Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

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 womenwho 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 lodgerwas 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 bringsmy 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.

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.