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By Root 893 0

a passage in the book featuring fog, and then they'd compare the literary fog and the meteorological fog, and in the middle of all this I saw, peripherally, a flicker of light. I turned away from the witches and wizards and toward my mother's apartment window; it was now completely dark, and I couldn't see my mother anywhere. I must have stared at the window for five, ten, fifteen minutes. The witches and wizards got into their vehicles and drove away into the night, and still I stood there, waiting for my mother to turn her light back on, waiting for her to emerge from the building, waiting for something. But this is another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide (which, as you've figured out by now, is also a detective's guide, a son's guide, a guide that is as specific or generic as you and I need it to be): you can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated. And when you start to wonder whether the window will ever be illuminated again, and whether you were seeing what and who you thought you were seeing when it was lit, then you've waited too long, and the best thing is just to go home. So I just went home.

15

It should be said at this point that I knew all along that my father was a drunk and hadn't had a stroke at all. I must have known that; how could I not have known that? Of course I knew that. I was just pretending to believe that my father had had a stroke. Because we all know that to be a son is to lie to yourself about your father. But once you start telling yourself the truth, does that mean you are no longer a son, and he is no longer your father? And then what are you? And what is he?

The truth was that my father was a drunk, and there had been a party at my parents' house. It must have ended not long before I got home for the second time that night. The place was an even bigger wreck than before. There were ashtrays everywhere and they were full to overflowing, and so, rather than empty the ashtrays, the smokers had used every available surface ― flat and concave, highly flammable and less highly flammable ― to deposit their ashes. The living room looked postvolcanic. On the coffee table was a line of juice glasses, and inside each glass were the watery remnants of something dark and evil, something you were no doubt supposed to drink all at once or not at all. On the couch, someone had left behind the sort of visor you might see a card dealer or a cub reporter wearing in an old movie. On the floor between the couch and the coffee table, there was a translucent gasoline funnel. I picked it up and saw a long piece of white hose or tubing dangling suggestively from the bottom, and I put it down again. The exercise bike had been thrown in the corner of the room, on its side; one pedal was pointed ceilingward and still spinning. The television was on, but the sound was not; it was a program devoted to heart surgery, and they kept showing close-up shots of open and then closed chest wounds. There was music playing loudly, so loudly I couldn't tell what it was or where it was coming from, especially since my parents, to my knowledge, didn't own a stereo. I followed the noise through the living room and into my father's bedroom. The bed was as big a disaster as the rest of the house: sheets were draped over the chair, the end table, the headboard, everywhere but the bed itself. There was a boom box on the floor, vibrating from its own noise. Over the crash of guitar and bass, I could hear the singer ask obscurely, "Does anyone have a cannon?" I turned off the boom box and heard normal human voices coming from the kitchen. I followed them. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, and across from him was another man, someone I'd never seen before. In between them, on the table, was the shoe box, and scattered around the table were the letters. I missed my mother right then, badly, the way you miss one parent when the other one isn't doing what he's supposed to.

"I know where Mom is," I said to my father, but he didn't hear me, or pretended not to. The other man did hear me, though; he