The Night Listener : A Novel

you want.” (Could a thirteen-year-old—even one this bright—know about Thomas Pynchon?)
    “You know what I think?” Pete said.
    “What?”
    “You have to promise me you won’t tell Mom.” Bewildered and extremely wary, I considered the ramifications of such a pact. If there was even a remote chance I was dealing with a multiple, was it wise to start taking sides, to conspire with one personality over the other? “Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked him finally. “Secrets are not very healthy things, you know.
    Especially in families.”
    “Yeah, but this would really upset her. She’s way too worried about me already, and I don’t wanna make it worse. I know how she is, Dad. She takes things too hard. She’s not as strong as she looks.”
    But I don’t even know how she looks, I thought. I could walk right past her in broad daylight and never know she was there. She would just be one more of those strangers who smile at me oddly at stoplights and on elevators, recognizing my face from a book jacket. Should I be keeping secrets from someone who had that kind of advantage over me?
    On the other hand, what choice did I have?
    “Okay,” I told Pete. “This is between you and me. Tell me what you think.”
    I heard him take a breath, as if to steel himself for the moment. “I know why they wanna send out that PR guy. It’s to prove that I exist!”
    I had not expected this somehow, but there it was—so unadorned and unaddressable that I was the one who turned into the fraud.
    “Oh, c’mon, sweetie. That’s crazy. What are you talking about?”
    “Don’t you get it? They’ve never seen me or anything, so they want proof before they publish the book. That’s the only reason they’re doing this! The fuckers don’t even believe me!” He began to sob now, a terrible animal wail unlike any I’d ever heard from him.
    “I knew this would happen! I knew they would never believe me if I told the truth!”
    “Oh, sweetie.”
    “Hold me, Dad, will you?”
    “I am holding you. I’m doing that right now.” The sobbing continued, then trailed off into sniffles. I could feel his wet cheek against my shoulder, the hothouse warmth of his breath.
    “This is too hard, Dad. I can’t do it anymore.”
    “Do what?”
    A pause, and then: “Any of it.”
    “Oh, c’mon now,” I said softly, unable to manage anything else.
    “I mean it, Dad. It hurts too much.”
    “You mean…physically?”
    “Every way. I’m really tired all the time. I got shingles now and I ache all over and I can’t even breathe half the time. We just keep going to the hospital…and I just wonder…what’s the point? Even the doctors think that. They start sighing real loud as soon as they see me coming.”
    “To hell with ‘em. Tell ‘em to do their job.”
    “They are, Dad. It’s just not working.”
    “It is working. You’re alive and…you’re creating and there are people who love you, Pete…”
    He began to sob again.
    “Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry…”
    “It’s not your fault. You’re the only good thing that’s ever happened to me.”
    “No, I’m not. Don’t say that. You have lots of good things. You have Donna and your friends and…lots of things.”
    “My book was the only part of me that I liked.”
    “Oh, Pete, you don’t mean that.”
    “I do, Dad. Before my book I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to die.”
    “Ashamed? What do you have to be ashamed of?” I caught a quick flash of that grisly shed where Pete’s father had fucked him while his mother had wielded the video camera. Then I saw those other monsters, faceless and numberless—unaccountable—who had ordered this child off the Internet, like a cheap ring or a Beanie Baby.
    “You were just a little kid, Pete. There was nothing you could do. It wasn’t under your control at all. C’mon, I know you know that. I’m sure Donna’s told you that a thousand times.”
    “Yeah. But I didn’t believe it until I wrote it down.”
    “And it’s still written down. I have it right here on my desk. The whole thing. Nothing has changed, Pete.”
    “But they don’t believe me.”
    “We don’t know that for sure.”
    “I do. I can feel it. They think I made it all up.”
    “Well…look…I’m gonna talk to Findlay and—”
    “You never doubted me, did you?”
    And with that the boy in my arms twisted his head to gaze up at me, those beach-glass eyes growing wider with urgency and need.
    He blinked at me several