Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

And then he taught me what it was to be much stronger than others, which is a lesson I am still proud of. The mustache seemed to retreat, but how quickly did it borrow my air and slam right onto me, scratching my face and digging at my eye! My breath failed at the sight of it, my father’s yellow mouth-fur like an animal spun from a pitching machine to pin me on my bed. He asserted some great weight onto my neck until I was stilled. No, I could not think of any way to move and he clenched my arms in his hands and I thought he might drive his shoulder into my chest cage.

The house was calm, the blinds drawn. I had never before waited so long to breathe. He was breathing fine, loud, hard. There was air coming onto me that I could not have, you see. One was in bed covered in his father. A certain impatience bloomed in me. The man was using his largeness to effect a stillness in his son. And in his air the sounds came up and burst open—his, my own, the room’s, I do not know.

“What are the circumstances, then? Exactly what might the case be here?”

Oh dear I could not move the air into me.

“Who gets to decide what happens next? Do you think it might be you or do you think it might be me?”

My feet were cold and they stuck out and I had scratches on my leg I could not get to. My father was so close to me I could not see him. There were birds of light cresting into my blackout. No mustache, no body, no bed, no house.

“Me or you,” the words. “Me or you.”

My father is gone now,but maybe yours is too. Is yours dead or has he vanished? If you do not know, we are in the same old boat, and the boat is made of rotten mush. But as much as I would be pleased to relate to you, to suggest that our lives are virtually the same, right down to the disfigurement between our legs, however laughable that sounds, I warrant that you have not also lost a second person, a lodger from your very own home, to be precise, who vanished or died in or around the same day and time as your father. And that you may or may not be a suspect in the situation. A person of interest. Or even a person at all.

These dayswe practice our supper at a large oak affair. There is Jane Rogerson, Paul Mattingly, my mother, and myself. The leaves of the dining board have been snapped under to soften not just the loss of my father, but also the lodger, who’d been leasing rooms from us these last endless years. Our two men are disappeared or dead, we do not know, and we can hardly tell the difference anymore. They vanished around the same time, and our smaller minds believe the events may be related. The candles and the newspaper rack and the candy bowl—in which my father dipped his little finger before making a speech—are gone, and the curtains are now bound up with wire. We keep them open because no one is much bothered by the glare, although Paul says he gets distracted by the many gray birds that now circle the house, their beaks bearded in dark foam.

The only sounds at supper are the huffing sobs of Rogerson, my father’s lady-in-waiting. I watch this woman carefully when she weeps, not least because of the glaring sexuality discharged by those who frequently cry. She will not meet my stare. Her body comes in a small parcel and she likes to deny herself in pale sweaters knitted so minimally that one could pass an entire hand through the holes to stroke the person beneath.

At first my mother took Rogerson’s sadness as a sign of hunger, and urged me to pass her more fish, which is no problem in terms of supplies. We never run out. But I have tired of scraping out her portions later into the day laborers’ food mailbox and now we only serve her enough to color her plate.

At my mother’s request, I have requisitioned my father’s room for scenarios. We have a Thursday night theater that features a quite credible imitation of my father by Paul, who is twice the size of our lost man. Paul stoops and shuffles through the room, one hand clutching his collar together, the other hand held out for money. Even my mother giggles at the accuracy of it, or she coughs and seems to choke, and always recovers with a smile. Paul can certainly render a man. A plate of sweet pastry is kept nearby.

On Mondays I sometimes query Jane Rogerson in my father’s room. She enters nervously just after her nap and does not survey her surroundings, which vexes me a great deal. She has lost a mourner’s share of weight and her face has taken on the deep creases of an old man’s bottom. If she knows something, it will be hard to determine, for there is more to Rogerson than a woman who once nearly sponged the life out of me at bath times, a treatment so fantastically rough that I often bled from the road burn on my back. Some might warrant that she sponged my missing father too, yet with a more delicate hand, in a mature style, a transaction that occurred off-hours, with a soundtrack of deep moaning. One can easily overhear certain insinuations about their bathing ritual. If I spent more furtive time in the servants’ quarters, I could hear many sorts of things from Paul Mattingly and his guests. I am usually strong enough to decline such easy acquisitions of knowledge.

I have performed minuscule rearrangements to my father’s bedroom items to catch Rogerson off guard. If she inhabited this room during the late hours, for instance, when a sexuality might be attempted, she could be startled if my father’s array of his “forest jewels,” the acorns and pinecones and woodland scruff he collected and staged so meticulously, no longer sprinkles over his bureau. She has little to say. Her speech returns mostly to moments of my childhood, a topic I feel can have no bearing on the investigation. She entreats me to recall scenarios that apparently featured just the two of us, strolling overland to some knoll or other that would host our required picnic, me with my elastic-waisted pants down around my ankles to better regulate my faulty gait. When I concentrate my mind on the matter, however, I can remember nothing of the sort, just small, red people on boats being splashed in a terrible syrup. It is the one memory I have confidence in.

Sometimes I sit beneaththe window that gives out onto the scene of my father’s disappearance. Somewhere, ghosted into the glass, is the blueprint of what happened here. A father, my own, swifted off: by someone else’s power, by a higher power, by the powers that be. Mostly I look out at the burned yard, I sip from a bowl of soup, I surround myself with my father’s trade magazines: Population Now, The Limits of Rooms. I will not be approached for conversation, unless it is the detective, who enjoys broad legal access to my person, and who has spectacularly failed to turn his interrogation of me into the kind of courtship one so often reads about in literature between accuser and accused: a fiery, sexual battle of wills between fiercely intelligent if facially destroyed men who, though they differ in moral composition—one man kills children, the other man does not—overlap so deeply in other respects that they are like brothers who share a single, knotted torso.

In the many scenariosof my father’s disappearance, all of which have been whiteboarded in the living room and summarily dismissed, wanton speculation is succumbed to like a delicious drug, and I am ashamed at our collective lack of intelligence, imagination, and vision. Our heads may as well be crushed. We may as well lease ourselves for experimentation down at the night school.

My father, goes a theory put forward by Paul Mattingly, is caught in a crowd of day laborers—known to cluster at the head of our driveway—and is swept into the back of a truck, mistaken, perhaps, for a subdivision carpenter, someone grimly determined to support his family. The men in the truck are cheerful and talkative and they motor up a smooth road into the hillside. When the rain begins, a tarp is tented over the cab of the truck, ballooning in time with the anxious breath of the passengers. This is when my father becomes nervous and asks to be released. He uses simple phrasing. He does not disguise his voice. His captors are impressed by his calmness, but kill him anyway.