by Ben Marcus
My dissent from this view is not so important. It is not that I think Paul Mattingly is a simpleton, at least not precisely. He is a nice man to play fort with, and I am glad he is able to help my mother. But one cannot be too cagey. The belongings of our lodger, whose disappearance features a lower grief index—if it rates at all—are now in the possession of Paul Mattingly, who apprentices himself after the great collectors. With so little to do around the house, now that my father is not here to spearhead some garden project—our sole video footage of the lost man finds him squatting on his camp foldout, barking orders through a megaphone as unidentifiable children shuttle mulch to the juniper shrubs—Mattingly has been known to round up the items of various men who are missing and to store these items in glass cases. Creating his bias, so to speak. The certain feeling that he might be rooting for someone, therefore blunting his instrument of assessment.
Additionally, Mattingly’s narrative nowhere mentions our lodger running like buster through the woods, quite possibly on fire, screaming for his life. I saw this myself. Asleep or awake, I saw it very clearly.
* * *
—
In mythology, when a stranger from a distant land catches fire, it can signal that he is from the underworld, and that the kindness of his hosts—their ministrations with warm soup, the private massage offered by the eldest daughter, the gift of hand-drawn currency folded in muslin—has caused him to swell with shame, and then to combust. This suggests that our domestic tranquility has built-in protection from peril—intruders will burn if they seek to harm us—and it gives some comfort. Our lodger, however, came from Cleveland Village, the north end, and if we were unduly kind to him I’ll admit that it was not under my watch. In other words, our lodger caught fire for reasons mythology cannot quite explain. A different sort of logic applies to his immolation.
* * *
—
All throughout the late summer, when the detective visits he is distracted, he is sad, he is happy, he is handsome and witty, he repulses me. I assure him that I have nothing to hide, but can anyone ever say this with any honesty? Who can legitimately speak in such a way? I have so much to hide that I may one day break into pieces.
Today, while I am theorizing with him, he checks his watch repeatedly, but clearly does not see what he desires there. What a sorrow it is when our disappointments come from something we wear on our own bodies. I cannot say that I feel for him, because my feelings have been littered elsewhere. They are gone from me. But I see his predicament. I see it and I honor it.
It is important to me that he knows what I know, to a certain extent, anyway. Beyond that certain extent, I’m not sure he could handle his own mind. I wouldn’t want that responsibility.
I give him to understand the moment that informed the disappearance: my father, an assistant at the Institute, whose job it was to test the occupancy rate of its rooms and offices and elevators, recruiting bright young humans to fill those spaces until the floor joists started to creak. His morning tasks to occur in or around the home. The garden, the path, the hedge, the mailbox. A sliver of lunch before the bicycle ride to work. Daily my father had to navigate the cluster of day laborers clogging our driveway, who enjoyed a lightly sexual heckling of my father as he tried to get his bike moving from an uphill standstill with his little legs. Many times I watched the day laborers grab at my father’s crotch as he tried to cycle his way free, while my father grimaced or smiled, I was never sure which. All of this produced the sound of a father going away. One should issue a record album of such sounds, the acoustics of departure, even forced departure, undertaken while muscle-bound workers fan your groin. A man like that can be heard for miles. How could we possibly lose track of him?
His supervisor Lauren Markinson asserts that he showcased an appearance no more disheveled than usual when he submitted his revised population figures during his final day in our lives, and my mother alleges an evening encounter with him, although the latter is easily refuted, given that Mattingly is the only sire my mother is allowed, whether or not my mother knows this. Young men in my situation, who are now no longer young, must early on make a reality calculation on behalf of their mothers, to keep them just shy of the amount of information that would ruin them.
* * *
—
One cannot help entertaining the theory that my father, given his professional inclinations, worked a population reduction upon his own home, clearing the way for his only son, myself, to thrive, the way old-growth trees are known to suck poison from deep in the earth in order to weaken themselves, just as the baby saplings around them require more room to grow. A suicide of trees, I believe it is called. It is a fancy name for a father throwing himself under a bus, allowing his son to thrive. It is part of a larger genre of misassigned heroism, but I am pleased to let my father enjoy the credit. And now I am filling the cavity left by two men, my father and the lodger, swelling into the newly vacant rooms. Space is for taking, and my father knew this.
After all, what’s mine is mine, and also some of what isn’t.
My father would also say that metaphors are for the dead, or winning is for losers, or that the expression “good day” is an oxymoron.
Until now, the question around here, posited by friends, family, strangers, and the police, has been punishingly literal: Who took my father? We have failed to ask, at least out loud: Might he still be on the property, buried alive, barely breathing? Or might it not have been his time? Could we admit that in some instances it is just more polite to quietly disappear? Did he leave of his own accord? And the lodger? Did they leave together, hand in hand? How many abductions are self-engineered, simply out of kindness?
But it is not my job to posit the questions, only to field them, however much I’d like to be stationed behind the detective’s face so I could better attack myself and take charge of the drama that should have resulted by now.
When my father was alive, I had to wake and look into a mirror that rigged me into an old man, a limper, with a face that looked newly leaked of air, as if I had been sleeping on one of those airplanes that never land, ejecting its occasionally dead passengers over the Atlantic. My father’s living body on the property was a caution to me: like a crystal ball smeared with the blood of a neighbor’s pet. If there was a really good question, it might be: Why should a younger man be forced to look upon his own crippled future, in the form of an older man? What purpose could that kind of dark forecasting ever possibly serve?
In other words, in these tired times, why have a father at all?
* * *
—
Pursuant to his investigation of my missing father, not to mention the lodger, the detective shows me pictures: trucks, men, trees. In folklore, when an authority figure visits your house, even to interrogate you about a so-called crime, you are obligated to return his gifts in kind, so I have offered sweet coffee, a duck prosciutto, and Jane Rogerson’s braided fry bread with shards of dark sugar, but the detective has declined. He does not seem suspicious of me so much as arthritically afflicted, and while I inspect his materials he paces the great room as if he’s dodging crippled birds on the floor. He shows me photographs of gray shapes that resemble planets attacked long ago, and I study these, not sure if I should shake or nod my head. I hadn’t realized that landscapes could be guilty of something, but locations, the detective reminds me, foster guilt, they contain and stage crime and are therefore far more useful than mug shots of men and women, which have apparently lost professional credibility. I am meant to address the images he shows me, trap though that might be, and say “whatever comes into my mind.” This is presumably the exhausted pink man’s technique for locating my lost father, and possibly also our lost lodger, and I will certainly indulge him. If you can find a disappeared man this way then I am pleased. It is always fascinating to discover the truth-divining techniques used by sweaty, small, nervous men, who even while succ
eeding appear to be in agony. Pinched, suffering faces, fat bellies, and bad skin. They mean so well, they try so hard, feeble though they are! I imagine what he really wants to do is climb inside my head and thrust away into the hidden folds of my brain, until some evidence leaks forth onto my face. It is not entirely unpleasant for me to contemplate such an assault.
Of the detective’s evidence, the pictures of trucks are what I enjoy, since they have apparently been stolen and returned, sometimes with blood and grass in the bumper, sometimes with a tooth in the wheel well, sometimes with three different kinds of semen dried into the cup holder. It does suggest quite a party for my father, if he died this way. A festive demise. Most of the trucks are lovely vehicles abducted for the secret uses of people we know little about. I admit to the detective across the coffee table the central mystery that overwhelms us all. We do not know the people who drive the roads. We do not. There are so many of them, and we will never speak to them or hear their stories. We will not see them make love or die, we will not reach our hands down their throats to massage their lungs.
When people steal trucks, the detective tells me, they seem keen to perform the most illegal acts, which can tend to require a certain degree of what is called off-road travel, a jagged lurching into restricted areas where the law cannot easily survey. Here they smash people, they tear them, they bury them. And then the truck thieves seem compelled to leave a morsel of human waste, doing so out of a sense of duty to history or statistics, a desire to belong to the elite population of people who defecate at a crime scene.
Some witnesses say the truck that may have taken my father—the one that sped past our house the morning he went missing—was dark navy, although my imagination tends to apply a red stain to things. All I frequently remember of a person is his mouth. My father’s lips frequently looked boiled down into a sticky wound. I sometimes watched him as he slept next to my canoe-bodied mother, and there was his mouth, glowing like candy, which always made me think that dirt and hair would be more likely to stick to it: dirt and hair and debris, and maybe some unidentifiable shining thing, stuck to my father’s face like a jewel.
I breathe into my coffee mug and imagine my father riding in these trucks, bouncing in his seat like a hand puppet, on his way to being spectacularly killed. If it is true, then bravo for him. I am well pleased. I want to tell the detective how proud I am of my father. It offers some satisfaction. There is an age for a young man when he realizes his father will no longer excel or succeed at anything, that he will pursue decline in various degrees, perfecting his small stabs at failure until he seems like a machine designed to demonstrate mistakes, rather than a man. It is nice when an exception to the rule arises, even if it comes at a cost.
* * *
—
The men and women who study body mass and space, bearing loads, clustering, and oxygen quotas, have, according to my father’s publications, proposed an apportioning system, called Melissa, that distributes additional air to children when a room exceeds a certain occupancy rate. The term “Melissa” must stand for something technical that can now be acronymized into the name of a child, most likely dead now, maybe one of those taken by van and dumped in the sea, with only an audio recording remaining of the splash she made when she went down.
But what does Melissa mean for the rest of us? That the children, once our buildings buckle and spill over with a sweetness of people, will be trampling over our dead bodies before too long, that they’ll be breathing their own sugary air when we are blue and cold on the floor, that these devices will be tripped accidentally and the children will walk forth with a great new power.
In other words, it’s clear that a person requires an exit strategy that can be executed without oxygen, and I recall the one issued by our own Thomas Jefferson, who said that the best exit strategy of all is simply never to arrive in the first place.
Which leaves me here at 4523 Westmoore Ave. to puzzle out the mystery. My mother and the others come and go, and I would mistake them for shadows were it not for the sweet vegetal reek of people who sleep and cry too much, that legendary scent often said to rise off the backs of people who have lost their leader.
* * *
—
Perhaps the lodger was not involved in orchestrating my father’s disappearance. I would be glad if he were innocent. Perhaps Mattingly, the hairless house assistant, is no liar. It is so trying to accuse a stranger of some terrible thing when one feels predisposed to blaming someone nearer at hand. But nor is it kind to accuse a man of his own disappearance. A trap seems waiting for this sort of behavior. One should possibly instead be issuing a gentle “Bravo.” Perhaps one will soon do so. Who cannot admire a man, even a father, who otherwise brooked so little admiration, to so cleanly vanish?
* * *
—
The detective brings my attention to the lodger, tapping a folio in his lap of what is apparently a collection of lodger data. What was his routine? the detective would like to know. How would I characterize the varieties of his ingress and egress? Always the same door? Did he glance at my father or touch my father or make mention of my father either in the company of my father or not? And, in turn, did my father return the attention or spurn it? Did he chase after the lodger, did he grab him or hold him or did the two of them ever succumb to kisses in the evening?
If we examine the routine of our lodger, I suggest to the detective, we find little to worry about. On Fridays, for instance, our lodger was frequented by certain of his mathematics peers, hobbyists all. The gentlemen of these were tidy and quiet. In the oaken entranceway, where the finials appeared to imprison our visitors, his guests often stooped to sniff from clear bags of crumbs, a health-chew so rich in calories that one needed only to suck the nutrients from a fistful of the stuff and later spit the dried shards onto the garden, a compost of the mouth that spiked our flowers with deep blasts of energy. The visitors carried knapsacks and reserved their humor for the German tongue. At times, a language was uttered as if one might be avoiding a mass of bread in the mouth, after which followed always the sharp barks of laughter coughed into their fists, their eyes gleaming and tearing. One of the men liked to grip his own neck brace as if he would topple over without it.
The women who befell our lodger in the afternoons were not so many as the gentlemen, but they stayed longer and made great noises, slamming the walls with their big hands, barking math formulas into a long cone they passed between them that required many refills of dark water. They wore large trousers and let their hair go to their waists and appeared somewhat stronger and vaster than the men. My mother, the gracious hostess, shook their hands and trilled what little German she knew in their direction, squirting about them with the excitement of a hotel dog. These women handled my mother rather too freely, I believe. They passed her around between them and adopted a mechanical halt to their speech, an aloof-sounding language that was only spoken while they held my mother, until I had to intervene and usher them from the house. My mother’s sweet gasps for breath left her convulsing mildly afterward for hours, unsure whether she had been attacked or made love to, a mother who confused suffering with valor as she heaved and panted in the garden in between restorative sips of her cloudy mint drink. It would take days of private swaddling and sessions beneath the panel-light to calm her.
I tell the detective I am poor at math and a weak listener. Other people’s words can invite me into a deeply passive tranquility. Can their message possibly matter to me? I am given to wonder. Is their speech in some way medically necessary to my being? The lodger and his visitors performed operations on the chalkboard I could never decipher. I sat on the viewing couch some afternoons at their theater of operations and watched them frenzy over their figures and formulas, as if they were scooping extra air out of the room and lathering it on themselves. They did not seem to mind my presence, though I might have been sent out for something they called “crisps”—
a word they seemed to use for anything that could be eaten—after which the door was frequently bolted and their laughter erupted like a flushed toilet. When I stayed on the viewing couch, a heckler invariably shouted up from his seat next to me to vex the man or woman with the chalk, whoever was laboring at the board to the scrutiny of everyone assembled. There was a considerable deal of backseat solving when they practiced their math together. More than once I saw a man brutally felled by the crisp backhand of a woman who could solve the problem faster.
I am eager to place blame, and to place it here, since it fits the differential that the intellectual elite killed the king. I believe, along with Emily Dickinson, that smart people have little to do, in the end, but make love to their children and assault those in power. But although the mathematicians were aggressive and mean and aloof, although they were sexual to a nearly unbearable degree, and they undressed me and killed me with their eyes each time I soiled the room with my presence, they were not kidnappers or killers.
* * *
—
As a grown man, my body has shrunk down and corrected to the society I keep, as if some corset in the air has kept me from becoming a disgusting giant. Since my father’s big poof, I am mostly couch-bound, heaped in blankets, awash in my own greenhouse effect. There will be no photos of me, but you might picture a boiled-faced man, long ago threshed by children with sticks. My age, when sounded out slowly, is also a word in Spanish, meaning “the fat behind the knee.” My height is not important, because I do not stand up much, unless the detective is visiting and he entreats me to survey the yard and the field beyond to search for clues. Then I slide on my garden boots, and off we go.