“I hear you, but I feel like you’re the guy,” he said when I called him up to see if he was serious, mentioning my misgivings up front. “You move down there, you do your thing, you meet all the people now that they’re grown up, you make your first really big book. You’re ready.”
“I’m tired of California,” I said. “It’s practically all I ever write about. I was thinking of trying to find something in the South. Louisiana, maybe.”
“The house is on the market,” he said. “These are your people, right? An actual self-made cult, grotto of the porno demons, teen devil worshippers in the Santa Clara Valley. You move in. Devil House. You move into Devil House. That’s the angle here.”
It felt like a joke. “I don’t want to buy a house just to write a book about it,” I said.
“It’s kind of a natural extension of your method, don’t you think?” Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.
“Knocking on doors and buying houses are two pretty different things.”
“That’s what makes this a different book,” he said. “That’s how it gets bigger. You own the place. It’s yours. Past history suggests it takes you about eighteen months to get it together. You can turn right around and sell it when you’re done, it’ll be like a short-term lease with return on your deposit.”
“Did something happen I don’t know about? My advances don’t really cover down payments on houses.”
“Chandler,” he said. “This isn’t the city. There’s not even fifty thousand people there. You’ve got to have a decent enough credit history after your last few years. Besides, we get a cut of your movie rights. I know you’re not exactly starving out there.”
There was quiet for a few seconds.
“Even if you prorate for the down payment you’ll be paying less on the mortgage than you pay now on rent in the big city,” he said. “Come on. This has your name all over it.”
That call was five years ago, all the way back in December of 2001. This was a different place then; the cracks in the tech bubble were still fresh and raw, though property values would start to climb again soon enough. I’ve been hard at work ever since, but I haven’t turned the book in yet, in part because, while this is that book, it’s not the one that my contract obligates me to eventually write: DEVIL HOUSE, a work of nonfiction, between 80,000–120,000 words, about the multiple murders committed in the ADDRESS TK block of Main Street in Milpitas, California, on or about the night of November 1, 1986.
It is instead a book about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates. I got the idea from my grandfather, I like to say. I tried counting up the great-greats it would take to really get all the way back, but after a while you lose track and get lost. It happens every time. My grandfather, anyway. He lived in a castle but never forgot the grassy glades and wooded byways of his youth.
2.
THE OLD-FASHIONED GENERIC ANSWERING MACHINE was still holding its own against voice mail back in spring of 2002, even in burgeoning tech enclaves. I listened, with real pleasure, to the sound of moving parts forced into labor far beyond their intended life spans. On the outgoing message, a voice burbled through the warp and wobble of aging tape, managing to sound both bubbly and professional, a hard combination to hit: “Thank you for calling New Visions Properties. This is Whitney Burnett. None of our associates can take your call at this time.”
It was a woman’s voice, maybe someone in her twenties. I start categorizing people from the moment I first meet them; it’s a good habit to pick up if you’re going to try to put stories together from the messy loose ends of people’s actual lives. I imagined a young woman who, at some unfixed point down the line, intended to own her own business; a person whose ambitions were modest, and who had more drive than she really needed to meet them. “Please leave us a brief message telling us how we may be of assistance to you, and we will return your call. If you require immediate assistance, you may reach me on my mobile phone”—here she sounded out the number twice, area code included, in a cool, forceful voice that made me feel obligated to follow through.
“Thank you, and have a pleasant day.”
I left a clumsy message, talking for longer than I needed to and interrupting myself frequently, but when Whitney called back an hour later she cut directly to the chase.