Night Film(60)

Kay Glass was the name of the missing friend in A Small Evil—the unseen woman who invites her new coworker, Alexandra, and Alex’s fiancé, Mitchell, to her parents’ beach house for the weekend. In the opening minutes of the film, Alex and Mitch, having argued during most of the drive from the city, arrive at the house a little after midnight. They find it entirely in the dark and deserted, the friend—Kay Glass—nowhere to be found. An initial search of the home—a modernist glass structure standing at the edge of the ocean like a monument to nihilism—reveals that a horrific crime has taken place moments before their arrival, and the perpetrators—masked, dressed head-to-toe in black—are still there.

I’d recognized the name because not only were the Blackboards rife with theories and the occasional shrine to the elusive Kay Glass, I’d also heard Beckman give a detailed lecture on the name and its meaning. He contended Kay Glass meant chaos. Beckman further argued that the missing woman—the question of what had happened to her—was, in fact, a metaphor for the inescapable darkness in life. The figure was a Cordova trademark, and Beckman had named one of his cats after it: Shadow.

“Kay Glass is the Shadow that hounds us relentlessly,” Beckman said. “It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.”

The fact that out of all the potential pseudonyms, Ashley had chosen that one—a missing woman from her father’s film—led to all sorts of psychological conclusions, the most obvious being that her father’s stories were a part of her day-to-day reality, maybe even overshadowed her sense of self. What was her response when Peter Schmid had asked her who she was?

No one, she’d said.

It reminded me of the profile in the Amherst newsletter. It’s wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she’d said. To forget your name for a while.

Our taxi eased down the deserted street. In front of us, the Manhattan Bridge extended at a diagonal like a massive fallen tree no one had bothered to remove. Dingy walk-ups had sprouted up around it.

“There,” Hopper said, indicating a building on our right.

The awning out front read 83 HENRY STREET in white letters, followed by a few Chinese characters. Metal grates had been pulled down on either side of the front entrance—a green door with a small rectangular window.

I paid the driver, and we climbed out.

It was oddly silent and still, the only sound the faint moans of unseen cars racing across the bridge. I stepped up to the door, looking through the window.

Inside, a derelict hallway spray-painted with graffiti extended beyond a row of mailboxes.

“Look,” Nora whispered, pointing at the label beside the buzzer for #16. It read K. GLASS.

“Don’t press it,” I said. I stepped back to the curb, staring up at the building: five stories, crumbling red brick, a rusted fire escape. All of the windows were dark except two on the second floor, another on the fifth with frilly pink curtains.

“Someone’s coming,” Hopper whispered, moving away from the door, darting around the corner, where there was a parking lot. Nora lurched backward, hurrying down the sidewalk. I stepped around the trash bags piled on the curb, heading across the street.

Seconds later, I heard the door open behind me, rapid footsteps.

An Asian man wearing a blue jacket had exited, walking toward Pike Street. He didn’t appear to have seen us—not even Hopper, who’d slipped past him and managed to catch the door before it closed.

“Nice,” Nora whispered excitedly, rushing inside after him. “Number sixteen must be the top floor.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, stepping after them.

But Hopper was already racing down the hall and out of sight, Nora right behind him. I held back, inspecting the mailboxes. Apart from Glass at #16, there was only Dawkins in #1 and Vine in #13.

I slipped down the hall, a TV babbling somewhere close by. Hopper and Nora could already be heard clanging upstairs. Because of a bright light somewhere beyond the corridor, their dark, elongated shadows were suddenly tossed against the wall in front of me—two long black tongues sliding down it, licking the cracked brown tiles and vanishing.

I headed after them, the steps strewn with trash and ads for Asian escorts, mostly in Chinese. One flier, wedged into a filthy windowpane, read ASIAN GIRL-MASSAGE and featured a naked Korean wearing rubber chaps shyly peering over her shoulder. MEET YUMI, it read.

Hopper and Nora had disappeared somewhere along the top floor. As I started up the next flight, kicking aside a Tsingtao beer can, there was a sudden bang somewhere below me.

I stared over the metal railing.

No one was visible. Yet I swore I could hear breathing.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice echoing through the stairwell.

There was no answer.

I moved up the remaining flights, pulling open the door marked 5, spotting Hopper and Nora at the end of a long dim hallway outside #16. As I caught up, they both turned, startled, at something behind me.

A woman had just appeared at the opposite end.





34


The single neon bulb on the ceiling drenched her wide nose and forehead in sickly yellow light. She was quite fat, wearing a long green skirt and black T-shirt, straggly brown hair covering her shoulders.