eight years of my life, I never used a toilet!”

It was true. She never had, and I had never thought about that. In all of fiction, probably, urination scenes are specific to men.

“I have to sit somewhere else for a while,” Willy said. Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and her eyes seemed half again as large. “Whatever you do, don’t bother me.”

She carried the plate of half-eaten rhubarb pie to the last booth in the line across from the bar. Because just about everybody in the room watched her go, I realized that they had been eyeing us ever since Willy had shouted that I had done a BAD JOB.

The waitress slipped into Willy’s booth and started talking in that earnest manner people adopt when they think they are telling difficult truths. I thought Willy would get rid of her in about ten seconds. It took five. The waitress came scuttling out of the booth, looking like a hen trying to stay ahead of a fox, and everyone else pretended to ignore the drama we had brought to Chicago Station.

It took Willy something like twenty minutes to collect herself and make her way back through the tables in a gunfire of glances questioning and dismissive. (Some of those older ladies thought she deserved every bit of the punishment they assumed I was giving her.) She slid in, extended her arms over the table, and let herself tilt limply back against the dark wood behind her. “I give up,” she said in a defeated voice. “I’m a fictional character. There isn’t any other explanation. You created me. I don’t belong in this world, which is the reason I feel this way—the reason I’m in danger of fading away. Fading out. Put me back in the world where I belong, crummy as it was. In that world I was a person, at least.”

“I can’t,” I said. “That world doesn’t exist anymore. You’re here, and I can’t finish the book.”

“So I’m just going to eat a hundred candy bars every day until unreality finally catches up with me and I disappear.”

I signaled for the check. The waitress moved up to the booth with the deliberation of an ocean liner coming into a narrow port. She slapped the slip of paper down on the table and backed away. I looked at the total and started counting out bills.

“I trust that we have dealt with the big secret,” Willy said. “And I have to admit, it’s a doozy. What’s the little one, the one Tom didn’t want to tell me?”

“Brace yourself,” I said. “Tom knew something that made him worried and unhappy every time you mentioned your daughter. He didn’t want to tell it to you because he thought you’d hate him, or fall apart, or both. He was on the verge of suggesting that you see a good psychiatrist.”

“I’m waiting.” And she was: under the limpness and the weariness she was communicating enough tension to make the air crackle.

“Remember that Holly wasn’t in that photograph of your husband’s body you found in Mitchell’s office?”

She nodded.

“There’s a good reason Holly wasn’t in the photograph. You didn’t have a daughter. You and Jim were childless.”

Willy looked for signs that this preposterous chain of sentences was somehow supposed to be funny, or a trick, or anything but a statement of fact. When she saw no such sign, she got angry with me.

“That’s unspeakable. It’s obscene.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t love you anymore. I never did—how could I love someone capable of saying that to me?”

“What was Holly’s birthday?”

“What difference does that make?” Willy started to scramble out of the booth, and I caught her arm.

“Tell me about her birth. What was it like? Did you have a doctor or a midwife? Home birth, or hospital?”

In her suddenly colorless face, her eyes blazed at me. She stopped trying to fight her way out of the booth. “She was born . . .” Her eyes went out of focus; softly, her mouth opened. “I know this, of course I know it.” She closed her eyes, and I let go of her arm. “Doesn’t my life, this existence of mine, seem pretty stressful to you? When I feel like this, I really can’t remember everything. If you give me a second, it’ll come back to me.”

“All right,” I said. “Let it come back to you.”

Willy opened her eyes, tilted her neck, and looked at various spots on the ceiling, as if hunting for the answer she needed. “Okay. Holly was born in a hospital.”

“Which one?”

She let her eyes drift down to my face. “Roosevelt.”

“Willy, you got that from me. That’s the hospital my doctor sends me to. How much did your baby weigh?”

She went back to searching the ceiling. A couple of seconds later, she licked her lips. “She weighed a normal amount, for a baby.”

“You don’t have any idea of how much that would be, do you?”

She made a rapid, inaccurate calculation. “Ten pounds.”

“Way too much, Willy. Don’t you think it’s odd that you can’t remember giving birth?”

“But I did give birth, I had a daughter.”

“Willy, the little girl who was murdered was a version of your childhood self. She was you. Do you know why you’re named Willy?”

She shook her head.

“In my book, your real name was Lily—Lily Kalendar. You couldn’t pronounce the letter L, so you called yourself Wiwwy, and people thought you were saying Willy. And the name of your hero, your incredibly brave, smart, inventive boy, was Howie Small. Howie equals Holly the way Willy equals Lily. That’s how I got these names—from a little girl’s lisp.”

“My father’s name was Kalendar. You said that was someone’s name. What was his first name?”

“Joseph.”

“Tell me about him.”

“If you look into what you already know, Willy, you’ll find everything you need to know. Lately, Joseph Kalendar has been in my thoughts a great deal.”

“I don’t know anything . . .” She began to protest, but her voice died away. Whatever surfaced in her mind, on loan from mine, disturbed her greatly. The initial look of shock on her face gradually melted into sorrow, and tears filled her eyes again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “How many women did he kill?”

“Six or seven, I can’t remember which.”

“And my brother. And my mother.”

“Probably. No one ever found her body.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Willy asked.

We stepped outside into strong sunlight and moved slowly toward the car. It was like walking someone out of a hospital. She looked at my face. “This is what you know about my father.”

I nodded. Before Willy got into the car, she said, “He built secret hallways and staircases into our house.” She was still stunned. Her face was all but immobile. “And he built . . .” She stared at the fact she had just conjured and could not speak.

“He built an extra room at the back of the house. Get in now, Willy.”

Like a child, she climbed in. Her eyes were glazed. “He built that extra room. It had a slanting roof that came right down to the ground. It had a huge big wooden bed in it. My father did things there, things I can’t remember. And that was the real night room.”

I closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. Despite the shade I had found, you could practically have cooked a pot roast in the interior of the car.

“There were no lights in that room. And it didn’t have any windows.”

Willy was doing nothing more than parroting what she found in our shared memories. She wasn’t even close to responding to them, for they were not yet part of her emotional life. She had been overloaded with information, and what she had learned had exhausted and numbed her.

Her next question surprised me. “What were you going to do with me at the end of your book?” A little wall-eyed, her head back against the cushion, she spoke as though about someone in whom she had once taken an interest.

“You were going to walk into your old house at 3323 North Michigan Street, in Millhaven. That’s where Joseph Kalendar lived. You were going to go into the night room, meet the Lily who became Willy, and understand that she was the child you wanted to rescue. Or something like that. I was still working it out. The only reason you wanted to break into that warehouse was that it had MICHIGAN painted on its facade. What really drew you in was the part of your childhood you had blotted out.”

I started the car and turned up the A/C. Cool air streamed from the vents, lowering the temperature layer by layer, from the floor mats up.

“Was it going to be beautiful, your ending?”

“I think it was, yes.” I backed out of our space beneath the tree and headed toward the exit. “When I thought about it, it seemed very beautiful.”

“And I screwed it up for both of us.”

“No, I did,” I told her. “In the book that’s just about to be published, I implied that Joseph Kalendar had killed his daughter. His spirit, or whatever you want to call it, has been after me ever since he found out. He’s enraged.”

“What does my father want? What is he looking for?”

I got us back on the road out of Willard and moving toward 224. What did Joseph Kalendar want from me? I remembered the name of the little Ohio town where Willy and I had stumbled across Mr. Davy’s splendid Lodge and within Room 119, overlooking the parking lot, first fallen into each other’s arms. “Restitution,” I said. “That’s what the old madman is looking for.”

“Well, I want it too. What was the story about my husband’s murder? Did Mitchell kill him?”

“I’m not absolutely sure. I hadn’t worked it out yet.”

“Well, did Mitchell take those pictures?”

“Probably.”

“How come a man at that hotel in Nanterre told me he was checked out, and ten minutes later another man said he was still there?”

“I was going to figure that out later.”

“Would a banker really ever transfer money like that, without a signature?”

“Probably only in Hendersonia,” I said.

Neither one of us noticed the mud-slathered Mercury Mountaineer that had been trailing us, always six or seven cars back, since we’d left the restaurant.