The Nobodies Album (8 page)

I consider going back to bed. Enough time has passed that I might be able to will myself to sleep. But then my cell phone rings. It’s Joe’s number; I remember it from yesterday.

“Hello, Joe?” I say.

“Uh, no.” It’s a woman’s voice. “My name is Chloe Treece. I’m Joe’s girlfriend.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Frost, and I’m just noticing how early it is, but Joe mentioned he’d seen you, and I wanted to talk to you.”

“All right,” I say. I wait. “Does it have to do with Milo?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Well, if you have any information that might help his case, please, please talk to his lawyer about it.”

There’s a pause. “It’s complicated,” she says. “I’d like to talk to you first.” She surprises me by laughing softly. “You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

This catches me off guard. So … what? She knows something about the murder, or she wants me to sign her copy of
The Human Slice
? When I don’t answer right away, she goes on. “And if you want, I know where Roland Nysmith lives. I could take you by to see Milo afterward.”

My blood speeds up. “He’s made it clear he doesn’t want to see me.”

“Oh, please,” she says. “He’s just being a douche. Big stubborn guy—does he get that from you?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, which is fine, because I don’t know what to say. “Come with me. We’ll go over there. Roland will be able to convince him to talk to you.”

“All right,” I say evenly. “Where and what time?”

“We’re in Pacific Heights,” she says. She gives me an address. “Can you make it around eleven? Joe will be out then.”

“Fine,” I say. “See you then.”

I hang up. I feel jubilant and terrified. I need to take a shower and figure out what to wear. I turn back to my computer and write a quick reply to my agent: “Please decline these and any future requests. I’m not talking publicly about any of this. Thanks, O.” I close my laptop and start getting ready for whatever comes next.

From the Jacket Copy for
CARPATHIA
By Octavia Frost

(Farraday Books, 2007)

I
t’s 1935, and animator Oscar Clough’s life has reached a new low: his fiancée has left him, he’s drinking heavily, and the cartoon studio he works for is struggling in the face of competition from Disney and stricter censorship rules resulting from the new Hays Production Code.

As Oscar sinks into depression and uncertainty, unexplained images start appearing in the cartoons he has drawn: a playing card hidden in a garden of flowers; a bell drawn into the pattern of a woman’s dress; a ship’s oar nestled among the swirls of bark on a tree trunk. As the images accumulate, Oscar wonders whether he’s losing his mind, or whether someone is sabotaging his drawings, or even—perhaps—whether there may be supernatural forces at work. With the help of Cecily, a receptionist at the studio and the only person who shares his ability to see the hidden pictures, Oscar is forced to confront an event he’s long tried to forget: his trip on the ill-fated
Titanic
at the age of nine.

Excerpt from
CARPATHIA
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING

We sat in the sand as the daylight began to fade. It need hardly be said that I am not one of those souls who take great pleasure in visiting the seaside, but on this day it seemed like the only thing left to do. Somehow I’d thought that if I took Cecily out, if we spent the day together, then we would get to the bottom of this. Cecily was the key, I thought—the only other person to see what I saw, when everyone else said it was just an accident of the way a particular line curved, the way the camera caught the movement of the drawing from cel to cel. But now the day was ending, and I knew nothing more than I had that morning. So I took her to the ocean, and I waited to see what would happen.

I’d picked up a number of stones as we were walking, and now that we’d settled ourselves, Cecily was looking at them. “Do you think this might be a moonstone, Oscar?” she asked, holding up a rough gray rock.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks pretty ordinary to me.”

“Well, they are ordinary, until you polish them up. My mother told me that there used to be piles of moonstones on this beach. She and my father came here once, before we kids were born. She said there were mounds of them, four or five feet high, and people would wade through them, looking for good ones.”

I tried to picture it—ladies in long dresses, perhaps carrying parasols, holding the arms of men with mustaches and summer suits. All of them taking an afternoon to search the ground for holiday treasure. “So where did they all go?” I asked. “I can’t imagine they were all gathered up, if there were that many of them.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve been washed away.”

It could be. We think the ocean doesn’t change, but its borders are never fixed. I thought about the sandy floor littered with bright gems: a payment from the land to the sea, compensation for a debt we couldn’t begin to understand.

I returned to the topic we’d been circling all day. “Langer could have my job for this, don’t you think? If he were to find out—I mean, if he could see the pictures. He already thinks all the animators are slipping racy messages into the artwork. You know he lives in fear of the Hays people shutting him down.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine he’d do that,” she said.

“The censors would find some reason, I’m sure. These are the men who put a skirt on Flossie the cow.”

She smiled. “Well, we couldn’t have her udders showing, now could we? Simply scandalous.”

We laughed. I felt happy to be on this windy beach with Cecily, happy just then that I wasn’t anyone else, not one of the shopkeepers selling postcards and ices or the ragged men fishing for their dinner from the pier. So recently I had been on the verge of becoming a different man: angry, lonely, perhaps even unhinged. It was extraordinary, this effect Cecily had on me. Extraordinary that even in the midst of such turmoil and confusion, I could actually feel lucky.

But I couldn’t let the other matter go. In my mind I went over the sequence of events once again. There was the day it all began, when I’d gone to the pictures after running into Ettie and her new boyfriend in the coffee shop, when I’d seen the playing card hidden in the flower bed in the Cappy Penguin cartoon; the day at the studio when the bell appeared right on the production cel, woven into the pattern of Delilah Pufkin’s dress; the terrible morning when I’d discovered the ship’s oar carved into the bark of the tree where the Singing Sparrows built their nest. Most recently there was my date with Cecily, when we’d both noticed the seagull-shaped cloud in the background of “Farm Funnies.” I’d gone through it all a thousand times, and there was nothing new to know about any of it.

I looked out at the sea. There was a young man out there with a wooden board, gliding over the surface of the water. I didn’t understand how he didn’t get swept under, and it made me very uneasy to watch. How would it feel to stand on the skin of the waves, to ride the galloping ocean as if it were a beast? I felt a lick of panic run through me, and in the tensing of my body, a memory clicked into place.

“I know what it was,” I said to Cecily. “That day in the theater, when I saw the card.”

“What about it?”

“Well, remember I said I’d been reading the papers before the show started, and there was something that had left me feeling troubled?”

“Yes?”

“I couldn’t think what it was, but I knew I’d been feeling worried about something before the cartoon even started. Well, I just remembered—it was a story about the tidal wave, do you remember? The one in Japan, that wiped out all those villages?”

She nodded. “That was awful.”

“That’s what it was. I had just read that the number of lives lost was much higher than they’d thought, somewhere around fifteen hundred. And you know, fifteen hundred, that’s the same number as … well, those lost on the
Titanic
.” I felt embarrassed, as if by mentioning this unpleasant bit of my past, I was emphasizing a character flaw.

She was looking at me a little doubtfully. “I’m not sure I understand you. That’s a coincidence, certainly, but are you saying that reading that article had something to do with the picture of the bell appearing in the cartoon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Just a minute ago, it had seemed like a momentous revelation, but now I wasn’t sure. It was hard to put into words, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But to say I’d felt “troubled” was not quite accurate. What I’d felt that evening, as I thought about that sudden rush of water, whole families drowned in their beds, was a sudden, welling terror, almost as if I myself were in danger of being crushed by a wall of water. I nearly left the theater, because I felt I couldn’t breathe in that crowded space, the air weighted with popcorn grease and smoke. So when the lights went low and the projector started its rattle, I could barely even watch the cartoon, the figures I myself had drawn and coaxed into motion. Until I saw the playing card, and I remembered the way my brother, Archie, used to call me Ace. And I felt as if I’d just stepped onto solid ground.

“I’m being haunted,” I said suddenly. Neither of us had spoken for several minutes. It was going to be dark soon, and cold, and it would be time for us to leave this place and ride the train back to the city, with all of its loneliness and gaiety.

“Haunted?” Cecily repeated. To her credit, if she felt any dismay at my words, her face didn’t betray it. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it in the shadows.

“Yes. Or maybe, anyway. I think I’m being haunted by my brother, Archie.”

If I had heard myself saying these words a mere two months earlier, I would have wondered about my own sanity. But it made a certain amount of sense to me now. Tidal waves, scientists say, are sometimes caused by the eruption of an underwater volcano. An explosion beneath the surface, unsettling everything that lies submerged. Think what’s down there, never to be seen by human eyes: treasure ships and the carcasses of sea monsters, the empty bones of sailors and pirates and virgins offered up in savage rites. Our glorious rescue ship, the
Carpathia
, is under there somewhere, torpedoed during the World War and gone to her rest. And, of course, the
Titanic
herself, broken in two and sunk in some forgiving patch of silt. If a single twitch of the earth can raise a wave as big as the greatest buildings men have ever made, then who’s to say it can’t also wake the dead?

“The playing card,” I said. “It was an ace, and that was always his nickname for me. It’s almost a little joke for that to be the first one. That was his way of getting my attention.”

“And the others?” Cecily asked. I was grateful for how normal her voice sounded, how willing she was to listen to me, no matter how strange my musings became.

“Well, the bell … when I first saw it, I immediately thought of the bell on the
Titanic
, the one they rang to alert the passengers that there was danger. And the oar seems clear enough—it’s meant to remind me of the lifeboat. I remember even my mother took a turn at rowing. By morning her hands were bloody.”

There was a breeze, and Cecily wrapped her arms around herself. I took off my jacket and laid it on her shoulders.

“And the last one?” she asked. “The seagull?”

I didn’t answer her question right away. It seemed impossible to talk about the seagull without explaining what had come before, but that wasn’t the story I’d meant to tell. Though in a way, she knew it already. Who didn’t?

Someday, I thought, I’ll tell her everything. Someday there would be time enough for all the small details. My brief memories of the voyage itself, before the disaster—games of tag with Sally and Lovie in the corridor outside the second-class library; the novelty of eating food brought by waiters; the charts my father showed me, which tracked how far we had come and how far we had left to go. My anger at Archie, seventeen and suddenly fancying himself an adult, who wanted nothing to do with me or our sisters but spent his days smoking with the men and talking to a pretty girl from Philadelphia. The argument he and I had on Sunday afternoon when I tripped walking past them on the promenade, dousing them both with lemon squash from a glass I’d been carrying. He knew I’d done it on purpose, but I wouldn’t admit it, and we spent Sunday evening glaring at each other without saying a word.

And then it was night, and here begins the part that would have been familiar to any listener. Why tell it at all? I woke to a long scraping noise, which didn’t sound like the beginning of any kind of end. My mother pulled us from our beds. We dressed and went to join the strange scene on deck, where the mood was almost festive: children running here and there, barefoot women wearing nightclothes and fur coats. My father handed us into the lifeboat, Archie standing tall beside him, and assured us that all this would be sorted out soon. My parents didn’t even kiss each other good-bye, so certain were they that they would be reunited.

It wasn’t until we’d been rowing for an hour or more under the cold stars that we began to hear cries from the ship, and I understood that this wasn’t some midnight adventure. As I pressed close to my mother, her arms full with my two sleeping sisters, everything seemed to happen at once: explosions and gunshots and the music of an orchestra; the sudden dark as the lights onboard were extinguished. The ship rising vertical in the night—and a terrible crack—and the strange, gentle way she disappeared under water, almost without making a sound.

And still the dark and the cold and my sisters crying softly beside me. Loud wailing from the water. A sailor in our boat slumping over, still. A man in evening clothes floating dead on a cake of ice, so close I could have reached out and touched him.

It’s occurred to me in recent years that I don’t know exactly how my father and Archie died. Drowning, of course, is the most obvious answer, but it’s also possible that they died from cold or from the impact of slapping hard onto the glass of the sea. They might have been crushed under a bed or a piano; or perhaps my father’s heart, never strong, took him before the water could. They might be on the ship yet, wherever she has rested, their skeletons held in place by the wreckage that has pinned them, the seaweed that has tied itself around their bones.

But Cecily hadn’t asked about any of that. She had asked about the seagull. And if I’d been able to find the words to explain, I think she would have listened. But it was too much to tell, and people don’t change that much. I’d been alone in that lifeboat, even surrounded by my mother and my sisters and a crowd of determined survivors, and it was my fate to remain alone now. So I didn’t answer her question. We sat quietly for a few more minutes, and when we stood to begin our walk to the train station, I didn’t take her hand.

God is generous, but he’s not a pushover. You don’t get rescued twice. The pictures in my cartoons got more and more obvious, until Langer had no choice but to fire me. Cecily married one of the soundmen from the studio, and most likely went on to have a houseful of children, though I couldn’t tell you for sure.

I don’t live in Hollywood anymore. I packed up my pencils and went to live someplace where dreams happen only while you sleep. My life is as ordinary as I can make it, at least until I lie down and feel myself drift, setting sail for destinations I haven’t chosen. I don’t know if it’s a premonition I should heed or a message from Archie or simply my own mind tormenting me. But when I close my eyes, I drown every single night.