Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Hopefully, it wasn’t contagious.

I checked my watch but saw it had stopped after being submerged in the pool. It read 7:58, which couldn’t be right. It had to be later.

And then, heaving my backpack over my shoulder, I stepped out of Thumbscrew, following along the scaffolding to see what else was in this massive soundstage, what other worlds plucked from Cordova’s treacherous head I could sift through like an archaeologist searching for bones.

When it became too dark to see anything, I took a picture, looking at it in the camera’s screen.

An enormous red bird had been crudely spray-painted across the concrete wall to my left. I’d seen it in articles about Cordova. It was what Cordova’s fans used as a way to invoke the man’s presence, an anonymous sign calling for him to return. I moved on, stepping around the end of the scaffolding, entering what appeared to be a vast room. I could dimly make out an enormous mountain in front of me strewn with boulders. I took another photo and realized the mountain was garbage, the boulders corroded gasoline barrels, sprouting like giant mushrooms across the expanse.

I took off across it, knocking right into a wooden sign.

MILFORD GREENS LANDFILL

DO NOT ENTER

HAZARDOUS

I was in La Douleur —French for the pain.

The film’s meek and mousy heroine, Leigh — receptionist at a car dealership by day, community college student by night — agrees to spy on her best friend’s husband and not only becomes smitten with him — a native German named Axel — but gets dangerously entangled in his gangland dealings.

The first night, she follows his maroon Mercury Grand Marquis all over town, eventually ending up here sometime around dawn, the Milford Greens Landfill. Leigh watches Axel park his car and take off on foot across the junkyard, flocks of seagulls wafting off the trash like a screeching exhaust.

He carries a small bag, its color the unmistakable robin’s-egg blue of Tiffany —the jewelry store. Spellbound, Leigh tiptoes after him, her hair going fizzy, her frumpy blouse untucking from her skirt. She climbs inside an old funeral hearse to spy on the man as he scales the hill to an overturned school bus. After removing a paper bag from behind the front wheel, Axel sticks the Tiffany bag in its place. Leigh waits for him to drive away, then makes her own way to the school bus, skidding and sliding through the debris. She pulls out the Tiffany bag, and inside finds a small blue Tiffany ring box —a box commonly used for engagement rings. Leigh is about to open it, when, noticing a black car pulling into the junkyard parking lot, she loses her balance and slips, the blue Tiffany box clattering through an open window into the derelict bus. Leigh goes after it. Within minutes, the thug known simply as Y shows up to collect the Tiffany bag. It doesn’t take him long to discover the bag empty, Leigh cowering inside the bus. And that’s the moment La Douleur morphs from voyeuristic suspense into a spellbinding wrong man nightmare.

The landfill didn’t smell hazardous. There was a musty dampness in the air, as if this were a subterranean basement sealed for years, and faintly within it, a smell of gasoline. I stopped to check behind me and saw with surprise that it looked as if I were actually outside. Colossal screens mounted along the scaffolding gave the impression of wide-open sky. I could discern ghostly clouds painted there, though at least twenty feet above, the screens cut out to the empty black soundstage. The effect was dizzying, seemed to suggest some truth about the inherently blinkered nature of human perception. If only you looked a little farther, McGrath, you’d see it all gave way to … nothing.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but down along the section where I’d entered was a small gravel parking lot fringed with bushes, a lone car parked there, beneath an unlit streetlight. With a chill of unease, I realized it was Leigh’s boxy blue Chevy Citation, straight from the 1980s. It looked as if it were waiting for her to come back.

Maybe she never had. Maybe Leigh had never left this warehouse — or The Peak. I couldn’t recall if I’d heard of the actress ever appearing in another film.

I turned, squinting far ahead at the indistinct smudge on the hill, realizing as I stumbled toward it, it was the overturned school bus, the very one Leigh gets trapped inside. In the final minutes of La Douleur, she’s forced in there by the gangsters, blindfolded and bound. Though she struggles courageously, determined to untie her hands using a metal spike jutting out of a derelict seat, the question of her fate is left unanswered. As she whimpers and flails, the film fades to black — though her cries can be heard throughout the end credits, barely drowned by the Beastie Boys song “Posse in Effect.”

The incline was surprisingly steep, and I began to trip and slide in the plastic bags, blown-out tires, mattresses, and cracked TVs. I’d gone a few yards when I realized not just that the incline was growing even more vertical, but that my movement was dislodging the trash beneath me. I could feel it shifting, and within minutes the entire mountain was dislodging around me. I froze but found myself falling backward, nearly submerged in an avalanche of rusted cans and garbage bags. I scrambled upright, untangling myself from a biohazard suit, surfing toward the perimeter of the set as the entire hill continued to loosen, including that bus. It was impossible to get up there. I groped my way to the scrim of sky, lifted the fabric, and scrambled through the scaffolding as the landfill continued to crash behind me. I’d had enough of La Douleur. I’d be damned if I was going to die buried alive in Cordova’s trash.

I lurched to my feet and took off down the dark corridor. Far ahead, at the very end — what looked to be a mile away — was an opening with pale red light. I hoped it was the way out of here.

Every now and then I stopped to listen, hearing only the wind yowling across the soundstage roof high overhead. The longer I walked, the more that red light remained doggedly, persistently far-off. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was hallucinating, or if this warehouse’s concrete floor was somehow a treadmill and I was running in place. At one point I smelled, rather bizarrely, salt water. It was strong, intermixed with the scents of seaweed and sand. It had to be another film set, built behind the scaffolding rising up to my left, but it was too high to see anything.

I could see the red light getting closer and felt sudden nerve-racking curiosity about what it was. Marlowe Hughes’s suburban McMansion in Lovechild ? The brothel where Annie looks for her father in At Night All Birds Are Black ? Archer’s boxcar clubhouse from The Legacy ?

I stepped around the corner.

It was the greenhouse from Wait for Me Here.

What was it Beckman had said about it? “If there was one setting that perfectly evoked the treacherous mind of a psychopath, it isn’t the Bates Motel, but the Reinhart family greenhouse, with its domes of moldy glass and corroded iron, tropical plants growing inside like insidious thoughts run amok, the frail sand pathway snaking through the foliage like the last vestige of humanity shrinking out of sight.”

The greenhouse was a domed rectangular structure, built out of glass panes and pale green oxidized iron, the architecture mimicking the Royal Greenhouses in Brussels. It sat in serene seclusion in a dense medieval forest of Douglas firs — the effect created by more screens rigged around the set. The intense red light was emanating from inside the greenhouse and then, I remembered —of course —from the film.