by Jamie Metzl
Don’t I know it?
I remain silent. It’s not worth making it again clear that Toni’s the one who left me.
“Dikran, are you there?” she says.
I’m thirty-nine years old, but I still cringe at the sound of my real name. To this day, it brings haunting memories of being teased on the bus to my new school. Dikran had been a perfectly respectable name at the Chamlian Armenian School. Two days of being called Dickwad after I transferred to the Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Glendale had inspired my supersonic switch to the English version of the name, Richard.
“Can I call you back, Mother?”
“Of course, janum,” she says in her motherly tone. “You know I say these things because I love you and don’t want you to be alone.”
“I know, Mom,” I say as I push open the door and begin dragging my bags of garbage down the stairs. “I’ll call you.”
The words have hardly left my mouth and I already feel guilty that I probably won’t.
4
The earth, by most accounts, has existed for four and a half billion years. Life emerged more than three billion years ago. Humans, at least in our current form, have been around for two hundred and fifty thousand years. What, I can’t help but constantly wonder, do any of us leave behind?
We have babies and pass on our DNA, capture our thoughts in words or images, or simply accrue nonbiodegradable junk that outlasts us. None of these feel capable of shaking the sense of absolute impermanence that haunts me.
Maybe I should have learned when we lost Astrid that even the most precious things can be lost for no discernible reason. Perhaps had we known who killed my baby sister in the senseless drive-by shooting seventeen years ago, I could have more peace.
I remind myself every day over and over that I was self-indulgently hanging around post-graduation Davis the day Astrid was killed, that if I’d have been home the flow of that day would have been altered, the butterfly effect would have guided the stray bullet elsewhere. I remind myself that I knew and my parents didn’t that Astrid was getting herself into trouble, that she was hiding the track marks on her arms, hanging out in parts of town where she should never have been and with people with whom she should never have associated.
Undoing the tie on the first bag of garbage before me, I feel the sad contradiction that we live our lives moving forward but only begin to understand them in retrospect, the urge to do for MaryLee what I was never able to do for Astrid. I begin the process of excavating a life to illuminate a death.
A part of me wants to find the syringe I’m looking for, to complete this strange parallel I’ve drawn in my head between Astrid and MaryLee. Another part wants to leave MaryLee as innocent and at peace as she seemed when I first saw her earlier today.
I’m sure there are official procedures, but I’m too inexperienced to know them. My process is more intuitive. I spread a large sheet of white butcher paper over my basement table and draw grid lines across both axes, dividing the sheet into twelve squares. I number each, put on my rubber gloves, open the first garbage bag, and place each individual item into one of the squares. No syringe.
My analysis begins. The Healthy Choice lemon chicken with pasta in square two suggests someone watching what she eats but not fully informed about how to do it. Could be. But the chopsticks in square three don’t feel completely like Springfield, and the pink woman’s sock in square seven looks a little small for a healthy sized Caucasian like MaryLee. The crumpled turkey bag from Cosentino’s market also doesn’t seem to jibe with the methodical feel of MaryLee’s apartment. Her world had the peace of the water lilies; this garbage does not.
The receipt from 7-Eleven in square ten itemizes the gallon of two percent milk and a dozen eggs, and, more importantly, lists the last four digits of the credit card used to pay. I call out the numbers to my u.D, put the garbage into numbered Ziploc bags, and place them in my basement refrigerator.
As I unpack and spread the contents of the second garbage bag, I still don’t see a syringe but begin to sense a story. The stem of iceberg lettuce with the leaves cut, not ripped, the sliced-off white bread crusts, and the VitaMix cereal in the first few of my squares give me the impression I’m looking at a careful female’s garbage. The recycled paper coffee cup in square seven conjures someone who progresses slowly in her drinking. I lift the lid and inhale the scent of hazelnut. The dental floss, methodically squeezed toothpaste container, and spent jar of Radiant Light face cream in my next few squares suggest to me the kind of meticulousness I associate with MaryLee’s tidy apartment.
My pulse quickens as I examine the coffee receipt for $2.42 from the UMKC Hospital Hill Café in square eleven, dated October 16, 2023—yesterday—at 3:37 p.m. MaryLee might not have been the only UMKC student in her building, but a link to UMKC certainly narrows the field. Square twelve holds an empty envelope from Softbank Mobile and a receipt from Corner Drug from yesterday at 4:41 p.m. listing items costing $10.95, $24.95, and $1.65 each. I wish the receipt had come from a chain like Rite Aid or Nepstar that would have itemized, but it is what it is. I dictate the figures to my u.D.
Of course, I realize, it would be far easier to just do a DNA test on the coffee cup rather than go through my highly unscientific process of weighing my prejudices and preconceptions. If I had DNA processing equipment in my basement, I surely would be following that tried-and-true approach. But the police certainly aren’t going to tell me what they find any time soon, so I have to do my own work with the means at my disposal.
I come back up to my kitchen to think. No syringe, no other evidence of Blue Magic, but still the basic problem of a dead girl. I imagine Martina would probably now want me to drop the story and move on to something “juicier.” But juicy or not, I somehow can’t seem to get the image of MaryLee Stock lying dead on the floor out of my mind. I open the file Joseph has sent me.
Nothing jumps out from his notes on MaryLee’s parents, Carol and Greg Stock. Two working people raising their adopted daughter until he passes away and she goes to work for the YMCA. They, and then she, paid their taxes on time every year, paid their monthly dues at the YMCA without fail, and, like most of us, left only a minimal public trail.
The photos, however, haunt me. The first is of the young, earnest couple in the wedding announcement from the Springfield News-Leader. The next, from the same paper, shows the two of them, slightly older, holding a young girl between them. The family looks slightly stiff, as if being posed in a shopping mall photo studio. The grip of each parent’s hand on MaryLee’s shoulder brings to mind jumper cables connected to a car battery. The final photo, from the Springfield YMCA newsletter, shows a slightly older but more frightened Carol Stock, alone, announcing she has joined the YMCA accounting office.
The satellite photograph of the Stock house in Springfield is just what I’d have expected, compact and rectangular with a small yard.
I don’t know how to read the adoption papers, but nothing jumps out. I uSearch the agency, All Blessings International, and look through their website thinking of the poor woman in Romania giving up her child for adoption, not knowing her baby would one day wind up dead on the floor of a Kansas City apartment.
The next three documents are from the UMKC—pretty much Bs across the board with a few As sprinkled in. This semester she’d been taking Organic Chemistry II, Organic Chemistry lab, Mammalian Physiology lecture and lab, and Introduction to Pharmacy.
The Monday schedule shows that Organic Chemistry lab, her last class of the day, ended at 3:30. Hypothesizing for a moment the second garbage bag is hers, the 3:37 hazelnut coffee fits this timetable perfectly. I still don’t know what she would have done between 3:37 and 4:41, when she, or whoever, made purchases at Corner Drug. If she’d sat and drank her coffee during that time, how would the coffee cup wind up in her garbage at home? Even a patient coffee drinker would hardly nurse a coffee for more than an hour. I always drink mine in about three minutes. Mammalian Physiology lab is scheduled for
tomorrow from 8:30 to 10:30, with Intro to Pharmacy starting at 11.
I tap my u.D. “Call Joseph.”
“Boss?” he answers.
“I need the contact information for Carol Stock. Find out if there are surveillance cameras in the Whitehill apartment complex, the UMKC Pharmacy School coffee shop, and the Corner Drug on Forty-Eighth and Troost. See if you can find MaryLee’s Visa number.”
I hear Joseph gasp. Even he knows that credit numbers are sacrosanct in our world of near-zero privacy. I reframe.
“See if you can determine if the last four digits of her Visa Digital Authorization Code were”—I pause to look at the numbers on my u.D—“3927. I’m going to UMKC tomorrow, so see what you can tell me about her classmates. Also, try to find out if MaryLee had blood drawn in the last couple of days at the UKMC clinic.”
I start to feel guilty about overloading poor Joseph. “And Joseph.”
“Boss?”
“Feel free to work from home on this one.” I must not be feeling that guilty.
I wait for Joseph to respond until it becomes aggressively clear he has no intention to.
“Thank you, Joseph.”
“Yeah,” he says as the call drops.
My freezerator’s door display springs to life as I approach.
I turned off the digital avatar four months ago after the cheap thrill of the Manga vixen I programmed to call me “master” had worn off. Voiceless and faceless, my Haier Jeeves 2300 now struggles to communicate with me with text display, the one tool left at its disposal. ALERT: YOUR DAIRYLAND MILK IS TWELVE DAYS PAST EXPIRATION. THE SIX EGGS IN THE DOOR COMPARTMENT ARE SEVENTEEN DAYS PAST EXPIRATION AND SHOULD NOT BE EATEN. KIRKLAND CARROTS ARE SHOWING SIGNS OF DECAY AND SHOULD BE DISCARDED. The door becomes clear as I touch it, revealing among other things the carrots that even a starving rabbit would be smart to avoid. It’s easier to work around these items, so I go for the manual option and pop a couple of frozen pitas into the toaster, take my Costco hummus from the fridge, toss a frozen chicken breast on a plate, cover it with Gates Bar-B-Q sauce, and stick it in the microwave for seven minutes.
The exchange with my freezerator reminds me, like so many other things these days, of Toni.
She’d harassed me when we first started dating about all the expired items in my kitchen, rejecting my stated philosophy that expiration dates were mostly a scam by food companies to get consumers to buy more. Her early-morning raid on my kitchen the third night she’d stayed over had made my internal commitment meter go off, but I never missed the items she’d thrown away. Perhaps it was poetic justice that my old refrigerator-freezer had broken down two weeks after we split and I replaced it with a new model freezerator that adopted Toni’s crusade against expired food where she left off.
Of course, there’s a lot more to what I’m feeling than that.
It’s funny how people end up residing in each other—knocking on the door at first, staying a few days, sometimes, metaphorically at least, moving in. Then they move out and the internal space they once occupied leaves a void, like a paper cutout, only the angels holding hands are gone and the cut-up paper is the only evidence they once were.
Antonia Hewitt, Toni, had been a great partner, girlfriend, Chiquita banana—I was never sure of the right word—for the eight months we dated. I loved the silly hats she sometimes wore, the special place she had in her heart for underdogs. I loved the way her mouth would go crooked when she was really laughing. I loved waking up in the middle of the night and just feeling her there.
But amazing as she was, is, I was never able to completely give myself over to the relationship. As much as I tried, I could never fully accept that she took life as she experienced it in her day-to-day and didn’t see its ultimate goal as challenging every concept and pushing herself in a lifelong process of reinvention. I’d feared our growth trajectories would diverge and as my fears accrued I became more cautious.
Toni’s frustration, of course, grew with my caution. I answered her questions as honestly as I could muster but couldn’t counter the sadness that grew in her with each difficult conversation. I didn’t want her to go but couldn’t muster enough of a response when she told me she was leaving. Part of me sensed it was the right answer.
“You’ll see,” she’d said angrily then, “you think you need someone flying next to you but what you really need is ground control.”
Would I have cared she didn’t see life morphing like a spore but instead as a prix fixe meal to be slowly enjoyed if we’d had two or three kids and all the practicalities that would have entailed? Was I just hiding behind abstract principles to avoid embracing the real life staring me in the face? I didn’t know, and not knowing itself became my problem.
I tap my u.D. “Call Toni,” I say.
My finger races to the red icon before I hear the first ring.
5
My 6:30 a.m. u.D alarm feels merely inspirational.
I’d hoped to go to the gym but end up grumbling “snooze” six times and barely making it out of bed. I settle for a few quick sit-ups and push-ups before sauntering to the shower.
Maybe my Armenian athletic role models were not quite inspiring enough, I think, as I wander down to the kitchen and pour myself some VitaCharms. Sure everyone’s heard of Andre Agassi, Agassian as he’s lovingly called in Glendale, but you know you’re in trouble when Garry Kasparov and the Maleeva sisters top the pantheon of your group’s sports heroes.
I put Joseph on my dashboard screen as I head to UMKC pharmacy school.
“Boss,” he says, “can’t find any record of MaryLee Stock going to the university clinic or giving blood, but I’m still looking. Also, a reservation has been made in the name of Carol Stock at the downtown Marriott. They have room 825 reserved for her. She’s expected to check in today.”
“How do you get this shit, Joseph?” I mumble to myself, not really wanting to know. “And who should I look for at the pharmacy school?”
“Hold on a second, boss,” he says, “I’m calling up the names of her lab mates now.” He begins reading from the screen. “Anil Sharma, third year medical student, born Creve Coeur, Missouri. Min Zhao, Chinese national, from Wuhan, China. Undergraduate degree from Lanxiang University, member of UMKC Chinese Students Association, second year pharmacy student. Neary Savang, Cambodian-American, born in Kansas City, Missouri, valedictorian of Don Bosco High School in Kansas City, second year pharmacy student. Joyce Rodriguez, born Juarez, Mexico, attended college and high school in Tucson, Arizona, American citizen.”
“Got it. Thanks.” I tap out.
America has fallen from its former heights in so many areas as China has surged, but for a local school that once educated Missourians and now also trains third-tier elites from around the world, UMKC is more than adequate.
I don’t know what to expect as I enter the uninspired yellow faux-brick building. The police still haven’t officially released the name, but it somehow feels that news of MaryLee’s death must have begun to circulate. The school is functioning, but something seems amiss.
I walk up one flight of stairs looking for room 205. It is 10:18 and Mammalian Physiology is scheduled to end in twelve minutes. I wait outside the door feeling slightly nauseous from the wafting smell of formaldehyde.
Perhaps time just moves more slowly in places that feel like high school, but the twelve minutes seem like an eternity. As the first students start trickling out, I realize I don’t have any pictures of the people I’m looking for. I ask a young Asian woman with a head scarf if she can tell me who Anil Sharma is. She points tentatively. The group of four is packing up.
“Are you Anil?” I ask.
He looks up cautiously. The three women around him fit my perception of what a Min, Neary, and a J-Rod ought to look like.
“I’m Rich Azadian from the Kansas City Star.”
He doesn’t respond.
“I want to ask you about MaryLee Stock,” I say quietly.
The group freeze
s.
“What do you know about MaryLee?” he asks suspiciously.
The woman I believe to be Joyce begins to tear.
“What do you know?” he asks, this time more aggressively.
I’m not sure what to say. I need to confirm their obvious suspicions that something’s wrong before I can ask them about MaryLee, but something seems inappropriate about doing so. I shake my head slightly from side to side. We stand facing each other in silence.
“Excuse me!” I hear a voice with authority coming from across the room. “Who are you?”
“Rich Azadian from the Kansas City Star.”
“I am Dr. Marc Solomon. What the hell are you doing in my lab?”
“I’m asking some questions.”
“On UMKC property? Have you cleared this with school administration?”
“No,” I say, perturbed.
“Then get the hell out,” he says in a trembling voice. “You have no right to be here. Get out. Now.”
I’m fighting for this story but know that Solomon is right. If the police haven’t yet released the name, then the university can’t make an official announcement. If the university can’t make an announcement, they can’t start grief counseling. I’ve clearly disrupted the process.
“Now,” Solomon says, firmly placing his hand on my back and aggressively ushering me out of the classroom, down the stairs, and out the front door. I don’t resist. I walk to my car, not sure exactly how to proceed.
“Mr. Azadian.”
I turn to see the woman I think is Neary running toward me. She is short and compact. Her waist-length black hair trails behind her like a blowing scarf.
“I’m Neary Savang. MaryLee was my friend. Is she dead?”
I’m a little surprised by the directness of her question, but her earnest tone and pleading eyes force an honest response.
“I’m so sorry,” I say softly.
Neary’s shoulders collapse inward.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeat pathetically.
I stand awkwardly as she struggles to pull herself together.
