Seven days after Dad left, the phone began to ring.
I didn’t answer it, though I remained poised by the answering machine, my heart banging in my chest, in case it was he.
“Gareth, you’re causing quite a stir around here,” said Professor Mike Devlin. “I’m wondering where you are.”
“What on earth have you done with yourself? Now they say you’re not coming back,” said Dr. Elijah Masters, Chairman of the English Department and Harvard Alumni Interviewer. “I’ll be sorely disappointed if that is the case. As you know, we have an unfinished chess game and I’m beating you to a pulp. I’d hate to think you’ve disappeared simply so I have to forgo the pleasure of telling you, ‘Checkmate.’”
“Dr. Van Meer, you must call the office as soon as possible. Again, your daughter Blue has not appeared in class all week now. I hope you’re aware that if she does not begin to make up some of the work, the idea of her graduating on time will be more and more—”
“Dr. Van Meer, this is Jenny Murdoch who sits on the front row of your Patterns of Democracy and Social Structure seminar? I was wondering if Solomon is now going to be in charge of our research papers, because he’s like, totally giving us new parameters. He says it only has to be seven to ten pages. But you wrote on the syllabus twenty to twenty-five, so everyone’s totally baffled. Some clarification would be much appreciated. I also wrote you an e-mail.”
“Please call me as soon as possible at my home or office, Gareth,” said Dean Kushner.
I’d told Dad’s assistant, Barbara, that I’d written down the incorrect contact number for Dad at the conference and asked her to let me know as soon as she heard from him. She hadn’t called, however, so I called her.
“We still haven’t heard,” she said. “Dean Kushner’s having a heart attack. Solomon Freeman is going to have to take over his classes for finals. Where is he?”
“He had to go to Europe,” I said. “His mother had a heart attack.”
“Ohhh,” said Barbara. “I’m sorry. Is she going to be all right?”
“No.”
“Gosh. That’s so sad. But then why hasn’t he—?”
I hung up.
I wondered if my steady stupor, my inertia, marked the onset of madness. Only a week ago I’d believed madness to be a far-fetched idea, but now I recalled a handful of occasions when Dad and I had encountered a woman muttering expletives as if she were sneezing. I wondered how she’d become that way, if it was a debutante’s dreamy descent down a grand flight of stairs or else a sudden misfire in the brain, its effects immediate, like a snakebite. Her complexion was red like raw dishwasher hands and the soles of her feet were black, as if she’d meticulously dipped them in tar. As Dad and I passed her, I held my breath, squeezed his hand. He’d squeeze back — our tacit agreement he’d never allow me to wander the streets with my hair like a bird’s nest, my overalls marred with urine and dirt.
Now I could, with no trouble at all, wander the streets with hair like a bird’s nest in overalls of urine and dirt. The That’s-Ridiculous, the Don’t-Be-Absurd had happened. I’d be selling my body for a frozen Lender’s bagel. Obviously, I’d been wrong all along about madness. It could happen to anyone.
For those who are Marat/Sade aficionados, I must deliver bad news. The shelf life of a depressed torpor for any otherwise healthy individual is ten, eleven, at the most, twelve days. After that, the mind can’t help but notice such a disposition is as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, and that, if one didn’t stop bouncing around like a big girl’s blouse, Pimms and strawberries, Bob’s your uncle and God save the bloody Queen, one just might not make it (see Go See a Man About a Dog: Beloved Englishisms, Lewis, 2001).
I didn’t go mad. I got mad (see “Peter Finch,” Network). Rage, not Abe Lincoln, is the Great Emancipator. It wasn’t long before I was tearing through 24 Armor Street, not limp and lost, but throwing shirts and June Bug needlepoints and library books and cardboard moving boxes marked THIS END UP like Jay Gatsby on a rampage, searching for something — even if it was something minor — to give me proof of where he’d gone and why. Not that I let myself hope I’d discover a Rosetta Stone, a twenty-page confession thoughtfully tucked into my pillowcase, between mattresses, in the icebox: “Sweet. So now you know. I am sorry, my little cloud. But allow me to explain. Why don’t we start with Mississippi…” It wasn’t likely. As Mrs. McGillicrest, that penguin-bodied shrew from Alexandria Day, had informed our class, so triumphantly: “A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.”
The shock of Dad gone (shock didn’t do it justice; it was astonishment, stunned, a bombshell — astunshelled), the fact he had blithely hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned (again, too tepid for my purposes — hoodzonked) me, me, me, his daughter, a person who, to quote Dr. Luke Ordinote, had “startling power and acumen,” an individual who, to quote Hannah Schneider, did not “miss a thing,” was so improbable, painful, impossible (impainible), I understood now Dad was nothing short of a madman, a genius and imposter, a cheat, a smoothie, the Most Sophisticated Sweet Talker Who Ever Lived.
Dad must be to secrets as Beethoven is to symphonies, I chanted to myself. (It was the first of a series of stark statements I’d concoct in the ensuing week. When one has been hoodzonked, one’s mind crashes, and when rebooted, reverts to unexpected, rudimentary formats, one of which was reminiscent of the mind-bending “Author Analogies” Dad devised as we toured the country.)
But Dad wasn’t Beethoven. He wasn’t even Brahms.
And Dad not being an unsurpassed maestro of mystery was regrettable, because infinitely more harrowing than being left with a series of obscure, incomprehensible Questions — which one can fill in at one’s whim without fear of being graded — was having a few disquieting Answers.
My rampage through the house uncovered no evidence of note, only articles about civil unrest in West Africa and Peter Cower’s Inside Angola (1980), which had fallen in the crevice between Dad’s bed and bedside table (as nutritionless pieces of evidence as they come) and $3,000 in cash, crisply rolled up inside June Bug Penelope Slate’s SPECIAL THOUGHTS ceramic mug kept on top of the refrigerator (Dad had purposefully left it for me, as the mug was usually reserved for loose change). Eleven days after he left, I wandered down to the road to collect the day’s maiclass="underline" a book of coupons, two clothing catalogues, a credit card application for Mr. Meery von Gare with 0 % APR financing and a thick manila envelope addressed to Miss Blue van Meer, scrawled in majestic handwriting, the handwriting equivalent of trumpets and a stagecoach pulled by noble steeds.
Immediately, I ripped it open, pulling out the inch-thick stack of papers. Instead of a map of the South American White Slavery network with rescue instructions, or Dad’s unilateral Declaration of Independence (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a father to dissolve the paternal bands which have connected him to his daughter…”), I found a brief note on monogrammed stationery paper clipped to the front.
“You asked for these. I hope they help you,” Ada Harvey had written, then scrawled her loopy name beneath the knot of her initials.
Even though I’d hung up on her, hacked off her voice without a word of apology like a sushi chef chopping off eel heads, exactly as I’d asked, she’d sent me her father’s research. As I raced back up the driveway and into the house with the papers, I found myself crying, weird condensation tears that spontaneously appeared on my face. I sat down at the kitchen table and carefully began to page through the stack.