The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  “Well,” he’d said after class, when she asked him about it, “I put on my teacher face, and, I don’t know, by some inverse Stanislavskian miracle, I actually feel, for the time being at least, like I love them and want nothing more than to teach them. To be there with them.”

  And this face now, she’d thought: have you put on your father face?

  He was making his escape from the grinning cup holders. She followed him into his study.

  “Dad.”

  “You made it.”

  “Me and Lucas. Sorry. I sort of had to bring him.” Her parents thought Lucas was hopeless and liked him anyway. They found his endless self-glamorizing travails sad and funny. His suffering was his charm, and he knew it.

  “I’m sure that’s not true, but don’t apologize.”

  She closed the study door.

  “A retirement present.” She took out the bag of mushrooms and handed it to him. “Since I can’t afford to buy you a ticket to the Place Beyond Culture. Wherever that is.”

  It had been her father’s cruel joke: “Once you’re old enough to leave home, I’m gone. Some lost culture. Or better yet someplace where there’s no culture at all.”

  The first time she heard this, back in grade school, she’d felt a sudden dread, even though she knew he was just teasing.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she’d said, affecting a tone of weary knowledge. “You guys are staying right here. In this house. Definitely.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere,” her mother had said with a laugh. And she’d felt a second surge of apprehension at the thought that her parents could joke so easily about splitting up.

  He held the bag up to the light. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  “She’s going to know. She always knows when you’re high.”

  “I mean don’t tell your mother it’s from you.”

  “How is she anyway? She wouldn’t answer me when I asked.”

  “She’s as well as can be expected.” He had opened the bag and was inspecting a mushroom.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means she’s fine. More or less. She’s recovering. She gets tired easily. And irritable. Very irritable.”

  “Don’t eat all of them. I was told one is more than enough.”

  “No, no. This is for social purposes. Or I should say communal purposes.”

  Months before, he’d asked her if she could find him magic mushrooms. “It’s no longer the sort of thing you can ask your students to share with you,” he’d said. “That sort of thing is frowned on now.”

  He set the bag on his desk. “I need something to put these in.” He circled the room, past the familiar eyeless stare of his hanging masks, lifting things from the clutter and putting them down. “A bowl. Wooden, preferably. But your mother might be in the kitchen.”

  “What were you doing in here anyway? This is your retirement party. Shouldn’t you be out there celebrating?”

  “Should be, would be, could be. You and Lucas: same as always, I presume?”

  “Yeah. That’s the whole problem. But stop using me as an alibi. An excuse to hide in here. Get out there. Those people, they’re here for you.”

  “I can’t talk to my own daughter?”

  “You can talk to me anytime.” She opened the door.

  “Jesus.”

  “H. Christ,” she finished. His favorite curse. She grabbed him as he started through the door. “And don’t go find Stuart or somebody and just hide in a corner.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m going. Anything to get away from you.”

  She grabbed him again. “And talk to Charlotte. She’s just sitting there by herself.”

  “She’s probably taking mental notes of everything. Research. Can’t you go say hello to her?”

  “I already did. I complimented her on her pirate patch.”

  “It’s not like you do it once and then you’re off the hook. You’re never off the hook. You mingle. Talk to people. Talk to them again.”

  “That’s funny coming from you.”

  “See, you’re the same as me. Exactly like me. That’s not fatherly pride. It’s a criticism. But I don’t accept that it’s just my influence. I refuse to feel guilty about you being antisocial. I always hid my tendencies. I would speak to people, complete strangers, just so you would see it and learn. When you were little I made you—”

  “Dad. I know what you’re doing. Go. Go away. Shoo.”

  She hated hearing him say they were alike. Not only because of the flaws she saw in him. It made her feel assembled. As if everything she’d always considered her character, her own unique self, was really just her parents’ scribbles across a tabula rasa. Or the genuine Karmala, if there was one, buried beneath, unrecoverable . . .

  She left the room, thought of the mushrooms on the desk, and closed the door behind her.

  When she was growing up, her father would sometimes smoke weed in the house with his students when her mother wasn’t around. Once she’d come home from school and nobody was there. She found her father out in the sauna he’d had built in the backyard. He called it his sweat lodge. He and his students were inside. They were talking, but they weren’t making any sense.

  “It’s kind of like truth or dare,” her father explained to her. “Except we’re daring ourselves.”

  “To do what?”

  “To reveal things about ourselves we didn’t know before we said them.”

  “Doesn’t that make it truth or truth?”

  “You want to join us?”

  “No,” she said. “It sounds boring.” Even then—at eight or nine or however old she was—the idea of sitting around revealing things about yourself didn’t strike her as appealing.

  Much later, when she was a college student, she’d reminded her father of that day. “You were all on something, weren’t you? I mean not just weed.”

  “If you and I are remembering the same incident, I’d been teaching my students about the varieties of Native American religious experience and the assistance of psychotropic allies. Allies: what a great Castanedan word. Remember his books? I used to read them to you before bed.”

  “Yeah. Other kids get fairy tales. I got anthropology.”

  “Although as it turned out those books were more fairy tale than anthropology. We didn’t know that then, of course. But the point is . . . What was the point? Ah: peyote buttons. Nobody had any. But one of my students provided the means for us to conduct our own informal pharmacological fieldwork. LSD if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I thought you guys were crazy.”

  “I remember having some kind of peak experience. The sort of genuine sweat-lodge-mystical-journey kind of thing you hope for. I remember having it. I just can’t remember what I learned. Either that or I imagined it all. That’s the problem: all the things you learn along the way, the supposed insights—they’re only good for the moment you’re having them. You can’t save them up and use them later. You look in the bag you’ve been carrying around your whole life and it’s empty.”

  “Wow,” she’d said. “That’s reassuring, Dad.”

  She drifted through the living room. Into the dining room.

  “Karmala. My God. Come here, you.”

  She let herself be hugged. “I see you were talking to Charlotte,” she said.

  “We must pay homage. On bended knee.”

  “What does she think about the tattoos anyway?” Stuart had a Morse code of dots and dashes across his face, part of an initiation ceremony when he was a young ethnologist doing fieldwork with some long-lost tribe or other. The only thing left of them, as far as Karmala knew, was in Stuart’s writings and on his face. “Does she approve?”

  “I’ve never asked but no would be my guess. Not a prudish grandmother kind of thing, probably. I just don�
��t think she ever approved of my going native, as she saw it.”

  “Must be nice about the tattoos though, these days. You don’t stand out anymore.”

  He made a mournful face, dots and dashes shifting. When she was little he’d done it deliberately for her, tricks to ripple the patterns. “You’d think so. But, well, first of all, I liked standing out, truth be told. And maybe I still do stand out, but for the wrong reasons. People think I’m some bizarre old fogey trying desperately to keep up. I might as well have a Mohawk and a safety pin in my nose, or, I don’t know, whatever it is now. Flannel shirt and ponytail.”

  “That would be desperate. That was like five years ago, but yeah. Anyway, I always liked your tattoos.”

  “Thank you. By the twenty-first century everyone will have one, and then where I will be? For your generation, they’ve become an initiation ceremony into what exactly? Enlighten me. Not adulthood, surely. You have other rituals for that.”

  “You’re asking the wrong person. I don’t have one.”

  “Yet.” He started away, a meandering shuffle, drink in hand. Turned. “It will be legally mandated, mark my words.”

  “Resist!” She raised a fist in the air.

  “Ah, Karmala: ever the contrarian.”

  She found another drink. You mingle. Talk to people. Talk again. She tried. She felt like she was impersonating herself. If she were working, she could do it easily. She would be incognito as Karmala, or as the Karmala they all expected her to be. She worked for a consulting firm that provided demographic microcultural analysis for corporations. Basically, she did undercover anthropological fieldwork and reported her findings to companies so they could do a better job selling people things. She never knew what happened to these reports but liked to imagine them safeguarded somewhere, conserved for the future in impenetrable corporate hard drives. She’d infiltrated reading circles, support groups, a cosplay convention for obscure retro anime characters—fanged, emerald-haired, she’d been Wairudo Furawa, interdimensional warrior princess—and, most recently, a meeting of Neo-Luddites convinced the information superhighway would bring about a nightmarish Orwellian future ending in civilization’s demise. (It was one of the Neo-Luddites—this was the nickname she and her coworkers used at the office; the Neo-Luddites didn’t actually call themselves that—who had sold her the mushrooms.) The hardest part of her job was not pretending to be someone else. That was the part she liked. The hardest part was the preparatory research. You didn’t just walk into a closed microculture and wing it. She’d given herself away only once, her first time in the field, at a national Pi Beta Phi alumnae gathering. Not because she hadn’t sufficiently prepped, but because she was too nosy, too overtly curious with her informants.

  She wasn’t sure if she was ashamed to tell her parents because of the whole anthropological-methods-for-evil-corporate-ends part, or because, career-wise, even after studying theater in college and communication theory in graduate school, she’d ended up following in her father’s footsteps in spite of herself . . .

  And where did those footsteps lead? To a lifetime spent trying to capture and hold fragile things before they collapsed. She saw in her mind Stuart’s loosening net of dots and dashes, its code dimming across his features into indecipherability.

  What she really needed, Karmala decided, was a break from this party’s gallery of ruined faces. This sad trip down memory lane. She could hide in her room for a while. That was one place that hadn’t changed since childhood. Her parents had protected it from ruin or practical utility by keeping it exactly as it had been the day she left home.

  She went upstairs. If she did get a tattoo: what symbol to summarize her life? Her personality? Not to mention the question of where. Reveal or conceal or peek-a-boo?

  Hushed voices argued on the other side of her bedroom door. She put her ear against it: a man and woman were debating the merits of one of Charlotte’s early books. They both hated it, for different reasons. She opened the door, preparing indignation at these trespassers into her private space. They stared from the bed, her father’s graduate students most likely, clothes scattered across her Shanna the She-Devil blanket. After the shock left their faces they replaced it with their own look of indignation.

  “If you want to criticize Charlotte, why don’t you go tell her all about it? I’m sure she’d love to hear your opinions.” She closed the door, opened it. “And get off my bed.”

  She went downstairs.

  A man came out of the study with one of her father’s masks on.

  “Dad. Should I be concerned?”

  He said something, muffled by the mask. He took it off.

  “Only if you want to be. There’s always cause for concern.”

  “Okay.”

  “The looming darkness.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Ultimately we choose how to face the terror. Or if we face it.”

  “Words of wisdom. I shouldn’t have given you the mushrooms.”

  “I haven’t even taken any. Well, one. Half of one. No effect. I’m still waiting. I think we all are. There’s a communal bowl in the study if you want to partake. What was I talking about?”

  “Terror. You can put the mask back on.”

  “That’s the first time you’ve said that. You were always screaming for me to take it off.”

  “Because it was terrifying. Since we’re talking about terror. Chasing a five-year-old around the house with a mask on.”

  “It was fun. It was supposed to be fun. Kids love masks. Halloween. Or Setsubun. The Japanese father, pursuing his children in a demon mask until they throw beans at him and he’s cast out. Then the home is purified.”

  “You never gave me any beans. Just ran around the house in a mask without any clothes on.”

  “You’re conflating two memories. I prefer to sleep naked. For which I feel no need to apologize. I get up to use the bathroom. Perfectly natural. If we’d all been born somewhere else . . . I had hoped I could save you from cultural brainwashing, but I should have known better. Don’t tell Charlotte I called it brainwashing. It goes against everything she taught me. Where is she anyway? I don’t see her in her corner.”

  “Maybe she found the mushrooms.”

  Over on the couch, Lucas was with the POW again. Listening, puffy-eyed, as the old man talked. Not just puffy-eyed; Lucas was crying, she realized. Crying. For all his moping, she’d never seen him cry before. She felt outraged, as if at a betrayal . . .

  Her father was gone.

  She wandered from room to room. She had the feeling that she was looking for something important, but couldn’t remember what it was. She stopped, leaned against a wall.

  What right did Lucas have, crying like that? Showing a face like that?

  She drank from her cup. She wondered what the POW was saying to Lucas. It occurred to her that she’d never really asked her father questions about his life. He’d told her what he wanted to. And until now that had been enough . . . Stuart, her father, the prisoner of war: in twenty years that generation would be gone. A vanishing breed . . . Gone: she was seized by a panic to act. To save her father from extinction. Why hadn’t she tried harder to find out more about him? Still, it wasn’t too late. She could conduct an interview, her father as her informant. Create an oral history of his hidden life, carried out clinically, like the reports she prepared at work. Everything important preserved there. But she already knew she wouldn’t do it. She would end up getting distracted by something. She would forget.

  She looked around, trying again to spot the transformed faces of people she’d known once, but didn’t recognize anyone now. A vanishing breed. She saw her father vanishing into the Place Beyond Culture, which she pictured as vaguely heavenly, soft-sided and featureless like a vast padded room. Although maybe she was picturing that Catholic place: Purgatory. Or was it Limbo? Because what features could the
re be, after all, in a Place Beyond Culture?

  But if she was going to worry about one of her parents vanishing into Limbo, shouldn’t she be worried about her mother? And thinking this, she did worry, again, a feeling that always felt more like guilt. Guilt for insufficient worrying . . .

  Her mother’s hors d’oeuvres. That was what she’d been looking for. She went hunting. She was determined to find them. On an end table, she finally located a tray full of the stuffed olives. She picked it up, carrying it with her, plopping one olive in her mouth at a time as she walked. She really had no idea what the pink paste was. All these people . . . She walked and plopped, two at a time, three, filling her mouth. All these people here to honor her father.

  She set the empty tray on a chair. She was ready to go, once she found Lucas, missing from the couch now, along with the prisoner of war. She had done her duty by this point. Stayed long enough. She would tell her parents she had work to do over the weekend and needed to head back to the city. Which was true: she had research for her next undercover assignment. Plus she didn’t want to stay too long, or the acquaintances and strangers would all leave and only her parents and their close friends would be left. It could all get awkward. And then her parents would insist she and Lucas stay overnight. She thought of the Charlotte-debating grad students fucking on her Shanna the She-Devil blanket. So there was that too. All good reasons to go.

  Her mother was in a dining room chair, watching the guests. “Have you seen Dad?” Karmala asked, trying to decide if her mother looked more tired than usual.

  “I haven’t seen him, or anyone else I know. Everyone’s gone missing. Who are these people in my house?”

  “Can you say goodbye for me? And congratulations and everything. We’ve got to go.”

  “You can say it yourself. You know how he’d feel if you just left without a proper goodbye. He’s here somewhere.”