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, where 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.