“Cool.” He nodded toward the movie. “I’ve been waiting for this scene. You’ll love it. It’s bonkers.”
There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that’s been rumbling around inside me ever since I first read it, and part of it goes, “Blown from the dark hill hither to my door Three flakes, then four Arrive, then many more.” You can count the first three flakes, and the fourth. Then language fails, and you have to settle in and try to survive the blizzard.
So it was with the tightening spiral of my thoughts: I thought about his bacteria being inside of me. I thought about the probability that some percentage of said bacteria were malicious. I thought about the E. coli and campylobacter and Clostridium difficile that were very likely an ongoing part of Davis’s microbiota.
A fourth thought arrived. Then many more.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I emerged from the basement to find the dying light of the day shining through the windows, making the white walls look a little pink. Noah, playing a video game on the couch, said, “Aza?”
I spun around and entered a bathroom. I washed my face, stared at myself in the mirror, watching myself breathe. I watched myself for a long time, trying to figure a way to shut it off, trying to find my inner monologue’s mute button, trying.
And then I pulled the hand sanitizer out of my jacket and squeezed a glob of it into my mouth. I gagged a little as I swished the burning slime of it around my mouth, then swallowed.
—
“You watching Jupiter Ascending?” Noah asked as I left the bathroom.
“Yeah.”
“Dope.” I turned to leave, but then he said, “Aza?” I walked over to him and sat next to him on the couch.
“Nobody wants to find him.”
“Your dad, you mean?”
“It’s like I can’t think about anything else. I . . . it’s . . . Do you think, like, he would really disappear and not even text us? Do you think maybe he’s trying and we just haven’t figured out how to listen?”
I felt so bad for the kid. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he’s just waiting until it’s safe.”
“Right,” Noah said. “Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.” I was starting to stand up when he said, “But couldn’t he have sent an email? They can’t trace that stuff if you just use public Wi-Fi. Couldn’t he have texted us from a phone he picked up somewhere?”
“Maybe he’s scared,” I said. I was trying to help, but maybe there was no helping.
“Will you keep looking, though?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure, Noah.”
He reached over to pick up his video game controller, my sign to go back downstairs.
—
Davis had paused the movie in the midst of a starfighter battle, and the bright light from a suspended explosion was reflected in his glasses as he turned to me. I sat down next to him, and he asked, “You all right?”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“Is there something I should do differen—”
“No, it has nothing to do with you. It’s just, like, I just . . . I can’t talk about it right now.” My head was spinning, and I was trying to keep my mouth turned away from him so he wouldn’t smell the hand sanitizer on my breath.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I like us. I like that we’ve got our own way of doing things.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” I was staring at the frozen movie screen, waiting for him to un-pause it. “I overheard you talking to Noah.”
I could still feel his spit in my mouth, and the respite the hand sanitizer had provided was dwindling away. If I could still feel his spit, it was probably still in there. You might need to drink more of it. This is ridiculous. Billions of people kiss, and nothing bad happens to them. You know you’ll feel better if you drink more.
“He needs to see somebody,” I said. “A psychologist or something.”
“He needs a father.”
Why did you even try to kiss him? You should’ve known. You could’ve had a normal night, but you chose this. Right now needs to be about Noah, not me. His bacteria are swimming in you. They’re on your tongue right now. Even pure alcohol can’t kill them all.
“Do you just want to watch the movie?”
I nodded, and we sat next to each other, close but not touching, for the next hour, as the spiral tightened.
FIFTEEN
AFTER I GOT HOME THAT NIGHT, I went to bed but not to sleep. I kept starting texts to him and then not sending them, until finally I put the phone down and took my laptop out. I was wondering what had happened to Davis’s online life—where he’d gone once he shut down his social media profiles.
The google hits related to Davis were overwhelmingly about his father—“Pickett Engineering CEO Reveals in Interview He Won’t Leave a Dime to His Teenage Children,” etc. Davis hadn’t updated his Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or blog since the disappearance, and searches for his two usernames, dallgoodman and davisnotdave02, turned up only links to other people.
So I started looking for similar usernames: dallgoodman02, davisnotdave, davisnotdavid, then guessing at Facebook and blog URLs. And then after more than an hour, just after midnight, it finally occurred to me to search for the phrase, “the leaves are gone you should be, too.”
A single link came up, to a blog with the username isnotid02. The site had been created two months earlier, and like Davis’s previous journal, most of the entries began with a quote from someone else and then concluded with a short, cryptic essay. But this site also had a tab called poems. I clicked over to the journal and scrolled down until I reached the first entry:
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”
—ROBERT FROST
Fourteen days since the mess began. My life isn’t worse, exactly—just smaller. Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not—that’s something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I’m lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle.
“And then a Plank in Reason, broke / And I dropped down, and down—”
—EMILY DICKINSON
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way—one for every person who ever lived, more or less. I was thinking about that beneath the sky tonight, unseasonably warm, as good a showing of stars as one gets around here. Something about looking up always makes me feel like I’m falling.
Earlier, I heard my brother crying in his room, and I stood next to the door for a long time, and I know he knew I was there because he tried to stop sobbing when the floorboards creaked under my footstep, and I just stood out there for the longest time, staring at his door, unable to open it.
“Even the silence / has a story to tell you.”
—JACQUELINE WOODSON
The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.
“The world is a globe—the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”
—TERRY PRATCHETT
Sometimes I open Google Maps and zoom in on random places where he might be. S came by last night to walk us through what happens now—what happens if he’s found, what happens if he’s not—and at one point he said, “You understand that I’m referring now not to the physical person but to the legal entity.” The legal entity is what hovers over us, haunting our home. The physical person is in that map somewhere.
“I am in love with the world.”
—MAURICE SENDAK
We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are thats—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.
Eventually, a she showed up.
“What’s past is prologue.”