Want Not (58 page)

He tucked the notebook into one of the bags he’d brought, for safekeeping. Precisely what he’d do with it, he didn’t know. Such deliberations were for later. To the bag he added the eyeglasses for no other reason than that they’d touched his father’s face, and the bare fact of that tactile connection seemed precious, and worth preserving. He decided to start with the walls, because they would be easy. There wasn’t much on them—just three framed photographs of Jane’s two kids, fashionable young professionals whose overscheduled lives had permitted them just two or three annual visits to their grandfather, a ten-minute cab ride away. They weren’t bad kids; just typical. Had their grandfather been on Facebook he might’ve drawn their affections. These photos he put in another bag, for Jane if she wanted them. Books were everywhere, overrunning the windowsill and piled haphazardly by the bedside, and these Elwin mounded into two rickety stacks in a corner of the room, for later boxing. He investigated the file cabinet he’d delivered to his father last year, presuming it to be empty because despite months of his nagging his father had seemed oblivious to its presence, but no, he’d finally used it; the top drawer was crammed with notes and photocopies and what looked, at first glance, like a diary or journal. Sorting these was too much for Elwin to deal with now, so he turned to the dresser.

There at the top—who’d folded all the clothes so nicely? Boolah? His father?—was the shirt he had bought his father last Christmas. Its positioning there felt like either a wry rebuke or a heart-cracking affirmation. He’d purchased it at Walmart, thinking his father—something of a dandy in his prime—was too far gone to pay attention to his clothes, yet after unwrapping it he’d rubbed the sleeve between his thumb and forefinger and said cagily, “You got a pretty sweet deal on this shirt, didn’t you?” He shut the dresser drawer, not wanting to deal with the clothes now, either, and with the frantic agitation of being trapped in a maze he went spinning back to the nightstand, home base. He could feel something building in him now, a grippiness in his lungs, a low throbbing murmur at his temples.

In the nightstand drawer he found his father’s wallet, the same tattered, overworn black leather one he’d carried for as long as Elwin could remember, probably since before the advent of credit cards. Inside it was his father’s expired New Jersey driver’s license, with a photo Elwin had never seen—a photo he wished he could tease his father about, because the startled wide-eyed expression suggested someone had goosed him just as the camera snapped. There too in the drawer was a string-tied packet of the letters Elwin used to write him from California, buoyant and contentment-soaked letters (delusive, in retrospect) from the sunnier coast, with all their bragging about the weather and tenure and minor awards and too their unremitting assurances, in closing, that Maura sends her love. There were postcards, too, from Jane (why?), along with—Elwin gasped—whole chapters of David’s novel (it was real!) stuffed into big manila envelopes bearing flamboyant and exotic Chinese postage. Digging deeper, he found a scrap of paper his father must’ve “laminated” by himself, with endless reels of Scotch tape, on which was written, below the name Alice, their old Montclair phone number—so he wouldn’t forget how to call his dead wife. Elwin watched the taped-up paper tremble in his hand, and scanning the room he felt himself smothering under the ghost-weight of it all, of his father’s everywhere presence, its jumble of the known and the unknown. He felt himself cracking beneath the weight, his eyesight smearing.

Boolah overheard Elwin as he passed down the hallway: a stifled, coughy weeping. Ducking his head into the room, he found Elwin crunched into the chair with the scrap of paper still shaking in his hand. “You doing all right?” he said gently.

Elwin looked up at him, his cheeks smeared, his eyes already reddened. “What do I do,” he begged, “with all this
stuff?
”

E
XCERPT FROM THE
Preliminary Report on Deterring Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Plant,
Attero Laboratories report ATT94–1783/UI-409, p. D-67. Co-authors: Drs. Elwin Cross Jr. (Trueblood Center for Applied Linguistics, Marasmus State College); Byron Torrance (Harvard University); Sharon Keim (independent artist); Richard Carrollton (Columbia University); Jose Nunes, Esq. (Georgetown University School of Law); Thomas B. Rankin (Duke University); Ronald Shapiro (University of California at Berkeley); Jacqueline Boesinger (Case Western Reserve University); James Dees (Western Research Group, Inc.); Randolph Yates (University of Washington); and B. R. Weems (Richard Varick College).

The entire site will be a message in itself, the framework for redundant and reinforcing levels of communication integrated into a holistic system of messaging. The message will be imparted both non-linguistically (via the unnatural syntax and negative entropy of the site design as well as through Level I communications) and linguistically, in the six primary languages of the United Nations (Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese) and in Navajo, as follows:

THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR. NO HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED IS COMMEMORATED HERE. NOTHING IS VALUED HERE.

THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE. THE MESSAGE IS A WARNING ABOUT DANGER. YOU MUST HEED IT.

WHAT IS HERE IS REPULSIVE AND DANGEROUS TO US. THE DANGER IS STILL PRESENT, IN YOUR TIME AS IN OURS.

THE FORM OF THE DANGER IS AN EMANATION OF ENERGY, AND IT CAN KILL. THE DANGER IS UNLEASHED ONLY IF YOU DISTURB THIS PLACE.

THIS PLACE IS BEST SHUNNED.

SENDING THIS MESSAGE WAS IMPORTANT TO US. WE CONSIDERED OURSELVES TO BE A POWERFUL CIVILIZATION.

The author wishes to acknowledge a debt to the physicist Gregory Benford, whose book
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia
(Avon Books, 1999) was frequently & shamelessly raided during the writing of this novel. Credit also goes to the writer and activist Derrick Jensen, whose ideas—in sometimes mangled form—are strewn throughout this book.
Always In Our Hearts
(Record Books, 1999), by Doug Most, provided guidance for several scenes.

The excerpt from the Waste Isolation Plant warning message is derived, almost verbatim, from the warning proposed in
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,
Sandia National Laboratories Report SAND92-1382/UC-721, p. F-49. That said, this is a work of imagination, and is in no way intended to accurately reflect the inner workings of the WIPP.

For their generous expertise, the author wishes to thank Dr. David B. Givens, Ph.D., from the Center for Nonverbal Studies; Christine Foy Stage, from the Orange County Attorney’s Office in Goshen, New York; Tom Rankin; Mary & Hershel Ladner; Kate Dubost; Sarah McCusker; Skyler Gambrell; and Ben Weaver, for joining me on that buffet line of West 36th Street trash bags. Gratitude is also owed to Matthew Teague and Tyler Johnson, and to Bob Schluter and Rosemarie Curti as well. This book, and arguably its author, would not exist without the love & support of Catherine Miles, whose atypical lapse in judgment, when a small-town Mississippi landscaper-slash-“writer” twisted a paper bar napkin onto her finger and asked her to marry him, still seems, fourteen years later, nothing short of a miracle.

J
ONATHAN
M
ILES
’s first novel,
Dear American Airlines,
was named a
New York Times
Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Wall Street Journal.
A former columnist for the
New York Times,
he serves as a contributing editor to magazines as diverse as
Field & Stream
and
Details,
and writes regularly for the
New York Times Book Revie
w and
The Literary Review
(UK). A former longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he currently lives with his family in rural New Jersey.