Special Topics in Calamity Physics (76 page)

The Political Science Department assistant answered the phone.

"Hey, is my dad there? It's Blue."

"Hmm?"

I glanced at the clock. He didn't have a class until 11:30 A.M. "My dad. Dr. Van Meer. Can I talk to him please? It's an emergency." "He's not coming in today," she said. "There's that conference in Atlanta, right?"

"Excuse me?"

"I thought he went to Atlanta, replacing the man who was in the car accident—?"

"What?"

"He requested permission for a substitute this morning. He won't be in for the— "

I hung up.

"Dad!"

I left the comforter in the kitchen, raced down the stairs to his study, switching on the overhead light. I stood in front of his desk, staring at it. It was bare. I yanked open a drawer. It was empty. I yanked open another. It was empty. There was no laptop, no legal pads, no desk calendar. The ceramic mug was empty too, where he usually kept his five blue ink pens and five black ink pens next to the green desk lamp from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville, which also was gone. The tiny bookshelf next to the desk was completely empty too, apart from five copies of Marx's
Das Kapital
(1867).

I sprinted up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the hall, yanking open the front door. The blue Volvo station wagon was parked where it always was, in front of the garage door. I stared at it, at the egg-blue surface, the rust around the wheels.

I turned back inside and ran to his bedroom. The curtains were open. The bed was made. Yet his old sheepskin loafers purchased at Bet-R-Shoes in Enola, New Hampshire, were not capsized beneath the television, nor were they beneath the upholstered chair in the corner. I moved toward the closet and slid open the door.

There were no clothes. There was nothing—nothing but hangers jittering along the pole like birds, frightened when people stepped too close to the bars to stare at them.

I ran into his bathroom, swung open the medicine cabinet. It was bare. So was the shower. I touched the side of the tub, feeling its stickiness, the few remaining drops of water. I looked at the sink, a trace of Colgate toothpaste, a tiny drop of shaving cream dried on the mirror.

He must have decided
we're moving again,
I told myself.
He went to fill out a Change-of-Address card at the Post Office. He went to the supermarket for moving boxes. But the station wagon wouldn't
start, so he called a taxi.

I went into the kitchen and played the answering machine, but there was only the message from Eva Brewster. I looked on the counter for a note, but there wasn't one. Again, I called the Political Science Department assistant, Barbara, pretending I knew all about the conference in Atlanta; Dad said there was "a motor-mouth on Barbara, coupled with the foul stench of the ridiculous." (He cheerfully referred to her as "the Haze woman.") I called the conference by a specific name, quickly decided beforehand. I think I called it SPOUFAR, "Safe Political Organization for the Upholding of First Amendment Rights," or something to that effect.

I asked her if Dad had left a number where she could contact him.

"No," she said.

"When did he notify you?"

"Left a message at six this morning. But, wait, why don't you—?"

I hung up.

I wrapped the comforter around me, turned on the television, watched Cherry Jeffries in a yellow suit the color of a road sign with shoulder pads so sharp they could cut down trees. I checked the clock in the kitchen, the clock in my bedroom. I walked outside and stared at the blue station wagon. I sat in the driver's seat and turned the key in the ignition. It started. I ran my hands along the steering wheel, over the dashboard, stared at the backseat, as if there might be a clue somewhere, a revolver, candlestick, rope or wrench carelessly left behind by Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum after killing Dad in the library, conservatory or billiard room. I examined the Persian carpets in the hall, searching for singular imprints of shoes. I checked the sink, the dishwasher, but every spoon, fork and knife had been put away.

They'd
come for him.

Members of
Nachlicht
had come for him in the night, placed a linen handkerchief (embroidered with a red N in the corner) dabbed with a bit of sleeping potion over his unsuspecting snoring mouth. He hadn't been able to struggle because Dad, although tall and hardly skinny, wasn't a fighter. Dad preferred intellectual debate to physical assault, eschewed contact sports, considered wrestling and boxing "faintly preposterous." And although Dad respected the art of karate, judo, tae kwan do, he himself had never learned a single move.

They'd meant to take me, of course, but Dad had refused.
"No! Take me instead
Take me!"
And so the Nasty One—there was always a Nasty One, the one who had scant regard for human life and bullied the others—pressed a gun to his temple and ordered him to call the university. "And you'd better sound normal or I'll blow your daughter's brains out while you watch."

And then they made Dad pack his own bags in the two large Louis Vuitton duffle bags June Bug Eleanor Miles, age 38, had given to Dad so he'd remember her (and her spiky teeth) every time he packed his bags. Because even though, sure, they were "revolutionaries" in the classical sense of the word, they were not barbarians, not South American guerrillas or Muslim extremists who relished the odd beheading every now and then. No, they held fast to the belief that all human beings, even those held against their will, waiting for certain political demands to be met, required his/her personal belongings, including corduroy pants, tweed jackets, wool sweaters, Oxford shirts, shaving kits, toothbrushes, razors, soaps, dental floss, peppermint exfoliating foot scrubs, Timex watches, GUM cufflinks, credit cards, lecture notes and old syllabi, notes for
The Iron Grip.

"We want you to be comfortable," said the Nasty One.

That night, he still hadn't called.

No one had, with the exception of Arnold Lowe Schmidt of
The New Seattle Journal of Foreign Policy,
telling the machine how thawry he was that Dad had declined hith invitathon of writhing a cover pieth on Cuba, but to pleath keep the periodical in mind if he wanthed "a preeminent repothito
ry for the publicathon of hith
death."

Outside, I walked around the house some twenty times in the dark. I stared into the fishpond, devoid of fish. I returned inside, sat on the couch watching Cherry Jeffries, picking at the half-eaten bowl of fruit, which the radicals had allowed Dad to prepare before they carried him away.

"My
daughter has to eat!"
Dad commanded.

"Fine," said the Nasty One. "But be quick about it."

"Would you like some help cutting the cantaloupe?" asked another.

I couldn't stop picking up the phone, staring at the receiver, asking,

"Should I report him missing to the police?" I waited for it to tell me, "Yes, Definitely," "My Reply Is No" or "Concentrate and Ask Again." I could call the Sluder County Sheriffs Department, tell A. Boone I had to speak to Detective Harper. "Remember me? The one who talked to you about Hannah Schneider? Well, now my father's missing. Yes. I keep losing people." Within an hour, she'd be at the door with her pumpkin hair and complexion of refined sugar, narrowing her eyes at Dad's vacant reading chair. "Tell me the last thing he said. Does your family have a history of mental illness? Do you have anyone? An uncle? A grandmother?" Within four hours, I'd have my own green folder in the filing cabinet next to her desk, #55io-VANM. An article would appear in
The Stockton Observer,
"Local Student Angel of Death, Witness to Teacher's Demise, Now Missing Father." I hung up the phone.

I searched the house again, this time not allowing myself to whimper, not allowing myself to miss a thing, not the shower curtain, or the cabinet under the bathroom sink full of Q-tips and cotton balls, or even the roll of toilet paper inside of which he might have taken a moment to scrawl,
They've taken me do not worry
with a toothpick. I examined every book we'd returned to the shelves the night before in the library, for he might have swiftly slipped a page of legal paper into its pages on which he'd written,
I'll get out of this I swear.
I turned over every one, shook them, but found nothing at all, apart from
The Heart of the Matter
losing another clump of pages. This searching continued until Dad's bedside clock read that it was after

2:OO A.M.

Denial is like Versailles; it isn't the easiest thing to maintain. To do so took an astounding amount of resolve, oomph, chutzpah, none of which I had, starfished as I was across the black-and-white tiles of Dad's bathroom floor.

Clearly, I had to accept the notion of Dad's kidnapping being up there with the Tooth Fairy, the Holy Grail or any other dream concocted by people bored to tears with reality, wanting to believe in something bigger than themselves. No matter how charitable these radicals were, they wouldn't have permitted Dad to pack each and
every one
of his personal items, including checkbooks, credit cards and statements, even his favorite needlepoint by June Bug Dorthea Driser, the tiny, framed "To Thine Own Self Be True," which had been hanging to the right of the kitchen telephone, now gone. They also would have put their foot down when Dad took a half hour to cherry-pick the selection of texts he wished to take with him, Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press 1955 two-volume edition of
Lolita, Ada orArdor,
the
Paradise
Lost
he hadn't wanted me to throw, the hulking
Delovian:A Retrospective
(Finn, 1998), which featured Dad's favorite work, the appropriately titled
Secret
(see p. 391, #61,1992, Oil on linen). Also missing was
La Grimace, Napoleons Progress, Beyond Good and Evil
and a photocopy of "In the Penal Colony" (Kafka, 1919).

My head throbbed. My face felt tight and hot. I pulled myself out of the bathroom into the middle of Dad's spongy bedroom carpet, the one thing he loathed about the house —"one feels as if one is walking on marshmallows"— and began to cry, but after a while, my tears, either bored or frustrated, sort of quit, threw in the towel, stormed off the set.

I didn't do anything but stare at the bedroom ceiling, so pale and quiet, dutifully holding His tongue. Somehow, out of pure exhaustion, I fell asleep.

For the next three days—frittered away on the couch in front of Cherry Jeffries—I found myself imagining Dad's final moments in our house, our beloved 24 Armor Street, setting of our last year, our last chapter, before I "conquered the world."

He was all plan and calculation, all bird-quick glances to his wristwatch, five minutes fast, silent steps through our dim-drenched rooms. There was nervousness too, a nervousness only
I'd
be able to detect; I'd seen him before a new university, giving anew lecture (the barely discernible trembling of index fingers and thumbs).

The change in his pocket rattled like his withered soul as he moved through the kitchen, downstairs to his study. He turned on only a few lamps, his desk lamp and the red one on his bedroom nightstand that drowned the room in the jelly-red of stomachs and hearts. He spent a great deal of time organizing his things. The Oxford shirts on the bed, red on top, followed by blue, blue patterned, blue-and-white stripe, white, each folded like sleeping birds with wings tucked under them, and the six sets of cufflinks in silver and gold (including, of course, his favorite, those 24-karat ones engraved with GUM, given to Dad for his forty-seventh birthday by Bitsy Plaster, age 42, a misprint by the jeweler due to Bitsy's bubbly handwriting) all tucked into the Tiffany felt pocket like a bag of prized seeds. And then there were his socks herded together, black, white, long, short, cotton, wool. He wore his brown loafers (he could walk fast in them), the gold and brown tweed (faithfully hanging around him like an old dog) and the old khaki slacks so comfortable he claimed "they made the most unbearable tasks bearable." (He wore them trudging through the "squishy Thesis Statements, fetid quagmires of Supporting Evidence" inevitably found within student research papers. They even allowed him to feel no guilt as he wrote C- next to the kid's name before continuing on, relentlessly.)

When he was ready to load the boxes and duffle bags into the car—I didn't know what waited for him; I imagined a simple yellow cab driven by some sea urchin driver with goose-bumped hands, tapping the steering wheel to Public Radio's
Early Bluegrass Hour,
waiting for John Ray Jr., Ph.D., to emerge from the house, thinking about the woman he left at home, Alva or Dottie, warm as a dinner roll.

When Dad knew he'd forgotten nothing, when it was all gone, he walked back inside and up to my room. He didn't turn on a light, or even look at me as he unbuckled my backpack and perused the legal pad on which I'd scrawled my research and theory. After he reviewed what I'd written, he returned it to the bag and hung it on the back of my desk chair.

He was incorrect putting it there. That wasn't where I'd put it; I'd placed it where I always did, at the end of my bed on the floor. Yet, he was pressed for time and no longer needed to worry about such details. Such details mattered very little now. He probably laughed at the Irony. At the most unlikely of moments, Dad took time to laugh about the Irony; or, perhaps it was one instance he didn't have time to, because if he moved toward Laughter, he might have to continue down that shoulderless, exitless road of Feeling, which could lead one, rather swiftly, into Whimpering, Full-on Howling and he didn't have time for that kind of detour. He had to get out of the house.