Marisha Pessl - Night Film: A Novel

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out? Do you want to know what is there or live in the dark delusion that this commercial world insists we remain sealed inside like blind caterpillars in an eternal cocoon? Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or can you fight your way out of it and fly?

STANISLAS CORDOVA
Rolling Stone, December 29, 1977

Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.

Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again. Or your boyfriend bragged hed discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal hed barely survived.

Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferenthes there to react against. Hes a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world. Hes underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark. Hes down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day.

Hes a myth, a monster, a mortal man.

And yet I cant help but believe when you need him the most, Cordova has a way of heading straight toward you, like a mysterious guest you notice across the room at a crowded party. In the blink of an eye, hes right beside you by the fruit punch, staring back at you when you turn and casually ask the time.

My Cordova tale began for the second time on a rainy October night, when I was just another man running in circles, going nowhere as fast as I could. I was jogging around Central Parks Reservoir after two a.m.a risky habit Id adopted during the past year when I was too strung out to sleep, hounded by an inertia I couldnt explain, except for the vague understanding that the best part of my life was behind me, and the sense of possibility Id once had so innately as a young man was now gone.

It was cold and I was soaked. The gravel track was rutted with puddles, the black waters of the Reservoir cloaked in mist. It clogged the reeds along the bank and erased the outskirts of the park as if it were nothing but paper, the edges torn away. All I could see of the grand buildings along Fifth Avenue were a few gold lights burning through the gloom, reflecting on the waters edge like dull coins tossed in. Every time I sprinted past one of the iron lampposts, my shadow surged past me, quickly grew faint, and then peeled offas if it didnt have the nerve to stay.

I was bypassing the South Gatehouse, starting my sixth lap, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw someone was behind me.

A woman was standing in front of a lamppost, her face in shadow, her red coat catching the light behind her, making a vivid red slice in the night.

A young woman out here alone? Was she crazy?

I turned back, faintly irritated by the girls navetor recklessness, whatever it was that brought her out here. Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they werent immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.

The track straightened north, rain needling my face, the branches hanging low, forming a crude tunnel overhead. I veered past rows of benches and the curved bridge, mud splattering my shins.

The womanwhoever she wasappeared to have disappeared.

But thenfar ahead, a flicker of red. It vanished as soon as I saw it, then seconds later, I could make out a thin, dark silhouette walking slowly in front of me along the iron railing. She was wearing black boots, her dark hair hanging halfway down her back. I picked up my pace, deciding to pass her exactly when she was beside a lamppost so I could take a closer look and make sure she was all right.

As I neared, however, I had the marked feeling she wasnt.

It was the sound of her footsteps, too heavy for such a slight person, the way she walked so stiffly, as if waiting for me. I suddenly had the feeling that as I passed shed turn and Id see her face was not young as Id assumed, but old. The ravaged face of an old woman would stare back at me with hollowed eyes, a mouth like an ax gash in a tree.

She was just a few feet ahead now.

She was going to reach out, seize my arm, and her grip would be strong as a mans, ice cold

I ran past, but her head was lowered, hidden by her hair. When I turned again, shed already stepped beyond the light and was little more than a faceless form cut out of the dark, her shoulders outlined in red.