This was the night my father died.
Only the sounds of his sobbing brought me out of the stunned darkness that had instantly covered everything. This was a new dimension now.
Shaking, I refocused on the screen, unable to turn away.
My father gripped the bathroom counter, still sobbing. I wanted to avert my eyes when I saw an empty vodka bottle lying next to the sink.
From somewhere in the house, “The Sunny Side of the Street” began playing again.
The camera kept floating closer. It was now in the bathroom.
It was closing in on my father indifferently.
I stifled a scream when I saw that there was no reflection of the camera or who was behind it in any of the mirrors that walled the bathroom.
And then my father stopped sobbing.
He looked over his shoulder.
And then he straightened up and turned around to fully face the camera.
He stared into its lens.
The camera was an invitation to die.
My father was now looking directly at me.
He smiled sadly. There was no fear.
He said one word.
“Robby.”
And as the camera rushed toward him, he said it again.
The video collapsed into darkness.
The anticlimax of not seeing what happened to my father at the moment of his death forced me to rewind the video to a crucial point that I believed could help me understand what I had just seen and suddenly my movements were calm and purposeful and I was able to concentrate solely on what I needed to do.
Because I did not think there was a camera.
Even now I can’t explain the logic of this, but I did not believe there was a camera in my father’s house that night in August of 1992.
(There had been “certain irregularities,” according to the coroner’s report.)
I found the image of my father standing in the kitchen, with the camera watching him through the window.
And I located immediately what I thought was the answer.
A small, flesh-colored image in the corner of the video, in the lower right-hand quadrant of the screen. It was the reflection of a face in window glass.
It moved in and out of focus even though the image of my father remained steady.
There was no camera videotaping this.
I was seeing something through the eyes of a person.
I enlarged the image.
I pressed Pause and enlarged the image again.
The face became clearer without the overall image being distorted.
I enlarged the image once more and then stopped because I didn’t have to anymore.
At first I thought the face reflected in the window was mine.
For one moment the video showed me that I had been there that night.
But the face wasn’t mine.
His eyes were black, and the face belonged to Clayton.
Years had passed since that night. Almost a decade had passed.
But Clayton’s face wasn’t any younger than the face I had looked into in my office at the college on Halloween, when he held out a book for me to sign.
Clayton couldn’t have been older than nine or ten in 1992.
The face reflected in the windowpane was that of an adult.
I checked the other attachments, and after viewing the next two—October 4 and October 5—I realized it was pointless. They were all the same, except that Clayton’s image became clearer in each one.
Without realizing it I had already reached for my cell phone and was dialing Donald Kimball’s office. He didn’t pick up. I left a message.
An hour passed.
I decided to leave the house and drive to the college and find a boy.
16. the wind
“Clayton who?” the secretary asked. “Is that the last name or the first?”
It was almost three, and after driving aimlessly through town replaying the video in my head, I called Kimball again and left another message asking him to meet me in my office at the college, where I would be “hanging out” for the rest of the afternoon. My plan wasn’t to tell him the specifics of what I had seen—I just wanted to place Clayton in his mind, as someone to watch, the possible suspect, the fictional character, the boy who was rewriting my book. And I kept my tone even and natural, reiterating “hanging out” twice so he wouldn’t think I was losing it. Then I called Alvin Mendolsohn’s extension and was surprised when he answered. He spoke coldly to me as we uselessly defined our territory in a very brief discussion that confirmed Aimee Light had not shown up for either of her two scheduled tutorials and also had failed to notify him of her “absentia,” to which he added, “She’s a very impractical young woman,” and then I countered with, “Why—because she’s not doing her thesis on Chaucer?” to which he replied, “Don’t take yourself so seriously,” and then I said, “That’s not an answer, Mendolsohn,” before we both hung up on each other. Needing to be bolder than I felt, I summoned up the nerve to stand in the admissions office, in front of the desk of a blandly good-humored young secretary perched next to a computer, and asked her to look up a student’s name and any contact information regarding how I could reach him since, I admitted regretfully, I had to cancel an appointment. But even in my distracted state I realized, once I’d croaked the word
(if there isn’t a person, how can there be a name?)
“Clayton,” that I didn’t have anything else. He had not supplied a last name. But the campus was small, and I assumed that “Clayton” might be rare enough that he would be easy to track down regardless. The secretary thought it was odd that I didn’t know the last name of one of my students, so I blithely waved a hand around when she inquired about this lapse, the gesture explaining away my absentmindedness, my busy and special life, how unreliable the famous writer was. For some reason, we shared a wooden laugh that momentarily relaxed me. She seemed used to this—the faculty of the college apparently made up of other frantic misfits who forgot the names of their own students. I dazed out, and realized that I was nearing a period in my life when I was seeking assistance from people half my age. I watched the secretary swing toward the computer, her hands sweeping over the keypad.
“Well, I’ll enter the name and we’ll do a search.”
(“I’m a big fan, Mr. Ellis.”)
I spelled the name, correcting her (for some reason, she thought it began with a K, and who knew if it didn’t?), and she typed it in and then tapped a key and sat back.
I could tell from the expression on her face that the screen might as well have been blank.
I was about to lean over and scan the screen with her when she tapped a few more keys.
I realized things were becoming complicated when I noticed her sighing repeatedly.
(You should have never come to Midland County. You should have stayed in New York. Forever.)
“I’m not finding anything with ‘Clayton’ in it,” she said, scrunching her face up.
(“I’m a freshman here.”)
“He said he was a freshman,” I added unhelpfully. “Could you check again?”
“I mean, look, even if you had a last name, Mr. Ellis, nothing would come up in the student directory because there’s no Clayton listed anywhere.”
“This is extremely important.”
“I understand that but there’s no Clayton listed anywhere,” she repeated.
“Please just check one more time.”
The secretary smiled wryly at me—it was actually a sympathetic expression.
“Mr. Ellis . . .”—(and it was maddening that desirable young women were now calling me this)—“the school directory—do you know what that is?—has confirmed that there is no one with the name Clayton—either as a first name or a last name or a middle name—attending this college.”