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.
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 feeclass="underline" 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.