“Well?” the doctor says.
“Hannah?” her mother says. “Did it work? Is it working?”
There is a game she sometimes plays. The wishing game. She’ll say, “I’m looking forward to our trip to Costa Rica,” or “I’m riding a horse across the Scottish Highlands,” and then, as if a spell has been cast, an image will crystallize. She is on a white sand beach with coconuts thudding the sand and dolphins arcing from a lagoon. She is pounding across a bog, through swirling mists, while the horse kicks up divots of mud and bagpipes honk and wheeze. No matter how expensive or distant or impossible the dream, the wishing game makes anything possible.
“I can see,” she says. She has said this many times before, has whispered it into her pillow and coat collar and closet, testing the words in quiet places to see if they spoil once released to the air. But this time it’s true. She can see.
It is difficult for her to comprehend images, her frame of reference so far limited to her other senses. What she sees is like an echo. And inside the echo there is another voice. There is a blazing white above, and a muted white all around, through which things—people?—move. Her mother asks, “Can you see me? Hannah?”
She sees something, but is it her mother? It must be. But everything is mixed up. She can’t forge colors with shapes or shapes with distance or distance with texture, every different input temporarily fizzling her brain, making her want to shout, “Does not compute, does not compute!” As if someone put a banana under her nose and a shark in front of her face and jazz in her ear and a broom in her hand and said, “What a beautiful sunset.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t tell what’s real.”
Chapter 1
LELA STARES AT her reflection in the dead computer screen, a black cutout against the fluorescent blaze of the newsroom behind her. Her face appears an oval smear with hollows for eyes, a gash for a mouth, as if she were looking into some haunted mirror. She lifts the phone to her ear and dials the number for Alderman Robert Dahm. The ring purrs. Her pen hovers over a yellow legal tablet. There was a time when she found it impossible to concentrate at her desk, one of forty cubicles surrounded by glass-walled meeting rooms and editorial offices here at The Oregonian, where she has worked Metro the past five years. But she has learned to focus, to crush down her attention and blur into white noise the copy machine whirring, the printer and fax machine bleeping, the cell phones and landlines ringing, the televisions blaring, the voices calling all around her, just as she has learned to tolerate the smell of mildew that clings to the walls and the taste of the burned black coffee in the lounge.
She has never heard of the company Undertown, Inc. That’s who City Hall says bought Rue Apartments, the four-story stone building in the Pearl District, long ago condemned and surrounded by chain-link. The Rue was one of her first big stories at the paper—back when she was freelancing—a feature about the ten-year anniversary of Jeremy Tusk’s death. She’s since become a staff writer at The Oregonian, and Tusk has become a celebrity serial killer. Plug his name into Google and a long list of hits will come up, including leaked crime scene photos and occultist conspiracy theories. There’s a display dedicated to him at the Museum of Death in Los Angeles and at least two direct-to-video horror films have cited him as an inspiration.
Lela is thirty now, she was twenty-four then, when she toured through the weed-choked lot, the thirty-unit building with the broken windows and a gnarled tree growing on its roof. In her article she described its shadow-soaked hallways as palpably dark. She described Tusk’s two-bedroom apartment, still cobwebbed with police tape, as tomblike. She quoted a detective as saying, “Up to me, we’d burn the place down, raise a barbed-wire fence, keep everyone the hell away. Cursed ground.”
The alderman’s secretary answers and patches her through. “Lela Falcon?” he says, and she says, “Yes,” as though he’s the one bothering her. His voice, a nasal whine, asks what he can do for her this afternoon.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the Rue building?”
“The Rue—you mean that the property sold? Why does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. You know it matters.”
“So you can write another story about that demon-worshipping psychopath cutting people up and making their skin into curtains? Maybe I don’t want you dredging up all those bad memories. It’s not good for the city.”
“It is good. It is good. That’s the story. A new chapter. Portland moves on.”
“You write a story, you bring up all those nasty details, people get upset.”
“No. Don’t be stupid. You’re wrong. It’s the opposite spin. New building, new city, new era. Bluebirds and hopefulness and all that happy crappy bullshit.”
His sigh makes a wind in her ear. They talk another five minutes. Due to a tax foreclosure, the property belongs to the city, and last she heard, they were going to convert the lot to green space, landscape it with trees and shrubs and grass and benches. Last she heard, from the alderman’s own mouth, it was not “appropriate” to develop the lot for residential or economic purposes due to what had happened there.
Now the city of Portland has sold the lot to Undertown, Inc., for an undisclosed purchase price. A generous one, the alderman says, one they couldn’t refuse in these lean times. “It will be a good boost. We need a good boost.”
“And construction is already underway? I’m hearing about this how many weeks later? Who are these people? What are they going to do with the lot?”
Robert doesn’t know. Something about the Internet. She asks him for contact information—she wants to reach out to Undertown—and he says she’ll have to figure that out on her own. All this time her pen gashes paper, scratching out notes.
“You know, you should smile more,” he says, and she says, “How do you know I’m not smiling?” and he says, “You never smile. It might help you—that’s all I’m saying. Professionally. Personally. Try it sometime.”