by Ben Marcus
What I took him to see first was the burned outline of a person in the grass, way out on the back property. Like the chalk outline of a dead body, but made with fire. Had the person been on fire before he fell, thus burning the grass in his very own shape? That was the likely explanation. The detective photographed the singed grass before new grass and weeds grew in, and thank goodness, because now there might be burned ends of certain grasses here and there on our back property, but nothing coherent enough to suggest that a man, very possibly on fire, fell here and probably died here, although where he went after that no one seems to know.
Invariably we return to the garage, where wooden slats, smeared with a grease, lean in the corner. We’ll call this grease an inedible substance that might help machines operate more quietly. This grease has simply been rubbed just about everywhere, creating such a lovely shine on the older things of our home, a glistening creaminess on the wheelbarrow, the garbage tins, the withered football, the tenoning jig. There is an excess of it coating the baby flamethrower, propped in the corner. I tell the detective that the flamethrower belonged to my father, who used it to scorch our bamboo field each autumn. Always preferable to hacking at the stumps with a scythe. I do not tell him that a gasket can be removed to extend the flume, when giving chase, for instance.
And the wooden slats? They are new. No one can account for so many oddly shaped wooden slats now filling the garage. And they can be pieced together, after much puzzlement, to form a most terrible structure.
But, on the other hand, what items of our world cannot?
* * *
—
Upon our first visit to the garage, I told the detective about the wooden slats, but I did not demonstrate what could be built with them. Why build monsters for strangers? He puzzled over the grease that soon covered his hand.
“You say this is a new substance?” he asked. The utterance of the question seemed to exhaust him.
“I do not remember it before,” I replied. “You can taste it if you want to. I could have Paul bring us a spoon.” I looked around for a sign of Paul, willing my face into a searching gesture, even while inexplicably picturing Paul demonstrating intercourse to an audience of scientists in a field.
The detective sniffed his hand and held it to the sun. His face winched and he gagged, and then he laughed a little bit and seemed also, perhaps, to be crying.
He wanted to preserve some of the grease for a laboratory test, so I held open the wide-mouthed Ziploc bag he produced. I had to massage his long thin hand through the bag in order to extract the grease. I milked each finger, I felt his bones through plastic and flesh, I squeezed them down until the grease pinched off into a pasty smear at the bottom of the bag. I want to say that it felt strange—like a piece of pork—but it didn’t feel strange enough; it felt exactly and terribly just like a man’s hand should feel: there just aren’t any words.
As we hiked back up the rottenstone path, I considered the common use of grease. A body is greased so that it might better slide into a crawl space. And grease on a body can delay, for at least a short while, the effects of a high-intensity flame. These uses I kept to myself, since the detective had given in to his sadness. I walked just ahead of him so he could do his weeping in some bit of privacy, although he turned out to be the sort of man whose weeping was devoid of pathos or gravity or even any clear emotion. It sounded merely as if he was catching his breath after jogging, and I wished we had a toolshed for precisely those moments when a stranger spoils the afternoon with his expressions of feeling.
* * *
—
When the detective first started his inquiry, I had hoped we would join together in our wonder, our bafflement, our aching curiosity, to probe the mystery of these lost two men, collaborating so intensely that we would be reluctant to resolve the case. Why? Because certainly that would mean a farewell so devastating we might claw our own faces off. This would be the project of a lifetime, even as wives and friends came and went, as houses eroded around us and we migrated to a trailer on the back property, where one of us peed from the steps while the other continued taking notes. During long days of research, the detective and I might discover, deep in the lodger’s web browser history, for instance, a series of site visits that would link him to my father, providing a motive so compelling that his murder of my father would seem entirely forgivable and inevitable. Our book would be called A Very Understandable Murder, and while editing the proofs we’d have several scratch fights and someone’s glasses would be smashed, but we’d emerge even closer than before, particularly after I produced a wrenchingly personal chapter admitting that, though I cared for my father, I would have killed him myself had I been the lodger. And the detective and I, now old companions who occasionally bathed and groomed each other in the evening, might choose to delay the resolution of our work, each of us keenly saddened by the prospect of such resounding success, because where, in the end, would crushing accomplishment leave us, but tired and alone and full of anxiety for the future?
* * *
—
I do not like to speak of others. It is tiring to shine my light on people, who might shrivel under its glare and suddenly become reduced to meat and bone, a few stray teeth and a pile of hair. But remarks made in reference to the lodger are in some sense going to be remarks made about my vanished father, and are therefore permissible and useful.
We shared a certain prejudice for exercise that permits me to discuss his terribly fascinating body, which, even under the glare of my flashlight while he slept, revealed little to me. For instance, I jogged daily with the lodger down Multer to the Beeves cul-de-sac and then up Forstinge and across the Bus Road and back to the house.
At the outset of our jogs the lodger declined to limber himself. He stood at the driveway and studied the section of the newspaper devoted to numbers while I conducted my preparations. I believe in bending deeply on an inhale until my inner light goes brown, as though the buttocks of a giant are swallowing me. When I fold my body at the waist, the world around me darkens like an oily painting and I begin to see myself as people in the distant future might see me: crushed, glistening, scarcely human.
Once aground we invariably observed the universal jogger’s silence, grim men at their exercise, charging in tandem from the house, until the lodger turned down Korial at the Forstinge precipice, electing a route he referred to with a string of numerals, a decision that roused in me an instant fatigue and anxiety, tempered by an ever-so-slight, and unspecified, sexual response. And off I ran after him.
Sometimes I chanced upon the lodger attempting the jog alone, usually in the cold early mornings when we were just discovering how much of our garden had been eaten by the woodland deer, who roved up every night to strip our land of its beard. I’d step into the brick-lined ivy patch to survey the waste and see the lodger trotting nervously along the roadway, studying his feet as if he was rehearsing tactical steps. In the evenings the lodger stood for long periods at the toilet, hands akimbo, before the water was stirred slightly by his weak drops of pee. Around the house, I did not like his hands, for he could barely hold his food and he trembled when he ate. In folklore, a trembling guest usually indicates that a demon is harbored inside his chest struggling to gnaw his way free, and that the guest is just a shell the demon has used to invade the house. I sometimes horse-stamped behind the lodger on the stairs so I could see his startled face in profile, one of the biggest faces there was. Saint Francis of Assisi, who loved all creatures, admitted that he loathed large-faced men, even as he prayed to God for more tolerance.
* * *
—
How odd that we can be geniuses and morons at once. Given everything we know in this world—some of it, or even most of it, oppressive and meaningless and distracting—we don’t always know who is alive and who is dead. There are creatures, at large in the world, whose status eludes us. In other words, w
here are they, and do they breathe? Is there finally any other question we might ask?
* * *
—
I believe in respect for the dead. When it is warranted. When it is earned. Do you disagree? So let me not criticize he who is perhaps perished. The perished should enjoy only our praise and highest regard, unless the perished have maneuvered in the wrong, pursuing error, which leads to disgrace, regardless of the perished’s status among the living. I am fond of the perished, and do not wish to condemn them. Unless they are condemnable, and then the perished are worth at least several critical remarks. The perished are good people, usually. But when they are not, we would like to kill the perished a second time, or we would like to magically revive the perished and then sit on the perished with our bare bottoms so their last breaths come from deep in our asses. And maybe even then we would boil the perished until only their bones remained. From the bones comes a very fine powder. Very fine. You can nearly make something extraordinary with it, extraordinary and new. In this instance, let me be entirely fair, or even more than fair, just in case, so that someone who may now be dead will not be rendered before you and then reduced to dust: the lodger’s physique was stunning, wrapped in a skin so white one could almost call it clear. He was one of those young fellows whose white cap of hair made him seem all the more youthful, like a child in a silver fright wig. He was, too, apparently a brilliant mathematician, although he always made it clear that he loathed the professionalization of math, the corruption, the rampant mediocrity, the sort of sexual obviousness of the whole enterprise.
I will certainly miss the mathematicians. In the early days of their visits, when my father still loomed bodily over the property, I would watch from my window as they stopped to chat and laugh with the day laborers, sometimes pointing at our house, and my breath bounced from the glass back over my face, shrouding me in a steam that, while deeply foul and rank, had a sweetness that was unmistakably my own. It is a climate I would like to share with the detective, a homemade climate that, if only he could walk in it regularly, might afford him a far deeper sense of just what kind of people have managed to stay alive and accounted for here. Even if it’s just air, it’s our very own brew, and it’s been steeping around us for as long as we can remember.
* * *
—
There has been no talk of acquiring a new lodger. His room has been ribboned in yellow tape by the police, which my mother dusts so that the tape does not lose its shine. His board is paid through the year. No kin have emerged to siphon a refund from us. His blackened shoes are hardening in place outside his door. It is not clear to me why Paul has refused their inclusion in his missing persons collection, but now the shoes have stiffened into the floor, as though a leathery growth has arisen from the oak parquet, and even if I trip against them on the way to my room at night, the shoes do not yield their position.
* * *
—
It’s been three months and still no progress on the investigation. The detective is finished, he says. No more. He admits to a retreat of fascination on the part of his employers, a change in the subject. He brandishes his notebook and waves it over us, proving something about the inadequacy of its contents. A language of withdrawal is being used in his workplace, he says. Speech and behavior will no longer be brought to bear. The investigation is going dark.
“There are no suspects, then?” I ask.
“Sometimes the suspect and the victim are, shall we say…” A smile takes over his face and he coughs and appears to choke. He bends over and waves me away, but I am not going near him.
In the quiet speech I reserve for myself when stern talks are in order, when I have strayed from my own aims and softened in my resolve, I give the detective to know that, after all, he needs no title, and no official sanction, to visit us and puzzle over the family subtraction. It might be years and years later, when his visits here are classified merely as those of a hobbyist. He might simply be a long-retired gentleman who continues the courtesy of looking in on our diminished family, since he was once paid to wonder about what happened here, to leverage his advanced intellect onto the problem of the two missing men. Only politely will we, out of duty, remark on my father, sometimes fondly gazing at the photo that shows him anxiously clutching his high school diploma. Should not every family, missing men or not, enjoy its own detective, a professional to chase down and systematically address each puzzle that arises?
I further give him to understand, whispering now, that even if the official institutions are fetishizing progress and resolution, there is no need for our local group—beholden to absolutely no one or thing but our own refined style of courtesy—to suffer such a glaring failure of concern.
The detective remains folded over himself, coughing weakly, and I might be inclined to wonder if my syntax itself is acting as a diminisher. I think of the giant, in the Whitman poem, who spoke so forcefully that everyone around him was crushed small, so so small. The people in his life could only recover and grow back to full size if he remained absolutely silent, but the giant had trouble with this. As much as he loved his people, he could not keep from talking, however it wounded them.
It is only as the detective cheats his body toward the door, like a lump of meat moving under a rug, that my periphery is clouded with figures I know all too well: Rogerson, Mattingly, and my mother, who holds in her hand a tub of what I have come to know as a rather extraordinary ointment. The aroma that suddenly sharpens in my nose is unmistakable: here are people who will not let a man stand down.
As they close in around him, I turn back to my window, which no doubt will be recording all there is to see, the shadows moving and thumping—a struggle so soft and magically gentle that one must fairly wonder about complicity, the way animals with rope will actually bind themselves to a post, the way, in the athletic footage, a man will crumple microseconds before he is tackled. Who among us, after all, does not dream of being elected for a smothering?
* * *
—
Our final criteria for men, including the detective, should be this: How do they look once felled? All of us should be knocked to the floor and finally judged asprawl. The detective is down. I do not think he will rise again.
In his pocket I find a Ziploc bag, unopened, featuring a clouded bolus of paste. The grease that never went to the lab. On his notepad I discover text for the items that he is meant to purchase at the grocery store, etched in a script adorned by his curly enforcements, his to-do lists. The technique of his doodling hand is not as precise as I might have guessed, particularly for a man trained in unknown whereabouts, a whereabouts specialist. I would have hoped for an architectural style, a man who drew buildings or at least boxes and geometrical shapes linked with suggestive vectors. Systems and such, the blueprints to an interrogation room. Perhaps some numerical formulas. The suggestion that he has mastered his world and might soon launch a powerful campaign. Instead he is a balloonist, a man whose handwriting diminishes the meaning of everything he writes, infantilizing the people and trivializing the objects. This is handwriting that will take many days to undo, language that now must be unraveled and forced to lie flat, in a single line, meaning nothing once again.
We will take the words out of his book, as if they’d been written in a single miles-long piece of thread, and we will stretch the thread taut, until no more words gargle up, until uttering them out loud is simply to breathe. However long it takes.
I crouch down closer, against the last outgoing heat of him, where the air is still adjusting to the loss, closing in on the space he once occupied, and I see the hairy particulars of one man’s escape. Sometimes you can smell a hole even if you can’t see it. It is, I must admit, a hole I’d rather fancy entering myself, and I can imagine the flush of applause such a departure would excite, the signature admiration my descendants would feel for me if I crawled from life in plain sight and left nothing but qu
estions. Questions and envy. Is it what my father felt when he left us? Pride and joy and fear and delight?
Nathaniel Hawthorne said that each question we ask is a costume for fear. We spend a lifetime getting out of costume, removing layer after layer, but most of us, he says, run out of time. We die too soon, still wearing the mask, the cloak, the cape, the paint on our faces. What can we do for our friends but help them along in this endless, complicated disrobing?
I beckon to my mother, to Rogerson, to Mattingly, and together we crouch down against the cold shape of our friend and get to work, removing from him everything that has ever stood in the way of showing who he really is—the disguises, the clothing, the skin, the inner shield. Piece by piece we take that man apart.
3
Critique
In the year of I Can’t Breathe, a hospital occurred on the island. The building was fashioned, rather quaintly, of matter. Bricks, windows, smoke. The hospital used flesh traditionally—draped over the anguished little need machines we call people. Space was pushed through rooms, to keep them from collapsing, or so it seemed. In truth, no one understood how such a spectacle could remain stable. Religion and science broadcast a distant wisdom, no different from birdcalls, and actual birds policed a space the size of the whole world.
The air was breathable. The scale, despite appearances, was one to one.