Marisha Pessl - Night Film

It’d been at least a year since I’d ventured in there.

The door was jammed, and I had to force it open, kicking aside old sneakers and blueprints of the Amagansett beach house I’d considered buying Cynthia in an eleventh-hour attempt to “work things out.” The million-dollar marital Band-Aid, never a wise idea. I pried loose what was obstructing the door, a framed photo of Cynthia and me, taken when we were touring Brazil on a Ducati, searching for illegal gold mines, so in love, it was impossible to fathom a day it might not be the case. God, she was gorgeous. I chucked the picture aside, pushed back piles of National Geographic s, and found what I was looking for — a cardboard box.

I pulled it out, hauled it over to my desk, and sat back in my chair, staring down at it.

The duct tape I’d sealed it with was unsticking.

Cordova.

The decision, five years ago, to take the man on as a subject had been accidental. I’d just come back from an exhausting six-week sojourn in Freetown, a Sierra Leone slum. At about three in the morning, wide awake, jet-lagged, I found myself clicking onto an article about Amy’s Light, the nonprofit dedicated to scouring the Internet for Cordova’s black tapes, buying them, and destroying them. A mother whose daughter had been brutally killed by a copycat murderer founded the organization. Like the central murder in Wait for Me Here, Hugh Thistleton had kidnapped her daughter, Amy, from a street corner, where she was waiting for her brother to return from a 7-Eleven, took her to an abandoned mill, and fed her through the machinery.

An organization dedicated to keep Cordova from infecting our youth, declared the website. This mandate I found to be poignant for its sheer impossibility — trying to rid the Internet of Cordova was like trying to rid the Amazon of insects. Yet I didn’t agree with it. As a journalist, freedom of speech and expression were cornerstones — principles so deeply embedded in America’s bedrock that to surrender even an inch would be our country’s undoing. I was also staunchly anticensorship — Cordova could no more be held responsible for Amy Andrews’s gruesome death than the beef industry for giving Americans fatal heart attacks. As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

Until that night, I’d hardly given Cordova a second thought beyond enjoying (and getting creeped out by) some of his early films. Wondering about the motives of a reclusive director was not my professional aim or my specialty. I tackled stories with stakes, where life and death were on the line. The most hopeless of all hopeless causes was where my heart tended to go when on the lookout for a new subject.

Somehow, at some point that night, my heart got into it.

Maybe it was because Sam had been born just a few months before and, suddenly faced with fatherhood, I was more susceptible than usual to the idea of protecting this beautiful clean slate — protecting any child — from the destabilizing horrors that Cordova represented. Whatever the reason, the longer I clicked through the hundreds of Cordova blogs and fansites and anonymous message boards, many of the postings by kids as young as nine and ten — the more insistent my sense that something was wrong with Cordova.

In hindsight, the experience reminded me of an alcoholic South African reporter whose path I’d crossed at the Hilton in Nairobi when I was there in 2003 working on a story about the ivory trade. He was on his way to a remote village in the southwest where a Taita tribe, close to the Tanzanian border, was dying out and was considered walaani — cursed —because no child born there could live longer than eleven days. We’d met at the hotel bar and after commiserating over the fact that both of us had recently been carjacked (validating the city’s nickname, Nairobbery ), the man told me he was thinking about missing his bus the following morning, abandoning the story altogether, because of what had befallen the three reporters who’d gone before him to the village. One had apparently gone mad, wandering the streets stuttering nonsense. Another had quit and a week later had hanged himself in a Mombasa hotel room. The third had vanished into thin air, abandoning his family and a post at the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

“It’s infected,” the man mumbled. “ The story. Some are, you know.”

I’d chuckled, assuming such dramatics were a side effect of the Chivas Regal we’d been guzzling all night. Yet he went on.

“It’s a lintwurm. ” He squinted at me, his bloodshot eyes searching my face for understanding. “A tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail. No use going after it. Because there’s no end. All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.” He held up a tightened fist. “ Dit suig jou droog. Some stories you should run from while you still have legs.”

I never did find out if he made it to that village.

Cordova’s daughter found dead. The thought pulled me back to the present, and I opened the old box, grabbed a stack of papers, and started through it.

First: a typed list of all the actors who’d worked with Cordova. Then a list of shooting locations from his first film, Figures Bathed in Light. Pauline Kael’s review of Distortion, “Unraveling Innocence.” A film still of Marlowe Hughes in bed in the closing shot of Lovechild. Typed transcripts of my notes from Crowthorpe Falls. A photo I’d snapped of the fencing surrounding Cordova’s property, The Peak. Wolfgang Beckman’s syllabus for his Cordova class, taught a few years ago at Columbia film school, though he was forced to cancel it after only three classes due to outcry from parents. (“Special Topics in Cordova: Darkly Alive and Totally Petrifying,” he’d impishly called the class.) A DVD of the PBS documentary on Cordova from 2003, Dark’s Warden. And then a transcript from an anonymous phone call.

John. The mysterious caller who proved to be my undoing.

I pulled the three pages out of the pile.

Every time I read through them, transcribed within minutes of hanging up — I tried and failed to find the moment in the conversation where I’d lost my head. What, exactly, had prompted me to disregard twenty years’ experience and jump the shark during a television appearance not twenty-four hours later?

S. McGrath, May 11, 2006. 11:06 — 11:11 P.M.

SM:

Hello.

Caller:

Is this Scott McGrath, the reporter?

SM:

It is. Who’s this?

No immediate answer. Voice is older, mid-sixties or seventies .

Caller:

I hear you’re investigating

Cordova.

SM:

How’d you hear that?

Caller:

Word gets around.

SM:

Are you a friend of his?

No answer. He sounds nervous.

Caller:

I don’t want this call

recorded.

SM:

It’s not. What’s your name?

Caller:

John.

Not his real name. I am tempted to turn on my phone recorder — a necessary precaution — but plugging in the TP-7 jack makes a clicking noise on the line. I don’t want to scare him off.

SM:

What’s your connection to Cordova?