Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Hopper appeared to have fallen into an irritated mood, slumped way down on the couch, arms crossed, his faded white T-shirt — gifford’s famous ice cream, it read — twisted around him. He reminded me of a teenage hitchhiker I’d once met in El Paso; we were the only two at a diner counter at the crack of dawn. After we got to talking, swapping stories, he said goodbye, hitching a ride with the driver of a BP oil truck. Later, I got up to pay my bill only to realize he’d stolen my wallet. Never trust a charismatic drifter.

“Maybe there’s something inside,” I said, turning the stuffed animal over. I took out my switchblade, cutting an incision down the back of the monkey. I pulled out the stuffing, yellowed and crusty, feeling around the inside. There was nothing.

I realized my cell was buzzing, the number a 407 area code.

“Hello?”

“May I please speak to Mr. Scott McGrath?”

It was a woman, her voice crisp and musical.

“This is he.”

“It’s Nora Halliday. From the coat check? I’m at Forty-fifth and Eleventh Avenue. The Pom Pom Diner. Can you come? We need to talk.”

“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Give me fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.” She hung up. Shaking my head, I stood up.

“Who was that?” Hopper asked me.

“A coat-check girl, last person to see Ashley alive. Yesterday she nearly had me arrested. Today? She wants to talk. I have to go. In the meantime, I’ll hold on to the monkey.”

“That’s okay.” He snatched it back, giving me a wary look, before shoving it back into the envelope and disappearing with the package into the bedroom.

“Thanks for your time,” I called over my shoulder. “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything.” But suddenly Hopper was slipping out into the hall right behind me, shrugging on his gray coat.

“Cool,” he said. He locked the door and took off down the stairs.

“Where are you off to?”

“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Gotta go meet a coat-check girl. ”

As his footsteps echoed through the stairwell, I berated myself for mentioning where I was headed. I worked solo, always had.

But then — I started down the stairs — maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea to team up with him, this once. There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women. And in my experience with that thorny subject — which included decades of trial and error, throwing out countless years’ worth of shoddy results (Cynthia), the sad realization I’d never be a leader in the field, just another middling scientist — they really had only one identifiable constant: Around guys like Hopper, icebergs turned to puddles.

“Fine,” I shouted. “But I’m doing the talking.”

The Pom Pom was an old-school diner, narrow as a railroad car.

Nora Halliday sat in the back by a wall-sized photo of Manhattan. She was slumped way, way down on the seat, her skinny legs stretched out in front of her. Yet she wasn’t just sitting in the booth. She looked like she’d put down first and last month’s rent, plus a security deposit, plus an exorbitant broker’s fee, signed a lease, and moved into the booth.

On one side of her were two giant Duane Reade shopping bags, on the other a brown paper Whole Foods bag and a large gray leather purse, unzipped and sagging open like a gutted reef shark, inside of which you could see all it had ingested that morning: Vogue, a green sweater still attached to knitting needles, a sneaker, a pair of white Apple earphones wrapped around not an iPod but a Discman. It might as well have been a gramophone.

She didn’t notice us walking toward her because her eyes were closed and she was whispering to herself — apparently trying to memorize the block of highlighted text from the play in her hands. On the table in front of her was a plate of half-finished French toast floating like a houseboat on the Mississippi in a pool of syrup.

She glanced up at me, then Hopper. Instantly — probably from the jolt of his good looks — she jerked upright.

“This is Hopper,” I said. “Hope it’s okay he joins.”

Hopper said nothing, only slid into the booth across from her.

She was wearing a strange outfit: stonewashed jeans straight from an eighties movie, a wool sweater so hot-pink it scalded the eyes, black wool fingerless gloves, lipstick a livid shade of red. Unlike last night, her pale blond hair was down, parted in the middle and surprisingly long, hanging all the way to her elbows, stringy on the ends.

“So, you’re an actress?” I asked, sliding in beside Hopper.

She smiled, nodding.

“What have you acted in ?” Hopper asked.

This caused her eyes to skid confusedly over to him, then swerve back to me. Even I knew that was one of the rudest questions to ask an actor.

“Nothing. Yet. I’ve only been an actress five weeks. That’s how long I’ve been in the city.”

“Where’d you move from?” I asked.

“Saint Cloud. Near Narcoossee.”

I could only nod, as I didn’t know what Narcoossee was. It sounded like an Indian reservation and casino where you could play craps and watch a Crystal Gayle lookalike sing “Brown Eyes Blue.” But Nora smiled without shame, closing the play, touching the cover like it was a sacred Bible — yet it was David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

“Sorry I was so rude last night,” she said to me.

“Apology accepted,” I said.

With a tiny frown, she swept her hands officiously over the surface of the table, brushing a few toast crumbs onto the floor. She then turned and opened up the Whole Foods bag, peering inside as if there were something alive in there. She reached in with both hands and gently pulled out a bulky red-and-black bundle, placing it on the table and sliding it toward me.

I recognized it immediately.

It was a woman’s coat. And for a moment, the diner and everything in it dissolved. There was only that article of clothing, so ferociously red, staring me down. It looked like a costume, ornate, faintly Russian — red wool fabric, the cuffs black lamb, black cord embellishing the front.

The woman I’d encountered at the Central Park Reservoir, weeks ago, had been wearing it.

The soaked dark hair, the ambling in and out of lamplight, the coat lighting like a flare, alerting me to— what ? Had she simply been toying with me? How the woman had managed to follow me down into the subway as quickly as she had defied logic. The incident had been so odd, when I came home that night I couldn’t sleep, infected by the strangeness of it. I climbed out of bed more than a few times to pull aside the curtains, half expecting her to be there, her slender form like a red incision in the sidewalk, her face turned up to me with hard black eyes. I’d actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there’d be no limit to the fiends I’d encounter. They’d simply crawl out of my head, down into the world.

But the sidewalk had no red tear. The street, the night, remained flawless and still.

I’d actually started to forget the entire episode— until now.

It had been Ashley Cordova.

The realization was startling, and it was quickly followed by the paranoid feeling something was wrong, including this awkward coat-check girl. She had to be involved in some kind of setup. But the girl only smiled innocently back at me. Hopper, on the other hand, must have seen something on my face — complete shock — because he was squinting at me suspiciously.