Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [93]
“I’m not ranting,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Calm down—that’s all this is about.”
“Let’s just talk about this tomorrow night, okay?”
“Why can’t we have a private conversation?” I asked. “Jayne, whatever our problems are—”
“I don’t want you here in this room tonight.”
“Jayne, your daughter thinks that doll is alive—”
(And I do too.)
“I don’t want you in here, Bret.”
“Jayne, please.”
“Everything you say and everything you do is so small and predictable—”
“What about new beginnings?” I reached out for her leg. She kicked my hand away.
“You screwed that up sometime last night between your second gallon of sangria and the pot you smoked and then racing around this house with a gun.” A desperate sadness passed over her face before she turned off the lights. “You screwed that up with your big Jack Torrance routine.”
I sat on the bed a little longer and then stood up and looked down at her in the faint darkness of the room. She had turned away from me, on her side, and I could hear her quietly crying. I stepped softly out of the bedroom and closed the door behind me.
The sconces flickered again as I walked down the hallway past Sarah’s closed door and the door Robby always locked, and downstairs in my office I tried reaching Aimee Light on my cell phone but only got her message. On my computer screen was an e-mail from Binky asking if I could meet with Harrison Ford’s people sometime this week, and I was looking at the screen about to type back an answer when another e-mail appeared from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. This one arrived earlier than usual, and I clicked on it to see if the “message” had changed, but there was only the same blank page. I started to call the bank but then realized that no one would pick up because they were closed by now, and I sighed and just stood up from the computer without turning it off, and then I was moving toward the bed I had become so used to when I suddenly heard sounds coming from the media room. I was too tired to be afraid at that point and I listlessly made my way toward the noise.
The giant plasma TV was on. The movie 1941 was playing yet again—John Belushi flying a plane high over Hollywood Boulevard, a cigar clenched between his teeth, a mad gleam in his eye. As I pressed Mute, I assumed this was a DVD we had bought and that maybe the automatic timer had switched it on. Robby had been watching it last night before Jayne and I left for the Allens’ and he probably hadn’t taken the disc out. But when I opened the DVD player, there was no disc in it. I stared at the TV again, puzzled. I picked up the remote and pressed Info and saw that the movie was playing on Channel 64, a local station. But when I looked through the cable guide for that week the movie wasn’t listed, on that channel or any other; and since Robby had watched it last night I checked the schedule to see if it had been listed for that date. According to the listings it had not been on last night either. And then I remembered passing by Robby’s room on the night of the Halloween party, when Ashton Allen had been sleeping while 1941 blared from Robby’s TV. I checked the cable guide for the thirtieth, and again there was no listing for 1941 anywhere. As I sat in front of the TV, desperately searching for any information about why this particular movie continued playing, I suddenly noticed scratching noises.
They were coming from outside the bay window of the media room.
I immediately turned the TV off and sat there, listening.
And then the scratching noises stopped. After a moment they resumed.
I stood up and started toward the kitchen, the ceiling lights in the living room dimming and flaring on again as I walked beneath them (trying—successfully—to ignore the green carpeting and the realigned furniture). This happened again in the hallway leading to the kitchen, which was dark until the moment I stepped inside, when the lights flickered on. When I stepped back