Among the Missing (10 page)

“No,” I said at last, my voice thick and uncertain.

“Oh, Andy,” he said, as if very disappointed. “Andy, Andy. Look! Here I am!” He held his arms out wide, as if I’d run
toward them. “Your Dreadful Double!” I watched as he straightened himself, correcting the slow tilt of his body. “I know you,” Mr. Mickleson said. His head drooped, but he kept one eye on me. “You must be coming to me—for
something
?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. I couldn’t even begin to imagine, and yet I felt—not for the last time—that I was standing in a desolate and empty prairie, the fields unraveling away from me in all directions. The long winds ran through my hair.

“Don’t you want to know a secret?” he said. “Come over here, I’ll whisper in your ear.”

And it seemed to me, then, that he did know a secret. It seemed to me that he would tell me something terrible, something I didn’t want to hear. I watched as he closed my notebook and placed it neatly on the coffee table, next to the
TV Guide
. He balanced himself on two feet, lifting up and lurching toward me. “Hold still,” he murmured. “I’ll whisper.”

I turned and ran.

I once tried to explain this incident to my wife, but it didn’t make much sense to her. She nodded, as if it were merely strange, merely puzzling. Hmmm, she said, and I thought that perhaps it
was
odd to remember this time so vividly, when I remembered so little else. It
was
a little ridiculous that I should find Mr. Mickleson on my mind so frequently.

“He was just a drunk,” my wife said. “A little crazy, maybe, but …” And she looked into my face, her mouth pursing. “He didn’t … 
do
anything to you, did he?” she said awkwardly, and I shook my head.

“No—no,” I said. And I explained to her that I never saw Mr. Mickleson again. I avoided the house after that night, of course, and when school started he wasn’t teaching Science 7. We were told, casually, that he had an “emergency,” that he had been called away, and when, after a few weeks, he still didn’t return, he was replaced without comment by an elderly lady substitute, who read to us from the textbook—
The World of Living Things
—in a lilting, storybook voice, and who whispered “My God,” as she watched us later, dissecting earthworms, pinning them to corkboard and exposing their many hearts. We never found out where Mr. Mickleson had gone.

“He was probably in rehab,” my wife said sensibly. “Or institutionalized. Your father was right. He was just a weirdo. It doesn’t seem that mysterious to me.”

Yes. I nodded a little, ready to drop the subject. I couldn’t very well explain the empty longing I felt, the eager dread that would wash over me, going into the classroom and thinking that he might be sitting there behind the desk, waiting. It didn’t make sense, I thought, and I couldn’t explain it, any more than I could explain why he remained in my mind as I crisscrossed the country with my family, any more than I could explain why he seemed to be there when I thought of them, even now: Mark, fat and paranoid, on his houseboat; my mother in Mexico, nodding over a cocktail; Debbie, staring at a spider in the corner of her room in the group home, her eyes dull; my father, frightened, calling me on the phone as his liver failed him, his body decomposing in a tiny grave in Idaho that I’d never visited. How could I explain that Mickleson seemed to preside over these thoughts, hovering at the edge of them like a stage director
at the back of my mind, smiling as if he’d done me a favor?

I didn’t know why he came into my mind as I thought of them, just as I didn’t know why he seemed to appear whenever I told lies. It was just that I could sense him.
Yes
, he whispered as I told my college friends that my father was an archaeologist living in Peru, that my mother was a former actress;
Yes
, he murmured as I lied to my father about Katrina;
Yes
, as I make excuses to my wife, when I say I am having dinner with a client when in fact I am tracing another path entirely—following a young family as they stroll through the park, or a whistling old man who might be my father, if he’d gotten away, or a small, brisk-paced woman, who looks like Katrina might, if Katrina weren’t made up. How can I explain that I walk behind this Katrina woman for many blocks, living a different life, whistling my old man tune?

I can’t. I can’t explain it, no more than I can admit that I still have Mickleson’s plaque, just as he probably still has my notebook; no more than I can explain why I take the plaque out of the bottom drawer of my desk and unwrap the tissue paper I’ve folded it in, reading the inscription over, like a secret message: “I wear the chains I forged in life.” I know it’s just a cheap Dickens allusion, but it still seems important.

I can hear him say, “Hold still. I’ll
whisper
.”

Hmmm, my wife would say, puzzled and perhaps a bit disturbed. She’s a practical woman, and so I say nothing. It’s probably best that she doesn’t think any more about it, and I keep to myself
the private warmth I feel when I sense a blackout coming, the darkness clasping its hands over my eyes. It’s better this way—we’re all happy. I’m glad that my wife will be there when I wake, and my normal life, and my beautiful daughters, looking at me, wide-eyed, staring.

“Hello?” my wife will say, and I’ll smile as she nudges me. “Are you there?” she’ll whisper.

M
ine is the typical story: I used to despise my father, and now that he is dead I feel bad about despising him. There’s not much more to say about that.

When I was young, I used to identify with those precociously perceptive child narrators one finds in books. You know the type. They always have big dark eyes. They observe poetic details, clear-sighted, very sensitive: the father’s cologne-sweet smell, his lingering breath of beer and cigarettes, his hands like ___. Often farm animals are metaphorically invoked, and we see the dad involved in some work—hunched over the gaping mouth of a car, straightening the knot in his salesman’s tie, pulling himself into the cab of his semi-truck, on his hands and knees among the rosebushes. We’ll see a whole map of his wasted, pathetic life in the squeal of his worn-out brakes, in the wisping smokestacks of the factory where he works, in the aching image of him rising before dawn to turn up the thermostat. The mom will peer from behind a curtain as he drives
away. Her hands tremble as she folds clothes, washes dishes, makes you a sandwich. Something you don’t quite understand is always going on, and you press close to the bathroom door she is locked behind. You’ll probably hear her weeping.

Now that I have children of my own, this bothers me. This type of kid. Sometimes, when I feel depressed and stare out the window while my kids pester me for attention, or when I lose my temper and throw a plate or whatever, or when I’m in a good mood and I’m singing some song from the radio too loudly and too off-key, I think of that gentle, dewy-eyed first person narrator and it makes my skin crawl. It doesn’t matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you’re not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.

My father is a good example. My father used to whistle merry little tunes when he was happy and soft, minor key ones when he was sad. I can’t remember when exactly this began to annoy me, but by the time I was eleven or twelve, I could do a pretty amazing parody of it. I’d see him coming, loping along with his hands behind his back and his eyes downcast, whistling some dirge, and I could barely contain my private laughter.

Once, when he was visiting, he began to whistle in an elevator,
completely oblivious of the obvious codes of silence and anonymity that govern certain public places. The second the doors slid shut, he abruptly puckered his lips, like a chaste kiss, and began to trill, filling the air with melody, accenting the tune with grace notes and a strange, melodramatic vibrato at the climactic parts, until everyone nearby was turned to stone with horror and embarrassment, staring straight ahead and pretending they couldn’t hear it.

He was on his last legs by that point—“last legs,” he said, as if he had more than one pair. I didn’t believe him at the time, in part because those words seemed so trite and goofy. I felt that any person really facing death would conceive of it in much grander terms. Even my father.

One time my father hit my mother. I wish you could’ve seen his face: the bared teeth and bulged eyes, the mottled redness of the cheeks and forehead, the skin seeming to shine like a lacquered surface. If someone had been there to take a photograph, to freeze the expression in the moment before his hand lurched up to grab my mom by the neck, in a purely objective picture, you would not be able to identify the emotion in that look as rage. You might assume that it was pain or terror. There’s a great photo from the Vietnam war—you know the one, of the guy screaming as he’s shot through the head. That’s what my dad looked like at that moment.

I never saw him look like that, before or after. But if I close my eyes I can see that face as clearly as I can picture the school portraits of my children on the coffee table, or the blue LeSabre
that is waiting for me in the garage, or my first and only dog, Lucky, who, on the night of my parents’ fight lay under the table in the kitchen, his long snout resting warily on his paws.

I’m sure that my father never realized how easily I could graft that face over his gentle one, how much more easily I could conjure up that image instead of some thought of his good qualities. It probably would have made him cry. He wept easily in his last years. I recall seeing him sitting in his easy chair, touching his fingers to his moist eyes as he watched a news special about poor orphans in Romania. When he and my mother had their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and he stood up to make a speech, his voice broke. “This woman,” he said, and he choked back a sob. “This woman is the first and only love of my life.”

I don’t know. It’s hard to decide if the waver in his voice was authentic or not. Who knows what he was really thinking as he spoke, as he stood there with my mother beaming, glistening-eyed, up at him—whether that strangled “love of my life” was tinged with regret, self-pity, whether it was because he was standing in front of all those people who knew that he and my mom hadn’t had the most pleasant of lives together. But it also might be that he said it with true, honest feeling. In the end, there probably isn’t much difference between being in love and acting like you’re in love.

I don’t mean this as a put-down either. I really don’t believe that it’s possible to be in love all of the time, any more than it’s possible to always be good. So you must go with the next best thing. You try to pretend.

There are times when I would do anything to be a good person. But I’m not. Deep down, most of the time, I’m not.
What can you do? You have a flash of goodness and you try to hold on to it, ride it for all it’s worth.

There was this one time that my kids and I were playing with clay, the three of us together. I don’t know why this moment was special, but it was. We were all quiet, concentrated on our work, our fingers kneading and shaping. We were making an elephant, and I remember how excited they were when I rolled out its trunk, a careful snake between my palm and the surface of the table. My youngest was about three at the time, and I remember how he rested his cheek against my arm, watching me. I remember how soft and warm that cheek felt. The older one was pounding out a flap for the ear, and I can recall my voice being gentle and perfect when I told him how great it was. He gave it to me; I pressed it to the elephant’s head.

But it didn’t last for long, that moment. I am sure that neither of them remember it as I do, for pretty soon they started arguing, whining about who had more clay and so on. It was a jolt; I could actually feel the goodness moving out of me, the way you can feel blood moving when you blush or grow pale. “Come on, guys,” I said, “let’s not fight. This is fun, isn’t it? Let’s have fun.” But my gentle voice was just an imitation, I was mimicking the tone of those enlightened parents you see sometimes, the kind who never seem to raise their voice beyond the steady monotone of kind patience, like the computer in that movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

But even parents like that won’t be forgiven, you know. My wife’s friend is a psychologist, and she spent her life explaining things in the most calm, reasonable voice you can imagine. She never raised her voice. Even when her kid was two years old, she
was out there saying things like, “Please don’t run in the street, because, even though you’re excited and it’s hard to pay attention, some people drive their cars too fast and they might not see you,” et cetera. Now, naturally, her adult son won’t talk to her. At all. He finds her unbearably manipulative. Repressive. Repulsive. Good words like that.

I recall when my wife’s friend first told us about this. How old was I? Twenty-three or twenty-four maybe, and the son might have been twenty. I was sitting at the kitchen table across from this old, heavy, smooth-talking gal, the leader of some women’s group thing my wife went to, and I was holding my sweet, sleeping baby in my arms. I can recall giving her that stern, bored stare I used to reserve for people I thought of as adults. She was almost my father’s age, and her angry son was only a few years younger than I. She was a failure, I thought then. I stared down at my sleeping baby’s face, the long-lashed eyes, the softly parted lips that moved slightly, as if he dreamed of nursing, and I thought: That will never happen to me. I will never let them hate me.