Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [155]
Steam was curling from the Range Rover’s crumpled hood.
I couldn’t move. My entire body was throbbing with pain. My leg was soaked with blood. It kept gushing through the bite marks in my jeans.
“What do you want?” I started to scream.
The Range Rover kept shuddering because my foot was locked against the accelerator.
The boy was floating closer, moving steadily toward me, relaxed.
Through my tears I began to make out his features more clearly.
“Who are you?” I was screaming as I sobbed. “What do you want?”
Behind him I could see the house melting away.
He was now standing by my window.
He was staring at me so starkly it was as if he were sightless.
I tried positioning myself so I could open the door, but I was trapped.
“Who are you?” I kept screaming.
I stopped asking that question as his hands reached out to me.
That was when I realized there was someone else who was more important.
“Robby,” I started moaning. “Robby . . .”
Because Clayton was—and had always been—someone I had known.
He was somebody who had always known me.
He was somebody who had always known us.
Because Clayton and I were always the same person.
The writer whispered, Go to sleep.
Clayton and the writer whispered, Disappear here.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10
30. the awakening
I regained consciousness in a hospital room at Midland Memorial the day after the first surgery to save my leg was completed. The operation had lasted five hours. I had been sleeping for more than twenty-four hours.
When I woke up Jayne was standing over me. Her face was swollen.
My first thought: I am alive.
The relief was short-lived when I saw the two police officers in the room.
My second thought: Robby.
I realized that they had been waiting for me to wake up.
I was asked, “Bret . . . do you know where Robby is?”
The room was cold and empty and I felt something humming beneath the fake calm. There was a horrible insistence to the question that was barely restrained.
I whispered something that caused a disturbance. What I whispered was not what they were hoping for.
Jayne’s exhausted face died. I became blinded by it.
When we were told that Robby Dennis was now officially missing I could not describe the sounds Jayne began making, and neither could the writer.
31. the endings
Questions the writer asked me: How long do you hold on to a child? You have to decide if the world is worth returning to, and in the end, what are your options? I know where Robby went, but do you?
For the first few days after Robby’s disappearance I was still recuperating and underwent four more operations—so substantial was the damage to my right leg—and during this time I was lost in the mercy flow of the morphine drip. Ultimately the leg would be saved, and doctors told me I should be grateful, but the only thing I could think about was Robby. There was nothing else to take the place of that. We were conscious of only that one thing. We could only wait and then, as time passed, we began waiting without hope. But Jayne kept coming out of the cave she would hide herself in and emerge newly determined, even after admitting it was all useless. Why? Because I had offered her something to grasp on to with the deposition I gave when I told the Midland authorities I believed our son was a runaway and that he had not been abducted. When asked why I believed this “theory,” I realized very quickly that there was nothing to sell them. I had not seen the e-mails to—or from?—the other missing boys on the afternoon of November fifth because the computer had died (and when the police searched the house after the attack, the computer was no longer in Robby’s room, even though I told them I was positive I had seen it) and the evidence of a conspiracy (a drunken Nadine Allen, the playful whispers of boys in the courtyard of a mall, the two Salvation Army boxes I’d glimpsed in Robby’s room—no one could ascertain if any clothing was missing or not—and the twelve trips we eventually estimated he made to Mail Boxes Etc. in October alone,