Night Film(110)

At this, Hopper began to sob, a tortured choking sound that seemed to tear through him. “I wanted him to hate me. So he’d go back. I didn’t want him to like me. I didn’t want him to look up to me.”

He took a deep breath and fell silent, his head in his hands. After a minute, he wiped his face in the crook of his arm, hunching forward in the chair, visibly determined to keep talking, fighting his way through the story or he’d get lost in it, drown inside it.

“I took off. A minute later, when I looked back I could see his flashlight, a tiny white light in the dark behind me, so far away. It looked like it was getting smaller, like he was heading back up the path. But then I actually couldn’t tell if it was moving toward me or away. Maybe he was still coming after me. I continued on. But an hour later, I realized I had no way out. The trail I was supposed to follow was through a canyon called The Narrows, and as I came into it, slipping in the mud, I saw there was a raging river where the trail was supposed to be. There was no way across. I had to turn back. It took forever because the path was pretty much a mudslide. I wasn’t even sure I’d make it, and I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had the map. It felt like I stumbled forever through the dark. Three hours later, I made it to the ridge and the new campsite. It was about five in the morning, still pouring. Everyone was asleep. No one had noticed I was gone. I unrolled my sleeping bag, slipped into one of the other tents, and collapsed. When I woke up the counselors had taken a head count. There was no sign of Orlando. By the afternoon they’d called the National Guard. I remember it was this beautiful day. A huge blue sky, so bright and beautiful.”

He leaned forward, taking a deep, uneven breath, staring at the floor.

“They found him eleven miles away, drowned in a river. Everyone thought it was an accident, that he’d gotten lost in the commotion. But I knew the truth. It was because of what I’d said. He was walking and saw the river, and he threw himself in. I did it. I killed that sweet kid who hadn’t done anything except be himself. There was nothing wrong with him. It was me. I was the loser. I was the waste of flesh. I was the one that no one loved. And no one ever would. See, Ashley had saved Orlando,” he whispered. “And I destroyed him.”

He closed his eyes. He looked so anguished whispering this, it was as if the words cut into him. After a moment, he forced himself to look up, his eyes watery and bloodshot.

“They helicoptered us out, back to base camp,” he continued. “The outraged parents descended. The counselors faced negligence charges. Two served jail time. Some of their discipline methods came out, and the camp changed its name to, like, Twelve Gold Forests a year later. No one knew I had anything to do with what had happened. Except Ash. She didn’t say anything. I just could tell from the way she looked at me. We were the last two to leave. A black SUV came for her, no parents, just a woman driver wearing a suit. Before she climbed into the backseat, she turned and she looked in at me, where I was watching inside the cabin. It would’ve been impossible for her to actually see me, but somehow she did. She knew everything.”

He seemed on the verge of crying but wouldn’t let himself, angrily wiping his eyes in the crook of his arm.

“You were supposed to be checked out by your parents,” he said, his voice hoarse. “My uncle couldn’t make it. But things were nuts with police, the local news, Orlando’s family; finally the cops just turned to me and said, ‘Go.’ I could just walk the f*ck out. And that’s what I did.”

I’d been so absorbed listening to him, I’d hardly noticed Nora had darted across the living room. She retrieved the box of Kleenex off the bookshelf, smiling as she handed it to Hopper, slipping back to the couch.

“The next five months were a blackout,” he said, pausing to blow his nose. “Or a black hole. I hitchhiked. I went into Oregon and up into Canada. Most the time I didn’t know where I was. I just walked. I spent nights in motels and parking lots, strip malls. I stole money and food. I bought some heroin once and locked myself in a motel room for weeks at a time, floating away in a haze, hoping I’d find the end of the Earth and just float off. When I reached Alaska, I went into this one town, Fritz Creek, and stole a six-pack of Pabst from a convenience store. I didn’t know every mom-’N’-pop shop in Alaska keeps a shotgun behind their register. The owner shot two inches from my ear, right into a display of potato chips, then pointed the barrel right at my head. I asked him to please pull the trigger. He’d be doing me a favor. Only goading him like that, like a madman, I probably scared the shit out of him, because he lowered it and, visibly freaked out, he called the police. A month later, I was at Peterson Long, a military boarding school in Texas. I’d been there about a week, and I remember I was in the library—it had bars on the windows—wondering how the hell I was going to break out, when I got this email out of the blue.”

He smiled reluctantly, staring off somewhere, as if even now surprised by it.

“All it said in the subject line was ‘Do I dare?’ I didn’t know what that meant or who the hell sent it. Until I read the email address. Ashley Brett Cordova. I thought it was a joke.”

“Do I dare?” I repeated.

Hopper glanced up at me, his face darkening. “It’s from Prufrock.”

Of course. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a T. S. Eliot poem, a crushing description of paralysis and unrequited romantic longing in the modern world. I hadn’t read the poem since college, though I still remembered some of the lines as they burned into your head the moment you read them: In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.