2010
When Alice Emmenthaler e-mailed asking if she could interview me about the Neversink, I was surprised. We’d met once or twice at family things, but we’d never been at all close—she was about fifteen years older than me. I knew who she was, of course, but I was a little surprised she’d even thought to e-mail me. And besides, I wasn’t sure what I could tell her that would be useful. I didn’t know if she knew my story, but in a nutshell: I got out as quickly as I could, and I stayed away. I wrote back saying as much, and she said, well, she was going to be in LA anyway for some business meetings, so would I mind getting lunch. I never mind getting lunch, I said. Where and when?
We met at a Moroccan place near my apartment, in Los Feliz. She looked younger, different than I’d thought from Googling her dust jackets and promo shots. Some people have an energy in person that photos don’t capture. I ordered some fruit tea and we sat on the sidewalk, Ernie flattened out at my feet. I’d been up late the night before, doing an improv set, and I guess I was loopy, because when she asked about my life I told her everything: how I’ve been in Los Angeles for a decade since college, screenwriting and performing, and bartending at the Vermont, how my girlfriend moved away last year and I live with my dog in a little dump in Eagle Rock; how I actually dressed up as the Captain Morgan’s pirate for a stretch to make some extra cash—three hundred for a night out at Footsie’s or the 4100 Bar, taking pictures and lining up buttery nipples on my cutlass for bachelorette parties; how, for this, I attended the Tisch conservatory at NYU and still pay five hundred a month in loans; and how, in spite of how bleak all of that might sound, I’m happy here. As the song goes, I love LA.
Small talk out of the way, it seemed, she set a minirecorder on the table and said, “So, Noah, what was it like growing up there?”
“Liberty or the Neversink?”
“Both.”
“I don’t know. Weird, but also normal, I guess.”
“How so?”
“I mean, you know how, when you’re a kid, however things are is normal. You could be growing up on Mars and think that was how it was for everyone.”
“Weird how, though?”
“Well, you’ve been there.”
“Yes, I have. I’m going back to do some more research, too.”
“It’s a creepy place anyway, and then I got older and learned more and more about the history of it—” I trailed off, unsure where I was going with that. Ernie shifted at my feet as if to remind me of where we were—in Los Angeles, on a beautiful day.
She said, “Did you ever see anything strange? Hear about anything?”
“Like what?”
“Anything. Related to the killings.”
“Not really. They’d basically stopped by the time I was a kid.”
“Were there any theories about who it might have been?”
“Of course. There was always speculation. My dad seemed to think it was an out-of-towner.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like someone from the city who visited the hotel on holidays, maybe had family in the area.”
“What do you think?”
“What’s the book going to be about, exactly? Are you playing detective, trying to crack the case?”
“Not in a legal sense, no. I’m just trying to put things together to my satisfaction. About the killings and what happened to me. But I also want to weave in a history of the hotel through the decades and our family. I’m still figuring it out.”
As she described the project, she poured more tea and took a bite of the coiled pastry I’d ordered, the powdered sugar dusting her fingers. Looking at her, I got this weird feeling we were meant to meet up, that this was something important and preordained. When she finally paused, I told her as much, and it was obvious she thought this was stupid. I don’t really believe in destiny, but it does feel like sometimes things just line up. Probably all that LA good-energy stuff rubbing off—I know actors who do this thing where they pretend they’ve already gotten the part before they audition, because it helps them line up their chakras or whatnot. It takes an adjustment to move here from the Northeast, where everything is negative and ironic and self-deprecating, to get used to this culture of what is—to be honest—sometimes extremely silly optimism. But it’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed out here—because you can choose to be happy, to not lug around your history and family and life story like an overpacked suitcase. The way my father, who depresses the hell out of me, does.
I said some of this, and she said, “What’s so depressing about Len?”
“How much time do you have?”
“As long as it takes.”
We wound up getting dinner at Casita del Campo, one of my favorite spots. Around the second pitcher of margaritas, the recorder was off and we were just talking. About the world and comedy and LA and writing and so on, and so on. I asked her what had compelled her to write about the Neversink, and she told me how she’d almost killed herself three years before. And how the thing that had saved her was this idea that she had to go down, keep going down. That’s how she put it. She said she realized she had to dig into the story of what had happened to her and the hotel and everything, that this would be how she’d move on.
I said, “You should try my technique—just run as far away as possible.”
“I did try that. It wasn’t working.”
Her black eyes reflected the light from a decorative sconce over the table, and I felt this overwhelming desire for her approval, to please her. “Seriously, Alice. I’ll help however I can.”
After dinner we went back to my apartment and I walked Ernie, then we listened to music and smoked a little grass—I like calling it grass, it’s so dumb and seventies, and it made her laugh, a pleasing low tone. I put on this Can album, Ege Bamyasi, that I really like to listen to baked, and my mind drifted back to her description of herself in that room, how it had ruined her in certain ways forever—irretrievably, that was what she’d said. The thought of a perfect, happy little kid being damaged in that way made me start crying—wailing, like I was the hurt child in Alice’s story.
“Noah,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, come here,” she said, and she held my head in her lap while it shook.
We had a good time that week. In some ways—and I told her this after one too many beers by the pool at her hotel—she felt like the older sister I’d always wanted and had never had with Suse, who’d always been distant. That’s very kind, she said, and looking me up and down added that I was like the groundhog she’d never had. Funny stuff, I said, maybe you should be the comedian. The next night I bartended, and she came in, ordered a French 75, pretended not to know me at first. On the tip line, she wrote “LOL.” We drove her rental out to Malibu and bought cherries from a roadside vendor in Topanga Canyon. I ate them from the bag and threw the pits down the sloping hill, thinking how nice it would be if one of them took root and a cherry tree grew there.
On the day before she was supposed to fly back to London, Alice came and saw me perform at the Laugh Factory. On Wednesdays, they have this five-minute set thing with about thirty comedians, and everyone goes up, one after the other. It’s pretty rough, and there’s usually a lot of drunks chattering in the front tables, but I did all right, some dumb extended joke about why I quit playing professional basketball, having lost my passion for the game.
Afterward we sat at the bar. She said, “That was pretty good.”
“Pretty thank you.”
“Pretty you’re welcome. I have to say, though, you don’t seem like a typical comedian.”
“No?” I said. “Lumpy with a Jewfro? I’m the model.”
“Yeah, but not unhappy. I’ve known a few comedians. You’re not an asshole and not suicidally depressed.”
“You don’t have to be depressed; that’s bullshit.”
“Yeah?” She sipped her drink.
“I mean, do you have to be depressed to be a good welder? A good figure skater?”
“Maybe. And you know that’s different.”
I laughed. “I like to be happy, sue me.”
“There’s your problem,” she said. “That’s why you’ll never be good.”
Just then, another comedian stopped by and invited us to a party one of the Groundlings was throwing in Coldwater Canyon. We settled the bill, got in the car, and drove up, miraculously finding a parking spot right outside. Everything was light and fun, but I stopped pacing myself and, okay, might have gotten a little bit drunk. On the back porch, as we were sharing a smoke to the strains of Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” I said, “That’s why I’ll never be good, huh?”
“What?” She was looking down the steep backyard, a tangled grove of lemon trees and birds of paradise.
“You said I would never be good.”
“No. I said trying really hard to be happy is why you’ll never be good.”
“That’s such a fucked-up thing to say.” She shrugged, and I went on. “But I guess you’re a screwed-up person, right? It’s probably why you’re so good at what you do.”
“You’re drunk, Noah.”
“That’s what you think, though, isn’t it?”
In a practiced, casual motion, she flicked the cigarette off the porch and said, “What I think is that people running from themselves don’t make good art. I think you’re extremely invested in being laid-back and cheerful, and I think that comes at a cost. Maybe it’s worth it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, that’s better,” she said, and she may have said something else, but I was walking through the scrum of the party, pushing past a couple making out on the stairs and moving down the driveway and street, letting gravity and my drunkenness lower me down the long hill, walking down Hollywood, down Sunset, past the Seventh Veil and a pair of prostitutes on stilt-like heels catcalling me and laughing when I flipped them off, trudging past Kaiser Permanente and the Scientology center, and finally, at three in the morning, collapsing half drunk in my bed to not sleep the rest of the night.
The next day, with a hangover like an itchy wool shirt worn under my skin, I took two Ativan and drove south, all the way down to San Diego. It felt good to escape LA’s summer clinch, and cresting the hills in La Jolla, the temperature dropped ten degrees. I parked alongside the Pacific Beach Boardwalk and took Ernie down to the ocean, where we lay in the sand between two rival gangs of sunbathing teenagers.
Sedated by the heat and the sedatives I’d taken, Ernie panting by my side, I drifted into one of those strange zones between sleep and waking. Very clearly, I was back in my old bedroom, in the cottage. It was winter—strange to feel the cold and the warm sand simultaneously—and the wind clattered the shutters outside the window. It sounded like someone trying to get in. I’d childishly begged Susannah to sleep with me on those windy nights, but she’d long ago told me to grow up and shut up, and so I had. And then, one night, came the man.
I was lying sleepless in bed when outside my window was this weird yellow light. My bedroom faced the woods, so I couldn’t think what it could be. It got a little brighter, then went dark, and I was about to get out of bed when the window opened. It was so unreal—the hand entering, then the arm, a foot delicately thrown over the sill, a black boot, then the dark figure pushing through and standing there—that for a moment, I hadn’t screamed. I’d just stared, knowing I was having a nightmare. But usually the moment you realize you’re dreaming is the moment you wake up, and I hadn’t. The man had just stood there staring at me, and I at him. Then I’d tried to scream but couldn’t, could only lie there silent and shaking.
He approached the bed and leaned over. He put his hands around my neck and began squeezing, suffocating me slowly, and there was nothing I could do about it. I closed my eyes and submitted. Only then did the pressure ease, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone without any evidence he’d been there, other than the barest smudge of snow on the carpet, which melted away. I wasn’t able to sleep for a week after that. When I told my parents, they told me it was a nightmare, and that was almost the worst part, that they didn’t believe me.
The man returned several more times over the years, then no more. Now, twenty years later, he was back and I was eight again, seeing the glow outside, squeezing my eyes, hearing the window open, willing him away, willing myself to a remote beach like the one I dimly sensed beneath me. Trying to scream but making only a whimper. Thrashing and thrashing, my muscles barely twitching. The man standing there, getting closer, on top now, smiling down at me.
The girls on either side startled up from their sunbathing at the man jumping up from the sand and jogging out into the ocean some twenty yards away. I waded fully clothed out into the waves and must have presented a disturbing enough scene to send a young lifeguard trotting out. He brought me in under his tanned, muscular wing to a smattering of mild applause. People watched for a minute but lost interest as I walked Ernie back up to the boardwalk—just another loony drawn to the beach, nothing to see here. Soaked through, I rolled down the windows and drove, shivering, back to LA. When I got to the hotel, Alice was packing, almost ready to leave.
“Hey,” she said. “What happened to you?”
“I told you the first night, I want to help you.”
“I think you might be the one that needs help.”
“Help me help you help me.”
“Come in.”
Once again she turned on the recorder, once again Ernie settled under my feet, but this time I had a story for her. How the man started coming at night. How when I told my parents, they said it was a nightmare. And how when I kept having this nightmare, they hired a therapist who diagnosed sleep paralysis. Victims of hypnagogia often, he said, suffer the delusion of someone in the room with them, someone holding them down. He even brought in a reproduction of an old painting called The Nightmare, in which a little gray ogre perches on top of a prostrate damsel. A terrifying painting, and a small comfort, considering I knew what was happening wasn’t a delusion.
How, after weeks and months of these therapy sessions, I began to believe my psychologist. When the light outside appeared, I closed my eyes and thought about other things—playing on a sunny beach with friends from school—and I could almost convince myself that the footsteps in the room and the hands on my neck were just some other, renegade part of my imagination. After all, if the man was real, why hadn’t he killed me, why hadn’t he gone after my sister or my parents?
And how, finally, on one morning in the spring, by which point I had convinced myself it really was just a nightmare, the nightmare left something behind: an old military flashlight. A small green metal box with a hinged clip on the rear—it must have slipped from his jacket and fallen under the bed. I pressed the little red button and it turned on, casting the room in the ghostly yellow light that announced his arrival outside my window. It was both terrifying to know the man was real and gratifying to know I hadn’t created him, that he didn’t dwell in the recesses of my consciousness. I figured I’d tell my parents at breakfast, but I didn’t. The flashlight stayed where I’d put it, in my closet, inside a box of old baseball cards.
“Why didn’t you show it to them?”
“I guess I knew he’d realize he’d lost it, and somehow that would mean he wouldn’t be back. But also, what if I showed them and they still didn’t believe me? What if it was like the nightmares? Not having them believe me—to go on doubting myself—would have been the scariest thing of all. Does that make sense?”
She nodded. “It does to me.”
I reached in my pocket and pulled it out, the flashlight. I turned it on and the hotel room was suffused with that weird glow. “I’ve held on to it ever since. After all these years, it still works. To remind me I’m not crazy, to trust myself. Because, you know, I was right. He never did come back after that.”
She took the light from my hand and held it in front of her. “I remember this from the basement.”
“Yes.”
She got up and poured us both wine in plastic hotel cups, and we drank together listening to the AC hum. “You understand that what I’m writing will hurt our family, right? I don’t want you to be blindsided. I like you.”
“I like you, too.” Outside the window, a line of birds perched on the building next door took flight, and their shadows fell like water. “And I don’t care if it hurts them.”
“No?”
Ernie shifted under me. I wiped my eyes and took a breath. “I think the place is evil. I think they’re hiding something; they’ve been hiding something for a long time. I want to know who did this to us.”
She rolled her suitcase down to the lobby, and I followed with Ernie. Her airport Uber arrived and we embraced one more time; then she was gone. I was almost home before I realized she’d taken the flashlight with her.