Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

My dissent from this view is not so important. It is not that I think Paul Mattingly is a simpleton, at least not precisely. He is a nice man to play fort with, and I am glad he is able to help my mother. But one cannot be too cagey. The belongings of our lodger, whose disappearance features a lower grief index—if it rates at all—are now in the possession of Paul Mattingly, who apprentices himself after the great collectors. With so little to do around the house, now that my father is not here to spearhead some garden project—our sole video footage of the lost man finds him squatting on his camp foldout, barking orders through a megaphone as unidentifiable children shuttle mulch to the juniper shrubs—Mattingly has been known to round up the items of various men who are missing and to store these items in glass cases. Creating his bias, so to speak. The certain feeling that he might be rooting for someone, therefore blunting his instrument of assessment.

Additionally, Mattingly’s narrative nowhere mentions our lodger running like buster through the woods, quite possibly on fire, screaming for his life. I saw this myself. Asleep or awake, I saw it very clearly.

In mythology,when a stranger from a distant land catches fire, it can signal that he is from the underworld, and that the kindness of his hosts—their ministrations with warm soup, the private massage offered by the eldest daughter, the gift of hand-drawn currency folded in muslin—has caused him to swell with shame, and then to combust. This suggests that our domestic tranquility has built-in protection from peril—intruders will burn if they seek to harm us—and it gives some comfort. Our lodger, however, came from Cleveland Village, the north end, and if we were unduly kind to him I’ll admit that it was not under my watch. In other words, our lodger caught fire for reasons mythology cannot quite explain. A different sort of logic applies to his immolation.

All throughout the late summer,when the detective visits he is distracted, he is sad, he is happy, he is handsome and witty, he repulses me. I assure him that I have nothing to hide, but can anyone ever say this with any honesty? Who can legitimately speak in such a way? I have so much to hide that I may one day break into pieces.

Today, while I am theorizing with him, he checks his watch repeatedly, but clearly does not see what he desires there. What a sorrow it is when our disappointments come from something we wear on our own bodies. I cannot say that I feel for him, because my feelings have been littered elsewhere. They are gone from me. But I see his predicament. I see it and I honor it.

It is important to me that he knows what I know, to a certain extent, anyway. Beyond that certain extent, I’m not sure he could handle his own mind. I wouldn’t want that responsibility.

I give him to understand the moment that informed the disappearance: my father, an assistant at the Institute, whose job it was to test the occupancy rate of its rooms and offices and elevators, recruiting bright young humans to fill those spaces until the floor joists started to creak. His morning tasks to occur in or around the home. The garden, the path, the hedge, the mailbox. A sliver of lunch before the bicycle ride to work. Daily my father had to navigate the cluster of day laborers clogging our driveway, who enjoyed a lightly sexual heckling of my father as he tried to get his bike moving from an uphill standstill with his little legs. Many times I watched the day laborers grab at my father’s crotch as he tried to cycle his way free, while my father grimaced or smiled, I was never sure which. All of this produced the sound of a father going away. One should issue a record album of such sounds, the acoustics of departure, even forced departure, undertaken while muscle-bound workers fan your groin. A man like that can be heard for miles. How could we possibly lose track of him?

His supervisor Lauren Markinson asserts that he showcased an appearance no more disheveled than usual when he submitted his revised population figures during his final day in our lives, and my mother alleges an evening encounter with him, although the latter is easily refuted, given that Mattingly is the only sire my mother is allowed, whether or not my mother knows this. Young men in my situation, who are now no longer young, must early on make a reality calculation on behalf of their mothers, to keep them just shy of the amount of information that would ruin them.

One cannot helpentertaining the theory that my father, given his professional inclinations, worked a population reduction upon his own home, clearing the way for his only son, myself, to thrive, the way old-growth trees are known to suck poison from deep in the earth in order to weaken themselves, just as the baby saplings around them require more room to grow. A suicide of trees, I believe it is called. It is a fancy name for a father throwing himself under a bus, allowing his son to thrive. It is part of a larger genre of misassigned heroism, but I am pleased to let my father enjoy the credit. And now I am filling the cavity left by two men, my father and the lodger, swelling into the newly vacant rooms. Space is for taking, and my father knew this.

After all, what’s mine is mine, and also some of what isn’t.

My father would also say that metaphors are for the dead, or winning is for losers, or that the expression “good day” is an oxymoron.

Until now, the question around here, posited by friends, family, strangers, and the police, has been punishingly literal: Who took my father? We have failed to ask, at least out loud: Might he still be on the property, buried alive, barely breathing? Or might it not have been his time? Could we admit that in some instances it is just more polite to quietly disappear? Did he leave of his own accord? And the lodger? Did they leave together, hand in hand? How many abductions are self-engineered, simply out of kindness?

But it is not my job to posit the questions, only to field them, however much I’d like to be stationed behind the detective’s face so I could better attack myself and take charge of the drama that should have resulted by now.

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 investigationof 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.