The Woman Who Sang

The Woman Who Sang

One afternoon Michael Hayes, a classmate of mine, picked up the notebook I had left on the kitchen table. He stayed up all night with it. The next morning he knocked on my door with his eyes red and said, "Where does a person get criminal psychology this exact, James? You're a genius."

He had both of them under his arm, and he kept the black one and handed the composition book back, open at the inside cover. The name line on it had been filled in twice. In red crayon, a child's block printing, five letters with an E at the front, the last three gone over until the paper furred and split. Under that, in ballpoint, in my own hand at nine years old, my name.

Michael took the manuscript around to every publisher in the city. Six months later my first novel came out and did numbers nobody had expected.

God didn't give me any time off. The mechanic's case closed, and a new set of images moved in.

This time I was chained inside a homeless woman in her sixties in Brooklyn. She lived by pushing a rusted shopping cart through back alleys, collecting plastic bottles and scrap metal. Behind the bent back and the smell of garbage she was working toward one thing: a perfect plaster doll.

In her thinking, human skin was dirty and it rotted. The only way to save what was beautiful about a young woman was to take the best parts of her and seal them inside a white plaster figure.

She used the way she looked to get close to women walking home late from work. A fall beside the loaded cart, and when the woman bent down to help, a rag went over her face.

The nights after that put me in a basement under an abandoned factory, where a large hollow plaster mold stood against the wall.

She didn't kill them right away. She wore a magnifier pushed crooked on her face and worked from a drawing on a piece of cardboard, taking what the drawing called for: the first woman's green eyes, the second woman's long hands, a section of skin from the third.

The part that got to me was how gentle she was. She sang old lullabies the whole time, under her breath, barely audible. Then she laid everything into the mold in order, poured a bucket of wet white plaster down over it, packed it tight, and sealed it in for good.

I didn't throw up this time. That was the part worth noticing: my head was getting used to cruelty.

I woke in the middle of the night and my handwriting came out steady. The notebook stopped being a way to get clean; I started taking notes on purpose, the angle of every cut, the smell of wet plaster over the smell of blood. I picked my adjectives and turned the whole thing into chapters people couldn't put down.

The second book opened a different era for my writing. What surprised people was the switch, a voice from the other side of the room, quiet and thin and without a single limit in it.

By the third book the schedule had set. Up at 4:10 a.m., 12 pages before daylight, the kettle clicking off twice every morning because I always let the first pot go cold. I kept a tally in the margin, one stroke a page, the fifth stroke crossed through.

That was only the start.

For years after that, God kept dropping new lives into my head, new men with new rituals. I rode the current and copied it down, every breath, every count, and turned it into books that shook the field. Seven novels, four adapted screenplays that collected awards, and rights deals worth millions of dollars coming down on my life like weather.

I went from an orphan in a rented room in Albany that smelled like the hallway to a man being carried along by money and ambition.

I got used to suits cut on Savile Row, to smiling on prime-time interviews, to taking compliments about my "extraordinary imagination" and my "cold grasp of the criminal mind." I got used to press conferences under a wall of flashes and to good wine at parties full of people who mattered. The money and the attention took up so much room that I stopped thinking about what the material had cost, or whose body it had come out of, night after night.

I thought the gift would keep going forever. Then the next case came.

This time the dream put me inside a man who was working toward a young woman. She had a birthmark shaped like a maple leaf on her left side and she liked her toast burned at the edges, and I had been with her more than 30 nights, which meant I knew her habits better than anyone in her actual life did.

The story was moving toward the place where it would break. I wrote down each night's installment, and he had her backed into the end of an alley in the fog.

Then, on the 34th night, the film stopped.

I woke at 5:00 a.m. with the pen already in my hand and nothing in my head. The next night, nothing. The third, the fourth, then week after week, until seven weeks had gone by, 49 nights of it. The thing was gone the way it had come. God's screening room had shut the projector off.

The quiet came back into my sleep, and what it brought with it was a worse kind of night: a man with the talent drained out of him, and nothing he could do about it.

It ate at me a day at a time. The house got smaller. The publisher kept calling about the schedule. Michael's calls changed, from advice to short answers to the exact figure I would owe if I broke the contract, and what bankruptcy would look like.

The eighth book stopped at page 22 and stayed there. I kept the hours anyway, 8:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night, the same document open. In June I counted what I had put down since March. Forty words, and I had cut 60 to get them.

Emily watched all of it happen, and the way she looked at me got tired. The arguments at the kitchen table were quiet and they came every night. She couldn't understand how a man people called a creative genius could go that far down over a stretch of not writing.

I was stuck between the empty room in my head, an ambition I had nothing left to feed, and the collapse of everything I had built.

And then the 50th night.

The yellow hallway light in the wood house in Milton, the childhood dream that 23 years of killers had replaced, came back.

The smell of my parents' blood was in my nose again. The scrape… scrape… of something heavy on the wood floor came back into the quiet.

And that night the old film didn't stop where it always stopped, on the seventh step with my knees wet. It ran four seconds longer. In the dark, right next to my ear, a voice was counting down in a whisper.

Four seconds is a long time from the inside. The edge of the seventh step was under the back of my thigh, the wood worn round along the nose of it. The wet on my knees had gone cold and the cold was working its way up the front of my legs. Somewhere behind me a door moved on its hinge and stopped.

The count came down in a boy's voice, close enough that I could hear the breath under it. Between the numbers there was a word, two syllables, the second one closing on a soft consonant. Every time I turned my head toward it the count came down over the top. I woke with the shape of that word in my mouth and nothing to put in it.

The fear went first, and what moved into its place was something I wanted.

The 15-year-old on the seventh step was 31 years behind me. I was James Miller, a crime novelist with a name, a man who had built a career and a bank account on other people's bodies. And with the bulbs pulled out of the room in my head, I found I would do anything rather than go down into bankruptcy and be forgotten.

Four extra seconds in last night's dream.

The part of my head that had spent years inside killers worked it out: that night in Milton was never a break-in that went wrong. It was the first thing God ever wrote for me. It had the man who did it in it, and the reason I was built this way, and most of all the best material I was ever going to get for the next novel.

A book with my own parents' deaths in it, in detail. A bestseller copied out of the head of the man who did it to them. Ambition had taken whatever was left in me by then, and what I had lost had turned into stock that moved off a shelf.

I needed that case. I needed my mother's blood and my father's voice and every mark left in the wood floor the year I was 15, so I could turn them into pages that would move the world again.

I wasn't driving up to Milton to put flowers on a grave or to make peace with anything.

I needed to go back now, to hunt down the last manuscript of my life.