In the Night Room (23 page)

“I bet they’re running into a lot of problems right about now.”

“I bet they’re scarfing down a lot of sugar right about now. But I guess I don’t have to worry about Mitchell anymore.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not exactly true,” I said.

“Save it. Is this the place?”

A tall, vertical sign outlined in lights spelled out
CHICAGO STATION
above a long, rectangular building faced with stone. I drove into the lot and parked under the only tree in sight.

“You’re not paying for lunch. I should split everything with you. Do you know how much money is in that bag back there?”

“A hundred thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.”

Her face went soft and confused, almost wounded. I was afraid she would start to weep.

“Did I tell you that? Don’t answer.”

She got out of the car and opened the back door. The long white bag lay across the seat, and she pulled it toward her and unzipped the top. Curious about what all that money looked like, I stood behind her as she reached in and lifted a neat, banded bundle of bills out of the bag. “Let’s just take two of them,” she said. “You carry them.”

Willy tugged two of the hundreds out of the pack and handed them to me. She leaned back into the car to replace the rest of the bundle, and I looked at the topmost bill in my hand. What I saw made me gasp. For a hideous moment it struck me as funny. It was a hundred-dollar bill of the usual size, color, and texture. The numbers were all in the right places. Just left of the center, in the big oval frame where Benjamin Franklin should have been, was what looked like an old-fashioned steel engraving of me, in three-quarter profile, from the top of my head to the base of my neck. I did not look anything like as clever as Franklin, and I appeared to be wearing my old blazer and a button-down shirt with a frayed collar. The little scroll beneath the portrait gave my name as L’Duith.

“Your money’s no good in this town,” I said, settling at the end for a cheap joke. “Take a look.”

Willy stared at the front of the bill, glanced up at me, then back at the bill. “That’s your picture on there.”

“So it seems,” I said.

Now she was so dumbfounded she seemed hypnotized. “How did that happen? How did you
do
that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Let’s go into the restaurant and get some real food in you.”

Willy took my arm like a wounded child. “Look, do I actually exist?”

26

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

“Of course you exist,” I told her. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

Willy leaned out of our booth and waved to a waitress taking orders at one of the tables in the middle of the room.

“But as you have noticed, you don’t quite exist in the normal way.”

“How come the town I live in and the Institute I went to aren’t real anymore, when they used to be? How come the stuff I remember seems to come from you? What the hell happened, did you make me up or something?”

The waitress appeared at our booth and gave us each a laminated menu. “Oh, aren’t those cute?” she said, pointing at the hundred-dollar bills Willy had left on the table. “They almost look real. Can I pick one up?”

“You can keep it, if you like,” Willy said. “I gather they’re not exactly—what’s the word?—fungible. I want a hamburger, medium. With fries. Make that two hamburgers, with fries.”

The waitress said, “Wow, it even feels real. So your name is L’Duith? What is that, French?” She was a comfortable woman in her mid-forties who looked as though she had been born wearing a hairnet.

“It’s part of an anagram,” I said. Willy was staring at me intently. “I’ll have a medium burger, too. And a Diet Coke.”

The waitress went off to the kitchen, and Willy focused on me in a way I found extravagantly painful.

I looked down at my hands, then back at her. Her eyes concentrated on mine, and I knew she was watching for signs of evasiveness or duplicity. She would have spotted a lie or a deliberate ambiguity before the words left my mouth.

“Right after we sat down, you asked me if I made you up. I don’t suppose you were being completely serious, but you hit the truth right bang on the head. Everything you know and everything that ever happened to you—in fact, everything you ever did before you showed up at that reading—came out of my head. As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be God.”

“You know, when I first saw you, I did think you were kind of godlike. I worshipped you. And you were certainly pretty godlike in bed!”

The waitress chose that moment to place two glasses of water on our table. Her face made it clear that she’d heard Willy’s last remark and had interpreted it to mean that I was a lecherous pig. She wheeled away.

“Oops,” Willy said.

“I worship you, too,” I said. “These simple words, all this deep feeling. I hope this is what God feels for his creatures.”

I moved my hand to the center of the table, and she placed hers in it. We were both on the verge of tears.

“Say more,” Willy said. “This is going to be the bad part, I know, but you have to tell me. Don’t be weak now. How could you make me up?”

She was right. I had to tell her the truth. “Before you showed up, I was writing a book. Its first sentence was something like,
’In a sudden shaft of brightness, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick turned her slightly dinged Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the temptation’—
no, it was ‘compulsion’—
’having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice,’
I forget what comes next, something about driving a little more than two miles on Union Street, which I also happened to make up.”

“Your first sentence was about me.”

“You didn’t exist until I wrote that sentence. That’s where you were born. Hendersonia was born then, too, and Michigan Produce, and the Baltic Group, and everything else.”

“That’s nuts. I was born in Millhaven.”

“Should we call the Births and Deaths office, or whatever it’s called, and ask them to find your birth certificate?”

She looked uncomfortable.

“Willy, the reason you couldn’t find Hendersonia in the atlases is that Hendersonia only exists in the book I was writing. I named it after a book about Fletcher Henderson.”

“In your book, you named a town after another book?”

“The name of the book is
Hendersonia.
A man named Walter C. Allen wrote it. It’s a wonderful book, if you’re obsessively interested in Fletcher Henderson. Do you know who he was?”

“A great bandleader and arranger. In the twenties, he hired Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Big influence on Benny Goodman.”

“See? You’re not a geeky jazz fan, Willy. You know that because I know it. Stuff from my head, at least the kind of stuff I think is important, gets into yours. Your memory is really my memory.”

“This is . . . Even with the things that have been happening, it’s still hard for me to believe that . . .” She removed her hand from mine and made a vague shape in the air.

“Let me tell you some things about yourself that I couldn’t have learned from Tom Hartland, who was, by the way, another fictional character of mine.”

Willy sat back in the booth, her hands in her lap, looking like a schoolgirl about to enter the principal’s office.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had written about her. The events of the previous two days had made some of the details recede. “You almost broke into a produce warehouse, but the thought of Mitchell Faber snapped you back into the real world. You realized that Mitchell Faber and your daughter couldn’t exist in the same world because your daughter was dead, so she couldn’t possibly be in that building.”

Her eyes widened.

“And it’s a good thing you changed your mind, because shortly after you got back into your car, a young policeman drove up behind you. He didn’t believe how old you were until you showed him your driver’s license. He told you that you couldn’t have too many worries—to look so young, he meant. And when he saw your address on Guilderland Road, he knew your house right away. When you tried to thank him, he told you to thank Mitchell Faber instead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I
wrote
it. I put that part in to indicate that the police were not going to be very helpful later on, when you escaped into Manhattan. In this book, you were supposed to be hunted by the police as well as Faber’s goons. Which is exactly the situation you’re in now, except I’m with you.”

“What was the name of this book?”

“In the Night Room.”

She absorbed that silently.

“There is a real night room,” I said with a sudden recognition. “It’s in Millhaven.”

“A real night room. I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s a room where it is always night. Because of the terrible things that happened there.” I took a leap into the dark. “To you.”

“When was this supposed to happen?”

“In your early childhood—the years you can’t remember. You don’t really remember anything that happened before you were sent to the Block. All you have of your first six or seven years is the sense that your parents loved you. That is a fantasy, a false memory. You use it to conceal what your life was actually like in those years.”

“That’s a goddamn lie.”

“Willy, none of this happened in real life. I made it all up. It’s fiction, and I know what I wrote—I don’t blame you for not believing me, and I can’t blame you for getting angry, but I know your history better than you do.”

She took that, too, in silence. For the first time in our conversation, I had used the word “fiction.”

“What else can I tell you? When you started to rearrange things in the house on Guilderland Road, sometimes an expression on Coverley’s face reminded you of Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca.
”

She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice the arrival of our waitress, who to get her attention had to say, “Excuse me, miss, your hamburgers are ready.” The woman put the plates on the table, and the glasses, and a bottle of ketchup, and Willy did not take her eyes from me for a second.

When the waitress had left, Willy immediately picked up one of her hamburgers and took an enormous bite out of it. She groaned with pleasure. Then she glanced at me and spoke a mushy, “Sorry.”

I watched her eat for a time, unwilling to make further demands on her attention. It was like watching a wolf devour a lamb. Every now and then she pushed French fries into her mouth; every now and then she sipped at her Coke.

After vaporizing the first hamburger, Willy wiped her mouth with her napkin and said, “You can’t imagine how much I needed that. I need this one, too.”

“How’s the lightness?”

“I don’t think I’m going to start disappearing anytime soon. We’re just talking about hunger now, basic hunger.” She attacked another batch of French fries. “Look. Part of me thinks it’s really creepy that you know these things about me. It’s like you went around peering through the windows and rummaging through the drawers, like you listened to my phone calls. I don’t like it. But another part of me, the part that loves you, is thrilled that you know so much.”

She bit into the second hamburger. Chewing, she said, “You shouldn’t know these things. But your face shouldn’t be on that money, either, and there it is.” She leveled a French fry at my handsome portrait. “What’s this L’Duith business, anyhow? You said it was part of an anagram.”

“The full version is Merlin L’Duith. Can you figure that out? You’re very good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, so it should be easy for you.”

Willy popped the french fry into her mouth and stared at the altered banknote. “Um. Two
L
’s. An
N
and a
D-E-R.
That’s easy. It’s an anagram for Tim Underhill.”

“I started Part Two of my book with a message from Merlin L’Duith, in other words myself, who said that he was the god of your part of the world, plus Millhaven. Merlin, who’s a magician, wanted to speed the plot along, so he summarized the day you met Tom Hartland at the King Cole Bar.”

“Why is your face on that money?”

“Probably because I didn’t bother to say anything about Benjamin Franklin, and when the bills came through, there I was.”

She pondered that.

“Merlin did something a little strange in his section. He let you notice the bits that he dropped out of your life. The lost hours, the transitions that never happened. He’s a god and a magician—he can do anything he likes.”

Willy stopped eating and, in an almost belligerent way, stared at me for a couple of beats. She resumed chewing. She swallowed; she sucked Coke into her system. “That was in your book? You did that? Hiding behind this Merlin anagram.”

“I had you notice the gaps that people in novels can never be aware of, because if they did, they’d begin to realize that they are fictional characters. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it, I just thought it would be interesting. I wanted to see what would happen. As it turned out, that was probably one of the things that let you leave the book and wind up in my life.”

Her stare darkened. She wasn’t blinking now.

“I hated those gaps. They made me feel that I really was losing my mind.”

She shoved her plate away, and the waitress, hoping to get us out of her territory very soon, instantly materialized at our booth and asked if we wanted anything else.

“Pie,” Willy said. “We heard you’re famous for your pies.”

“Today we have cherry and rhubarb,” the waitress said.

“I’ll have two slices of each, please.”

Willy waved her off and pointed a lovely finger at me. “Okay, you, or Merlin L’Duith, deliberately let me notice that these transitions had been left out of my life. But why did you have me leave Hendersonia in the morning and arrive in New York nine hours later? What was the point of that?”

Willy had turned a crucial corner, though she did not know it. She had already bought what I was selling. I wondered how long it would take her acceptance to catch up with her.

“You had to get there at night so that it would be night when Tom Hartland came to your room.”

“Why?”

“So that he could sleep in the same bed with you. At your invitation. It was the quickest solution—make it night instead of day. Whoops, nine hours gone.”

“Do you know how disconcerting that is?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

“You wanted Tom Hartland in bed with me because
you
wanted to be in bed with me. I’m right, aren’t I? If you invented me, you didn’t understand me very well, and no wonder, because you don’t understand yourself, either.”

“In the way you mean, I do,” I said.

“If you invented me, you did a BAD JOB!”

Before scurrying away, the waitress put two plates in front of Willy and, unasked, a cup of coffee. It was as though she had never been there at all.

“I didn’t
want
to go to Michigan Produce,” Willy said. “I didn’t
want
to hear my daughter screaming for help. How could you do that to me?” She levered a big section of cherry pie onto her fork and pushed it into her mouth. “You never understood what kind of person I was. I’m so much better, so much stronger than you thought. All you saw was this weak little woman being pushed around by men.” Her voice wobbled, and she brushed tears away from her eyes. “I suppose I’m not even a writer anymore. I suppose I didn’t have any talent.”

“Not at all. I gave you a beautiful talent, and an imagination so strong that twice you used it to rescue yourself.”