Benny grinned at me and for a moment I could see his younger self peering out, that kid who’d never touched a drop of liquor in his life before I met him.
“How’re your parents doing?” I asked him because that was the kind of thing we were supposed to ask one another now that we weren’t kids anymore.
“Dad had a stroke two years ago,” Benny said with a shrug. “I go back when I can to help her out. She’s lonely, I know, but whenever I do go we just end up fighting.”
I didn’t ask him about Emmanuel, about whether his parents knew. I figured probably they did. There were enough profiles floating around about Benny’s photos so you could only avoid knowing if you really tried.
“How are you and Luca doing?”
“Good.”
“He didn’t want to come with you?”
“Couldn’t get away. You know how it is with these NGOs. Anytime he leaves he feels like he’s letting people down.”
“It’s good what he’s doing,” Benny told me. “We need more people like him right now.” After a moment he stretched and I heard the joints in his shoulders pop. “It must be hard writing horror stories now, you know? It seems like that’s all we’ve got these days. I can’t bear to watch the news anymore.”
I didn’t sleep well that night. When I’d glanced at the papers they were filled with stories about tensions escalating, something to do with the South China Sea islands and whether the US was being too aggressive. John McCain was trying to dial things back but you could tell he was getting tired of it. His eyes looked sharp and a little bit scared.
I’d had panic attacks all throughout the October leading up to the election. There’d been Brexit, of course, our own particular mess. At a conference last summer an American colleague had told me, “What we’re seeing is radical politics. People stopped believing that they mattered to the system—but all that’s different now. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Anything could happen.” Trump had seemed funny back then, dangerous but still avoidable. They called it all a horror show but you could tell there was fascination underneath it all. How close could we come to disaster? But Hillary was ahead in the polls. Some of the Republicans were denouncing Trump, trying to put a little distance between themselves for when the eventual shellacking came on November eighth.
But it didn’t come. For weeks after, all throughout the Christmas break, whenever I heard Trump’s name it was as if there was a loud gong echoing in my head. My feed was filled with anguish, betrayal, heartbreak. But I had seen all that already. I felt immured, resilient—and besides I still didn’t believe, not really, that it would happen. Then eventually the cold hard truth settled in when I watched the inauguration with Luca. As Trump walked to the podium I burst out laughing, I don’t know why, the sheer cognitive dissonance of the whole thing. I felt hysterical. My palms were sweating.
Afterward I learned St. John had written a novel about something similar, Answering the King, about a madman who cheats his way to becoming the President of the United States. Eventually it comes down to a fifteen-year-old girl tormented with visions of the past and the future to stop him. The question at the heart of it is: if you could go back in time to stop Hitler, would you? They had made a movie about it with Steve Buscemi. I don’t remember who played the girl, only how wide her eyes were, how she captured that world-weariness so well for someone so young. She was a Cassandra. No one would listen to her.
That was the night when the whole thing with Luca happened. Normally we were very careful. I hadn’t been in my job for very long and he’d just moved across the country to live with me. We had talked about having kids one day but… We weren’t careful enough. Disaster crept in the way it always does.
I called Argo the next day. It was the first time I’d spoken to her and her voice was thin and cagey with a flat Ohio accent. It sounded as if it were coming away from much further away than the Upper East Side.
It felt strange to be listening to her voice and I thought about what Dylan Bone had told me. I’d read the obituary in fact, half as a joke and half because I knew Dylan didn’t make mistakes very often. He’d cut his teeth in the eighties horror boom and still made most of his money by convincing writers like St. John and Clive Barker to give him new material. It might sound mercenary but it isn’t, not really: Bone was a believer, a horror fanatic. He loved the stuff and even when the market dropped out of it in the nineties he had kept at it, putting out anthology after anthology with cheesy hand-drawn skeletons or zombified hands reaching out of the grave. Argo had been part of that, someone who’d made the genre in its heyday.
One the phone Argo was polite and she agreed to meet me for lunch the next day at a cafe. “It’ll have to be close to my apartment,” she told me, “I can’t move very well now.”
I told her I understood, and could meet her wherever she wanted.
“What’s this about then? Really?” Her tone wasn’t querulous, but wondering. “You know I wrote a chapter about working with St. John for some anthology twenty years ago, Devilish Discussions or something like that.”
I hesitated because I didn’t really have an answer. Yes, I knew the story about how she’d been sent St. John’s first manuscript by mistake. It had been meant to go to her boss but he’d been on vacation. She’d liked it but her boss wouldn’t touch it, and she didn’t have enough support inside Doubleday to push it through, not then, a low-level assistant. But they’d kept in touch, writing letters when the mood took one or the other. Then when Rosie had come along it had been “a day of glory”—so she called it.
I gave her the answer I gave most of my colleagues. St. John had changed the genre, really changed it. For one brief moment horror hadn’t been the red-haired stepchild of fiction. Horror had been king. And I wanted to know how that had happened. Part of my answer was true. I’d always been fascinated by the way books were made, the countless decisions that went into them. But if I were really honest it was simply because I’d become a fan, a real fan—maybe not Dylan Bone level—but my admiration for St. John was genuine.
It was more than that though. The real reason was one I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it had something to do with stories of chance—which St. John’s certainly was. And that underneath every story is a pivotal moment when things changed. I wanted to know what that looked like. I needed to know if Argo had understood when that manuscript crossed her desk what it would mean, if she’d felt a chill when he opened the envelop. Like someone had walked on her grave.
That afternoon Benny took me out to the Cloisters for old time’s sake, and it was beautiful, just like he’d promised it would be. The place was a mishmash of architecture taken from a series of medieval abbeys in France, Catalan, and the Occitan, simultaneously peaceful and surreal, liminal, a sliver of another world transplanted into New York.
“I thought you’d like it,” Benny told me. We were staring at a tree that had been shaped to fit one of the alcoves in the garden. Its branches curved unnaturally like a menorah to fill the space. I couldn’t help but wonder how it had been manipulated, what sort of subtle violence had pressurized the wood to assume the shape it had.
“I do,” I told him, shivering despite the mid-day heat.
“So, tomorrow. The editor, what’s her name again?” He snapped his fingers. “Argo, right? Lily Argo. You’re going to interview her. What about St. John then? Any chance you’ll get to speak to him?”
I didn’t think so. St. John lived in New Hampshire and I had no idea what kind of relationship the two of them still had. If they kept in touch. If Argo would even like me.