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By Root 1157 0

to do their laundry. Another Glenfiddich ordered in a nightclub you were far too old for, chatting up ponderous young girls who made you bristle and wince about all the things they didn’t know. But in that chair on that deck I thought: Get out of Midland County, grow a goatee, smoke cigarettes again, seduce women half your age (but successfully), arrange a nice workspace in a sunny corner of the condo, become less maniacal about form, confide all your secret failures to friends. Free Bret. Start over. Get younger. Absorb yourself back into the world of teenage flameout and the curving murals of scorched corpses—the things that had made you a youthful success. Continue your refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. Streamline yourself. Stop shrugging. Eliminate chic. Avoid all fey irony. Erase the jacket cover with the fuchsia lettering you had once desired. Get the full body wax and the spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. Act like you’ve just blown in from nowhere. Push the gangsta attitude with a very straight face. Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful and fake it all was.

Because 307 Elsinore Lane was haunted, and this was the only alternative I could come up with on that Tuesday morning. I needed something—the distraction of another life—to alleviate the fear.

But I didn’t want to travel back to that world. I wanted the idyllic glossiness of our life (more accurately, the fulfilled promise of that life) returned to me. I wanted another chance. But I could express this wish only to myself. What I needed to do was put it into action and prove that I hadn’t dropped out, that I hadn’t killed the buzz, that I could rejuvenate. I needed to prove that somehow I could shift out of the slow lane. I was still young. I was still smart. I was still convinced of things. I hadn’t lost it entirely. I could move through the hassle. I could erase Jayne’s resentment

(What had happened to the way she used to come as soon as I entered her and the nights I watched her face as she slept?)

and I could make Robby love me.

I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man’s vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.

(Though I didn’t know this on November fourth, that morning would be the last time I ever saw my family together again.)

And then—as if it was preordained—all of these thoughts triggered something. An invisible force pushed me toward a destination.

I could actually feel this happening to me physically.

A small implosion occurred.

I was staring at the crow circling above me and in that instant I suddenly realized something.

There were attachments.

Where?

There were attachments on the e-mails coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks.

My chest started aching and I could barely sit still but I waited in that chair on the deck until my family disappeared from the kitchen and I heard the Range Rover pull out of the driveway, and the moment the automated timers activated the sprinklers on the front lawn I hurried into the house.

I nodded to Rosa, who was cleaning the kitchen as I rushed past her, and then I bumped into Marta outside my office—the specifics of the conversation I can’t remember; the only important information was Jayne’s departure for Toronto the next day—and I just nodded at everything Marta said, wrapping the blanket tighter around myself, and then I was in my office, locking the door, dropping the blanket, fumbling with the computer, propping myself in the swivel chair. I could see my reflection in the computer’s black screen. Then I turned it on and my image was erased. I logged on to AOL.

“You’ve got mail,” the metallic voice warned me.

There were seventy-four e-mails.

On each of the seventy-four e-mails that had arrived the night before—the flurry of them materializing the moment I’d been making my connections—there was an attachment.

When I backtracked to the first e-mail