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 succeeding 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.