by Susan Choi
The Bronco, however, was waiting. He felt his rib cage constrict in alarm. He had to remind himself, as he approached, that he was now a law-abiding citizen. He possessed no narcotics. He paid his bills working construction and had taxes withheld. Even his van’s registration was current. “Help you gentlemen with something?” he called as the driver’s-side window scrolled down. He had a vanishing glimpse of himself in its glass, his dirty beard and long hair, his tall pack with his bedroll on top and his drinking cup dangling from one of the straps. The two men were clean-shaven and short-haired and dressed as if going to play golf, although there was nowhere to do such a thing in the region.
“Lewis Gaither?” the driver asked.
After a moment he said, “That’s my legal name. I go by Mark.”
“Your middle name,” the passenger said, which was a statement of fact, not a question.
Both men emerged from the car, holding out their credentials. It wasn’t the first time that Mark had faced cops—but the first in a long time. “I’d like to take off my pack,” he murmured, making clear he was docile. When they nodded approval, he lifted the weight from himself—tenderly, tremblingly—and then set it, his only true home, on his steps, before leading them into his house.
In fact he had faced cops all over the world. At ten months of age, so the story was endlessly told—its repetition by Ruth her failed effort to seem merely amused by the startling event—he had vaulted from his crib and not walked for the first time but run through the house (Tanzania), out the front door, and into the bush, from which local police and search dogs had been required to extract him. At six years of age, he’d first run away purposefully. That had been while they lived in Sri Lanka, so he hadn’t gotten far. He still remembered being led down a hallway, a khaki-clad Sri Lankan policeman to each side, each resting a palm on his shoulder. His waiting parents coming into view, his father’s face wrung with mortified anger and Ruth for once actually crying, a startling sight because rare. After that he’d run away from almost every domicile in which they had tried to install him, been retrieved and returned by grim cops of all colors and flags. He’d run away for no reason he knew—was he searching already? He’d held nothing against them, hadn’t even disliked them, let alone hated them, as they often theatrically claimed. He’d only felt separate from them, from the very beginning. Uncompelled by their faith, which was the whole of their lives, and so unable to connect himself to them. They had loved him, he knew, but he’d felt like a caged animal, restricted by all sorts of conventions that were contrary to him—and so misconstrued, and extremely alone. And perhaps this was why, though he felt he would like a companion, even after he’d forged his own life, the aloneness remained. Now he was forced to assume he must simply prefer it.
The conversation took place in his living room, the two special agents from the FBI perched uncomfortably on the block of upholstered foam that served as his sofa and pretending, Mark could see, not to absorb every detail of the thoughtless improvisation that was his house, which had been built—not by him—with components so shoddy that although Mark possessed all the requisite skills, he felt there was no point in ever replacing them. The Wonderboard in the bathroom was a soft mash of mold, the floor a spongy mélange of carpet scraps and plywood, the rest of the house an array of fire hazards, as if to offset the triumph of moisture. It was a house that rented for an almost token sum, even by the depressed standards of the local economy. No one had ever seemed to like living here, not because of the tangible defects but perhaps due to something more generally wrong, a misbegotten and mistaken sensation that applied to the entire site the house sat upon, and maybe even to the road that led here. There shouldn’t be a house or a lot or a road; it all sat in the shade of the unfriendly mountain, in fact butted heads with it, and lost. All of which had made it, in Mark’s view, the ideal habitation. The thing he’d grasped about the house at first sight was that if he lived there, he could walk out his front door and onto the mountain, which meant he hardly need live there at all. He had only ever cared for apartments or houses as places where he could store his equipment and park his car without getting a ticket. In his wandering youth, he’d once chosen the wrong place to live in his car while unemployed and without any money, and had wound up with tickets in excess of six hundred dollars, and a brief stay in jail, and a year on probation until the debt was resolved.
It had been a long time ago, although the emotions the episode provoked in him remained stormy and self-castigating. Even so, he was unprepared when the agents referred to the lapse. He’d been thinking they must be pursuing the methamphetamine labs that were now everywhere in his area and wondering if they could possibly think he had something to do with them, when the first agent, from the driver’s seat, said, taking out a small notebook and examining it, “Lewis Gaither, formerly of Morro Bay, California, is that right?” Morro Bay was the town in which Mark had incurred the six hundred dollars in parking tickets, almost eight years before, not long after his father had died.
“I realize you said that it’s Mark,” the agent went on politely. “But I’m working here from your arrest record.”
“Yes, that’s me,” Mark said after a moment, while within the constriction of his boots his feet suddenly boiled with pain, and within the darkness of his torso his guts somersaulted. He could not imagine in what way that incident was going to resurface now.
“Thank you,” the agent said with surprising simplicity, making a note in his notebook and closing it. “Special Agent Schoonmaker and I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Would you like to take your boots off?” the second man, Schoonmaker, asked. “You must be beat, just back from a hike.”
“No, thanks,” Mark said, flushing at the unexpected solicitousness. “I’m fine, really.”
“If we could take one more minute,” the first agent resumed. Mark had forgotten his name already. “We may be looking for another Lewis Gaither, who shares the same spelling you use.”
“My father,” Mark said.
Both agents nodded, unsurprised. “And he’s currently residing…?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. When did he die?”
“In 1986.”
This seemed to cause some slight surprise. “Where’s the death recorded?”
“Jakarta, Indonesia. He was a missionary there,” Mark added, though this last was in answer to a question that hadn’t been asked. On the inexplicable introduction of his father’s name into this inexplicable conversation, Mark was aware of a rising rigidity, of a feeling of affront so powerful as to overwhelm any sense of caution on his own behalf, and even any politeness. “What do you want with my father?” he said. “My father never did anything but work for the church and for poor people. Are you sure you’re not looking for me?”
The first agent said, “Unless you’ve gotten a new set of hands since you left Morro Bay, I don’t think we’re looking for you. We’re looking for past acquaintances of a man named Lee. A mathematics professor.”
“I didn’t go to college,” Mark said brusquely. “What does that man have to do with my father?”
“We think there’s some possibility your father knew Professor Lee. Does that seem possible? Did he ever mention this person to you?”
“No,” Mark said, his voice sounding thin to him, almost shrill, with impatience. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
It was about, apparently, the fact that the person called Professor Lee had gone to some midwestern school with Mark’s father, where both were doctoral students in math. “That’s not my father,” Mark broke in, overwhelmed—almost weak—with relief, as if there could have been any chance that his father—so pious and remote and resented and insufficiently known, but not the least unpredictable—might in fact have had some other life, some dark secret, no hint of which Mark had discerned. “My father was never a doctoral student, and he never lived in the Midwest. He got a B.A. degree som
ewhere in Texas, Southern Christian Men’s College or something like that, and then he went overseas to do work with his church, and he stayed overseas for the rest of his life. You must have the wrong person.”
Both agents paused, to assimilate this. “Your father, to your knowledge, was never a student at the U of I?” Schoonmaker said.
“I think I would have known about that. He was interested in science—in reconciling science with religion—and I think it was his dream I’d pursue something similar, but obviously I didn’t,” Mark said, the unpremeditated, unsolicited, inexplicable, and far-too-intimate disclosure giving him the sensation of hurtling downhill too quickly, so that his center of gravity outstripped his feet, and it was all he could do to catch up, before painfully falling.
The encounter concluded in empty pleasantries about the region and thanks for his time that Mark barely heard, except for the final reiterating words of the agent who had driven, as the two men were preparing to resume their places in the Bronco: “Jakarta, you said? That’s where your father was buried?” Mark had the sense, far less pressing than other current emotions but still irritating, that this was the critical point for some reason, and that he was not quite believed. But they could check for themselves, and he was sure that they would.
“Cremated, not buried. Jakarta. Nineteen eighty-six.” They thanked him a last time and left.
It was only a moment before the sound of their engine had died in the distance and the sounds of his hills had reclaimed their dominion: a catbird in his backyard complaining; the breeze registering in the hemlock grove’s faint susurrations; and almost drowning these out, the machinelike emissions from some ubiquitous insect that had hatched in that week’s rising heat. Yet Mark was agitated, so much so that despite his exhaustion he could not sit still to perform the deferred liberation of his feet from their boots. It wasn’t only the intrusion of his father’s cremation into this brush with the FBI agents, as if the entire bizarre episode had been staged to reopen that barely healed wound. Mark had also felt a startled discomfort—which, rather than diminishing now that the agents had gone, was growing more acute—at the agents’ suggestion, completely mistaken, that his father might have once studied math at a graduate school. The idea was completely mistaken—but it struck far too close to a true fact, repeated by Mark’s mother as often and as tiresomely as the Tanzanian crib-escape story: that his father had dreamed of becoming a great mathematician. In fact, Ruth would say, he’d shown real mathematical talent. But he’d sacrificed all such ambition to serve church and God.
When Mark had moved into his house the year before, its mildewed basement had presented him with an ugly shock, if no surprise: it had been crammed with the leavings of a disordered life, if not several, and Mark had almost felt he saw the phantoms of those vagabonds as they’d been when they’d made their untidy retreat. No concrete idea of where they were going, no new pad yet; some fragile connection to somebody staying behind. I’ll be back for this stuff in a month or so, man. You’re totally welcome to play the records, just make sure they get back in their sleeves. There’s some good stuff in there. Then a year would have passed, and then five, the caretaker long gone…. Mark had been able to learn nothing from the rental agent. And so, after a few months of uneasy struggle with the ethics of it, he’d borrowed a small Dumpster from a construction contractor he knew and set to cleaning out the basement himself, not entirely free of the feeling that he was chucking some alternate past of his own. Most of what he’d found had been worthless. The records, sliding heaps upon heaps of them, American rock he supposed might have been his own sound track if he’d grown up in this country, all the jackets and even many of the plastic disks themselves now grown over with bright-colored cushions of mold. He’d found a ghastly box of women’s clothing, almost transubstantiated into a single webby fungus; milk crates of newspapery pulp, some of which he recognized as songbooks and some of which he couldn’t recognize at all. And he’d grown sadder and angrier, in equal and increasing amounts, though why either and not just irritated he couldn’t have said. What had happened to this music enthusiast, to his perhaps-girlfriend, to their whole sloppy circle of gypsies? Boxes of hostile, indestructible jumble: a filthy metal ashtray in the shape of a crab, a baffling sculpture of a figure wielding comedy/tragedy masks, all the components being hardware, like nuts and bolts, welded together. Himself pitchforking it like so much rotten hay.
Only two items had resisted disposal. They were two saxophones—two of them. In almost identical mildewed black cases, the velvet within two identical horrors of mold. But the instruments themselves, once Mark cleaned them and applied metal polish and buffed with difficulty around all the little levers and doors, were dazzling, a pair of gold dolphins. They seemed to have rocketed out of the muck. Mark had no desire to keep them, yet something about the whole episode began to feel ordained, the dolphin saxophones leading him somewhere…. Aggravated by this illogical, God’s-hand-in-it-all strain of thinking, which could have been Ruth’s, he wrapped the saxophones in towels and drove to Albany to pawn them, and there, in the pawnshop, found himself irresistibly drawn to an old Canon camera, though he’d never had the slightest interest in photography. He made a trade and left the store with a camera: God’s-hand-in-it-all after all.
Now it was hard to dismiss the aptness of the fact that out of the ruins of another life’s archive his own life had a record of sorts for the very first time. With their ascetic and wandering lifestyle, his parents had never kept anything. Not just sentimental ephemera—photo albums and scrapbooks, baby clothes, toys, and drawings—but even such basic documentation as Mark’s birth certificate were entirely missing. These lacunae had not bothered Mark. (Except, briefly, for the one where the birth certificate ought to have been. At age nine Mark had become determined to have his name changed and, being told by some helpful adult that he would need his birth certificate, had asked his mother for it and learned it was lost. “So you can’t even prove Lewis Junior’s my name?” he had said and, impelled by how clearly she’d blanched, “You can’t even prove you’re my parents? Or that I’m nine and not ten? Or that I even exist?”) This was because Mark’s own habits were identically monkish. He had always disliked household accumulation so much that even when he’d lived in his car, he had felt too weighed down. This was why he’d experienced such recognition when he’d first bought and outfitted a backpack: his every need anticipated and ingeniously jigsaw-compacted, a whole elegant homestead that barely topped thirty-five pounds. Yet, whether paradoxically or not, it was his hiking that first made him want to accumulate—not objects but a record of things. More and more often, he found himself holding his breath at the sight of a black bear plumped on its bottom pawing blueberries into its mouth, or a beaver pair churning their pond with the whacks of their tails, or a pileated woodpecker drilling a tree while its manic eye twinkled at Mark, as if to suggest it could do the same job on his skull. Mark knew he was just passing through, that the woods were not his, but he wanted these things to remember. He wanted some proof for himself. He wanted to formalize memory—he had the sense he’d begun reconstructing himself, so that these encounters, and not his childhood tempest, were the touchstones he harked back to when he asked how he’d gotten to where he was now. He was no writer; the self-conscious, hunched labor of keeping a journal was foreign to him. But the old Canon settled itself in his hands as if it had never been anywhere else.
Of course, no sooner did he carry the camera into the woods than the bears withdrew up-mountain, the beavers ducked underwater, the pileated cackled from an unseeable height in the canopy. Mark found himself photographing those things that could not run away. The scarlet fallen leaves of maples beneath a first skin of ice. Sunfish Pond frozen solid and purple. And then, after the thaw, waterfalls to which no trail led, multistepped cataracts beneath shawls of hemlock seen by just a few people, if that many, in any one year.