Among the Missing (8 page)

It never felt like danger. I was convinced of my own powers of stealth and invisibility. He would not see me because that was not part of the story I was telling myself: I was the Detective!
I sensed a cool, hollow spot in my stomach, but I could glide easily behind him as he sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner, staring at the blue glow of the television, watching the news. He didn’t shudder as the dark shape of me passed behind him. He couldn’t see me unless I chose to be seen.

I had my first blackout that day I left Mickleson’s house, not long after I’d sneaked behind him and crept out the back door. I don’t know whether “blackout” is the best term, with its redolence of alcoholic excess and catatonic states, but I’m not sure what else to say. I stepped into the backyard and I remember walking cautiously along a line of weedy flower beds toward the gate that led to the alley. I had taken the Santa photo and I stared at it. It could have been a photograph of me when I was five, and I shuddered at the eerie similarity. An obese calico cat was hurrying down the alley in front of me, disappearing into a hedge that bordered someone else’s backyard.

A few seconds later, I found myself at the kitchen table eating dinner with my family. I was in the process of bringing an ear of buttered corn to my mouth and it felt something like waking up, only faster, as if I’d been transported in a blink from one place to another. My family had not seemed to notice that I was gone. They were all eating silently, grimly, as if everything were normal. My father was cutting his meat, his jaw firmly locked, and my mother’s eyes were on her plate, as if she were watching a small round television. No one seemed surprised by my sudden appearance.

It was kind of alarming. At first, it just seemed odd—like,
“Oh, how did I get here?” But then, the more I thought about it, the more my skin crawled. I looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall, a grinning black cat with a clock face for a belly and a pendulum tail and eyes that shifted from left to right with each tick. I had somehow lost a considerable amount of time—at least a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. The last thing I clearly recalled was staring at that photo—Mr. Mickleson or myself, sitting on Santa’s knee. And then, somehow, I had left my body. I sat there, thinking, but there wasn’t even a blur of memory. There was only a blank spot.

Once, I tried to explain it to my wife.

“A
blank
spot?” she said, and her voice grew stiff and concerned, as if I’d found a lump beneath my skin. “Do you mean a blackout? You have
blackouts
?”

“No, no,” I said, and tried to smile reassuringly. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “Listen, Andy,” she said. “If I told you that I had periods when I … lost time … wouldn’t you be concerned? Wouldn’t you want me to see a doctor?”

“You’re blowing this all out of proportion,” I said. “It’s nothing like that.” And I wanted to tell her about the things that the Detective had read about in the weeks and months following the first incident—about trances and transcendental states, about astral projection and out-of-body travel. But I didn’t.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, and stretched my arms luxuriously. “I feel great,” I said. “It’s more like daydreaming. Only—a little different.”

But she still looked concerned. “You don’t have to hide anything from me,” she said. “I just care about you, that’s all.”

“I know,” I said, and I smiled as her eyes scoped my face. “It’s nothing,” I said, “just one of those little quirks!” And that is what I truly believe. Though my loved ones sometimes tease me about my distractedness, my forgetfulness, they do so affectionately. There haven’t been any major incidents, and the only times that really worry me are the times when I am alone, when I am driving down one street and wake up on another. And even then, I am sure that nothing terrible has happened. I sometimes rub my hands against the steering wheel. I am always intact. There are no screams or sirens in the distance. It’s just one of those things!

But back then, that first time, I was frightened. I remember asking my mother how a person would know if he had a brain tumor.

“You don’t have a brain tumor,” she said irritably. “It’s time for bed.”

A little later, perhaps feeling guilty, she came up to my room with aspirin and water.

“Do you have a headache, honey?” she said.

I shook my head as she turned off my bedside lamp. “Too much reading of comic books,” she said, and smiled at me exaggeratedly, as she sometimes did, pretending I was still a baby. “It would make anybody’s head feel funny, little man!” She touched my forehead with the cold, dry pads of her fingertips, looking down into my eyes, heavily. She looked sad, and for a moment lost her balance slightly as she reached down to run a palm
across my cheek. “Nothing is wrong,” she whispered. “It will all seem better in the morning.”

That night, I sat up writing in my diary, writing to Big Me:
I hope you are alive
, I wrote.
I hope that I don’t die before you are able to read this
.

That particular diary entry always makes me feel philosophical. I’m not entirely sure of the person he is writing to, the future person he was imagining. I don’t know whether that person is alive or not. There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years? How many end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness like elderly relatives suffering some fatal lung disease?

Like the Detective. As I wander through my big suburban house at night, I can hear his wheezing breath in the background, still muttering about secrets that can’t be named. Still hanging in there.

My wife is curled up on the sofa, sipping hot chocolate, reading, and when she looks up she smiles shyly. “What are you staring at?” she says. She is used to this sort of thing, by now—finds it endearing, I think. She is a pleasant, practical woman, and I doubt that she would find much of interest in the many former selves that tap against my head like moths.

She opens her robe. “See anything you like?” she says, and I smile back at her.

“Just peeking,” I say brightly. My younger self wouldn’t recognize me, I’m sure of that.

•   •   •

Which makes me wonder: What did I see in Mickleson, beyond the striking resemblance? I can’t quite remember my train of thought, though it’s clear from the diary that I latched wholeheartedly on to the idea. Some of it is obviously playacting, making drama for myself, but some of it isn’t. Something about Mickleson struck a chord.

Maybe it was simply this—
July 13: If Mickleson is your future, then you took a wrong turn somewhere. Something is sinister about him! He could be a criminal on the lam! He is crazy. You have to change your life now! Don’t ever think bad thoughts about Mom, Dad, or even Mark. Do a good deed every day
.

I had been going to his house fairly frequently by that time. I had a notebook, into which I had pasted the Santa photo, a sample of his handwriting, and a bit of hair from a comb. I tried to write down everything that seemed potentially significant: clues, evidence, but evidence of what, I don’t know. There was the crowd of beer cans on his kitchen counter, sometimes arranged in geometric patterns. There were the boxes, unpacked then packed again. There were letters: “I am tired, unbelievably tired, of going around in circles with you,” a woman who signed herself Kelly had written. “As far as I can see, there is no point in going on. Why can’t you just make a decision and stick to it?” I had copied this down in my detective’s notebook.

In his living room, there was a little plaque hanging on the wall. It was a rectangular piece of dark wood; a piece of parchment paper, burned around the edges, had been lacquered to it. On the parchment paper, in careful, calligraphy letters, was written:

Which seemed like a possible secret message. I thought maybe he’d escaped from jail.

From a distance, behind a hedge, I watched Mickleson’s house. He wouldn’t usually appear before ten o’clock in the morning. He would pop out his front door in his bathrobe, glancing quickly around as if he sensed someone watching, and then he would snatch up the newspaper on his doorstep. At times, he seemed aware of my eyes.

I knew I had to be cautious. Mickleson must not guess that he was being investigated, and I tried to take precautions. I stopped wearing my favorite detective hat, to avoid calling attention to myself. When I went through his garbage, I did it in the early morning, while I was fairly certain he was still asleep. Even so, one July morning I was forced to crawl under a thick hedge when Mickleson’s back door unexpectedly opened at eight
A.M
. and he shuffled out to the alley to dump a bag into his trash can. Luckily I was wearing brown and green and blended in with the shrubbery. I lay there, prone against the dirt, staring at his bare feet and hairy ankles. He was wearing nothing but boxer shorts. I could see that his clothes had been concealing a large quantity of dark, vaguely sickening body hair; there was even some on his back! I had recently read a Classics Illustrated
comic book version of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and I recalled the description of Hyde as “something troglodytic,” which was a word I had looked up in the dictionary and now applied as Mickleson dumped his bag into the trash can. I had just begun to grow a few hairs on my own body, and was chilled to think I would end up like this. I heard the clank of beer cans, and then he walked away and I lay still, feeling uneasy.

At home, after dinner, I would sit in my bedroom, reading through my notes, puzzling. I would flip through my lists, trying to find clues I could link together. I’d sift through the cigar box full of things I’d taken from his home: photographs, keys, a Swiss army knife, a check stub with his signature, which I’d compared against my own. But nothing seemed to fit. All I knew was that he was mysterious. He had some secret.

Once, one late night that summer, I thought I heard my parents talking about me. I was reading, and their conversation had been mere background, rising and falling, until I heard my name. “Andrew … how he’s turning out … not fair to anybody!” Words, rising through the general mumble, first in my father’s, then my mother’s voice. Then, loudly: “What will happen to him?”

I sat up straight, my heart beating heavily, because it seemed that something must have happened, they must have discovered something. I felt certain that I was about to be exposed: my spying, my breaking and entering, my stealing. I was quiet, frightened, listening, and then after a while I got up and crept downstairs.

My mother and father were at the kitchen table, speaking softly, staring at the full ashtray that sat between them. My
mother looked up when I came in and clenched her teeth. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Andy, it’s two-thirty in the morning! What are you doing up?”

I stood there in the doorway, uncertainly. I wished that I were a little kid again, to tell her that I was scared. But I just hovered there. “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

My mother frowned. “Well, try harder, God damn it,” she said.

I stood there a moment longer. “Mom?” I said.

“Go to bed!” She glared.

“I thought I heard you guys saying something about that man that just moved in down the block. He didn’t say anything about me, did he?”

“Listen to me, Andrew,” she said. Her look darkened. “I don’t want you up there listening to our conversations. This is grown-up talk and I don’t want you up there snooping.”

“He’s going to be the new science teacher,” I said.

“I know,” she said, but my father raised his eyebrows.

“Who’s this?” my father said, raising his glass to his lips. “That weirdo is supposed to be a teacher? That’s a laugh.”

“Oh, don’t start!” my mother said. “At least he’s a customer! You better God damn not pick a fight with him. You’ve driven enough people away as it is, the way you are. It’s no wonder we don’t have any friends!” Then she turned on me. “I thought I told you to go to bed. Don’t just stand there gaping when I tell you something! My God, I can’t get a minute’s peace!”

Back in my bedroom, I tried to forget what my parents had said—it didn’t matter, I thought, as long as they didn’t know anything about me. I was safe! And I sat there, relieved, slowly forgetting the fact that I was really just a strange twelve-year-old
boy, a kid with no real playmates, an outsider even in his own family. I didn’t like being that person, and I sat by the window, awake, listening to my parents’ slow-arguing voices downstairs, smelling the smoke that hung in a thick, rippling cloud over their heads. Outside, the lights of Beck melted into the dark fields, the hills were heavy, huddled shapes against the sky. I closed my eyes, wishing hard, trying to will my imaginary city into life, envisioning roads and streetlights suddenly sprouting up through the prairie grass. And tall buildings. And freeways. And people.

It has been almost twenty years since I last saw Beck. We left the town in the summer before eighth grade, after my parents had gone bankrupt, and in the subsequent years we moved through a blur of ugly states—Wyoming, Montana, Panic, Despair—while my parents’ marriage dissolved.

Now we are all scattered. My sister, Debbie, suffered brain damage in a car accident when she was nineteen, out driving with her friends. She now lives in a group home in Denver, where she and the others spend their days making Native American jewelry to sell at truck stops. My brother, Mark, is a physical therapist who lives on a houseboat in Marina del Rey, California. He spends his free time reading books about childhood trauma, and every time I talk to him, he has a series of complaints about our old misery: At the very least, surely I remember the night that my father was going to kill us all with his gun, how he and Debbie and I ran into the junkyard and hid in an old refrigerator box? I think he’s exaggerating, but Mark is always threatening to have me hypnotized so I’ll remember.