Individualists: What think you?
Despite the shock of reading my father’s ungenerous, if true (true?) analysis of me and my personality disorders, I am curious what his online friends would suggest for me. (Though I am secretly relieved that he finds my brother’s disorders not so horribly disorderly after all.)
Indeed, the fellow Individualists have some ideas. So many ideas.
One thinks I should join the military—the Marines, to be exact. Another thinks military service is an awful idea because it is wrong for the country to maintain tax-financed armed forces. “Only private militias should exist in these United States.” Yet another thinks that I should go to college if and only if I get into a very “prestigious” school, in order to “enhance the signaling effect of the diploma.” My favorite Individualist tells my dad that perhaps he should consider setting up a trust for me, so that in case none of the other options come to fruition, at least I will have lifelong dining options beyond the pet food aisle. A final emailer, my second favorite, has a son she thinks I might like. Twenty-five years old, about to enter medical school. She’s attached a photo. Not bad …
The doorbell rings. I heave myself up from the desk and go downstairs, where Pete is standing in the doorway with P.F. Greenawalt.
Pete’s back is to me, so I can’t see his face. I can see P.F.’s, and he has a pretty intense look on it. He’s huffing a little and seems a bit out of breath. I suppose he’s an intense guy, anyway, in what anyone would understand to be a pretty intense situation. He’s dressed sort of like Dad-going-to-work. (Which he used to do, once upon a time, looking both frumpy and disheveled, just like I often do.)
It’s not warm, but there’s a line of sweat at his hairline. He’s wearing a dirty wool coat that looks like it’s about three sizes too big. His khakis are worn on the edges. His metal glasses are smudged and quite a bit askew. Taking P.F.’s somewhat malodorous coat and draping it over a chair, I wonder how all this differs from his usual weekend afternoon.
Pete stares at him, an intense look on his own face (“pinched” is the best word) as P.F. and I head back into my Dad’s office. I ponder the pinched-ness for a moment. Pete usually looks friendly and sleepy, not anxiously constipated. Is something wrong? Is he upset with me? Is he actually constipated? (Hey, at least we’d have that in common!) But then I remember why P.F. is here: the cigarette in the toilet bowl and who may have left it there.
“I was going to call the police, but I didn’t,” I tell him.
“Good, good …” Looking up, P.F. must realize that this is anything but double-good. “I mean, good that you didn’t call the police. If the authorities become involved, it will compromise everything.”
“You mean put my father in greater danger?” I ask.
P.F. blinks by way of response. He sort of reminds me of Ben right now. I kind of want to punch him, too, which is how I sometimes feel about Ben.
“Is anything missing from the house?” he asks after a moment, perhaps noticing what one might interpret as an unusual amount of chaos.
“Not that I can see. I assume that they’ve come looking for the J-File. I assume that they dropped the cigarette in the toilet to scare the shit out of us. Since I don’t know what a J-File looks like or where it is, I can’t say if it’s missing. I assume it would be in here.” I gesture around the cramped, musty office that—when not ransacked by a panicking Zoey—is organized in a way that makes sense to exactly one person. “If it were ever here at all,” I add.
I consider telling P.F. about ghost Mom, about how she told Ben that the J-File was destroyed, but I’m worried that he’ll stop helping us. We need him. I think we need him.
“I understand,” says P.F. His lips turn downward as he surveys the room, wandering from spot to spot to spot. He rubs his finger along, but not—and I monitor this closely—into a nostril. Then he turns to his eyebrows, smoothing them, then fixing his glasses. He pokes an index finger into one ear, circling it, wiping the finger on his pants, then the same routine with the other ear. P.F. is gross. I did not know you could be this kind of gross and work in politics. You must be really good at your job, I think.
Tall stacks of paper teeter precariously on whatever flat space is available. Books are strewn across the room (thanks mostly to me); so are piles of dust and dog hair. Roscoe’s cushioned bed still sits next to Dad’s desk; there’s still a circle of chewed-on bones and rawhides, along with Roscoe’s favorite squeaky toy: a stuffed dreidel that Mom got him as a Hanukkah present last year. (Yes, those tops you use during Hanukkah to play the world’s most boring holiday gambling game; the winner receives the world’s least delicious chocolates.) It’s apparently a huge hit with the canine crowd. Roscoe carried that stuffed, spit-soaked top around with him from room to room, shoving it at us, trying to make us throw it for him, even way past the holiday’s eight nights. He’d sometimes take it out on walks, holding it in his mouth as we wandered the cobbled streets of our not-so-new neighborhood. The more worldly neighbors would wish him a Happy Festival of Lights and ask what the Hanukkah fairies left for him under the menorah. He must miss all that, I think. If he’s still alive.
Shit. SHIT.
“Do you see anything … significant, or … promising in here?” I ask P.F. I bend down to pick up the dry stuffed dreidel and, hugging it to me, I sit on the dog bed. It’s very comfortable. It’s made of some special NASA-approved foam, according to the tag. I used to read here sometimes while snuggling with Roscoe, while Dad did what dads do at his computer. I guess my dad was doing dangerous, diabolical things. I had no idea that while Roscoe was snoring and I was digging into Wuthering Heights he was … what? I still don’t know. Doing things that led to this, I guess.
P.F. blinks again. He opens drawers. Pulls out pens, checkbooks, delivery menus. Birth certificates and passports from another drawer. He flips through the passports, one by one. Mine, with a really, really gawky photo, but otherwise nearly empty—I’ve been to Paris, once, with my parents when I was fourteen. Ben’s has a better photo but just the one stamp in it, too. My parents’ are filled with colorful pages. Jacob Trask, born in Philadelphia, dorky and pink-cheeked but not hideously un-photogenic. Stamps from Australia. Bali. Some other warm places with pretty beaches. Mom’s passport, which is much the same, except she was born in Rhode Island and possessed a flattering photo in which she wears a black linen V-neck and smiles warmly, her dark hair in long, loose waves.
“Sad,” P.F. says, examining the photo a little longer. He looks up at me and wins me over with three words. “You look alike.”
“Can I see?”
P.F. hands me the passports. I glance through them, page by page, trying to remember our lives, their lives. My parents used to go on vacation a couple of times a year together—alone, just the two of them—when we lived in Rhode Island. That Hyannis vacation, come to think of it, was one of the few we ever took as a family. They would alternate between stupid, boring beach resorts and then more exotic beach resorts. I always wondered why they didn’t include us. Were we that much of a hassle? (“Sixty four percent of parents in the United States vacation without their children,” Ben once told me, ending another potential brother-sister heart-to-heart.)
Not that I wanted to go, either. Dad said he hated the more exotic places because he always ended up feeling like an “Orientalist” while he was there. He hated “exoticizing” the “local poverty and squalor.” Mom said you could get a good bargain in that sort of a place. Their ridiculous commentary was enough to make me grateful to be left out.
Besides, Ben and I would always stay with Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa. We’d go to our own decidedly unexotic Rhode Island beaches for clam cakes. Not to be underestimated: this is a Rhode Island specialty, with bits of clam fried into big balls of dough. We’d go to the movies. Movies without subtitles, even. We’d have fun.
That stopped when we moved to Alexandria. And Mom died.
I push myself from the dog bed and put the passpo
rts back in the drawer. P.F. stays at the desk and presses a button on Dad’s computer. After a good long time, it chugs back to the blue screen again. I type the password, trying not to let P.F. see what it is, both to maintain the slightest bit of privacy and also because it just seems like an embarrassing window into our family quirks.
“You going to marry the med student?” he asks me.
I almost laugh. “I’ll let you know.”
“This is going to turn out okay,” he says. He reaches out. I worry that he is going to place his hand on my arm—ew, snot and earwax!—but he doesn’t. He just stretches and adds, as I’ve heard from someone else who doesn’t seem in a position to make these assurances: “I promise. Listen, Zoey, I really promise. If we work together, it will be okay.”
P.F. asks to look over the rest of the house. I trail him from room to room to room to room. Pretty much just the four rooms. We only have three bedrooms upstairs, and we skip Ben’s because he’s still asleep. Downstairs, there’s the combo living room/den/kitchen and Dad’s already-pored-over office. As P.F. peers bloodlessly into each space once inhabited by our fractured family—now just with Pete on the couch, reading some dusty book, looking up from time to time with a somewhat lost, somewhat impatient expression on that lovely, clear-skinned face, the ukulele again sitting in his lap—I recollect slivers of memories of what our family did here:
In front of the stove, Dad, exasperated, said to me that I had to do my homework if I wanted a hope of going to Berkeley. Then he made me practice tying fishing knots for an hour as punishment for getting a C on a calculus test.
In the den, Mom, who herself was no snazzy dancer, tried to teach my graceless brother how to do the box step. He refused. Then she danced with Roscoe. Then she danced with my dad. She tried to get me to dance with her, but I stormed off, angry about something; I don’t even remember what. It may have had to do with being picked well after our dog.
In the living room, Dad and I fought about me not wanting to go see Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Kennedy Center.
“I thought Wagner was a Nazi,” I said at the time.
“This is a monumental work,” Dad argued.
“Why can’t we go to the Civil War-themed restaurant if our principles are that flexible?”
“Because hamburgers do not qualify as an individual and monumental work,” Dad replied. “This does. And it’s about Thor. You have to love an opera that’s about Thor.”
But in fact you do not have to love an opera that’s about Thor. It was long and boring. And, as I later learned on the Internet, anti-Semitic. And I wanted a hamburger.
Still, there are not so many memories here. We haven’t lived in the house for even a year, and Mom’s been gone for a lot of it. Which leaves those two awful questions.
Is Dad a killer? Is Dad alive?
What the hell is going on here?
P.F. seems discouraged. “Is Ben awake now?” he says, looking at his watch. “It’s past eleven. He should be up.” He starts heading back to the stairs. I follow him, feeling anxious again. Pete comes up behind me. He puts his hand on my back.
“I’m here,” he says.
“Stay downstairs,” I respond without thinking.
A flash of some unpleasant emotion—hurt or anger or confusion—appears on his face, and then is gone. “Okay,” he says quietly, turning around.
When I reach the top of the stairs, P.F. is knocking on my brother’s door. He opens without waiting for a response.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“C’mon, Zoey,” P.F. says back. “Let’s be partners here.”
Ben is still in bed. But when P.F. gets into the room, he lurches upright, tossing his Star Wars comforter aside. He reaches immediately for that black-and-white notebook. He clutches it to his Star Wars pajama-ed chest. He needs new pajamas. These are far too small and far too wrong for a teenager. Does he even need pajamas at all?
“Get out,” Ben says in a low voice.
My brother’s voice is getting deeper. He will be a man at some point. If Dad were more conscientious, and believed in spiritual things, or wanted to be part of any kind of community and/or tradition, Ben would have been bar mitzvahed. In which case he would have gotten bar mitzvah money. In which case we’d have some money to keep us rich in things like, say, self-esteem. Or more practically, new clothes. Or groceries, which we are beginning to run low on. Or taxis, which we are coming to need more of.
“P.F. Greenawalt here is going to look around your room,” I tell Ben in a gentle voice, “to see if the J-File is here. Okay?”
“No,” Ben says. “I told you what Mom said.”
“But P.F. wants to see if it’s here,” I repeat, trying to give Ben a look to tell him to shut the fuck up about the destruction of the J-File and that he should perhaps cooperate so we can try to get Dad back. But Ben isn’t so hot at reading facial expressions. “P.F. wants to see for himself.”
“I don’t want him in here,” my brother says. His voice is loud now. “Get out!”
I whirl to P.F. and see that Pete has joined us in the doorway.
“Everything okay in here?” Pete asks, those light eyes looking very dark, locked on P.F.’s face.
P.F. bristles. His sweaty brow is creased. We have a standoff. Wonderful.
In the meantime, Ben flips his notebook onto his mattress, opens to a blank page, and starts to write. I can see his loopy scrawl: the initials W.L. I can’t make out the street address he’s putting down, but I see it’s in San Francisco. He puts down some dates, which I also can’t make up, then looks up at me.
“These dates coincide with Mom and Dad’s trip to San Francisco,” he says.
P.F. and Pete are still glaring at each other.
“I have to get one more thing into the notebook,” Ben says, flipping to the next page. It occurs to me that his too-tight and probably age-inappropriate pajamas haven’t been washed in a month.
The three of us tiptoe forward. None of us breathe. We watch my brother write:
M.L., 19 Riverside Road, Missoula, Montana, 2/5/1997
P.F. turns his stare to me. The color seems to have drained from his face.
“Why is he doing this?” he asks in a stingily quiet way. “I mean … where is he getting this information?”
Oh, how to respond?
“Ben is having some … I dunno. Some delusions, I guess,” I begin. “He thinks that Mom is …” I stop. These are words I never, ever, ever thought I’d utter to a nose-wiping Political Consultant—a stranger who is hanging around the house trying to figure out who is leaving cigarette butts in our toilet. Jesus. But he could help us. And we are running out of time. And are bereft of ideas. “He thinks Mom is telling him things that he should write in a notebook. Telling him those things while he’s sleeping.” I take in a deep breath. “She told him that the J-File was destroyed.”
We’re quiet.
Ben closes the book but doesn’t look up.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask P.F.
“No,” he says, without surprise or shock. I might as well have asked him if he liked Wagner. He seems to be reacting very carefully, deliberately. He runs his left index finger along his left nostril again, ever so slowly, and stops. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Me neither,” I say.
I scratch my nose. Watching P.F. Greenawalt’s various gross tics are making me feel itchy myself. They’re like a virus spreading among those who are too sensitive to social cues. After what feels like a very long time, Ben lifts his head. He seems puzzled that Pete is there.
“I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” Pete says. I’m not sure if he’s talking to Ben or to me. I hope both.
“May I?” P.F. asks Ben, once Pete is gone. Then he asks again, cajoling, wheedling, transparently trying to charm. “Please, fella? I think I recognize some of what you’re writing. I am just trying to help your father. It may seem impossible … Hell, it seems impossible even to little old me. But this
notebook may help me help your dad.”
I’m not sure if I want Ben to give over the notebook or not. This P.F, he’s cooking eggs and telling us about his car-buying philosophy one second; the next, he’s promising to save our father, our goddamned father. Who might have killed people. Who might be responsible for Mom’s death. Who might not have killed people and might not be responsible for Mom’s death. Me, Dad’s once-acolyte … I still can’t get myself to imagine what Dad might or might not have done. I want an authority figure here to help me know what to think.
Maybe Ben, independent Ben, does, too. Because he does something I never would have expected: he hands P.F. the dingy little notebook.
And now P.F. is all business. He flips through the pages, each with its initials, its addresses, its dates written out.
A smile breaks on his face. He very nearly looks angelic, even with that gleam of oil across his forehead.
“I was wrong,” he says. “Ghosts might exist after all.”
DO GHOSTS HAVE HAIR SALONS?
Chapter Nine
So, kooky thing here: it turns out that the notes my brother has been writing down based on what our dead mother tells him in his dreams are what constitute a J-File. Or maybe they represent the essence of a J-File. Or maybe they are the J-File. P.F. won’t confirm or deny, other than acknowledge that this is what everyone’s been looking for, more or freaking less.
Right here. Right in Ben’s stupid, mystical, incomprehensible, sad notebook.
“Ben, this is important,” P.F. says. “How are you really getting this information?”
“My brother is constitutionally incapable of lying,” I cut in. I sit next to Ben on the bed. He stiffens. In my eagerness to be protective, I’ve gotten too close again.
“Did your father tell you to write this down?” P.F. asks. “Did you hear your parents talking?”
Ben, apparently having resigned himself to a full confession, shakes his head. “Sometimes at night my mother comes to me in my dreams. She tells me what to write down. She says it is important information.”
Save the Enemy Page 9
