“Man, no,” he said. “People are still mad about it. Almost none of it was actually true, the way they wrote it up. None of those kids were really like that, they were from families people knew. Normal moms and dads, you know. They didn’t like feeling like everybody from the outside was going to be looking at them funny forever.”
“I always try to be fair to the people I write about,” I volunteered, “but it’s always going to be different for the people who lived through it.” I was a little surprised; among the crowd I ran with, River’s Edge had always been seen as a good example of how to get a story right.
“I guess,” he said. “You saw the movie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. But that’s a movie. Writers have a little more headroom to work with.”
It was quiet for a minute, and maybe for two minutes; an easy quiet, but not, I thought, without some meaning to it.
“But if you write a book, maybe somebody makes a movie.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. There was another moment, a break—not enough for too much discomfort to gather, enough to let him ask directly if I was going to write about that other case, the one that had happened in my house before it became my house: the one hardly anybody remembered as of yet.
“Probably, yeah,” I said.
He raised his can; I joined him in his toast before he delivered it.
“Well, good luck,” he said, and then he told me a story about a guy who’d brought in a 1951 Mercedes for repair that looked like it came fresh off the production line, original paint and everything, and I took this as an indication that he’d said what he came to say and was winding things down; but he stuck around for another twenty minutes, which seemed very gracious to me, if I’d understood the point of our earlier conversation.
We shook hands when we said good night; I tried not to think too hard about it, but found later that I couldn’t help myself, as I considered the increasingly colorful spread of butcher-block paper atop my desk, where, nightly, I was mapping out my list of the dead and their local connections. I reflected on how I’d seen River’s Edge as a pretty good movie about a small town south of San Francisco: it felt true-to-life. Sure, the actors were mainly gorgeous Hollywood types; that can’t be helped. But they’d taken pains to avoid shading things in black-and-white, hadn’t they?
I couldn’t say with any authority, I thought as I sketched my morbid family tree: red Sharpie for victims, green for suspects. And I thought back to the movie they’d made, out of The White Witch of Morro Bay, a film I only watched once, on opening night, in a theater where I felt embarrassed by what I saw: because I’d met most of the people who were being portrayed on the screen, people who, under the editing hand of the screenwriter, were now, at best, misrepresented, and were, in several cases, so wholly reimagined as to be entirely false to the reality I knew.
Certainly River’s Edge was truer than that, I thought, but I had Ken’s voice in my head, and several questions I intended to ask him if we found the time to have some beers again.
6.
IT’S A LUXURY TO WORK SLOWLY; I know it. But I don’t dwell on it. That’s the nature of luxury. You become accustomed to its presence. Even with its decor spruced up, no one could call the former Devil House extravagant, but my work allowed me to spend as much time as I needed on the most granular of details. Crawling around on the floor to see if any doorframes still bore nicks or scuffs. Staring at an imagined coordinate on a wall with my chin resting on my fists, narrowing my focus to these ridiculously specific parameters. Taking the time. Languishing in obscure details until they reveal their deeper secrets may not be wealth, but you’re fooling yourself if you think it isn’t luxury.
I thought about this when I drew up the list of the dead. It wasn’t a long list; there had been no serial killer here, no extended crime spree to reconstruct. The story of Devil House, at first blush, was the story of a moment, and of how that moment came to pass. At first I wrote the names in red Sharpie, on a leaf torn from butcher-block, which I taped to the wall in the living room. I lived with that for a few days, but every time I looked at it, it felt like an imposition. It belonged to the present. The names on it could have been anyone’s, and the glare of the shiny new paper kept reminding me that old photographs and clippings were the only view I had of the place as it once had been.
So I tore the sheet down and threw it away: and then, on all fours, I wrote out all the names again, but in chalk this time, directly on the floor. I was trying to summon the dead: as physical objects in space, as former presences—people who once stood where I was standing, who fell down where I was crouching, and who slowed to stillness in places from which I would get back up unharmed. Absent some feeling for the spaces through which they moved, I wouldn’t be able to pick up the thread.
But these floors were new: gleaming replacements, skintight masks. The victims at Devil House had bled out onto filthy carpet laid over old pine. I looked around at the walls; beneath new paint, they were the same as they’d been sixteen years ago. I thought about carving the names into them with a knife, but remembered the interior shots: spray paint and collage. A different aesthetic entirely. Details are important to me. And then, impulsively, using the heel of my hand, I began erasing what I’d written. It left a giant cloudy smudge on the floor that still suggested the shapes of names: perfect. This is how my process works, when it works.
I took pictures next—Polaroids; it was getting harder to find film since the bankruptcy, but there’s no substitute. Digital’s dry. Snapshots feel weird. Around here it was easier to find fresh packs than back home—in the city, people are hawks for the secondary market. They’ll buy up anything just on rumors of scarcity. Elsewhere, you might still run across three or four fresh packs dangling from a spindle in the aisles of a former Rexall, waiting for an enterprising manager to come along and notice that their packaging has gone yellow. I’d cleared out two inventories since my arrival. I kept my hoard in a shipping box in the closet.
I retained photographs of all the preparatory work. Over the course of a few weeks, I incorporated them into my shoebox full of eBay finds. The new pictures and the old ones began to blur together after a while: as if, in secluded company for too long, they’d become confused about who’d gotten there first. This is a practice of self-deception; pressed, I’d have no trouble telling foraged finds from my original work. But in here, by myself, I can believe whatever I like if I just work at it hard enough.
By this point I’d been in the house about four months. I’d eased in gently, taking my time, getting my bearings before settling down to business. The profound indulgence of my work; the security it represents; the decadent spaces into which I insinuate myself, both external—ruins, remnants, reconstructions—and interior: long hours of consideration and contemplation, solitary reflections that touch total immersion on one side and utter detachment on the other. Almost nobody I write about knew days like these. The ones who were gone had largely lived from day to day; those who’d survived the ordeals that drew me to them would likely never again number “time to think” among life’s pleasures.
* * *