Night Film(53)

“He could sing, dance, and act?”

She shook her head. “He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag.”

“That is extremely threatening.”

“When he got dressed up, even you’d think he was female.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“He used to say when he was gone, it’d be the end of a rare species. ‘There’ll never be another of me, not in captivity or the wild.’ That was his anthem.”

“Where’s old Moe now?”

“Heaven.”

She said it with such wistful certainty, it might as well have been Bora Bora.

“He died of throat cancer when I was fifteen. He chain-smoked cigarillos since he was twelve because he grew up at the racetrack. But he bequeathed me his whole wardrobe, so he’s always with me.”

She twisted around, yanking her arm out of the bulky gray wool cardigan to show me a red label sewn into the neck with elaborate black lettering. PROPERTY OF MOE GULAZAR, it read.

So a geriatric Armenian drag queen was behind her flamboyant wardrobe. My first thought was that she had to have made it up: She’d probably found a box full of the clothes at Goodwill, all with the same mysterious label, and invented a fantastic scenario for how she’d come to have them. But as she returned her arm into the sleeve, I noticed her face was flushed.

“I miss him every single day,” she said. “I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around. Ever noticed that?”

“Yes.”

Maybe it was true, then. And anyway, I supposed when one was confronted with the choice to believe in the existence of an Armenian drag-queen horse trainer or not to believe, one will believe.

“Is that the reason you wanted to be on this investigation?” I asked. “Because you know so much about Cordova’s films?”

“Of course. It was a sign. Ashley gave me her coat.”

To my amazement, the webpage had actually loaded successfully, reading at the top: YOU MADE IT.

I pulled a wooden chair beside Nora and sat down, noticing as I did she smelled of musky men’s cologne, dramatic as a hint of dark chocolate in the air, and I couldn’t help but imagine that was the proof I needed, a whisper of old Moe Gulazar, always with her.





29


Nora and I stayed up most of the night on the Blackboards.

It was like fumbling through a pitch-black funhouse with trapdoors and tunnels, voices calling out from rooms with no doors, stumbling down rickety staircases that twisted deep into the ground with no end.

Every time I was about to suggest we head to bed, continue sifting through this endless Cordova archive with rested eyes in the morning, there was one more anecdote to click onto, another uncanny incident, rumor, or strange photo.

Freak the ferocious out—there were quite a few pages on the site devoted to Cordova’s supposed life philosophy, which meant, in a nutshell, that to be terrified, to be scared out of your skin, was the beginning of freedom, of opening your eyes to what was graphic and dark and gorgeous about life, thereby conquering the monsters of your mind. This was, in Cordovite speak, to slaughter the lamb, get rid of your meek, fearful self, thereby freeing yourself from the restrictions imposed on you by friends, family, and society at large.

Once you slaughter the lamb, you are capable of everything and anything, and the world is yours, proclaimed the site.

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

These three words, which Cordova had mentioned in his infamous Rolling Stone interview while describing his favorite shot in his films—a close-up of his own eye—was a slogan on the Blackboards and for life itself. Sovereign: the sanctity of the individual, regarding yourself as princely, powerful, self-contained, wrestling authority for yourself away from society. Deadly: constant awareness that your own death is inevitable, which means there is no reason not to be ferocious, now, about your life. Perfect: the understanding that life and wherever you find yourself at the present are absolutely ideal. No regret, no guilt, because even if you were stuck it was only a cocoon to break out of—setting your life loose.

I’d known Cordova’s fans believed him to be an amoral enchanter, a dark acolyte who led them away from what was stale and tedious about their daily lives deep into the world’s moist, tunneled underbelly, where every hour was unexpected. Combing through the Blackboards’ whispers and suspicions, the sheer density of anonymous comments—which veered from reverential to frightened to supremely twisted and depraved—only underscored what I’d long suspected, that Cordova was not just an oddball eccentric along the lines of Lewis Carroll or Howard Hughes, but a man who also inspired devotion and awe in a vast number of people, not unlike a leader of a religious cult.

By 3:45 A.M. Nora and I—blank-eyed and delirious—were in the living room, digging out my pirated copy of Wait for Me Here—purchased for seventy-five bucks from Beckman—watching the terrifying opening scene, which featured Jenny Decanter, played by twenty-two-year-old Tamsin Polk, driving alone down the dirt forest road in the dead of night.

Abruptly, Theo Cordova—cast as John Doe #1—came crashing out of the trees, causing Jenny to scream, slamming on the brakes, sending her car spinning into a ditch, the engine stalling.