He had gravitated toward the theater, his natural home. He was astonishingly good-looking and had a handsome man’s indifference to engaging in intimate conversation and to exerting himself in courtship. In high school he played the Stage Manager in Our Town with a perfect New Hampshire accent. At the university he played the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie and Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode and Rosalind in an all-nonbinary As You Like It and King Creon in Antigone and Deeley in Pinter’s Old Times. Whenever he came home for visits, he sat in the living room staring at his iPhone screen, or he disappeared into the basement, where he memorized his next part. Conversations seemed to cost him a great deal of effort, and he never asked polite questions and could not feign interests that he did not have. Emotionally, he was always somewhere else, flirting with oblivion, a place where his parents could not find him.
He had many girlfriends, all of whom were initially delighted to be in his company and who thought they could turn his habitual half-smile and easygoing affability into a grin that signified love. But the half-smile was frozen in place, as was the affability, and the pleasant, speculative expression on his face never varied much in mixed company. Some coolness resided at his center, a little pinpoint of ice. He could be wonderfully wicked and entertaining, though it all felt scripted, and not by him, so the discouraged girlfriends drifted away from him or were discarded, confounded by his glacial surface and their own inability to melt it.
He had no cruelty in him, just an emotional absentmindedness that seemed to be part of his character.
After earning a BFA in acting, there he was, in Chicago, a star, playing the lead in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. And there he was, again, as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya. And he would return to Minneapolis, he told his parents, for the role of Estragon in Waiting for Godot, but then something happened to him, a mystery he refused to explain. There had been a girlfriend to whom a calamity had occurred. “I need to become a person,” he told his father over the phone. There was an urgency in his voice that Brettigan had never heard before. What sort of person? The question encountered a silence. He claimed that he would live on the streets for a time, “as an experiment.” What sort of experiment? He would not explain.
He moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes telling his family and friends where he was. But then he became unreachable, unlocatable. At first he had called his parents to say he was all right, but he was going to “de-phone”; then he let his cell phone service lapse. He was somewhere here in the city, drifting, though no one seemed to know exactly where. One of Brettigan’s friends claimed to have seen Timothy sitting in front of the luggage carousels at the airport, sitting there unmoving, minute after minute. When asked whether he was meeting anyone getting off a flight, Timothy had said, “No. I just like to see families reunited. I like to see happiness. Don’t you?”
And once Brettigan had seen a bearded man on a city bus who might have been his son, but the man got off before his father could reach him. At other times Timothy seemed to be over there, on the other side of the street, ambling without destination, studying the sidewalk, distantly walking away, like an urban ghost who gave you glimpses of himself before dematerializing. He was only visible out of the corner of the eye—fleetingly, in a crowd leaving a stadium, or in the distance on an escalator, at the ballpark eight sections over, or in the backseat of a taxi speeding away.
You couldn’t report him because he wasn’t really missing. He was here somewhere. And now his mother dropped in on churches, the ones with their doors open, and cathedrals, Quaker meetinghouses, basilicas, synagogues, Kingdom Halls, chapels, mosques, storefronts, and meditation centers, sneaking in quietly and sitting in the back, surveying those who sat and prayed, trying to imagine him back into existence as a happy solid citizen in one of these congregations, but half-seeing him, instead, on street corners, on benches, with the ragged and rusted-out street people with their staring empty eyes.
He will turn up someday.
Only God knew where he was. And another question: Where had God gone to?
- 5 -
Across the way in Minnehaha Park, seated at a picnic table underneath the shade of a large maple tree but still visible to Brettigan and his wife, a young couple, accompanied by a toddler, were smoking cigarettes and unwrapping their sandwiches while their daughter played nearby with a half-inflated yellow balloon. As Brettigan watched, the man transferred his cigarette to his left hand, inhaled, then took a bite out of his sandwich, and as he chewed and talked, cigarette smoke emerged from his mouth. The woman spoke to him, and he laughed softly without smiling, a married laugh, whereupon more cigarette smoke issued from his mouth and nose as if his head were on fire. He could smoke and eat sandwiches and laugh at the same time. How strange people were!
A cool front had descended from Canada, so the day was unexpectedly mild, with high wisps of clouds, and as Brettigan unwrapped his own sandwich, a bologna-and-lettuce-and-cheese concoction sprinkled with a few drops of mild green Tabasco, he felt a yearning for a deviled egg as a marker of summer. He put the sandwich aside and peered into the cooler.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are you?” His glasses slid lower on his nose, a result of sweat and the thinning effects of age.
“Where are you what?” Alma asked. “And what who?”
“I was talking to the deviled eggs,” Brettigan said, “which aren’t here. Which I thought we had packed. Which…I want to eat them.”
“They’re not hiding,” Alma told him. “They’re absent and forgotten.”
“Forgotten by whom?”
“By me,” she said. “In the kitchen, where I made them and left them behind, all freshly wrapped up in waxed paper on the counter. I can almost see them this very minute.” After reaching into the cooler and pulling out a bottle of white wine, she poured a drink for him in a plastic cup. “Sorry, Harry. It’s another modest senior moment. Here,” she said. “Have some wine. Drink up. You’ll forget what I forgot, those eggs. Isn’t it a beautiful day?” She examined the sky. “It’s one of the most beautiful days ever.”
Last night, rain had fallen for an hour, and today the air seemed to have been washed clean and somehow sanitized. Beyond the picnic table where the eating-and-smoking man and his wife were sitting, other couples and families sat or strolled in Seurat-like calm. In the distance was a sun-bleached playground, where little kids clambered over tubular structures. Other kids, shouting with glee, sat in swings pushed by their parents. As Brettigan bit into his sandwich, he had a thought: History has stopped today. History is powerless here.
“What are you thinking?” Alma asked. “You have that look you get.” She put her hand on his shoulder.
“The weather. I was thinking about the weather.”
“No, you weren’t. Your face had that faraway mask. You look like that when you have thoughts.”