Gary knows Warren County well. So many times, packed into his car along with boxes and suitcases, he slithered up the thruway to Point O’Pines, where he’d be swarmed by a hive of snap bracelets and rainbow shoelaces, a twenty-four-hour twittering of girls around his orbit, all of them sharing the same home base. No goodbyes for weeks.
The thruway is different than it was back then. It’s late March and the trees are still wounded by the blizzard. The mountains, which bob up three and a half hours into the drive, are still in their winter white caps.
Twelve minutes from Brant Lake is Chestertown, not much of a town, but standards shift here in the North Country. Barren restaurants, one-room post offices. It’s easy to forget, winding through the resilient clusters of trees, the human struggle to survive among them.
It was only hours ago that he was in the city, where the only trees are planted and staked with curb your dog signs. Now here he is, high in the ear-popping mountains, pulling up to the Realtor’s office and the woman with the keys to his future.
He already laid the groundwork with a phone call and his living requirements. He wanted something extremely private and available immediately. Don’t worry about his price range, he’d told the Realtor. She had faxed him a few options and today he’s all ready to lock this down.
From house to house and between them on the winding roads, Gary plays a city guy who’s earned himself a getaway, a little R&R in nature, away from all the stress.
Deeper into the woods they go, twenty-five minutes from Chestertown into Johnsburg, which is less a town and more a cluster of hamlets centered around Gore Mountain in North Creek, a major upstate skiing destination—but a joke for his clients who do Aspen or the Swiss Alps on holiday. They would never come up here.
North Creek is barren in between seasons, but in a few months the river will be loaded with rafts and kayaks. If Gary worries that this area will be too populated, his concerns must have diminished when they turned onto the isolated Cemetery Road. Past the headstones and half a mile down a dirt road, Gary finds what he is looking for.
This is the one. Gary drops $2,500 on the spot, just to show how serious he is. When he is back in the city, he meets his future landlord, a New Jersey man around Gary’s age. All the landlord knows is that Gary Wilensky is a low-key recluse looking to escape Manhattan, and that he’s prepared to hand over six months of rent, $11,500, up front in exchange for a one-year rental. They meet for a moment—a hello and handover of cash. The offer is too good to pass up.
Before Gary came along, the owner’s plan was to sell the house, and after Gary leaves, to put it back on the market, but after Gary, the house won’t sell— not for at least two years. It will become the notorious cabin off Cemetery Road, the “house of horrors,” as Newsweek will call it. Even the owner’s wife will refuse to go back inside.
Gary Wilensky scans each musty room, minding the windows, the doors, the exits and entrances. On a pad of graph paper, he takes notes. LIVING ROOM. CABIN DOOR: SMALL WOOD MAT—BLANKET. PATIO DOOR—LARGE WOOD MAT. VIDEO CAMERA—WINDOW—GARBAGE BAGS. DINING ROOM—GARBAGE BAGS? KITCHEN—DOOR—MAT.
The cabin itself has a simple layout. Two bedrooms, a dining room off the kitchen, and a den/living area. He works through the night boarding up the house, setting up his equipment. Gary the builder. Gary the woodsman.
He lays out his spoils from SpyWorld—gadgets with pages of instructions—assembling each one, running wires throughout the house. Gary the electrician.
Outside the house, he climbs a tree and strings more wires around branches, holding a camera in one hand, like a technological Tarzan.
Then there is Gary the party animal, who makes sure there are wine coolers in the fridge. Mixtapes and porn on deck.
Gary the movie star, who writhes around on the bed, rustling the bedsheets, posing for the camera.
Gary the nurse, who tucks in the bedsheets, prepares the bedpan, and lines up his medical supplies.
And Gary the architect of this plan, the darkest of them all, who handles each cold chain link, fastening them with hooks, testing the pulley, tightening the restraints. He’s the one who scribbles down items on a graph paper pad, adding to his master list everything that Gary Wilensky still needs before time runs out.