Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“For a user name, let’s try Gaetana Stevens 2991.”

Gaetana Stevens was the name of Ashley Cordova’s character in To Breathe with Kings (1996), Cordova’s last film, one of the black tapes.

I was amazed. Few people had actually seen it. I’d only managed to do so at Beckman’s, five years ago. He had one bootleg copy, which he’d refused to loan me because there was an impenetrable lock on the DVD prohibiting any type of copying or downloading — and Beckman suspected, probably rightly, that I’d never give it back.

To watch the film once was to be lost in so many graphic, edge-of-your-seat scenes that when it was over, I remembered feeling vaguely astounded that I’d returned to the real world. Something about the film’s darkness made me wonder if I would —as if in witnessing such things I was irrevocably breaking myself in ( or just breaking myself ), arriving at an understanding about humanity so dark, so deep down inside my own soul, I could never go back to the way I was before. This anxiety, of course, subsided as ordinary life took over. And even now that terrifying tale in my memory was little more than a collection of darkly lit, chilling images, punctuated by the presence of Ashley Cordova, whom I remembered as a beautiful, gray-eyed child who wore her hair in a red-ribboned ponytail.

She spends the film in silence, running in and out of drawing rooms, hiding under stairs and in maids’ closets, peering through keyholes and wrought-iron gates, blasting her bicycle fast across the lawn, leaving lurid slash marks on the grass.

The film’s plot was straightforward — as most of Cordova’s plots were, employing the general storyline of the odyssey or hunt. It was adapted from an obscure Dutch novel, Ademen Met Koningen, by August Hauer. The wealthy, corrupt Stevens family — a gorgeous clan of dissipated Caligulas living in an unnamed European country — is calculatingly butchered, one by one, confounding police. Though the inspector assigned to the case eventually arrests a tramp who did landscaping work for the family, the movie’s final hairpin twist reveals the killer is actually the family’s youngest child, the mute, watchful eight-year-old Gaetana — played, of course, by Ashley. By the time the inspector pieces this grisly truth together, it’s too late. The little girl has vanished. The last scene shows her strolling along the side of the road, where she’s picked up by a traveling family in a station wagon. In true Cordova style, it’s left ambiguous if this family is destined to meet the same horrific fate as her own, or if she simply made herself an orphan so she could be raised by a happier family.

“How did you manage to see To Breathe with Kings ?” I asked Nora.

She’d finished registering on the Blackboards, pressed I’m ready, and we were waiting to see if the page would successfully load.

“Moe Gulazar,” she said.

“Who’s Moe Gulazar?”

“My best friend.” She blew a strand of hair off her face. “He was an old horse trainer who lived down the hall. He loved everything about Cordova. Had black-market connections, too, so one day he traded all his horse trophies for a box of the black tapes. He held secret midnight screenings in the Activity Room all the time.” She looked at me. “Moe was a triple threat.”

“He could sing, dance, and act?”

She shook her head. “He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag.”

“That is extremely threatening.”

“When he got dressed up, even you’d think he was female.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“He used to say when he was gone, it’d be the end of a rare species. ‘There’ll never be another of me, not in captivity or the wild.’ That was his anthem.”

“Where’s old Moe now?”

“Heaven.”

She said it with such wistful certainty, it might as well have been Bora Bora.

“He died of throat cancer when I was fifteen. He chain-smoked cigarillos since he was twelve because he grew up at the racetrack. But he bequeathed me his whole wardrobe, so he’s always with me.”

She twisted around, yanking her arm out of the bulky gray wool cardigan to show me a red label sewn into the neck with elaborate black lettering. PROPERTY OF MOE GULAZAR, it read.

So a geriatric Armenian drag queen was behind her flamboyant wardrobe. My first thought was that she had to have made it up: She’d probably found a box full of the clothes at Goodwill, all with the same mysterious label, and invented a fantastic scenario for how she’d come to have them. But as she returned her arm into the sleeve, I noticed her face was flushed.

“I miss him every single day,” she said. “I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around. Ever noticed that?”

“Yes.”

Maybe it was true, then. And anyway, I supposed when one was confronted with the choice to believe in the existence of an Armenian drag-queen horse trainer or not to believe, one will believe.

“Is that the reason you wanted to be on this investigation?” I asked. “Because you know so much about Cordova’s films?”

“Of course. It was a sign. Ashley gave me her coat.”

To my amazement, the webpage had actually loaded successfully, reading at the top: YOU MADE IT.

I pulled a wooden chair beside Nora and sat down, noticing as I did she smelled of musky men’s cologne, dramatic as a hint of dark chocolate in the air, and I couldn’t help but imagine that was the proof I needed, a whisper of old Moe Gulazar, always with her.