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 Nächtlich 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 repothitory for the publicathon of hith ideath.”
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 Sheriff’s 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, #5510-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 2:00 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 or Ardor, 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 were La Grimace, Napoleon’s 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.