Gone at Midnight, page 24
Another wrote a lengthy post in the comment thread underneath John Lordan’s “BrainScratch: Elisa Lam’s Manipulated Elevator Footage” that I find compelling. In it, a man describes staying there with his girlfriend only weeks before Elisa died. He says one of the security guards essentially stalked them through the lobby, staring compulsively at his girlfriend.
“I did contact someone about this after ms. lams death . . .” he wrote. “I think if they were to find that guy that would be the answer to the mystery.”
I heard from a woman named Tanya Danielle, who emailed me about her experience at the Cecil Hotel in 2006. She was assigned a room with broken locks “on a seemingly deserted upper floor.”
While exploring the hotel I encountered an employee in the elevator . . . [who] offered to give me a tour of the hotel and the predatory glint in his eye seemed unmistakable . . . I have met my share of creepy guys but this man was different. He just seemed too polished and too sure of himself. I had the sense that he felt he could inflict his will on anybody.
When I read this, I got chills. We now have a fairly well-established pattern of female tenants feeling unsafe at the hotel because of what they perceived to be predatory employees, employees who sometimes offer to give these guests tours of the hotel.
THE RED SPARROW RETURNS
As I sat down in the lobby of the Cecil, I recalled the weirdest experience we had during the filming of our documentary. Our small crew consisted of only myself, Jared (who, earlier that day, had been chased by a woman with a rake), our cinematographer Jason, and Wilhelmina, the actress we hired to play Elisa in recreated scenes.
Wilhelmina had thus far done an impressive job in the recreation sequences. She took seriously the responsibility of portraying someone who suffered from bipolar disorder. She managed to convey Elisa’s quixotic but troubled personality wordlessly, gracefully, adding in nuanced idiosyncrasies of body language that conveyed the intelligent but troubled mind of someone struggling with bouts of depression and hypomania.
For this shoot, Wilhelmina was dressed in Elisa’s final iconic outfit, black shorts and a red hoodie. We filmed her in front of the Cecil Hotel. It turned out that the very hour we descended upon Main Street, so too did a paranormal tour whose final stop was the Cecil Hotel. Because of its dark history, it’s often featured by tours like Esotouric’s Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice.
As the tour bus ambled by, the DJ guide spoke over a small megaphone audible from the street, and the patrons cast their weary eyes upon the Cecil, the bright amber glow of its lobby extending out to the sidewalk.
“. . . . and then in 2013, tragedy and terror struck the hotel once again when twenty-one-year-old Elisa Lam was found by hotel employees in the water tank on the roof. Did she join the long lineage of spirits who have been absorbed by this strange building?”
At that moment, several of the tour patrons spotted a young Chinese-American woman, Wilhelmina, wearing the exact same outfit as Elisa at the very moment the tour guide was talking about the case. Several of them pointed with confused expressions. Others looked at the tour guide, assuming this was a pre-planned stunt. The tour guide, wide-eyed, looked like he had either seen a ghost, shit his pants, or both.
We finished our shots in front of the Cecil and decided to split up. Jared, Wilhelmina, and Jason departed on foot to shoot other exterior footage. I went back into the Cecil. During this trip, we hadn’t all booked rooms there, but I wanted to do some sleuthing.
As I waited for the elevator, suddenly I saw Wilhelmina pass in front of the hotel going in the opposite direction I had just seen them headed. And I didn’t see Jared and Jason with her.
I left the elevator and went outside. Wilhelmina was at the end of the street, waiting for the walk signal to cross Main.
I called her name but she didn’t hear me. I assumed she was walking back to the car to get a jacket or something, but I didn’t like the idea of her walking alone at night in that part of downtown.
Wilhelmina crossed the street, and I followed after her. The street noise was particularly loud that night, and she didn’t hear me calling her name. When she reached our car, she kept walking and turned right onto Olive Street.
What the hell is she doing?
I texted her. “Hey I’m behind u—where u going??”
About a minute later, she replied, “What? I don’t see you—lol. We’re headed to get food.”
I realized that the woman a block ahead of me was not Wilhelmina.
Whoever she was, she looked very similar from a distance and wore a red hoodie. I remembered the last time I was in front of the Cecil and saw the woman in red looking up at the hotel. Later, our paths had crossed again at . . .
The woman approached Pershing Square. I stopped and got my e-cig out. This is too weird, I thought, as she entered the purple pillars of the Square. I was about to turn back when I saw the woman in red take something out of her pocket. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was because I remained a solid forty to fifty yards away. But whatever it was, she tinkered with it and then started making short tossing motions.
Was she feeding the pigeons at night? I recalled the story of Goldie Osgood, the Pigeon Lady, who was brutally murdered at the Cecil.
I turned and started walking back. The Dark Water poster was right: Some mysteries are not meant to be solved.
A REVELATION
Back in my room, I did Half-Tortoise like never before, with a desperation. This is a yoga posture that is good for depression because all your blood goes to your brain for a minute. I get a high from it. Then I did some breathing exercises.
I got in bed and pulled the covers up to my chin. The room was dark but for patterns of arterial crimson light that rippled across the ceiling and walls.
The room phone rang, which scared the hell out of me.
“Hello?” I answered. Silence. “Hello? ” More silence. “Oh, for the love of God,” I said, hanging up.
I laughed. It was so similar to the movie 1408, in which wise-ass skeptic John Cusack stays at a haunted hotel and ends up losing his mind. At one point, he’s so desperate to get out of Room 1408, he climbs out the window and side-steps along the narrow terrace overlooking a long, horrifying fall. That scene stayed with me because I frequently have dreams involving me scaling precarious towers and structures at monumental heights.
I suddenly recalled part of my dream. In it, I had been hurtling through some kind of tunnel or maze. The corridors were cylindrical and seemingly made of something with membranes, and there were trap doors lining the sides. At the end of the dream, desperate to escape the maze, I curved into a trap door, absconding out into a vast nothingness.
Speaking of absconding, I thought, time to get the hell out of this room. I would head back to the 14th floor. Not to Room 1408 but rather Room 1427, where Richard Ramirez stowed the eyeballs of one of his victims.
As I turned onto the 14th floor, I tried but failed to run a quick self-assessment diagnostic. My brain just wasn’t working normally. Ever since the email from Lauren, I’d felt a steadily increasing dose of nervous energy intermixing with the depression. It was like the jitters one might get before a performance but compounded with an uncontrollable pulse of hysterics.
Except I wasn’t laughing. Or maybe I was but didn’t know it. Either way, they say it’s good to laugh at yourself, right?
Something was building, actually outpacing the depression, which at first I welcomed if for no other reason than having a sudden source of energy. It was depression with a kick, the sardonic malaise artificially infused with a booster shot of hot agitation. It was new and yet familiar—a more distilled essence of something I’d felt off and on for a decade.
Oh, I get it, I thought, remembering the email from Lauren, I’m angry. I slapped my palm against the wall.
Is this the hotel? I thought. I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to feel like the Cecil had hijacked his mind. I talked to people who said they didn’t believe in anything paranormal but had felt some really weird sensations at the Cecil.
I slapped the wall again and this time I followed it up with a punch to my own palm.
I was used to high highs and low lows. This was the first time I had experienced the two extremes at the same time.
I tried to steady my mind and focus. I recalled another salient review, one that was appropriate to the moment, which described lights turning on and off and the feeling of a demon summoner on the 14th floor. The reviewer said he and his partner checked out early and the receptionist and security guard laughed at them.
As they walked away, the security guard called out, “You guys don’t have to leave, the ghosts here are nice!”
I don’t know about a demon summoner, but the 14th floor definitely struck fear in me for the mere fact that it was both the floor where Richard Ramirez lived and the floor where Elisa’s surveillance video was recorded. There had also been several suicide jumpers who’d plunged from its windows. If the Cecil Hotel was a conscious mind, the 14th floor was a particularly active neural pathway.
The hallways even kind of resembled life-size brain arteries, with industrial pipes festooning the ceiling and walls like veins.
Suddenly, I remembered my dream from earlier when I took a nap. The environment combined with my burgeoning mania triggered images of wandering through a similar structure, though in the oneiric realm of the dream universe the hallways had been cylindrical corridors made of plasma and iridescent vapor. The passages wound through a dense labyrinth of nerves, blood vessels, or neural pathways and along the gaseous walls I saw dendrites, axons, and other glowing neurotransmitters shooting from my peripheral vision and into the vast reaches ahead.
At the time, in the dream, I had been a visitor in Elisa’s mind, a reluctant stranger searching for truth and hoping for her blessing. It was a dream borne of anxiety about my intrusion into Elisa’s life and fleshed out by my recent viewing of The Fantastic Voyage, in which scientists shrink down to the size of molecules to travel through a patient’s body.
Presently, in waking life it felt as if I had entered a nether region in between reality and the dreamworld, between life and death. The dream of traveling through Elisa’s mind was overlaid upon my journey through the Cecil Hotel. I wasn’t hallucinating (I don’t think), but summoning an anxious creativity.
In the dream, my speed accelerated through the winding effervescent tunnels that at moments became as colorful and vaporous as nebulas in deep space. The texture of the place was a strange amalgam of organic bodily sinews and interstellar gas and occasionally there was a hint of some underlying digital scramble of programming code.
I recalled an article I read about scientists discovering developmental parallels between brain cells, social networks, and galactic expansion. The title was “Universe Grows Like a Giant Brain.”
Panpsychists like physicist Gregory Matloff believe in a universal proto-consciousness. And if there is some base-level sentience to everything in the universe, that would include buildings, wouldn’t it? Why not the Cecil Hotel?
Why do I keep returning to this idea that the hotel is alive? I thought. Maybe there was some kind of synergy going on between my mind and the Cecil. Of course, usually a shared hallucination (known as folie à deux) is between a person and another person—not a person and a building.
I’m losing it, I thought. Or it’s already long gone.
But the dream felt so real, the desire for meaning so commanding. I was intoxicated by the idea that I was not a lonely visitor wandering through my own construct of Elisa’s brain, but rather surrounded by a living, breathing universe that could make sense of her death—and maybe even my declining mental health, too, while we’re at it.
I was also terrified of this, because Elisa’s life had ended so horrifically, so tragically. Where was the purpose? Where was the cosmic justice?
As I drew close to Room 1427, my spider senses engaged. I heard rock music playing; and the smell of marijuana wafted into the hallway.
I arrived at the door. Should I knock?
I lifted my hand, preparing to rap my knuckles against the door. But before I could, I heard a whooshing sound behind me.
At the end of the hallway, in the cul de sac straight past where someone or something had just turned right, the window to the fire escape was open. A breeze fluttered the white curtains draping the window sill. The corridor suddenly felt contorted, almost bird’s eye, as if the vertices were being stretched.
When I turned back to Room 1427, I saw a shadow slip over the eyehole. Someone stood on the other side of the door, staring at the bird’s eye view of my face.
I started to back away, sweat streaming down my forehead. That door seemed like the fulcrum of the entire building.
Suddenly, it opened and the shadowy face of a grizzled man appeared.
“Sorry,” I said, walking backward. “Wrong door.”
He just stared, said nothing. I continued backing up, mesmerized, until the wall interrupted my movement. Wind whipped the white curtain over my face, drawn haphazardly over the window leading to the fire escape.
The man carefully inched out from behind the door and stood in the hallway, staring at me with dilated pupils. I felt like I was in my forgotten dream, jamais vu laced with synchronicity, a lucid hallucination.
“Did you see Elisa?” I called out to the man.
He smiled absently and took one step forward. He shrugged and looked over his shoulder, then arched his head back toward me with an almost dramatic grin.
“Aw Christ,” I mumbled, light-headed. “I’m—uh—gonna have a smoke.”
I had wanted to check out the fire escape as part of my research. I decided there was no time like the present to retrace one of Elisa’s possible routes to the roof.
I jumped up into the window sill and edged out onto the fire escape. A warm, sultry night breeze greeted me, carrying with it the sound of traffic below. The foundation of the fire escape felt precarious. I had hoped for something that didn’t waver under my feet. Instead I got an obsidian trellis made of what felt like macramé.
I peeked back in to see if the man was still there. He was, but now he was facing away from me with his hands in his pockets. He was either tweaking or a ghost. Or both.
I followed the external fire escape staircase to the tiny ladder affixed to the concrete and leading to the roof. I climbed up a few steps, carefully grasping the side rails. Midway up, I stopped and looked out onto the skyline. Across the street, perched on the terrace of a building parallel to the Cecil, a stone gargoyle overlooked the city.
I wondered how long that beast had been there, how many people it watched fall.
It looked like it was grinning at me. That gargoyle, I realized, was there the night Elisa went to the roof. What did it know? What had it seen?
With one hand on the ladder, I brandished my whiskey and took a long pull; winced, made the “knttt knttt” sound Jack Nicholson patented in Easy Rider.
Suddenly, I realized the gargoyle had the face of the winged demon from my dream a year earlier. It was the exact same grin. The dream preconceived it. I stitched together my memory of the rest: I had climbed to the roof of the Cecil—just as I was doing now—and glimpsed Elisa encountering a tall, menacing figure that I now knew to be the same man from inside.
And at the end of the dream . . . I fell.
I stood there, the wind on my face. Should I continue up? I looked down. What the hell am I doing? I asked, staring at the gargoyle as I answered, Drinking whiskey on the ledge of a building during a mixed manic state.
I climbed back down the fire escape and through the window. The man was gone. The door leading to the staircase to the roof swung shut. He had gone to the roof... again, as in the dream.
But none of that mattered now. Back at the elevator, there was a mirror. As I looked at myself, it was suddenly so clear. All those years of inexplicable fluctuations, lapsing from the depths of despair to the heights of imaginative fervor, rising to be “the life of the party” one night only to crash into a bed-ridden mess of despondency for days.
I understood now why the treatment of my mental health had always been incomplete. I understood why my visions of the future, my plans for careers and projects, would change multiple times in one week, sometimes multiple times within an hour. I understood why there was never any telling what my mood might be like on a particular day, how I could watch myself—held hostage in my own body—manifesting a darkness I didn’t understand.
Elisa Lam suffered from bipolar disorder type 1—quite likely a severe case of it. This can sometimes be life-threatening and require hospitalization. I’d only recently learned that there is also a bipolar disorder type 2 that is characterized by less-severe manic episodes but still possessing potentially dangerous fluctuations between hypomania and depression.
Bipolar type 2 is notoriously difficult to diagnose. One of the greatest predictors is genetics. It was so clear to me that I almost couldn’t believe no one had ever mentioned it before as a possibility. It was the illness that took my aunt Jill’s life. It ran in my family. Bipolar explained my mood anomalies and erratic depressive patterns. Every symptom checked off against my life.
Did my interest, nay obsession, with Elisa’s death then stem, at least partially, from an unconscious need to diagnose myself and understand my own mind? Was Elisa’s tragic death the signpost in the wilderness leading me to this awareness? Were the last few years part of one big synchronicity?
I thought back on all my dangerous misadventures, particularly in my twenties, my impulsive decisions and behaviors, my over-the-top drug experimentation and abuse. How many times had I stacked multiple drugs just to feel normal? Just to have the courage to go and get groceries.
