Houdini Heart Read online

  What is it about my closet that troubles me?

  ~

  This is nuts. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing anything to avoid doing what I ought to be doing. Writing what is no doubt my last book. Turning back to my screen, I suddenly remember what some other writer said somewhere, and feel a sour grin tug at my mouth. “Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book,” said he, or maybe she, “but many have while trying to write one.”

  ~

  Something wakes me up. A loud pounding. How long has it been going on? Is it at my door? Is there something wrong?

  I suddenly realize—my god, the building’s on fire! I can’t do another fire. I can’t feel another fire. Someone is warning me, warning the others who live here. I leap up from my futon bed. Not bothering with what I wear, what I look like, what time it could be, not even pausing to turn on the light, I am across the darkened room in one jump. My mind is filled with fire.

  Whoever is pounding, pounds louder. I hear you. I’m coming. Don’t leave me!

  Terrified, I fumble with the door latch. My fingers are stupid with fear; what should take less than a moment takes an eternity.

  I finally throw open my door.

  Nothing. There is no one out here, no one pounding on my door or on anyone else’s door. No other door is open. No one else, crazed by the fear of fire and a pounding in the night, stands as I do, bedazzled by an empty corridor.

  The pounding comes again. Only once, a single tremendous blow. As if a wrecker’s ball has finally found River House.

  It’s not my door. It’s in the closet.

  I whirl round to face it. And behind me, the door to my room slams shut. I am in the dark once more.

  ~

  As ever, I am amazed by the writer’s mind. I begin a book about myself and the world dissolves into only me. A ghost story begins to take place under my hand, and the world is haunted. Perhaps I shouldn’t read my library books. Or write a ghost story. I am already haunted. I’m not sure I could take more of it.

  I drink myself back to sleep. Again.

  ~

  A month ago, I lived in Malibu by the sea. One month ago I had no idea I was close to death—mine or anyone else’s. Not dying meant I was still trying to live, and living was becoming more difficult by the hour. By no intention of my own, I’d stumbled into the movie business. It happens when you’re a writer and somebody thinks something you’ve written might do them some good, open a door, make them a movie.

  The movie business is like a small town, smaller than the town of Little Sokoki where no one knows my name. In the movie business, everyone knows your name. Or at least your “product.” They know what you do because what you do might have something to do with them. They know if you’re going up or coming down. If you’re going up, you can’t move for all the friends who surround you. If you’re going down—what friends?

  Few places are stranger than Malibu. In it live more world famous people than any other town on earth. Real estate per week can cost as much as many earn in a year. Yet it’s a dump. Bisected by the bumper-to-bumper Pacific Coast Highway, its beaches are filthy, its stores shabby, its layout shambolic. The carpet in the library was new when Gidget was surfing. There’s a center of sorts: a large, flat, and very vacant lot edged by a cold sea and hot hills. All of it is forever burning up or sliding down.

  I imagine the rich and famous like it that way. It discourages the poor and obscure from hanging around.

  For four years, he and I lived in a very nice house up a scrubby canyon above the “town” of Malibu, very near the rehab center where half of Hollywood gets sent when the police catch up with them. For three years Kate lived with us, not counting her time in my womb. All four of those years I shamed myself by writing to order. That’s what he said: “shamed myself.” He also said: “writing to order.” He, meanwhile, accepted work if he felt like it, drank if he felt like it. He felt like drinking more than he felt like working. He drank to forget he was dying. We all die, even movie stars. But he thought he was dying sooner than the usual span of time because great artists die young. In any case, whenever he sobered up, there was always a part for him. A good part. A very good part. Because he was good. Because there was no one else like him.

  It went on like that right up until the day of the fire.

  He might have been right. I suppose I was filled with shame. But if I was, I was too numb to feel it.

  ~

  I’m back in Price Chopper, idling along an aisle of wines. French, Californian, Spanish, Italian, German, even Vermont wines. I skip the Vermont, go for the German whites. Red wine hurts my head. Vermont wine is too delicate, too fruity, too politically correct. I read every label. It seems Vermont hasn’t discovered grapes. Right next to the ports and the sherries hangs a display of batteries. Why here? Then again, why not? To sell the batteries, there’s an offer of a cheap flashlight. I didn’t need a cup, but I’m sure I need a flashlight. All good ghost stories require a good flashlight.

  I buy three bottles of wine and one flashlight. With extra batteries.

  ~

  In the library there’s a book about Little Sokoki, written by various members of the Little Sokoki Historical Society. It can’t be checked out so I’ve read parts of it in a big soft chair in the library’s front window. River House has half a chapter to itself. And three black and white photographs. One was taken at its completion. (I am saddened to see there was once a second-floor iron balcony running the length of Main Street. A splendid thing. Why was it removed? Where did it go?) A second photo taken in the year 1927 (the balcony is still there), and a third sometime in the Seventies. In each photo, aside from the third where the balcony has mysteriously vanished, River House looks just as it does now. All around it, Little Sokoki grows up and falls down, horses and tram lines disappear, the cars and the clothes change with the years, trees are planted and then uprooted, then planted again, faces come and go, but River House remains the same.

  My hotel is one hundred and forty-four years old. Planned and paid for by Charles River Akeley, it was a monument to himself. Born in Little Sokoki in 1821, a failure in school, in employment, and in love, Charles fled to the hills of California and somehow inveigled a fortune from his fellow gold seekers. River House, erected some years later, said all C.R. Akeley needed to say to Little Sokoki.

  I am astonished to learn who has stayed here. Or merely wandered through. Among them: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Baker Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Houdini, Louise Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock just before filming The Trouble With Harry, Shirley Jackson, who lived and died forty miles away in North Bennington, Vermont, doing a rare, forced, and terrified interview at the publication of We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Stephen King passing through as he wrote The Stand…and now—me.

  ~

  The flashlight is a big help. With it, I can now see into the far back corners of my closet. Of course, there’s a loose board. I should have known there would be. When a hotel is one hundred and forty-four years old, when forty years ago it was slated for demolition, but saved at the last moment by a property speculator, when Hitchcock, Houdini, and Lovecraft have walked its halls, not to mention Jackson and possibly King, it’s bound to have a few nooks and crannies that didn’t, or wouldn’t, fit in with the remodeling plans. Curious, I pull at the board. With a little effort, and some kind of tool, I think I can pry it free. Table knife’s no good. Too small. Too flimsy. But I won’t use the bigger better one even if it was up to the job. And I can’t ask my unknown neighbors. “Excuse me, but you wouldn’t happen to have a handy crowbar I could borrow, would you?”

  It seems I’ll be unlocking my leather bag again. A woman needs her hammer.

  ~

  Watching a coven of the Little Sokoki homeless at twilight, I’m sitting in a pocket park at the end of Main Street near the bridge over the river. Like rats, they’ve crept out from their cardboard dens in the green tangle of the riverbank, are probing the
trash cans. Like pigeons, they peck at the refuse.

  I watch, remembering the homeless in Santa Monica. So many on the semi-tropical streets, if you gave each one a buck as you walked the few blocks from Lincoln to the sea, you’d be lucky to wind up with change from a hundred dollar bill. I remember asking him: what does it take to sleep in pissy doorways, to scrounge through slimed dumpsters, to beg in our new America? They can’t all be the institutionalized thrown out of their cozy institutions, or runaway American kids shooting up the Hollywood dream. They can’t all be latter-day My Man Godfreys. Somewhere along the way, they made choices. Even the ignorant, the oppressed, the afflicted, the innocent, and the stupid make choices.

  If whatever happened to them, happened to us, I said, looking out over our unnaturally green back garden in the yellow Malibu hills, what choice would we make?

  He said if he had a camper, he’d do what William Shatner did after Star Trek got cancelled. Live in it with his dog. But without a camper or a dog, he’d hang out in rich people’s back yards. Eat their pet’s food. Take baths in their heated pools. Sleep in their cabanas. Crap in their exotic flower beds. Eventually someone would rediscover him, and when they did, they’d give him a job. He was, after all, a genius.

  He was kidding. But not entirely.

  I said I’d like to think I would walk away. That I would seek what’s left of the Wilderness and take my chances alone like that kid, McCandless I think his name was, who wandered off into Alaska, only to die in an old abandoned bus from eating the wrong wild thing growing in the Alaskan woods. Or better yet, mysteriously disappear into the desert wilderness like that wonderful boy back in 1934. Everett Ruess walked away one day, and from that moment to this has never returned, or left sign of his passing…except to carve one word on a rockface. The word was Nemo, which in Latin means “no one.” What I actually did was write a book, then a screenplay, based on what I hoped I’d have the moxie to do. It made a much better movie than it did a book; it was much better starring Susan Sarandon than me. For one thing, until a month ago I never really walked away. No getting round it—when my time came, I ran.

  Still. I want to think I am not a rat or a pigeon or a dog eating dog food. I want to think I’m a cat, not so much running, as prowling.

  What I’ve actually done is gone to ground. Like a rabbit.

  ~

  She’s here. Standing just behind a fellow in rags stiff with filth. He’s sniffing at something he’s found in the trash. Now he nibbles at it. He ignores her, or hasn’t yet noticed her. I watch her watching him. He seems to fascinate her. She has begun to fascinate me. What is she doing besides getting smaller, flake by flake? Who is she? Outside, by the light of the dimming day, she looks younger than she did through the window of the thrift shop. Younger and smaller. But no cleaner.

  Oh hell. She’s seen me. She’s turning my way.

  I get up and hurry off. The thought of her standing as near to me as she stands to the ratman dining off trash disgusts me. And, somehow, also frightens me.

  My hammer weighs down my bag.

  ~

  Because he once stayed here, I’ve checked out a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. A blurb on the back cover informs me that Lovecraft should not be read alone, and never after dark. But I am alone. It’s just gone midnight and I’m sipping wine and reading The Whisperer in Darkness. It’s set only a few miles from here. Nearby towns are mentioned, roads I’ve traveled, rivers I’ve sat beside, woods I’ve wandered in. He calls Vermont a “region half-bewitched.”

  I wonder which room was his. I wonder if he wrote this particular story of alien possession in it. River House was still a hotel then. Its ceilings were still high, its walls “unfeatured.” I’ve seen photos. The walls were papered in flowers. In birds. In creeping vines. There were no closets; there were only wardrobes. All the beds were four-poster beds. A man who seemed not to notice his own times, I wonder if Lovecraft foresaw the shame that would come to River House.

  I stop reading and go back to prying the loose board away from the wall in the back of my closet.

  It comes all of a sudden—so suddenly, I fall backward, almost smacking myself in the forehead with the head of the hammer. I’m lying on my back, catching my breath, thanking my lucky stars (now, there’s a laugh), in short, doing anything and everything but noticing what I’ve uncovered. When I do notice, I almost fall over again, this time from wonder.

  Behind the wall are stairs.

  Well, of course there would be stairs, it’s only fitting. There’s something that lives in a writer making all this stuff up. And whatever or whoever that something is lives deep down in the brain, somewhere even the writer herself cannot see. Stephen King laid it right out there. He said he was so drunk and so coked out tapping away at his stories, he doesn’t even remember writing them. If he didn’t, who did? The thing living deep down inside, that’s who. Or what. The something that only whispers through my laptop while the rest of me is dying for a pee or a tuna melt.

  It takes me what remains of the night to make a hole large enough to crawl through.

  By then I’m too tired—and to be honest—too tipsy, to bother. Destroying a wall is an exhausting, messy, business. I shower, and fall into bed.

  ~

  What time is it? By the light in my window, the one looking down onto Main Street and across to another red brick building that separates me from the sweet green face of the river, it’s late in the afternoon. I’ve forgotten I own a traveling clock. I dig it out of a side pocket in my laptop case, set it by the clock face in the church steeple next to the library.

  I am wasting the little time I’ve given myself. I am meant to be writing a book. I am meant to be trying not to die.

  I sit up a bit, push my ratted hair out of my eyes, scootch back into my pillow. I switch on my laptop, place it on my stomach, wait for it to boot up. Listening to the busy sound it makes, my eyes alight on the hammer lying on the carpet in front of the bathroom door. Oh fuck. It comes back to me. I’ve made a hole in my apartment wall big enough to drag a small couch through. If I had a couch. What in the world was I thinking? I do not own this apartment. I could be asked to leave. I could be evicted. Then where would I be? I’ve spent a large part of my remaining money on the first and last month’s rent. Covering the security deposit. I’m not sure my security deposit is enough to cover the cost of repairing the wall.

  Why would I destroy the wall? Is it the drink?

  Surprised and horrified, I allow myself to look at my closet. Plaster and lathe dust are ground into the carpet. Splintered boards lean against the closet door, scattered chunks of masonry litter the floor. My mind chatters at me: if I cleaned up; if I got rid of the residue; if the closet door were closed, would anyone notice?

  From now on, I’ll keep it shut. Besides, no one ever comes in here. This isn’t a real hotel; there are no maids, no room service. And I’ve covered my trail well enough. No one knows where I am. Not yet, anyway. If they did, they’d be here. And if, for some reason, someone from Little Sokoki should knock, I would not let them in. As for leaving, if I leave, how long before the management found out? Long enough. Besides, if I wind up dead, they can sue me. I find this last thought comforting.

  An hour later, I am driven out by hunger.

  ~

  It’s gone dark by the time I walk home. It’s that still hour after the shops have closed and before people come out for the evening. There’s no one in the parking lot behind River House and off High Street but me. I stop under a sodium mercury lamp, stare up at it. It’s agig with fireflies. They flare up as bright as the hiss of a sudden match, fall like whirligigs, climb again, do loop-de-loops in the light. Nearby, cat’s cradled in the phone wires, two huge spider webs glutted with the bodies of the dead, glow by the light of the sodium lamp and the fireflies. I’m thinking of Anne Sexton. Some time before she gassed herself in her own garage, wearing her mother’s fur coat with a tumbler of vodka in hand (it was a glorious Octobe
r day and she’d just lunched with a friend and proof-read the galley sheets of her last book of poems, poems she sensed weren’t “good enough”), she wrote: “I could admit that I am only a coward crying me me me and not mention the little gnats, the moths, forced by circumstance to suck on the electric bulb.”

  I can admit that too. It’s always me. Who else do I see in the little gnats, the moths?

  I move on only when the local children of the night begin to appear, small town children, pitiful impersonations of real evil.

  With them, yet not with them, stands the ragged dog who sat by the youth with the camcorder. His coat is so filthy I can’t tell what color he is. He stares at me as I hurry off.

  ~

  To make doubly sure no one sees what I have done to the wall—what if my apartment is inspected for bugs; what if a fire really were to break out?—I’ll use some of my fallen ceiling tiles to cover the hole in the back of my closet. They’ll stay there if I prop my big leather bag up against them.

  If I knew who to go to, I’d ask about the woman with psoriasis. Surely, other people in River House find it strange that she walks the corridors in the middle of the night, that she sometimes pounds on doors. I’d try management, but after making a hole in my closet wall, I don’t want to attract their attention.

  Management consists of the dismissive Miss Jackson who works four days a week in an office at the far end of High Street’s second floor. Management also consists of the present owner of River House, the only son of the man who saved it from the wrecking ball. But the blandly attractive, mildly avaricious Benjamin Willow comes here only once a week. Other than Miss Jackson and Mr. Willow, there’s maintenance. Maintenance is a small furtive man with a dent on the bridge of his purple nose who lives on the ground floor, tucked away in a tiny apartment behind the movie house and the lingerie shop. He drinks. I know he does. Half the time I’m there, he’s there—in Price Chopper’s liquor aisle. He also goes to the New Hampshire dog track about twenty miles from here. I’ve seen his loser’s tickets torn and scattered like bread crumbs leading down and down to where he, I suppose, lives.