Gone at Midnight, page 12
Her last words to him before he was brought to the ICU were “don’t be scared.” She sat by his bedside, holding his hand, squeezing it to let him know she was there. He squeezed back once. But soon he slipped into unconsciousness. She sat there with him, alone. It was amazing to her, the thin line between life and death, the reality that we will all slip off into the ether someday.
Eventually the nurse nudged her and said, “I think you should tell your family to come in. He’s going.”
Elisa had clutched herself and cried as family members, nurses, and doctors rushed around her. At least he had seen her graduate high school. And years later, when she went to visit her grandma, all of grandpa’s trinkets and documents were still laying around, and it was like he was still here. She kept his scarf.
Elisa went to the Vancouver mall to get out of the house and escape her haunting memories of grandpa and puppy.
She saw a comically dressed man, which was all the distraction she needed. “I’m sorry,” she later wrote, “but a 50-year-old Asian man wearing a Paul Smith suit, a denim jacket, a mink stole, a Louis Vuitton backpack, Air Force Ones, and shutter shades—WHERE IS HE GOING? Does he work at an accounting firm run by Kanye West and a 10-year-old girl? Is he late for an appointment with Willy Wonka at the World Bank?”
Elisa wasn’t normally so harsh, but she needed to let off steam.
Before Toronto, it was all she could do to stay awake. Three straight days of sleeping. Relatives came into town, and she slept right through it. Well, mostly. That would have been great. Unfortunately, she was awake long enough to get berated for not socializing. Her family just didn’t understand that it was physically painful for her to sit at a table with other people. She did so with her boyfriend and his dad, and she had smiled and nodded her way through it.
It’s like there was another person watching her. Judging her. Making her believe things about herself that weren’t true. But it was just herself. She was both predator and prey. And sometimes it felt like she was running from someone—something—that pursued her as relentlessly as the Terminator.
Elisa wrote in her blog that she was hospitalized in a “mental ward” once: “a depressing hospital-colour painted place with bad food and donated furniture, an antiquated TV and incomplete puzzles . . . it reeks of hopelessness.”
If she wanted more of that she would need to “subsist on a vegan diet of lentils and berries and chant Buddhist sutras for 6 hours a day...
“Yoga, meditation, drum circles, acupuncture etc. I will emerge as an earth goddess in touch with my spiritual self embracing my wholeness! HBO Enlightened!”
Elisa returned from Toronto with bronchial congestion, a cough, a sore throat, and her ever-present insomnia problem. She had traveled to get outside her comfort zone, to live life in the real world instead of the cocoon of curated identities and pleasures she had accumulated online.
Her social alienation was growing more acute, and to make matters worse, she was continually in the throes of alternating hypomanic episodes or periods of deep depression, during which she would hole up in her bed and excommunicate herself from the world.
She felt so alienated she read The Loner’s Manifesto. Then she started hunting through the self-help sections of bookstores.
She saw some old friends, which she thought would make her feel better but actually made her feel worse. She saw a male friend with whom she’d once had a powerful platonic connection. Four years earlier she remembered waking up nestled in his arms. There was nothing romantic (all right, she might have harbored a crush at one point in high school), but their love ran deep. He counted as one of the only people in her life who directly asked her if she was depressed.
Now that connection was a distant memory. They weren’t in high school anymore, they no longer saw each other every day. Now he was off doing great collegiate things like all her other friends, leaving her behind.
Oh well, she thought. “ALL LIVES END. ALL HEARTS ARE BROKEN. CARING IS NOT AN ADVANTAGE.”
DRAWN TOWARD THE WINDOW
When I entered the lobby, I heard echoing laughter. The source: a drunk transient in the corner of the lounge. I checked in, noticing the same things others had described, the strange ornate decor of the lobby, the non-tenants milling about as though sizing up those who had come to stay. And behind the check-in desk of the lobby, which was once sheathed in protective glass, there were a dozen or so surveillance screens next to a stopped clock.
I wanted a room on the 14th floor, where Elisa’s surveillance video was filmed and where the Night Stalker had lived, but evidently those rooms were reserved for permanent residents (making me wonder what Elisa had been doing up there). Instead, they gave me a room on the 5th floor, the same floor Elisa stayed on. Good enough.
I immediately noticed the nausea others have described. A claustrophobic dread that sticks to your every thought like the moisture of humid air adhering to your skin.
I checked into my room. It was a cramped hole with a window looking out onto Main Street.
I walked over to the window and looked out, recalling how many people had ended their lives by jumping from the higher floors. What an awful way to die. What horror. Many people who have jumped and somehow lived reported that their immediate thoughts upon being airborne were panicked regret, as though the sudden reality of having taken such a drastic step instantly cleared the fog of their despair. I’ve often thought of what the remainder of that fall would be like.
I started thinking of what it would be like if I opened my window, climbed up onto the sill and simply stepped off—then I shook my head and admonished myself. What the hell was I doing thinking something so awful?
I recalled that Natalie the psychic had that exact same experience upon checking into her room: She suddenly found herself transfixed with the window and thoughts of suicide, as though the hotel whispered a mortal invitation, a beautiful vision of falling in grace, anticipating ultimate freedom from pain and fear.
As I tried to relax and settle into my room, the feeling of dread and nausea intensified. Ghostbusters was on the TV.
I stood up and walked over to the door and put my eye up to the eyehole, taking in the ever-creepy bird’s eye view of the hallway. I could hear murmuring voices, but no one was visible. My fear intensified. I felt restless, vulnerable, and endangered.
Dear God, I’m going to spend the night here? I thought. Yes. And I’ve got work to do.
I was looking for people who might know what happened to Elisa, obviously. But failing that, my goal in staying at the Cecil was to experience the hotel the same way Elisa did. Elisa had given virtually no attention to the paranormal. In all of her hundreds of pages of writings, not once did she ever reference ghosts, or hauntings, or possession, or anything in the esoteric paranormal realm. So unless it came to me, I would leave whatever entity that lived there alone.
I left my room and headed to the elevator, noting that even the hallways felt claustrophobic and surreal. There was something about the industrial piping that lined the ceiling and the soft cobalt glow that made me feel like I was inside some sentient mechanical structure.
Where was everyone? Since leaving the lobby, I hadn’t seen one tenant.
I entered the elevator and looked at the button panel, remembering Elisa’s frantic button-pushing from the footage. The upper corner contained the surveillance camera recording me and spread out before it was an azure sky and puffy white clouds painted on the ceiling.
It wasn’t the only odd artistic license taken by the Cecil Hotel management. Elsewhere, some of the walls of the hotel contained strange images, like that of an enormous black dog looming over a city.
THE SECURITY GUARD
I stepped off onto the 14th floor.
The 14th floor of the Cecil Hotel is actually the thirteenth floor. The building does not have a “13th floor.” This is not unusual. In fact, in a majority of cities a sizable percentage of hotels do not have a 13th floor due to persistent superstitions dating back centuries.
After watching the surveillance tape of Elisa so many times, it was surreal to be there in person looking down the very hallway. What the hell had spooked her so badly when she poked her head out to see if anybody was there? Had she heard someone or seen something? Or was she imagining something and working herself up into a frenzy over nothing?
To the left of the elevator, not far from where Elisa made her final exit, was a window leading to a fire escape. The window was closed and I was unable to open it. I was, however, able to get a clear look outside and was surprised at how precarious it looked. The rusted metal trellis and stair-ladder of the fire escape looked ancient and janky. Below was a long fatal fall.
I thought about Elisa’s movements from different phases of the video and tried to match them up to the mirror. I physically reenacted some of her actions.
Suddenly I heard a toilet flush and jumped right out of my skin. I had forgotten about the shared bathroom in the hall, and the ba-woosh sound came out of nowhere. It also meant someone else was on the floor with me.
I waited. But no one came out.
I walked back over to the window and looked out. I remembered that Elisa had been sans glasses, which explained why she had to lean down and draw her face so close to the button panel. But that fact made it harder for me to believe that she had pushed open this window and climbed out onto a decades-old fire escape where all that separated her from a fourteen-floor fall was a single misstep.
Then again, maybe without her glasses she couldn’t see how dangerous the fire escape was.
“What are you doing?” A voice suddenly rang out from past the elevator.
I jumped out of my skin again and then laughed amicably when I saw that a Cecil security guard was standing next to the bathroom. He had a walkie-talkie in his hand and was tucking his shirt in.
“I’m looking—at the fire escape.”
“Are you a registered guest?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not allowed out there,” he said.
“Well, unless there’s a fire, right?”
He stared at me.
“I have no intention of going out there . . . unless there’s a fire.”
Since the man clearly wanted me to leave the 14th floor, I took the elevator down to the 10th floor and wandered around. I had hoped to interview some long-term residents. A registered sex offender, I had learned from an online database, lived on the 10th floor. He had appeared on a CNN news clip in which he lounged in his room describing the hotel. This news clip had been hyper-analyzed by conspiracy theorists, some of whom posited that this man was responsible for Elisa’s death.
I loitered there for a bit, hoping someone would leave their room but none did.
My next course of action was to go to a nearby speakeasy, a vintage-themed dive bar, and try ascertaining whether it was the same one Elisa went to. It was a long shot. Even if it were the same one, the chances of anyone there remembering someone from several years earlier were extremely small. But sometimes you get lucky and the universe forgets to file away an old document.
MY FIRST LEAD
“Fidelio,” I said to the bouncer, remembering the password from the last time I was in town.
I felt like I was in the hipster version of Mulholland Drive (which, incidentally, features a shot of the Cecil Hotel) or Eyes Wide Shut, except inside there were not dozens of beautiful naked people wearing exotic masks but rather loose gaggles of mascara-and-sweat-drenched hipsters wearing fedoras, fishnets, and feathers, coming and going under a humid nimbus of cigarette smoke.
Through the haze, I saw occultnik artifacts hanging from the walls. Percussive jazz music, driven by a dissonant electronic offbeat, grew louder as I pushed my way past laughing drunk people who stood frozen, phones in hands, sharing versions of themselves warped by Instagram filters.
I get anxious in crowds, always have. It’s a combination of claustrophobia and social anxiety. Unless I’m drunk or otherwise high, I get anxious. In her posts, Elisa suggests the same.
I got a couple drinks and listened to the jazz, but the din of music and voices prevented me from asking random questions of strangers.
The only place that was quiet was outside, so I slipped back out the side door, where the bouncer sat on a stool in the darkness. I hovered near him, the blue glow from my e-cigarette lighting my feet as I walked in small, jittery circles.
Finally, I asked him, “Excuse me, sir. Kind of a random question but do you know anyone at the Cecil Hotel?”
After a pause, he responded, “Oh, that sketchy place over on Main? That the place where they found the girl on the roof?”
“Yes, sir. Crazy case. I’m writing about it. Trying to find people who live there or worked there.”
“I know someone who works at the Biltmore,” he said, typing into his phone. “Let me see if she knows anyone.”
We talked a little while longer and I stuck around, hoping the bouncer would get a response. And for about an hour and a half, I dizzily struck up conversations in the speakeasy, checking back with him every thirty minutes.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I was walking away from the speakeasy, when suddenly the bouncer called out, “Hey! I got a number for you . . .”
He handed me a small slip of paper.
“Her name is Tina, she might know someone.”
“Cool, thanks, man.”
It was the first, but not the last, time I would receive information from a bouncer. And next time, the info would be shocking.
NIGHT TERROR
Back at the Cecil that night, I couldn’t sleep. This insomnia was different from anything I’d ever experienced. I’ll just put it like this: The Cecil Hotel felt like it had a mind of its own, as though it were aware I had come there to study it and was therefore playing mind games with me, using its dark faculties to disarm me, neutralize me with fear.
I don’t usually get paranoid. I generally do not lay in bed convinced someone is going to break into my room and kill me in my sleep. Nor do I usually feel like the walls of a room are watching me. But that’s what it felt like in the Cecil. When footsteps echoed down the hallway, I froze in terror. Once, I couldn’t take it any longer and bolted to the eyehole to watch as a figure walked past. I sensed that he would suddenly stop and turn his head to look at me, which would have certainly given me a heart attack.
When I finally did fall asleep, my dream centered around Elisa. In it, I was watching her in a small room from a bird’s-eye view and she was aware that I was watching her and writing about her. She was also aware that she was dead. As I wrote about her, she began writing about me, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting. She composed somehow with a combination of pen, typewriter, and brain, some strange organic contraption right out of Naked Lunch.
Toward the end of the dream, she turned her head slowly up and to the right to look at me. Her eyes were missing, like one of Ramirez’s victims, and in their place were eyeholes from the hotel’s doors. While I observed her in bird’s-eye view, she could see me in telephoto closeness, could peer into my eyes and soul and discern my intentions and motives, which I wordlessly swore to her were pure.
THE MOST FRIGHTENING EYES I’VE EVER SEEN
In the morning, I felt a terrific urge to get the hell out of the building as quickly as possible. I wanted coffee and an omelette, so I planned to head to the nearby Margarita’s, the restaurant Richard Ramirez had frequented. But as my legs deposited me onto Main Street, I noticed that there was a young woman standing on the sidewalk, staring up at one of the windows of the upper floors.
I remembered my college experience at Santa Cruz—which happens to have been Elisa’s next planned stop after LA—and the figure staring at the balcony where a young man ended his life with a shotgun.
There was something else about the young woman that struck me. Her jacket wasn’t exactly the same as Elisa’s, but it was red and it concealed her face. The young woman stood in the middle of the sidewalk, compelling annoyed passersby and pedestrians to walk around her as she gazed, hands in jacket pockets, up at the Cecil.
I recalled the popular photograph taken by a teenage boy several years ago, which shows a wispy apparition in the shape of a human hovering in the window of the Cecil Hotel. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was connected with how many people have committed suicide by jumping out of the building’s windows, or with the morbid feeling of being drawn to the window that both myself and others experienced.
Is that what the woman in red was sensing? I asked myself. Or is she the embodiment of one of the jumpers, nostalgically revisiting ground zero of her exit from the material world? Or is it just a random person staring at a building?
There was only one way to find out. I started toward her, but she abruptly turned and headed swiftly down Main in the opposite direction.
I decided to check out Pershing Square, where the Pigeon Lady fed birds before she was brutally murdered inside her room at the Cecil. I crossed Main and navigated through throngs of disheveled people toward Spring Street. I passed The Last Bookstore, where manager Katie Orphan had reported one of the last known conversation with Elisa, and then zig-zagged for a few more blocks.
The Pershing Square block has undergone multiple renovations in the last few decades, shedding real-growth palm trees for fakes. It remains as a sleeping ground for the homeless.
Suddenly, the woman in red ascended a narrow flight of concrete stairs and entered the purple pillars of the Square. For a split second, she turned her head back, but I couldn’t tell if she saw me. It felt, strangely, that she had led me here somehow. And when she reached the top of the stairs she ran into a tall, menacing man with shaggy black hair, who appeared to have been waiting for her.
