Lost Girls

magazine from 1968. My father's. There beside the more contemporary detritus, in probably the same position it was left, never to be put along with the others fastidiously organized on the bottom shelf in the living room.

That's where I go now to patrol the room's book-lined perimeter. There must be over a thousand volumes, some shelved two deep and other rows with slim paperbacks laid over their tops. Why did he bother to bring them all the way up to this place? It couldn't have been an intellectual's dusty pride because there wouldn't have been an audience up here to show them off to. He must have simply wanted them here. Books were my father's society, the extent of his private life outside of his marriage, the occasional departmental wine and cheese, the son growing up episodically before his eyes.

When I come to a leather-bound copy of The Collected Keats I pull it out from its slot and press it hard against my chest. The promising, mysterious smell of old book fills my breath and I keep it inside me, the cowhide and dampness and ink lingering within like held smoke. Pull it open to the signed title page: Prof. Richard Crane, University of Toronto, March 29, 1962. Inside, various lines and stanzas have been encased by brace brackets with phrases like physical/spiritual unity and beauty-supremacy over death underlined outside them. Pretending to read but really just looking at my father's notes in the margins. The jagged lines of his handwriting, the way the pencil was always kept sharp--is this what he was like? Meticulous, brisk, whittling wood and lead into fine points? The words themselves say nothing, coded references lodged in a professor's brain. Still, I like touching the pages in the same places he must have.

I turn ahead and fall upon ''Ode to a Nightingale,'' the poem I memorized for university. Start to read it off the page but the voice in my ears is not my own but my father's. I can't see him or how he would have sat or stood, don't know whether it was a selection he would use whenever called upon to make a toast or the only lullaby he would have known to put me to sleep. But there's still his voice.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known . . .

I try to see the words as my father would have seen them for the first time. Looking not for their meaning but whatever charm came before all of that, the thing that seduced him into a life of language. When the poem is finished I close the book and tuck it into the outside pocket of my overcoat. It feels heavy there, tugs at my shoulder. But it's not going back.

Circle the room one more time, taking another look at all the things that now give rise to vague recognition as things, the collected pieces that distinguish a room from merely bordered space. But soon enough these, too, will go, all the particularity of chosen furnishings, comforts, and entertainments dissolving, falling apart. A building in fast decline without annual visitations from its caretakers, amateur nail-knockers and paint-slappers, without the voices to clear the cobwebs from the corners.

Down the short hallway to the bathroom. A chocolate fur growing out from the drain in the tub, a shower curtain with a map of the world printed over it pulled from half its hooks. A medicine cabinet that screeches open when I pull the door from its magnetic clip, so full of Wilkinson sword disposable blades, lipsticks, and scattered Band-Aids that half of it falls out into the sink. What surprises me is that it's still here, all the intimate tools of hygiene. Wouldn't they send somebody around to collect this stuff after they died? Then again, who would ever volunteer to drive up here just to bag the toiletries? So it was all quite sensibly left behind, and it's all still here. The leftover miscellany of lives pulled from their habits.

My parents' bedroom, containing a soiled box spring with a black crater in its center. Cheap Bauhaus-copy bedside tables on either side etched with graffiti.

Tony FUCKED Deb here until she screamed like a

CAT--July 24, 1989.

JIM MORRISON IS ALIVE AND LIVES IN

BRAZIL!

Eat the Rich, Then Puke Them Up.

My dick hurts.

I Lov u, Kathy. Do you Luv me 2?

I think of all of these strangers in this room, of Tony and Deb and Kathy wriggling out of jeans and throwing sweatshirts against the wall to look at each other's bronzed bodies in fluttering, kerosene light. Not caring whose bed this might have been in the past, or if they did care it only added to the fun, the idea of screwing in the same place once coldly occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Normal of 24 Middle-Aged Lane. They would make a point of marking their youth with a show of roughness and appetite. Fill the air with exhalations of pleasure and congratulation that grow louder in turn, pushing through the walls and out into the woods because who else was around to hear? The room sharp with the curdling of semen and cinnamon perfume.

I'm pulling the drawers open on the dresser left in the corner. Nothing in the top two except cigarette butts and rolling collections of mouse turd. But in the bottom drawer something heavy that rattles to the front when I screech it open. Hunker down onto my knees to get a better look. A hairbrush. Old-fashioned black enamel handle inlaid with a swirling plastic meant to look like pearl. The bristles spun together with hair. My mother's.

I don't know this, of course. It's not that I remember the brush itself or can identify the hair as hers. Just as likely to be another woman's. Left behind after the decision that they wouldn't be staying in this too-quiet cottage for another night. But when I bring it to my nose and take in the smell of it--woodsmoke and honey--I don't consider the more likely possibilities. Believe the individual strands I roll between my fingers could only be hers.

Time to get out of here.

But on my way through the sitting room toward the door I find myself instead kicking at the legs of the dining table, wrenching them out from their sockets. Then I'm balling up pages from the pile of newspapers and building a cone in the fireplace, setting the wood in a pyramid on top, lighting a match from the pack Flynn left with me and tossing it into the center. Within minutes it builds into a modest blaze, the furniture varnish sending up a black smoke that smells faintly of licorice. Gold shadows thrown over the ceiling.

I set to work pulling more of the furniture apart. Stack the spokes of the wagon wheel, panels from the top of the dining table and the backs of the kitchen chairs, all of it breaking apart easily if I stand on it in the right places. It's not vandalism if it's yours, and who else's would it be now? Maybe all given over to some executor to look after but they'd long since given up, maybe deciding to sit on the property for a couple of decades and hope for a rise in the market that will never come. So it might as well be mine. The final scraps of my inheritance popping and seething in the blackened hearth.

There's no satisfaction in seeing it go aside from the warmth it gives off. In fact it's this burning that makes the entire cottage feel suddenly animated, revived from a long sleep. The floor creaks as it expands against the foundation, shadows moving at the edges of my sight that could be figures embracing against the wall, running in through the door from outside or rising from the sofa after a nap.

Build up the flames until they arch high into the mouth of the flue, then pull a couple of my father's books off the shelves and sit down at the end of the sofa to read. I limit myself to final chapters. Endings pulled apart from the stories they belong to, some tidy and hopeful, others drifting off enigmatically with people staring out of windows over autumn fields or driving away from gravesite visits. Moments vibrating with significance because they're the last thing we're told. Decisions can now be made, morals drawn, characters designated as villains or heroes or mere comic relief. But I keep myself to the endings so that I don't have to judge, so that all I'm left with is the final moment, expansive and mysterious. And on every page my father's coded marginalia. The brace brackets and arrows of his private thoughts, working to pull all the threads together.

Try to keep reading but the light's already fading, the fire big enough to warm a yellow circle before it but no longer bright enough to read by. Check all the pockets, but no. Didn't bring my coke. I've gone all day and until this moment hadn't thought of it, and now that I have I expect at any second to begin the sweating, burn-headed process of becoming chemically upset, but nothing happens. Outside, the dark of early winter evening falls across the glass as a purple curtain.