Into the Light

Into the Light

The press called it "The Worst Literary Scandal of the Century."

The light came down the way halogen work lamps come down into a basement, pulling what had been rotting in there out where the public could look at it.

The coverage came fast and didn't let up, and I watched all of it on the small television bolted to the wall of a rented room in Poughkeepsie.

Nine days after the night at the police station, a major streaming service bought the production rights to a three-part documentary about the Milton case.

The True Crime podcasts ran episode after episode taking apart "The Impostor Novelist and the Ghost in the Basement."

A van from a Poughkeepsie station parked across from the rooming house for six days with its mast up. Two magazines ran my publicity photo on the cover in the same week, the one from 2014 with my hand at my jaw. One of them printed "The Man Who Wrote Nothing" across my chest in white letters. The other used a still from the basement, shot from where the bookcase had stood.

The market settled the question its own way: every book I had ever published started selling again.

Under the Flats and the five novels before it that had come off GhostInk's manuscripts sold out on every e-book platform.

People stood in line outside bookstores hunting first printings with James Miller on the spine, and what they were paying for now was the scandal.

The publisher forwarded the reader mail in two bank boxes, taped shut and labeled in marker. Most of it wanted money back. Eleven letters asked me to sign a book anyway. One envelope had been forwarded twice out of Brooklyn, postmarked three days before the night at the station, and it held a sheet of white paper folded in three with nothing on either side of it.

The publisher put out a recall notice first, to get ahead of the noise, then quietly went back to press for half a million copies with a reworked foreword. The royalties and the subsidiary money kept landing in my bank account every week.

I did the one thing available to me: I signed away all of it and had it routed to the victims' compensation fund.

On the criminal side, the federal investigators and the U.S. Attorney's office gave me immunity from prosecution on the impersonation and fraud counts in exchange for my testimony in the larger case. The immunity stopped at the criminal courts.

The DNA out of the basement, the forensic report on the old injuries, and the evidence on Kessler's suggestion network established that I had been a subject of the program since I was five years old. A man the government was not going to charge for the nightmares it had made him live inside.

Civil law doesn't hand out pardons for a lie.

A class action came in from the families of the victims in the suggested killings, and my publisher and a group of readers filed separately. The Authors Guild met in emergency session and struck James Miller from its rolls. The four biggest awards of my 20-year career were pulled in the same week. My name turned into an insult in publishing.

I took all of it with a flat, tired head. The collapse of the name James Miller didn't frighten me; it was old paint coming off all at once, putting me back to the bare surface underneath.

The room was on the second floor of a house on Academy Street, $310 a month, cash in an envelope under the manager's door on the first. It came with a bed, a dresser missing its bottom drawer, one chair, and the television. The window looked at the back wall of a dry cleaner. I kept my clothes in the duffel on the floor and used the dresser for the two books I still owned.

I ate at the counter of a diner two blocks down, eggs and toast at eleven, a bowl of soup at six, about $14 a day with the tip. The man in Room 6 ran his radio from nine at night until the station dropped to its overnight feed. Through the wall it came as weather, then long stretches of nothing, then weather again.

I filled the days walking. Four miles down to the river and four back, the same route, 90 minutes if I didn't stop on the bridge. The manager's key opened my door and it also opened Room 6, which I found out by accident on the fourth day and didn't bring up with anybody.

Michael came out of 19 days of deep coma in the intensive care unit at Westchester State Hospital.

I went to see him on an afternoon of thin gray rain. The room smelled like disinfectant and bleached sheets.

Michael sat in a wheelchair by the window, his whole left side paralyzed from the head trauma. The face that used to be pink and quick and full of angles had come down on one side, gray and slack.

I stood at the head of the bed and looked at him.

The right side of his mouth moved. His voice came out thick and dragged, one word at a time, and every word was clear:

"The second book... Her name was... Elizabeth Hale."

I stopped with my hand on the bed rail.

"I've had it 14 years," Michael said, and took off his reading glasses with his right hand, the only one that still worked. Something came up behind his eyes that I had seen a hundred times before.

"The second manuscript Ethan sent... She was 18... the house north of the tracks... ninety-eight... You... you write it down, James."

I looked at him. I didn't reach for a pen.

Michael, down to the last minutes of this wrecked life of his, with half his body clinically dead, was still an editor.

He was still carrying Ethan's bloody sentences around, still hungry for pages that could be turned into a bestseller.

Kessler's suggestion had gone into Michael too, down into the most ambitious part of him.

"There aren't going to be any more books, Michael," I said, and stepped back.

I turned and walked out of the room and left Michael sitting there, his right hand still up in the air, closing on nothing.

The corridor ran about 60 feet to the elevators. I counted the doors on the left side going down, nine of them, the way you count anything to give your head a job. A cart stood outside 412 with the lunch trays still covered. I said the name once, under my breath, to see what it would do, and it didn't do anything.

In the elevator I took out my phone and opened a blank note. Elizabeth Hale. Then 1998. Then 18. I looked at the three lines all the way down to the lobby and closed the phone without adding to them.

The lot was on the north side of the building, $6 for the first two hours. The rain had quit while I was upstairs, and the cars on both sides of mine were still beaded along the roof and the hood. Mine was dry everywhere, glass included. I sat in it for a while with the keys in my hand.

The visit with Emily ran 15 minutes at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

A thick acrylic panel cut the room in half. The gray plastic handset sat heavy in my hand.

Emily sat across from me. She wore the baggy orange uniform, her hair pinned back. No careful makeup, none of the easy smile of the woman who had lived beside me in the house in Milton. Emily looked thin, and the vagueness of somebody being worked on had gone out of her eyes.

She wasn't apologizing anymore. Emily had given the station everything, and she had taken the eight-year sentence for her part as a link in Kessler's network. Between the two of us, remorse and explanation had both come too late.

Emily picked up the handset and looked at me through the panel with the fluorescent light standing on it.

"I'm not going to apologize to you anymore, James," she said, her voice flat through the static in the handset.

"Because what I did to you... no apology buys any of it back."

I nodded. "I know."

Emily signaled the corrections officer standing nearby. The officer came over and put a small package in plastic wrap through the pass slot at the base of the panel.

"This is yours," Emily said, not taking her eyes off me. "The last bottle of the oil from Kessler's lab. Original, never opened."

I looked at the small dark brown glass bottle sitting inside the wrap.

"I'm never using it on you again," Emily said, dropping her voice. A faint line showed at the corner of her eye.

"But I couldn't pour it out. You decide."

The end-of-visit bell went off, hard and close. Emily set the handset down, stood, and followed the officer into the dark end of the corridor. She didn't turn around.

I carried the small cold bottle in my hand out into the gray fall sky over Bedford Hills.

I went back to the house in Milton.

Every piece of the forensic tape was down. The house was empty now in a completely different way.

No heavy bookcase over the opening in the floor, no maps on the walls, no boxes of Deakins's case files. The investigators had released the scene, and I had paid a crew out of my own pocket to fill the basement with concrete and trowel it flat.

Everything clean, silent, and empty.

I went through the house room by room with my coat still on. The bedrooms upstairs were down to the frames, closets open, hangers gone. In the kitchen the drawers had been pulled and pushed back with everything shifted, forks in with the dish towels. My mother's annex on the north side was bare to the walls, the radiator still under the window and four screw holes where the shelf had been.

I went out to the car for the bottle and came back. On the way up I put my weight on the second step of the porch and it held without a sound. I went back down to the gravel and came up a second time, and it creaked the way it always had.

The typewriter was already there — my father's manual Underwood, still standing on the plain oak table in the middle of the living room.

There was no publishing contract waiting. No advance in the hundreds of thousands. No Michael calling every morning about a deadline. No readers, no critics, and no shadow of James Miller, the number one bestselling author in America.

For the first time in 20 years, I sat down at a desk as myself. A man with nothing left to lose and nothing left to hide.

I rolled a clean white sheet of paper into the platen.

I put my hands on the metal keys.

Clack... clack... clack...

I typed the first line:

Everything after that moved at the speed of a slope coming down.

The letters came down in black ink on the white paper. I stopped and looked at the line I had just made.

I read it once more and left my hands where they were.

Then I stopped typing.

I sat back in the chair and took a long breath of the cold fall air coming through the gap in the window.

And then I saw it:

This was the first book of my life that nobody had handed me the frame for. No anonymous manuscript of Ethan's at the bottom of a cabinet, no script of Kessler's, no borrowed memory, no structure laid out in advance.

The lines were coming out of my own wound. Out of 31 years of it, out of my own lying, out of Deakins pulling air through a tube, out of the way the 11-year-old girl named Mia had looked at me on the flats, and out of the light empty space under my ribs right then.

It was coming easier and truer than any book I had written in the past 20 years.

I smiled. It was tired and it held.

I hit the space bar and started the second line.