by Ben Marcus
“You think these guys don’t mean it that they believe in equality?”
“No, I think they do, and that it has a kind of cost. They just distort themselves so much trying to do the right thing that there’s nothing left.”
“And you enjoy that?”
“Well, they enjoy that. They’re driven to it. I’m just a bystander to their quest. And I enjoy that. It’s old school, but I like to watch.”
“So you are basically fun times to date.”
“I pull my weight, romantically. I’m not stingy. I supply locations. I supply funding. Transportation. I’m kind of an executive producer. I can green-light stuff.”
“Nobody cums unless you say so, right?”
“That’s not real power,” she said, as if such a thing was actually under her control. She frowned. “That’s bookkeeping. Not my thing at all. Anyway, I think the romantic phase of my life is probably over now. My options won’t be the same. Freedom.”
“Jail time?” asked George.
“It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagined it that way. That would be nice.”
* * *
—
George hated to do it. They were having such a good time, and she must get this a lot, but he was her last living blood relative and didn’t he merit some consideration over all the hangers-on who no doubt lived pretty well by buzzing around in her orbit?
“All right, so, I mean, you’re rich, right? Like, insanely so?”
Pattern nodded carefully.
“You could, like, buy anything?”
“My money is tied up in money,” Pattern said. “It’s hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.”
“Not me,” said George. “I don’t. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn’t even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?”
Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad-news smile.
“You know the studies, right?”
Dear god Jesus. “What studies?”
“About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.”
“Tell me.” He’d let the rest of the comment go.
“It’s not good.”
“Well I don’t exactly want it to be good. I want it to be fun.”
“I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.”
Pattern laughed into her drink.
“Sweet, sweet Georgie,” she said.
* * *
—
It was getting late, and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern’s harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.
Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.
“Armageddon,” said George. “Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!”
Pattern didn’t smile.
“I hate to say it, little George, but I think I’m going to have to break this up.”
He didn’t like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.
“Here,” Pattern said, giving him a card. “Send your bills to William.”
“Ha ha.”
“What?”
“Your joke. That you obviously don’t even know you just made.”
She was checking her phone, not listening.
On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern’s car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.
“Do you think I can be in your life?” George asked. “I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.”
He tried to laugh.
“Oh, you are, George,” said Pattern. “Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.”
“You know what I mean. How can I reach you?” He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.
“I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.”
“But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.”
“No, no,” she whispered. “I don’t believe that. That’s not true.”
“Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.”
“Well,” she said. “Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?”
“Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?”
“Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.”
* * *
—
George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr. Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts—who and when and what and all those things that did not matter—but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.
At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.
One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.
Elizabeth—
Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don’t write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that’s okay, right? You’re out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. Do you see me? Send a sign, if so. Send a person, send a thing, send some weather. Or better yet, send yourself. There’s no substitute. I will be looking out, I swear. I will see you coming.
Your brother,
George
A Suicide of Trees
Before my father went missing, he taught me to give the weaker man a chance. The advice occurred when I was a child, after a baseball affair on the gentle border of soft Ohio, right where Widow Mountain is being rebuilt by our young inmates. As usual, there were children in competition that day much smaller than myself. I was compelled by park rules to utilize the gear designated for my age group, which I had long ago outgrown, such as small hand-slips and swatters—thus, I felt, unfairly restricting me from succeeding at a festival that seemed precisely designed by the sports council to bring my family shame.
So I called it upon myself to ask Paul Mattingly, the bald servant, to loot our vehicle for my own customized gear, which I then politely applied to myself for my next opportunity in front of the judges, who were supported by pillows in the low-lying viewing arena. It was just before this crucial moment that I noticed Jane Rogerson leading my swollen father—he was pink and glistening
, as if something had stung him on the inside of his body—over to the fence—the only thing standing between me and the people who were going to watch my comeback. I was getting ready and taking big swings and doing lunges to keep my legs from going cold. My father standing small in the summer dust raised up his hand to initiate a semaphore. Held it open, twisted it, pulled it down. This meant go to him now, or else get caught up in the blows and belts and slaps of his helper Rogerson, which she dispensed with the authority of a baker punching down dough. He summoned me over to him and talked me out of the whole affair. He talked the helmet off me and somehow got the bat out of my hands and the extra-large cleat off of my batting foot and talked me over to our vehicle where I was given children’s coffee and consoled by my mother, who even in close quarters could express an intense interest in the distant horizon, just beyond wherever I might be sitting. I watched from the passenger window as my batting turn was forfeited and the zero was hoisted up next to my small name on the scoreboard, snapped into position with the crispness of an egg cracking. A sharply bleating siren, accompanied by a flare that sizzled over the field, indicated that I had been disqualified, and several area televisions began to moan. Later in the evening, my father talked me into bed after Jane had given me a brief, forceful bath with her terrible sponge. When I was tucked in, he entered my room and sat on my bed and asked Jane Rogerson to leave us. Be reminded, please, that this story depicts a boy much younger than myself, who has little or no bearing on the individual that I have become. I will not entertain the pity of people I do not know.
“You are a strong boy and you are beautiful and you are my son,” my father said to me. “But you must remember that this is not true of anyone else, nor will it be, nor can it be.”
We were involved in what might be called a darkened room. There was his mustache to regard, for me, and that was all. Indeed it was often all that I saw when my father came at me in the dark. For discussions and such. The blond crop that styled his words to be so fatherly.
And then he taught me what it was to be much stronger than others, which is a lesson I am still proud of. The mustache seemed to retreat, but how quickly did it borrow my air and slam right onto me, scratching my face and digging at my eye! My breath failed at the sight of it, my father’s yellow mouth-fur like an animal spun from a pitching machine to pin me on my bed. He asserted some great weight onto my neck until I was stilled. No, I could not think of any way to move and he clenched my arms in his hands and I thought he might drive his shoulder into my chest cage.
The house was calm, the blinds drawn. I had never before waited so long to breathe. He was breathing fine, loud, hard. There was air coming onto me that I could not have, you see. One was in bed covered in his father. A certain impatience bloomed in me. The man was using his largeness to effect a stillness in his son. And in his air the sounds came up and burst open—his, my own, the room’s, I do not know.
“What are the circumstances, then? Exactly what might the case be here?”
Oh dear I could not move the air into me.
“Who gets to decide what happens next? Do you think it might be you or do you think it might be me?”
My feet were cold and they stuck out and I had scratches on my leg I could not get to. My father was so close to me I could not see him. There were birds of light cresting into my blackout. No mustache, no body, no bed, no house.
“Me or you,” the words. “Me or you.”
* * *
—
My father is gone now, but maybe yours is too. Is yours dead or has he vanished? If you do not know, we are in the same old boat, and the boat is made of rotten mush. But as much as I would be pleased to relate to you, to suggest that our lives are virtually the same, right down to the disfigurement between our legs, however laughable that sounds, I warrant that you have not also lost a second person, a lodger from your very own home, to be precise, who vanished or died in or around the same day and time as your father. And that you may or may not be a suspect in the situation. A person of interest. Or even a person at all.
* * *
—
These days we practice our supper at a large oak affair. There is Jane Rogerson, Paul Mattingly, my mother, and myself. The leaves of the dining board have been snapped under to soften not just the loss of my father, but also the lodger, who’d been leasing rooms from us these last endless years. Our two men are disappeared or dead, we do not know, and we can hardly tell the difference anymore. They vanished around the same time, and our smaller minds believe the events may be related. The candles and the newspaper rack and the candy bowl—in which my father dipped his little finger before making a speech—are gone, and the curtains are now bound up with wire. We keep them open because no one is much bothered by the glare, although Paul says he gets distracted by the many gray birds that now circle the house, their beaks bearded in dark foam.
The only sounds at supper are the huffing sobs of Rogerson, my father’s lady-in-waiting. I watch this woman carefully when she weeps, not least because of the glaring sexuality discharged by those who frequently cry. She will not meet my stare. Her body comes in a small parcel and she likes to deny herself in pale sweaters knitted so minimally that one could pass an entire hand through the holes to stroke the person beneath.
At first my mother took Rogerson’s sadness as a sign of hunger, and urged me to pass her more fish, which is no problem in terms of supplies. We never run out. But I have tired of scraping out her portions later into the day laborers’ food mailbox and now we only serve her enough to color her plate.
At my mother’s request, I have requisitioned my father’s room for scenarios. We have a Thursday night theater that features a quite credible imitation of my father by Paul, who is twice the size of our lost man. Paul stoops and shuffles through the room, one hand clutching his collar together, the other hand held out for money. Even my mother giggles at the accuracy of it, or she coughs and seems to choke, and always recovers with a smile. Paul can certainly render a man. A plate of sweet pastry is kept nearby.
On Mondays I sometimes query Jane Rogerson in my father’s room. She enters nervously just after her nap and does not survey her surroundings, which vexes me a great deal. She has lost a mourner’s share of weight and her face has taken on the deep creases of an old man’s bottom. If she knows something, it will be hard to determine, for there is more to Rogerson than a woman who once nearly sponged the life out of me at bath times, a treatment so fantastically rough that I often bled from the road burn on my back. Some might warrant that she sponged my missing father too, yet with a more delicate hand, in a mature style, a transaction that occurred off-hours, with a soundtrack of deep moaning. One can easily overhear certain insinuations about their bathing ritual. If I spent more furtive time in the servants’ quarters, I could hear many sorts of things from Paul Mattingly and his guests. I am usually strong enough to decline such easy acquisitions of knowledge.
I have performed minuscule rearrangements to my father’s bedroom items to catch Rogerson off guard. If she inhabited this room during the late hours, for instance, when a sexuality might be attempted, she could be startled if my father’s array of his “forest jewels,” the acorns and pinecones and woodland scruff he collected and staged so meticulously, no longer sprinkles over his bureau. She has little to say. Her speech returns mostly to moments of my childhood, a topic I feel can have no bearing on the investigation. She entreats me to recall scenarios that apparently featured just the two of us, strolling overland to some knoll or other that would host our required picnic, me with my elastic-waisted pants down around my ankles to better regulate my faulty gait. When I concentrate my mind on the matter, however, I can remember nothing of the sort, just small, red people on boats being splashed in a terrible syrup. It is the one memory I have confidence in.
* * *
—
Sometimes I sit beneath the window that g
ives out onto the scene of my father’s disappearance. Somewhere, ghosted into the glass, is the blueprint of what happened here. A father, my own, swifted off: by someone else’s power, by a higher power, by the powers that be. Mostly I look out at the burned yard, I sip from a bowl of soup, I surround myself with my father’s trade magazines: Population Now, The Limits of Rooms. I will not be approached for conversation, unless it is the detective, who enjoys broad legal access to my person, and who has spectacularly failed to turn his interrogation of me into the kind of courtship one so often reads about in literature between accuser and accused: a fiery, sexual battle of wills between fiercely intelligent if facially destroyed men who, though they differ in moral composition—one man kills children, the other man does not—overlap so deeply in other respects that they are like brothers who share a single, knotted torso.
* * *
—
In the many scenarios of my father’s disappearance, all of which have been whiteboarded in the living room and summarily dismissed, wanton speculation is succumbed to like a delicious drug, and I am ashamed at our collective lack of intelligence, imagination, and vision. Our heads may as well be crushed. We may as well lease ourselves for experimentation down at the night school.
My father, goes a theory put forward by Paul Mattingly, is caught in a crowd of day laborers—known to cluster at the head of our driveway—and is swept into the back of a truck, mistaken, perhaps, for a subdivision carpenter, someone grimly determined to support his family. The men in the truck are cheerful and talkative and they motor up a smooth road into the hillside. When the rain begins, a tarp is tented over the cab of the truck, ballooning in time with the anxious breath of the passengers. This is when my father becomes nervous and asks to be released. He uses simple phrasing. He does not disguise his voice. His captors are impressed by his calmness, but kill him anyway.