Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I stepped toward him.

He gave no indication he was aware of my approach. In fact, he seemed unaware of anything at all in the room. His gaze — stripped of those ink-black circular lenses he’d allegedly worn all his life — remained fixed out the window, where a vast lawn ringed by woods stretched out like an empty lake, its surface gold-green and hard in the afternoon sun. He had a dense head of silver-white hair, which showed no sign of relenting, a sizable stomach, which seemed more imperial, even threatening, rather than fat — as if, like some Greek god with explosive moods and appetites, he had swallowed a boulder and it hadn’t killed him, just kept him brutally secured to the ground. He was sitting back easily in the chair, his hands — massive workman’s hands — loosely hanging off the armrests, the way an exhausted king might relax on his throne. His face was different from how I’d pictured it, less certain somehow, slightly more drooping and crude.

Yet I was certain it was he.

Cordova.

I could even see the faded wheel tattoo on his left hand, exactly where Gallo’s had been. His gaze remained somewhere out on the lawn like an anchor that’d been thrown there. It was as if he was picturing something, a final scene for a film he’d never made — or a scene he’d intended for his life. Maybe he was imagining himself walking across the grass with the sun on his back, the wind pressing against his face. Perhaps he was thinking of his family, of Ashley, wherever and everywhere she was.

Gallo had warned me he’d be aware of nothing.

“A day or two after Ashley learned she was sick again, this last time, he went to bed early,” Gallo had told me. “He was always up at four A.M. working, living. But he didn’t come down. Alarmed, I went upstairs. I found him in his bed, propped upright in his pillows as if a ghost had come in the middle of the night to talk something over. His eyes were wide open, staring out at nothing. He was catatonic — a television turned on, but one single channel, only static.” To my shock, Gallo had gone on to explain it all in great detail: His doctors, certain he’d suffered a stroke, transferred him to a nursing facility for the elderly in Westchester — Enderlin Estates, outside of Dobbs Ferry — the decision to use the alias Bill Smith, so he wouldn’t be hounded or hunted, but left to live out his final days in peace.

I told Gallo it was a wild coincidence, this prevalence of death, two vibrant lives drawing to an abrupt close — first Ashley, now Cordova. Granted, he wasn’t technically dead, but given the kind of life he’d lived, he was —unresponsive, his spirit locked forever inside him, or else, it had already fled.

“It’s not a coincidence, ” Gallo snapped, as if she found the word insulting. “He was finished, don’t you see? Men and women who have fulfilled what they meant to, those who have found answers to a few grave questions about life — not all of the answers, but a few —they end their lives when they choose. They’re ready. And he was. He’d lived exactly as he wanted — wildly, insanely —and now he’s ready for the next. He’s wrung every drop of life out of himself, leaving only dried-up piles of nerves and bones. I know as sure as I know my own name he’ll be dead within a matter of months.”

I’d found Gallo’s demeanor startlingly efficient and brisk for a woman who’d just lost the focus of her life, the sun that had ordered her days. But then she lifted her head and I saw there were tears in her eyes — waiting for me to leave, so they could slide freely down her sunken cheeks. Silently she led me downstairs to the front door, extended her hand with a brusque “I’ll see you” —a statement we both knew was false. And though I didn’t especially like Inez Gallo and she hadn’t exactly warmed to me, we’d come to a sort of unspoken understanding, found on a surprising patch of common ground: both of us spectators swept up in the wild squall that was Cordova.

And now here he was, less than two feet away.

And he was a fragile old man.

I’d been fighting no one. The crimes, the horrors I’d tried and found Cordova guilty of, seemed laughable now, considering the fact that, all those moments I’d been so certain he was outmaneuvering me, he’d been right here — probably sitting peacefully like this in front of this very window.

I couldn’t help but be awed by the shock of it.

Even like this he was having the last word.

Strange emotion abruptly swelled in my throat. It might have been a laugh or just as easily a sob. Because I realized, staring at this man, that I was actually just staring at myself, at what I’d become much sooner and more suddenly than I’d ever know. Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

It was so calm standing next to him, so lonely. I swore I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free. It wasn’t the simple lungs of an ordinary man, but the faint howl of a gust of wind as it snagged the rocks of some far-off bluff by the sea. I wondered — another unchecked wave of feeling rising in my chest — what in the hell I was going to say to him after all this, all I’d done and come to see — if I had the nerve to say anything at all.

Or maybe, like a child encountering the reassembled bones of a dangerous species of dinosaur he’d dreamed about, read about with a flashlight under a comforter for nights and days, maybe I was going to simply reach out and touch his shoulder, wondering if in that touch I could get a sense of what he must have been like when he was alive, in his prime, roaming the Earth, a force of nature, when he wasn’t silent grayed bones on display, but something splendid to behold.

In the end, all I did was pull up a chair and sit down beside him.

And together, for what seemed like hours, we did nothing but stare out at that empty lawn, which seemed to hold in its strict boundaries and flawless green, the empty space in which we could pile our memories and questions, what we’d once loved but let go of, taking silent inventory of it all. When I became aware of the music again, piano music, a pale, listless approximation of what Ashley would have played, I realized then that all I was going to say to the man was “thank you.”

I did. Then I rose and left, not looking back.

What can I say about the ensuing weeks?

Marlowe Hughes said it best: “When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams. ”

I drove home from Enderlin Estates, pulled the curtains, and slept for twenty hours, a sleep as blacked-out and resolute as death. I woke up around nightfall the following day, shadows streaked across the ceiling, the dying light outside making the street blush with the elegance of a memory.

My old life took me back, the old faithful mutt that it was.

I was somewhat shocked to learn it was December. I spent a few evenings at dinners with friends, most of whom assumed I’d been away, traveling. I let them believe it. In a way it was true.

“You look good, ” quite a few of them remarked, though certain lingering stares seemed to suggest this wasn’t exactly true, that there was something else altered about me, something they sensed best left alone. I wondered, half seriously, if it was residue from the devil’s curse — if, even though it had turned out not to be true, perhaps one never recovered from having once believed. Maybe certain far-flung attic rooms in the brain had been violently broken into — doors bashed in, lamps broken, desks flipped upside down, curtains left dancing strangely by open windows — rooms that would never be reached again or ever reordered.