World Gone Missing

by Doyle, Laurie Ann;

  The tall man grins. “Why?” Now one of his big shoulders is jumping. “I mean, with ears like that.”

  What is he talking about? Chin? Ears? His sunburned fingers touch my arm but I don’t pull away. He’s strange, but strange I had been expecting. He’s dirty yes, but his smell isn’t bad, a musty too-long-without-a-shower smell. His hands are clean. He probably knows my father, the man the rest of the world calls Hate.

  He left when I was seven, moved to California, and developed this philosophy, religion, ideology—nobody’s quite sure what to call it. He used to stand on the steps of Sproul Plaza shouting I hate you! to people walking by. Amazingly, they laughed. After a while, a student reporter at the Daily Cal took notice.

  “Hate is caring,” my father told her, “as opposed to indifference. Indifference is the real problem.”

  Later, a journalist from the Oakland Tribune followed him around for a day. “If we can be honest,” the reporter quoted him saying, “straight about the negative feelings we all have for one another, then we can have a real conversation. We can care.” A Hate Camp of six or seven—ex-Berkeley students, artists, homeless people—sprang up in the park.

  “You tired?” the man says, still staring at me. “Because I am. We all are. What with life.” He stops jiggling for a moment and smiles. “Maybe I could help.”

  I am so tired, but I shake my head.

  “Where are you from? Nobody in Berkeley is from Berkeley.”

  This guy seems harmless, but still I hesitate. “Ohio.”

  “Where in Ohio?” he wants to know.

  “Oh, this little town called Monroe.” But the truth is I was born in New York City and lived there till I was seven. Monroe’s my mother’s hometown, the place where she moved us after my father left. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere.

  “I was from Milwaukee once. Now I’m from here. Berkeley’s a lot better than people give it credit for.” He stretches out a big hand. “Name’s Krash. With a K.”

  I touch his palm. “You don’t know someone called Hateman, do you?”

  “Sure. Good man, Hate. Helps handle all the crazy shit that flows into the park.”

  “He’s my—”

  “Hate,” he yells without letting me finish. “Hate! Someone here to see you!”

  When my father turns to look at me, he doesn’t seem surprised. He sits on a warped bench and motions to the empty place next to him, smiling at me blankly across the street.

  My hair’s short and gray now, not black and pulled into a long braid down my back. The last time he saw me, my face was pressed against our apartment window.

  He waves at me again.

  My heart starts banging in my chest, but now my feet take me across the street. When I enter the park, a man sits up in his sleeping bag, startled. Someone else keeps his head buried under a ripped quilt. I stick my hands in my pockets and keep walking. The air smells like incense and weed, heavy and too sweet.

  When my father first arrived in California, one newspaper said, he rented a room off Telegraph Avenue. Then he camped out in the bushes behind Sproul Hall and slept in the corner of a friend’s heated garage when it rained. But he was always in People’s Park, arguing about hate and love. So thirteen years ago, he decided to move outdoors permanently.

  “I’m not homeless,” he told the reporter. “I mean if I didn’t want a BMW, would you call me BMW-less?”

  Alongside the bench sit my father’s belongings. Safeway bags spill out of Whole Foods bags, a spiral notebook is flipped open to his black handwriting. Ashes fill two tuna fish cans to overflowing, and a pair of shoes lies nearby, one black, one white. For oppositionality, I know. Hate versus love. Webster’s Dictionary with HATE CAMP Magic-Markered on the cover holds down the corner of a crinkled tarp. My father worked at The New York Times for ten years: first copy boy, then reporter, finally Metro Desk editor. Both newspapers made a big point of that.

  I sit down on the bench next to my father. My hand’s shaking so bad I have to hide it under my leg. Forty years. He pulls out a pair of green-handled scissors tied to his pocket with a string, snips off the filter of a Virginia Slim Extra-Long, and inhales. Deeply. He has that smoky Dad smell I suddenly remember loving.

  He exhales a slow breath. “Before we begin... ”

  I know what he’s going to say, I’ve read it. Every conversation has to start with I hate you.

  “You don’t necessarily have to mean it,” he tells me, “but it’ll be there when you need it. Which you will—sooner or later.” My father goes on explaining, speaking quickly as if he’s said just these words in just this way to thousands of people. And I’m just one of the thousands.

  Until eight months ago, I didn’t think much about my father. The ache of missing him had faded or maybe become part of me. But in June, my mother died. Cleaning out her house, I discovered a Keds box hidden under the bed filled with postcards my father had sent me. For years they’d kept coming, postcards from Berkeley that she’d never shown me. I found a file folder, too, of old newspaper clippings. I read everything quickly, feeling happy that he’d cared, then guilty as if my mother were right next to me.

  Then angry. Why hadn’t she told me?

  I stared at the card of my father standing in front of Berkeley’s Campanile, one hand perched on his hip and smiling. I thought, Why not just take a week and see? Without my mother living ten minutes away, life felt empty.

  My father is still talking. Maybe I should hand him the postcard of palm trees and surf I’d brought with me. Or say, Dad, stop. It’s me, Toni. But I still can’t make myself reach through the silence of decades, the separation I’d assumed was permanent. Growing up, when people asked about my father, I shrugged. Sometimes I said he was dead. A missing father, that I didn’t want to talk about.

  But the man next to me looks very much alive, his eyes—the same blue as mine—bright. We have the same hair, too, frizzy at the first sign of rain. Finally my father stops, waiting for me. I tell him what he wants to hear, but it comes out muffled.

  “Good, good.” He smiles. “I hate you, too.”

  But sitting next to my father for the first time in decades, it’s not hate I feel. It’s not love either, just a strange kind of remembering. Not of this father, the one wearing a half-zipped sweatshirt and Mardi Gras beads, but the man in a herringbone coat staring up at the sky in Manhattan. The blue squeeze of sky between buildings. I remember the click and whoosh of bus doors, bright sun on ice, old men in elbowless jackets lying on top of metal grates, their newspaper blankets blowing, and my father takes me by the hand, steering me all the way around.

  “So,” he says now. “What is it you’d like to know?”

  He thinks I’m a reporter. Of course. My red raincoat and new shoes, the black oxfords I’d bought for work. I calculate property taxes, talk with homeowners in the Warren County Assessor’s Office. I’ve been there for decades. Not the most exciting job in the world, but steady.

  A part of me wants him to think we’ve never met.

  “You had a good life in New York, right?” I ask, trying not to sound nervous. “A successful career at The Times?” I pause. “A family.”

  He nods.

  “What made you leave that all behind?” I’ve always wondered. What was the real reason.

  “Drugs,” he says, folding one knee close to his chest. “I’d have to say it was drugs.” He tells me how this guy he worked nights with on the Metro Desk first got him stoned. “I stayed high for like three days.”

  “Really?” I say, turning it into a question. I know this. I’ve read it.

  He smiles. “Then I did acid. And whooooa. I realized there was more to life than getting ahead. Working night and day. At The Times, I was just grinding out what they told me to. The pressure not to fuck up was intense.”

  His mind melted, I overheard my mother say once.r />
  “I thought if I could get that much pleasure from a single joint, or hit, or whatever, why was I busting my ass doing all these things I didn’t want to do? Fuck it.” Now he tells me what nobody in my family would talk about, but is all right there in print. The hallucinogens. Dope. He says he stopped getting high when he moved outside because he wanted to get there naturally.

  “Now I’m addicted to fresh air,” he says, lifting a white eyebrow. “Sun. What comes in and goes out of People’s Park is incredible. But drugs are what got me started. I felt connected to everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes. Everything,” my father says, giving me a funny look. “The experience was life-changing.”

  “What about your family?”

  He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. His eyes look past mine. I turn to see a man in a gold helmet pedaling a bicycle, dragging two gold bins filled with newspaper up the street. He’s strange, even for here.

  “Hate!” he yells. “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you, too!” my father shouts cheerfully. The man gets off his bike and parks it against an oak tree. He hands my father a smooth white egg. The two silently touch palms, then the man bikes away.

  My father lights another cigarette as if this is nothing unusual. One eyelid crossed with tiny red veins flickers the way it always used to when he smoked.

  “Up until that point in my life,” he says, ignoring my question, “I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. Got married. Cut my hair short. Worked my way up at The Times. I was making good money. But I’d turned into concrete. A real piece of shit. I had everything I thought I wanted: a nice apartment, a TV, a car. But I still wasn’t satisfied.”

  I stay quiet.

  “So I quit The Times. Left my wife,” he says without emotion. “I started defying everything I’d ever been told. Even little things, like looking both ways when you cross the street. Except that was stupid. One day I got creamed chasing a Frisbee across Eighth Avenue in New York. I smashed my thigh and was in traction for, like, three months.”

  “You were?” This I had never heard.

  He nods. “I woke up in the hospital the next morning and couldn’t speak. Not a single word.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had a complete emotional breakdown,” he says intently. “Nothing in my life was working. My marriage was over. The Times refused to give me severance pay. Even words disappeared. I’d always had words.”

  My father sighs and his lips stay open for a moment. There’s no teeth behind them anymore. His gums are empty, but I don’t hear a lisp.

  “In the hospital, you know, I had time to think. I’d always been in a big hurry, finishing college, finding a job, writing what other people told me to. For the first time in my life, I had a chance to really think.” He lights another Virginia Slim off the one still burning. “That’s when it came to me.”

  “What?” I ask, still hoping to hear about a daughter.

  “I had to leave. Get away from everything. New York—the city I’d once loved—now seemed congested and completely contrived. As soon as I could talk again, I packed up and took off for San Francisco where life was freer. I never went back.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” he says with satisfaction. “Never.”

  Liar. Of course you went back, don’t you remember? I remember. You, outside there in your battered VW, the engine idling, gasoline smells seeping through the corners of our living room window. For hours I watched you, your fingers tapping the steering wheel, turning the radio off and on. Bowie’s voice wafted into the room, too. “Come away from that window,” my mother kept saying. “You know I can’t let you near him, Toni. I can’t even let that man in the door, the way the he’s gotten,”

  My father blinks the smoke out of his eyes. I sit on one hand, and the other, watching myself become the girl who never questioned her mother so at least she’d stay. Someone who can’t challenge the man next to her now.

  He hugs his knee closer and leans back. “The park’s amazing. I mean, by any sort of societal standard, I’m completely whacked. I say the worst things to people, Fuck you. I hate you. All they do is smile. Have a lousy day! I yell. They laugh. You probably think I’m nuts. But here in the park, I’m accepted. I’ve got my people. And I’m getting known in the world.”

  I can’t listen to another word. I stand abruptly, staring down at my father’s mismatched shoes. No one here—not Krash, not the man with the gold helmet, not any of the weirdoes he’d probably call family—even knows I exist. I’m forty-seven years old and they should know I exist. A police car speeds past, its siren screaming. A second one blasts by. I can’t hear what my father’s saying now, his lips are just moving, forming words I couldn’t care less about.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say.

  He squints up in the sun now overhead.

  “I’m late,” I lie. “For another appointment.”

  He smiles. “No problem. Come back if you’d like.”

  When I walk away, he calls after me. “Anytime. Just ask for Hateman.”

  

  What I want is to do is go home. Scan numbers at work, talk to people with clean faces. Take a long hot bath. I hurry down the crowded streets to Telegraph Avenue, walk through the door of my building, and take the agonizingly slow elevator up to the third floor. It’s a dive, this place, full of rent-by-the week rooms that looked fine on the internet, a place I assumed had to be okay because it was just blocks from the university. But the walls are painted a too-bright white and the new orange carpet smells noxious. It’s already buckling, rolling ahead of me in waves.

  I unlock my door and pull the suitcase out from under the bed. Stop, I tell myself. Don’t worry about it. Your father left a long time ago, remember. Decades. My shoulders ache. I call to reschedule my flight, ask for one leaving right away, but all they have is something in the morning. I pay the extra fees and book it. I fold a bright blue blouse in thirds—a blouse I thought my father would like but now will never see—and roll up a pair of gray slacks. Suddenly I’m exhausted. The bed’s uncomfortable, but still I lie back. Then I’m gone, fast asleep it seems, because the eyes I didn’t realize I’d closed, open. Noise is coming from outside. Metal on metal sounds, shouting. Could this be an earthquake? Wide awake now, I hurry to the only window, which faces the airshaft. Nothing looks wrong. The noise gets louder. I take the stairs down because who knows what might have happened to the elevator and push the big door open.

  It’s night now. The clouds have cleared, but no moon shines down. Dozens of people are walking up and down in the middle of Telegraph, banging on things and yelling. One man beats a white plastic bucket with a giant spoon, another clangs pots together, pots I remember seeing in the park. I look around for my father but he’s nowhere to be seen. I stand on the sidewalk, feeling people push past me. A woman lights an overflowing garbage can and a long yellow flame shoots up.

  Certain that plate glass will get smashed next, I spin around, heading back to my room. This is a riot, I think. People riot all the time in Berkeley I’ve heard.

  But the sounds change, take on a kind of rhythm. A woman laughs. Looking back over my shoulder, I see an old man playing his shopping cart like a xylophone . Maybe this isn’t a riot. It’s a party—students in blue and gold T-shirts, homeless people, anyone and everyone taking over the streets. The fire flickers but doesn’t flare.

  A woman in a tinsel-threaded jacket smiles and hooks her arm in mine. “Don’t just stand there,” she says, pulling me ahead. “Join us!”

  In Monroe, people only walk in the middle of the street during the Fourth of July parade and noise ordinances are strictly enforced. Tomorrow I’ll be back there. But tonight—

  The woman walks quickly and I have to hurry to keep up. The crowd folds in around us, teenagers with crew cuts, balding me
n with ponytails trailing down their backs, a woman pushing a stroller full of faded album covers. Boys play gray metal parking meters as if they were congas. The woman smiles and lets me go, pushing ahead.

  I step in and out of circles of light thrown from the streetlamps above, people moving all around me. The shiny top of a head is illuminated, the back of a wrist. I pass shadowy shop windows, cracked doors. An old woman in pink curlers sits down in the middle of the street and drinks from something wrapped in brown paper. I move around her.

  Out of a doorway, someone comes toward me with firm, slow steps. My heart lurching, I walk faster, but he matches my pace. I see a black shoe, a white shoe comes to meet it.

  My father smiles, the corners of his eyes wrinkling. I know he’s going to tell me to say I hate you so he can say it back. No, I decide. I’m not doing it. I’m not doing any of his hate stuff.

  Without a word, my father reaches out and touches the gray in my hair. He looks at me. “Krash mentioned something about a woman from Monroe,” he says, not calling me Toni, Smudge, or any of the other names he gave me. “Then I saw you just now. The way you tucked your chin in just like your mother—” His hand drops. “But older.”

  I pull away. Tonight my father’s wearing a pillbox hat, an old Jackie Kennedy throwback, covered with big plastic daisies and pink blossoms, real ones. He’s got on three sweatshirts, each collar dirtier than the next.

  “Look,” he says, his eyes narrowing with tension. “Your mother—” His voice trails off. “I was turning into concrete. Every day emptier than the one before. I had to leave. But that had nothing to do with you.”

  It’s awful how long I wanted to hear those words.

  He stops to and drags on his cigarette, then dives back in, saying how he was much too young when he married, how The Times brought out the worst in him, how he wanted to stay but couldn’t, meant to send money but never had enough, a nonstop stream of justifying, defending, rationalizing.

  He doesn’t want me to hate him, I realize. The one person in the world who should, shouldn’t. My stomach churns.