The Night Listener : A Novel (20 page)

“The PR person. Whoever. Maybe that person would…you know, obviate the need for any other publicity. Maybe one interview would take care of it. And you could control it completely, make it as short and easy as you want. There wouldn’t even have to be cameras there.”

“That’s what Findlay said.”

“Well, don’t you think maybe…”

“Look, Gabe. There are times when I wonder if Pete is gonna make it another day. He’s weak as hell and very fragile emotionally and
very
self-conscious about the way he looks. I just can’t let some stranger in here to pump him about the gory details. It’s too risky in every way.”

“Did you tell Findlay that?”

“Of course!”

“And?”

“He was completely unbending. He just kept saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but these are our requirements.’ He was a total asshole about it. It was like he was a different person. Like he’d already made up his mind.”

“I’m sure he’s just…” I didn’t know how to finish this, so I didn’t try.

“Just what?”

“Who the hell knows? He’s one of those repressed Yankee types.

I’ll talk to him, though. Maybe there’s something I can say.”

“What could you possibly—”

“I don’t know. But I’ll try, okay? I’ll do my damnedest. This isn’t a bit fair.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Is Pete there now?”

“In the other room. He hasn’t even eaten since we heard.”

“Fuck.”

“He won’t even talk to me. He’s being as stubborn as Findlay. He just rolled up in a little ball and faced the wall.” This image so haunted me that it took a while to form words. “Do you…uh…think he would talk to me?”

“Oh, God, Gabe, I don’t know.”

“Would you ask him?”

“You won’t be hurt if he doesn’t…”

“No. Just ask him, though, would you?”

A loaded pause, and then: “Hang on.”

There’s a term we use in radio called
room tone
that came to mind in the anxious moments that followed. Room tone, put simply, is the sound of ordinary silence. When you’re recording, say, a radio play, this sound is required in the editing process to make the background into a seamless whole. That’s because a silent room is never the same as the total absence of sound, and no two silent rooms are ever exactly alike. There are subtleties that are almost undetect-able to the ear: atmospheric oddities, the exhalation of a heating duct, the distant drone of traffic or plumbing. The sound of nothing can be cacophonous, in fact, when weighed against the cold polished chrome of Absolutely Nothing.

What I heard while I waited for Pete was the teeming silence of room tone. A void that said more than any sound, a living entity that could mold itself into shapes and colors and flesh itself, speeding me across a continent to a room I might never see, a boy I might never hold.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Pete. I’m here.”

“She told you, huh?”

“Yeah. She did.”

“This is so fucked, man.”

“Yeah, it is. It
is
fucked.”

More room tone, then a tiny squeak that told me he was crying.

“Oh, Pete…”

“It’s okay.”

“No. It’s not. I’m gonna talk to Findlay. See what we can do.”

“Won’t do any good.”

“Don’t be so sure. Findlay listens to me when he has to.” Does he ever, I thought. The squirrelly bastard.

“Forget about it,” said Pete.

“Why?”

“Because it won’t do any good.”

“Look, Pete, this is just about their silly publicity requirements. I think we can offer them a compromise that would give them what they want and still…protect your privacy. Don’t give up hope yet.

You’re gonna be an author if it’s the last thing I—”

“You don’t think this is about publicity, do you?” I felt a tightening in my chest. “Well…yeah…sure.”

“They would cancel a whole book just because of that?”

“Maybe. It’s all about sales these days.”

“What about those guys that never do publicity at all? Like…you know, Thomas Pynchon or somebody?”

“Well…there are always exceptions, I’m afraid. Especially if you’re that famous. You can demand anything you want.” (Could a thirteen-year-old—even one this bright—know about Thomas Pynchon?)

“You know what I think?” Pete said.

“What?”

“You have to promise me you won’t tell Mom.” Bewildered and extremely wary, I considered the ramifications of such a pact. If there was even a remote chance I was dealing with a multiple, was it wise to start taking sides, to conspire with one personality over the other? “Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked him finally. “Secrets are not very healthy things, you know.

Especially in families.”

“Yeah, but this would really upset her. She’s way too worried about me already, and I don’t wanna make it worse. I know how she is, Dad. She takes things too hard. She’s not as strong as she looks.”

But I don’t even
know
how she looks, I thought. I could walk right past her in broad daylight and never know she was there. She would just be one more of those strangers who smile at me oddly at stoplights and on elevators, recognizing my face from a book jacket. Should I be keeping secrets from someone who had that kind of advantage over me?

On the other hand, what choice did I have?

“Okay,” I told Pete. “This is between you and me. Tell me what you think.”

I heard him take a breath, as if to steel himself for the moment. “I know why they wanna send out that PR guy. It’s to prove that I exist!”

I had not expected this somehow, but there it was—so unadorned and unaddressable that I was the one who turned into the fraud.

“Oh, c’mon, sweetie. That’s crazy. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you get it? They’ve never seen me or anything, so they want proof before they publish the book. That’s the only reason they’re doing this! The fuckers don’t even believe me!” He began to sob now, a terrible animal wail unlike any I’d ever heard from him.

“I knew this would happen! I knew they would never believe me if I told the truth!”

“Oh, sweetie.”

“Hold me, Dad, will you?”

“I am holding you. I’m doing that right now.” The sobbing continued, then trailed off into sniffles. I could feel his wet cheek against my shoulder, the hothouse warmth of his breath.

“This is too hard, Dad. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Do what?”

A pause, and then: “Any of it.”

“Oh, c’mon now,” I said softly, unable to manage anything else.

“I mean it, Dad. It hurts too much.”

“You mean…physically?”

“Every way. I’m really tired all the time. I got shingles now and I ache all over and I can’t even breathe half the time. We just keep going to the hospital…and I just wonder…what’s the point? Even the doctors think that. They start sighing real loud as soon as they see me coming.”

“To hell with ‘em. Tell ‘em to do their job.”

“They are, Dad. It’s just not working.”

“It
is
working. You’re alive and…you’re creating and there are people who love you, Pete…”

He began to sob again.

“Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry…”

“It’s not
your
fault. You’re the only good thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“No, I’m not. Don’t say that. You have lots of good things. You have Donna and your friends and…lots of things.”

“My book was the only part of
me
that I liked.”

“Oh, Pete, you don’t mean that.”

“I do, Dad. Before my book I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to die.”

“Ashamed? What do you have to be ashamed of?” I caught a quick flash of that grisly shed where Pete’s father had fucked him while his mother had wielded the video camera. Then I saw those other monsters, faceless and numberless—unaccountable—who had ordered this child off the Internet, like a cheap ring or a Beanie Baby.

“You were just a little kid, Pete. There was nothing you could do. It wasn’t under your control at all. C’mon, I know you know that. I’m sure Donna’s told you that a thousand times.”

“Yeah. But I didn’t believe it until I wrote it down.”

“And it’s
still
written down. I have it right here on my desk. The whole thing. Nothing has changed, Pete.”

“But they don’t believe me.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“I do. I can feel it. They think I made it all up.”

“Well…look…I’m gonna talk to Findlay and—”

“You never doubted me, did you?”

And with that the boy in my arms twisted his head to gaze up at me, those beach-glass eyes growing wider with urgency and need.

He blinked at me several times, still holding tight, bracing himself for my answer.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Never?”

“Oh, Pete, why would I doubt you? What reason could I possibly have? I’m a writer myself, remember? I know how hard it is to tell the truth in print. Don’t you think I would respect that?”

“I guess,” he said softly.

My face was afire now, my stomach queasy with deceit. I knew I couldn’t sustain this sanctimonious charade a moment longer.

“Okay,” I said briskly, “here’s the plan. First, I’m gonna talk to Donna about how we can—”

“No!”

“Why not? I’m just gonna propose a plan.”

“What kind of plan?”

“Just a way we can…satisfy their requirements at Argus.” He was silent for a moment. “You won’t tell her what I said, will you? About them thinking I’m a phony?”

“No,” I said guardedly. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

“You can’t. She’ll totally flip out. She hates it when people don’t believe kids. It sets her off more than anything.” Which
could
be useful, I thought. An irate mother on the rampage might put Findlay on the spot in a way that I would never be able to do. Then again, what if things got so hot that the editor felt compelled to defend himself, to say who had planted his doubts in the first place? Or at least reinforced them. Findlay had left me out of it so far—as far as I knew—but I would certainly be pushing my luck if I provoked Donna.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just talk to Findlay. And if he goes for it I’ll talk to your mom.”

“If?”

“Well, I think he will. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”

“You’re not gonna tell me what it is, huh?”

“Sure. In a day or so. Just let me do my stuff, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

He’s counting on me, I thought. His old feral terrors are back again, no longer contained by his writing, free to prowl and maim at will.

And he needs his old man to make it all better.

SIXTEEN

THE SANDBAR

THE TERRORS OF MY OWN childhood were petty next to Pete’s, but they’re really the only measure I have: I would get hysterical in department stores whenever I heard the sound of those old-fashioned pneumatic tubes—the ones that once carried money and paperwork from place to place. To me there was something deeply disturbing about them: the way they would scream and swoop overhead like the Wicked Witch of the West. And when those canisters finally dropped in front of me with a creepy thud, my panic was not negotiable; the only remedy was retreat into my mother’s arms and her solemn promise—tearfully extorted—that we would never return again.

I was almost as sissy about merry-go-rounds. I could handle the animals that just went around, but the ones that went up and down were the stuff of nightmares, and no amount of gentle persua-sion could ever get me onto them. An even greater fear was of our cemetery; not of corpses or ghosts or the like, since it was just family history, after all, but of being locked in there after dark. I knew the place closed at five o’clock, that the big iron gates were chained shut then, so I kept an eye on the mausoleum clock when my father pulled the weeds off our ancestors after church. I was certain that without my diligence we’d be trapped in there all night, forced to eat worms and drink rainwater until the caretaker came in the morning.

Our cottage on Sullivan’s Island was a disheveled, gray-shingled thing that tiptoed above the tide on barnacled pilings. I loved it there. I liked to get up early, when the sand was still cool under the house, and crack the crust of it with my toes. Sometimes, all by myself, I’d head down to the place we called the Point, where there were dozens of odd little beach-bound pools, warm as piss and very shallow, where fickle tides were known to dump a treasure trove of flotsam and shells. My cousin Lucy, who was my age and lived two cottages away, would join me there after breakfast, and we would spend the morning digging for coquinas—brightly hued little clams no bigger than a black-eyed pea. In the belief that these poor creatures were lonely for their own kind, we would build them orphanages in the sand, lodging them according to color, as God had surely intended.

But I rarely ventured into the surf. The horror I felt under the dead weight of the waves was something primal and undeniable. My father once tried to break me of this by tempting me with the offshore sandbar. It might be scary near the beach, he said, but if you went out far enough, there was a place where the water was less than a foot deep, where you could stroll along as easy as could be, like Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. And I didn’t even have to be able to swim, since he was tall enough to walk us there, if I would just ride on his shoulders like the tough little roughneck he knew me to be.

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. But the old man promised we’d come back whenever I wanted, so I rode him like a trusted steed into the foam, anxiously awaiting the sandbar. I could see the waves forming in the distance, brittle as broken glass and grimly dark green on their undersides. Most of them petered out after a while, but one, I could tell, was building with evil intention. As I sank closer to water level I yelled at my father to stop, to turn around and go back, or let me down, but he just tightened his grip on my legs and headed toward that emerald menace like a madman.

“Hang on, son,” he bellowed above the roar of the surf. “We’re gonna jump that sorry son-of-a-bitch.” When I screamed again in protest, realizing his betrayal, he told me not to be such a crybaby, not to be such a goddamn girl, and this hellish green wall exploded over us, ripping me from his shoulders and spinning me backward and downward, like a palmetto bug caught in a storm drain. When I washed up in the shallows, coughing and sobbing, my father clapped me manfully on the back. “Goddamn,” he said, “that was a son-of-a-bitch, wasn’t it?” But I knew who the son-of-a-bitch was, and I wouldn’t speak to him until suppertime. The next morning, as Lucy and I were busily segregating coquinas, I told her what I’d learned from this: that when I got old and had kids of my own I would never lie to them, never promise them a sandbar I couldn’t deliver.