Be patient. Your letters are rain on my forehead. My letters are words spoken into your ear while you lie beside me, turning toward my mouth.

Do you know when you were most beautifully dressed, on that trip to Murnau? There can’t be any argument about it: the night we arrived.

I want to go back to that moment.

I realize that I deserve to be hit in the face for speaking beyond this moment, which belongs to you.

When I was a child, I did something very bad, though not in the public sense but only in my private reckoning. (The fact that it wasn’t publicly acknowledged as bad confirmed my suspicion that the adult world was asleep.) Afterwards, I was amazed that nothing had changed: the grown-ups, though somewhat gloomy, had gone about their business, their mouths shut in the natural way I’d admired from below since my earliest days.

What I’m most frightened of is experiencing the eclipse of love: seeing those eyes that were home to me close themselves off forever.

What will happen to me? Even if I sit among people until my last breath, welcomed, embraced, and initiated into their secrets, I’ll never be one of them.

What I wrote to do was to ask forgiveness. Instead, with your image before me, I return to my own solitude.

Many greetings to your mother. I send you all that I’m unable to say to you. I wish you God’s safety. Write. Write to your Murnau. I wish I could say more—

On March 10, 1931, with his own car in the shop, Murnau rented a light blue Packard for a two-day drive from Los Angeles to Monterey. Twelve miles south of Santa Barbara, his chauffeur stopped for gas at the Rio Grande Oil Station. When the chauffeur returned to the car, Murnau’s house-servant, a young Filipino, was seated at the wheel.

The Filipino told the chauffeur that Murnau had said he could drive. Murnau, seated in the back seat with Pal, didn’t confirm or deny the claim.

The Filipino drove for approximately five miles. The chauffeur records having protested repeatedly that he was driving too fast.

At about that time, Murnau is supposed to have said from the back seat, “Pal is frightened.” These were his last recorded words.

At six-thirty or so the Packard slung itself sideways off a bend and rolled over once. At first all of its occupants, including Pal, seemed unhurt. Murnau was found twenty feet from the car, conscious but unable, or unwilling, to speak. He was admitted to the Santa Barbara College Hospital. He died the following morning, fifteen years and two hundred and twenty-six days after the death of his friend Hans.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel is a work of imagination.

That imagination would have been pitifully undernourished without the contributions of the following texts: