Night Film: A Novel
BY MARISHA PESSL
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Night Film
Night Film is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Wonderline Productions LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Illustration credits appear on this page.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use the specified materials:
The New York Times: The New York Times standard logo & web page layout, copyright © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
Rolling Stone: Fictional Rolling Stone cover. Rolling Stone® is a registered trademark of Rolling Stone LLC. All rights reserved. Rolling Stone mock cover used by permission.
TIME Magazine, a division of Time Inc.: “Dummy Photo-Essay” created by permission of TIME Magazine, a division of Time Inc. TIME, Time.com, and “T” in Red Box Design are trademarks of Time Inc. Used with permission.
Vanity Fair: Permission courtesy of Vanity Fair / Condé Nast. © Condé Nast
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pessl, Marisha.
Night Film : A Novel / Marisha Pessl.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6788-6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-679-64391-3 (eBook)
1. Suicide—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Subculture—Fiction. 4. Investigative reporting—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. [1. Mystery fiction. gsafd] I. Title.
PS3616.E825N54 2013
813′.6—dc23 2012041163
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan
v3.1
In memory of my grandmother,
RUTH HUNT READINGER
(1910–2011)
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
A Note about the Interactive Elements of Night Film
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
About the Author
Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out? Do you want to know what is there or live in the dark delusion that this commercial world insists we remain sealed inside like blind caterpillars in an eternal cocoon? Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or can you fight your way out of it and fly?
—STANISLAS CORDOVA
Rolling Stone, December 29, 1977
PROLOGUE
New York City 2:32 A.M.
Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again. Or your boyfriend bragged he’d discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal he’d barely survived.
Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferent—he’s there to react against. He’s a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world. He’s underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark. He’s down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day.
He’s a myth, a monster, a mortal man.
And yet I can’t help but believe when you need him the most, Cordova has a way o
f heading straight toward you, like a mysterious guest you notice across the room at a crowded party. In the blink of an eye, he’s right beside you by the fruit punch, staring back at you when you turn and casually ask the time.
My Cordova tale began for the second time on a rainy October night, when I was just another man running in circles, going nowhere as fast as I could. I was jogging around Central Park’s Reservoir after two a.m.—a risky habit I’d adopted during the past year when I was too strung out to sleep, hounded by an inertia I couldn’t explain, except for the vague understanding that the best part of my life was behind me, and the sense of possibility I’d once had so innately as a young man was now gone.
It was cold and I was soaked. The gravel track was rutted with puddles, the black waters of the Reservoir cloaked in mist. It clogged the reeds along the bank and erased the outskirts of the park as if it were nothing but paper, the edges torn away. All I could see of the grand buildings along Fifth Avenue were a few gold lights burning through the gloom, reflecting on the water’s edge like dull coins tossed in. Every time I sprinted past one of the iron lampposts, my shadow surged past me, quickly grew faint, and then peeled off—as if it didn’t have the nerve to stay.
I was bypassing the South Gatehouse, starting my sixth lap, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw someone was behind me.
A woman was standing in front of a lamppost, her face in shadow, her red coat catching the light behind her, making a vivid red slice in the night.
A young woman out here alone? Was she crazy?
I turned back, faintly irritated by the girl’s naïveté—or recklessness, whatever it was that brought her out here. Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.
The track straightened north, rain needling my face, the branches hanging low, forming a crude tunnel overhead. I veered past rows of benches and the curved bridge, mud splattering my shins.
The woman—whoever she was—appeared to have disappeared.
But then—far ahead, a flicker of red. It vanished as soon as I saw it, then seconds later, I could make out a thin, dark silhouette walking slowly in front of me along the iron railing. She was wearing black boots, her dark hair hanging halfway down her back. I picked up my pace, deciding to pass her exactly when she was beside a lamppost so I could take a closer look and make sure she was all right.
As I neared, however, I had the marked feeling she wasn’t.
It was the sound of her footsteps, too heavy for such a slight person, the way she walked so stiffly, as if waiting for me. I suddenly had the feeling that as I passed she’d turn and I’d see her face was not young as I’d assumed, but old. The ravaged face of an old woman would stare back at me with hollowed eyes, a mouth like an ax gash in a tree.
She was just a few feet ahead now.
She was going to reach out, seize my arm, and her grip would be strong as a man’s, ice cold—
I ran past, but her head was lowered, hidden by her hair. When I turned again, she’d already stepped beyond the light and was little more than a faceless form cut out of the dark, her shoulders outlined in red.
I took off, taking a shortcut as the path twisted through the dense shrubbery, branches whipping my arms. I’ll stop and say something when I pass her again—tell her to go home.
But I logged another lap and there was no sign of her. I checked the hill leading down to the bridle paths.
Nothing.
Within minutes, I was approaching the North Gatehouse—a stone building beyond the reach of the lamps, soaked in darkness. I couldn’t make out much more than a flight of narrow stairs leading up to a rusted set of double doors, which were chained and locked, a sign posted beside them: KEEP OUT PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
As I neared, I realized in alarm, glancing up, that she was there, standing on the landing, staring down at me. Or was she looking through me?
By the time her presence fully registered I’d already run blindly on. Yet what I’d glimpsed in that split second drifted in front of my eyes as if someone had taken a flash picture: tangled hair, that blood red coat decayed brown in the dark, a face so entirely in shadow it seemed possible it wasn’t even there.
Clearly I should’ve held off on that fourth scotch.
There was a time not too long ago when it took a little more to rattle me. Scott McGrath, a journalist who’d go to hell just to get Lucifer on the record, some blogger had once written. I’d taken it as a compliment. Prison inmates who’d tattooed their faces with shoe polish and their own piss, armed teenagers from Vigário Geral strung out on pedra, Medellin heavies who vacationed yearly at Rikers—none of it made me flinch. It was all just part of the scenery.
Now a woman in the dark was unnerving me.
She had to be drunk. Or she’d popped too many Xanax. Or maybe this was some sick teenage dare—an Upper East Side mean girl had put her up to this. Unless it was all a calculated setup and her street-rat boyfriend was somewhere here, waiting to jump me.
If that was the idea, they’d be disappointed. I had no valuables on me except my keys, a switchblade, and my MetroCard, worth about eight bucks.
All right, maybe I was going through a rough patch, dry spell—whatever the hell you wanted to call it. Maybe I hadn’t defended myself since—well, technically the late nineties. But you never forgot how to fight for your life. And it was never too late to remember, unless you were dead.
The night felt unnaturally silent, still. That mist—it had moved beyond the water into the trees, overtaken the track like a sickness, an exhaust off something in the air here, something malignant.
Another minute and I was approaching the North Gatehouse. I shot past it, expecting to see her on the landing.
It was deserted. There was no sign of her anywhere.
Yet the longer I ran, the path unspooling like an underpass to some dark new dimension in front of me, the more I found the encounter unfinished, a song that had cut out on an expectant note, a film projector sputtering to a halt seconds before a pivotal chase scene, the screen going white. I couldn’t shake the powerful feeling that she was very much here, hiding somewhere, watching me.
I swore I caught a whiff of perfume embroidered into the damp smells of mud and rain. I squinted into the shadows along the hill, expecting, at any moment, the bright red cut of her coat. Maybe she’d be sitting on a bench or standing on the bridge. Had she come here to harm herself? What if she climbed up onto the railing, waiting, staring at me with a face drained of hope, before stepping off, falling to the road far below like a bag of stones?
Maybe I’d had a fifth scotch without realizing. Or this damned city had finally gotten to me. I took off down the steps, heading down East Drive and out onto Fifth Avenue, rounding the corner onto East Eighty-sixth Street, the rain turning into a downpour. I jogged three blocks, past the shuttered restaurants, bright lobbies with a couple of bored doormen staring out.
At the Lexington entrance to the subway, I heard the rumble of an approaching train. I sprinted down the next flight, swiping my MetroCard through the turnstiles. A few people were waiting on the platform—a couple of teenagers, an elderly woman with a Bloomingdale’s bag.
The train careened into the station, screeching to a halt, and I stepped into an empty car.
“This is a Brooklyn-bound four express train. The next stop is Fifty-ninth Street.”
Shaking off the rain, I stared out at the deserted benches, an ad for a sci-fi action movie covered in graffiti. Someone had blinded the sprinting man on the poster, scribbling out his eyes with black marker.
The doors pounded closed. With a moan of brakes, the train began to pull away.
And then, suddenly, I was aware, coming slowly down the steps in the far corner—shiny black boots and red, a red coat. I realized, as she stepped lower and lower, soaked black hair like in
k seeping over her shoulders, that it was she, the girl from the Reservoir, the ghost—whatever the hell she was. But before I could comprehend this impossibility, before my mind could shout, She was coming for me, the train whipped into the tunnel, the windows went black, and I was left staring only at myself.
1
A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink—I was losing count—leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn’t at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.
Infinitely delayed.
Every time I planted myself at these charity soirees, lost scenes from my married life, I wondered why I kept coming.
Maybe I liked facing a firing squad.
“Scott McGrath, great to see you!”
Wish I could say the same, I thought.
“Working on anything cool these days?”
My abs.
“Still teaching that journalism class at the New School?”
They suggested I take a sabbatical. In other words? Cutbacks.
“Didn’t know you were still in the city.”
I never knew what to say to that one. Did they think I’d been exiled to Saint Helena, like Napoleon after Waterloo?
I was at this party thanks to one of my ex-wife Cynthia’s friends, a woman named Birdie. I found it both amusing and flattering that, long after my wife had divorced me, swimming on to bluer seas, a dense school of her girlfriends swirled around me as if I were an interesting shipwreck, looking for a piece of rubble to salvage and take home. Birdie was blond, forties, and hadn’t left my side for the better part of two hours. Every now and then, her hand squeezed my arm—a signal that her husband, some hedge-fund guy (hedge fungi) was out of town and her three kids Guantánamoed with a nanny. Only a summons from the hostess to show Birdie her newly renovated kitchen had pried the woman from my side.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Birdie had said.
I’d done precisely that. This wreckage wanted to stay submerged.
I drained the rest of my scotch, was about to head back to the bar, when I felt my BlackBerry buzzing.
I slipped through the door behind me onto the second-floor landing. It was a text from my old attorney, Stu Laughton. I hadn’t heard from Stu in at least six months.