stood on a hillside in Cabo San Lucas, and they hid themselves within the rooms of the house on Valley Vista and the row of family portraits, drifting over all the promises canceled and the connections missed, the desires left unfulfilled and the disappointments met and the fears confirmed and every slammed door and reconciliation never made, and soon they were covering all the mirrors in every room we lived in, hiding our imperfections from ourselves even as the ashes flew through our blood, and they followed the brooding boy who ran away, the son who discovered what you are, and everyone was too young to grasp that our life was folding in on itself—it was so foolish and touching to think at one point that somehow we would all be spared, but the ashes pushed forward and covered an entire city with a departing cloud that was driven by the wind and kept ascending and the images began getting smaller and I could see the town where he was born as the ashes flew over the Nevada mountains mingling with the snow that fell there and crossed a river, and then I saw my father walking toward me—he was a child again and smiling and he was offering me an orange he held out with both hands as my grandfather’s hunting dogs were chasing the ashes across the train tracks, dousing their coats, and the ashes began bleeding into the images and drifted over his mother as she slept and dusted the face of my son who was dreaming about the moon and in his dream they darkened its surface as they flew across it but once they passed by the moon was brighter than it had ever been, and the ashes rained down earthward and swirling, glittering now, were soon overtaken by a vision of light in which the images began to crumble. The ashes were collapsing into everything and following echoes. They sifted over the graves of his parents and finally entered the cold, lit world of the dead where they wept across the children standing in the cemetery and then somewhere out at the end of the Pacific—after they rustled across the pages of this book, scattering themselves over words and creating new ones—they began exiting the text, losing themselves somewhere beyond my reach, and then vanished, and the sun shifted its position and the world swayed and then moved on, and though it was all over, something new was conceived. The sea reached to the land’s edge where a family, in silhouette, stood watching us until the fog concealed them. From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.
So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park.
ALSO BY BRET EASTON ELLIS
Glamorama
The Informers
American Psycho
The Rules of Attraction
Less Than Zero
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2005 by Bret Easton Ellis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint “The Way We Were” from the motion picture The Way We Were, words by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, music by Marvin Hamlisch. Copyright © 1973 (Renewed 2001) Colgems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellis, Bret Easton.
Lunar Park / Bret Easton Ellis.
p. cm.
1. Novelists—Fiction. 2. Suburban life—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. 4. College teachers—Fiction. 5. Hallucinations and illusions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.L5937L86 2005
813′.54—dc22
2005040923
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,