What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

  “Mom. Please!” Mary shrugged away.

  Susan had always loved her daughter’s hair, the thick mass of it. “Strong as Samson,” she used to tell Mary as a child. “That hair makes you unbreakable, sweetheart.” Mary had believed it far longer than she should have.

  Detective Wasserman interrupted, bent over Mary as if she were hard of hearing. “You just never know how a small thing can be the very thing we need for our big puzzle here.”

  A puzzle metaphor. Did he think Mary was an idiot? Did he think she was nine?

  She shook her head. The color was still there a little, framing her peripheral vision. A fuchsia mist melted around her mother’s worried gaze. Mary saw her mother hold her face in her hands for a moment too long, rub her eyes and grimace for a fraction of a second, washing away an unwanted thought.

  Mary’s father appeared in the doorway, trench coat slung over his arm, tie loosened, cell phone in hand. “I called State Farm,” he announced in a general directive, as if this were the paramount task that needed to be tackled in that moment. He hugged Susan, and then Mary, but then followed the sound of the detective’s voice to the kitchen. Mary heard the footsteps of the investigating police everywhere, clomping on the hardwood. It sounded like ten men, a dozen, two dozen. It sounded like a house party of footsteps. She wanted to go and watch them.

  Her father came back into the dining room and asked Mary, “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.” (Popped E and rolled around under the dining-room table.)

  “Why were you here, honey? At home?” asked Susan, reaching again for her daughter, then stopping short of a touch, catching herself and retreating.

  “Why?”

  “Why weren’t you in school?”

  That’s when it escaped. A bubble of air rising to the surface. A kind of hiccup. A giggle. A gigcup, you might say. Things had been just fine until then. But there it was, unmistakable. It would come to be a great regret. Proof of an inability to control her own body—what came out, what went in. The gigcup had been a result of Mary’s flummoxed mind, and in moments it would dawn on the McPherson parents.

  “Mary Elizabeth McPherson, what did you see?” Michael McPherson glared down at her with angry, parental eyes.

  A shrug. “Fuchsia.”

  Detective Wasserman put his hand on Michael’s shoulder, compelling him to sit down. Michael reluctantly sat.

  An officer peeked his head into the dining room. “Corey in here?”

  Detective Wasserman shook his head. The officer disappeared.

  “Fuchsia what?” Susan McPherson asked. She appeared to believe this was a clue, something they should perhaps tell Detective Wasserman.

  “Just fuchsia.”

  “Mrs. McPherson,” the detective said, “please let us finish up here, and then you can ask her anything you want.”

  “What do you mean? What does that mean? Were they wearing fuchsia?”

  Mr. McPherson’s home office and the garage appeared to be the only rooms disturbed in the house. “It’s possible that the perpetrators were startled by Mary’s presence and fled,” said Wasserman. Mary had seen nothing, sensed nothing. It didn’t help that her dad’s office was separated from the dining room by both the kitchen and the living room. With the radio on, it hardly seemed surprising that Mary had nothing to offer the police.

  The evidence technician dropped his brush and it clattered across the wood floor.

  Mary Elizabeth put her forehead on the table.

  “Are you all right?” Susan put her hand on Mary’s thigh. (Mary remembered Susan telling her once that a mother knows the answer to this question before she ever asks. But a mother always asks anyway.)

  Michael McPherson was surveying the room. Nothing had been taken. Wasserman told them dining rooms weren’t big targets, not like a few decades back when there was a market for secondhand silver and crystal. Now heirlooms were practically worthless. Brides these days wanted exotic vacations, kayaks, pink Cuisinarts. Thieves wanted iPods.

  “Where were you exactly?” Detective Wasserman asked.

  “Here,” Mary said, tossing her hand vaguely toward the floor, nodding once at the space under the table. Her voice was thin, as if her vocal cords had temporarily walked out on her.

  “Where?”

  “Here. Right here.”

  Two chairs, pulled out slightly. The minute he’d walked in, Michael knew there’d been something off about the room. So subtle. But he noticed these things. Once, as an undergraduate, he and some friends had moved every piece of furniture by a single inch in his roommate’s bedroom. The roommate never guessed what they’d done. He knew something was wrong—he’d banged his knee on the bed frame when he came in—but he never knew what it was. All semester long it irked him, until he eventually grew used to the difference and the difference became the habitual. One single inch. Could change nothing. Could change everything.

  Michael followed Mary’s pointed finger to the floor. His mind calculated:

  On the floor.

  Under the table.

  Feeling fuchsia.

  Not in school.

  “Jesus Christ, Mary,” Michael McPherson said. Now fully aware. And pissed off.

  Chapter 3

  1:58 p.m.

  Arthur Gardenia had been the first to call the police. He’d heard noises but was too terrified to go downstairs and actually find something.

  “The police are going to come right in,” warned the dispatcher. “Stay right where you are, sir.”

  He stood behind his desk. Not breathing, pressing his heels together as if the action might diminish him in some way.

  The police swarmed Arthur’s house in a small army, lights flashing, stationing themselves in both the street and the back alley. Arthur could hear snippets of words through their radio static. Canine . . . burglary one . . . Detective . . . in progress. They yelled up to ask if he was okay, told him not to move, not to touch anything, to wait for their all clear. He heard the clunk of heavy gear, jiggling metal, and a single hard pounding as if something had been dropped. One set of feet bounded up the stairs.

  “In here,” Arthur said.

  Detective Wasserman followed the sound of Arthur’s voice to the study. He came in the door and flipped on the light switch. Arthur gasped at the sudden burst of fluorescence and covered his eyes, and the detective drew his gun and squatted. Three or four confused seconds elasticized the two men, until Arthur waved one arm toward the detective saying, “Turn it off. Turn it off. The light.”

  The detective turned off the light and adjusted his eyes to the darkness, and Arthur quickly told him he had day blindness, and both men began to breathe again.

  “Wasserman,” the detective said by way of a more appropriate introduction. He took a single stride toward Arthur, holding out his hand, gun still drawn in the other, and he swiped his forehead with the back of his hand so that the gun arced through the air. Arthur did not think to shake the detective’s hand until the gun was back in its holster.

  The police cleared one room at a time, checking closets and under furniture. They sounded like a whole platoon. Wasserman sat Arthur down in his study to take the report once the premises had been checked. Arthur had not yet established those things missing from his house and he had not witnessed any perpetrators, despite feeling nearly sure he’d heard something. Wasserman advised Arthur to buy curtains for his downstairs windows. Invest was the word he’d used. Arthur might want to think about investing in a set of curtains, as if a dividend might be available on such a purchase. Arthur had lived without curtains for so long, lived without the ability to see past a reflection for so many years, that he’d forgotten—or else never considered—that his personal security might have been jeopardized by that one angry, fiery afternoon when he’
d burned them all in a fit. Occasionally, he had to remind himself that while he could not see well, most people could see him just fine.

  The police downstairs were loud, shouting to one another over their radios and their own lumbering movements. The lights in the hallway were dimmed low. Detective Wasserman wore a light cotton golf shirt with a blazer. Arthur thought detectives were required to wear ties.

  “What I’m offering,” said Arthur to the circling detective, “is simply that the pumping of several arms through the air might suggest a professional outfit. Organization.”

  Detective Wasserman stopped. “It might, Mr. Gardenia.”

  Was Arthur being patronized? Who was this small man? He wasn’t even wearing a tie.

  Arthur was fairly sure of what he’d heard, and the noises had alarmed him, but he had been listening to the radio at the same time. Maybe there’d been no sound at all, just disturbed air, the sensing of a presence other than his own. Live alone for long enough and you get to know just how much oxygen one small person can take up. He’d been in his study, in an oversize rocking chair, eyes closed, bookshelf blocking any possible light from the window, listening. His back door was propped open to let in some fresh spring air. He had a fence around his yard and took for granted his isolation. He listened as he always had, headphones on, but with one side pushed back, behind his ear, so that the outside world wasn’t gone, exactly, but muffled. He knew the radio schedule by heart. He woke at noon with Worldview, then took a break for breakfast, and started up again with Fresh Air and then All Things Considered, and if he hadn’t tired out, he stayed around for Marketplace. It whittled away the time, gave his days a kind of shape and heft. But it also offered him a vast array of dialects and speech blueprints, which he sometimes wrote out using the linguistic pattern he’d developed over the years. Arthur believed that the way people spoke was as individual as a fingerprint. There were subtle differences, the hiss of an s. The softness of an f. A jarring ch. He’d noticed some years ago that so few Americans used the letter t when it came in the middle of a word.

  He’d heard something, though he could not identify what that something had been. He had no physical recourse against an intruder, against a threat of any kind, really. What could he do? Wave an angry bat toward a blur? Once he may have been able to fend off an intruder, when he was young, in his early thirties, just a few years after he’d finished his PhD. That was before the colors of the world had begun to fade, reds to pinks, pinks to grays, oranges and reds, purples and blues, blues and greens, all melting, washing into one another until they were a mass of nothing. Palimpsests of color, indiscernible as layers.

  “It seems like it might be difficult to hear an arm pumping through air with headphones on,” Detective Wasserman said. Arthur didn’t tell him that he listened only through one side. He’d always done it, he reasoned, as a precautionary measure, a way not to be fully absent from the world. The irony was not lost on Arthur.

  The point of entry had been Arthur’s back screen door, wedged open with what Detective Wasserman suspected had been a screwdriver. Screwdrivers were the weapon of choice for break-ins.

  “It was Terry Gross,” Arthur said. “On the radio.”

  He imagined the way she spoke in reconfigured language and punctuation. Sometimes she’d throw two or three words together so they sounded like one. Terrygross, for example. Arthur believed personal dialects and idiosyncrasies and idioms were reflected in our letters and e-mails, and he aimed to capture it, the individual language of every person on earth.

  “I’m Quite Sure I hearD twothreemaybemore arms. I’m guessinghere. At the arms. Twothreearms in The Air. Pumping intheair.” Arthur both said and envisioned these phrases. He peered at the detective’s thick, wiry hair. The man had pockmarks on his nose, thin lips, and high cheekbones, but mostly what Arthur saw was an indistinct blur.

  • • •

  By the age of thirty-five, Arthur had gone entirely color-blind. So he gave up driving. Then he noticed the headaches, the eye aches. They came more often in summer, when the sun was high and bright, a phosphorescent light spearing his eyes. On winter days the sun glinted off the snow, casting shards of glassy light into his pupils. Sometimes those days were so bad he’d stumble into bed and stay there all day. During the school year, he began going to his office early and staying late; he never turned on the lights. He used overhead projectors in darkened classrooms and wrote in large letters on transparencies.

  The doctor told him he had cone dystrophy; self-destruct was the term Arthur remembered. His foveal cones, responsible for day vision, for fine detail, for color—for so much of the world—were self-destructing. Such drama happening in silence discomfited Arthur. He slept, he walked, he worked, and all along he had this terrible feeling of unconscionable physical theft. How, Arthur wondered, had such imbalances begun?

  He was officially diagnosed with hemeralopia. It was rare in American adults, rare among those not nutritionally or genetically predisposed to such a condition. So he had, at first, hoped that the color could be restored to him somehow. That he could take some pill, some vitamin, some exercises, that might restore his vision. The ophthalmologist gave him photo-chromatic glasses, which darkened in bright light, and told him to make sure he got Vitamin A. The doctor suggested Arthur carry a portable magnifying glass and a clip-on polarizer filter to wear over his glasses. Instead, Arthur went numb. In rebellion against what he believed was his physical doom, he tore down the curtains on the first floor of his house and burned them in his fireplace. The fire made him squint. Pride had kept him from replacing the curtains, and eventually he took to living mostly upstairs. He took a leave of absence from his tenured position at the College of DuPage, where he’d spent seven years teaching eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, who couldn’t have cared less, how to diagram sentences. He refused to get large-print books. He tried to go on afternoon walks, but he could barely open his eyes; he had begun to blink, on average, four times a second, and eventually the pain was too great and he simply went to bed in a darkened bedroom for one entire summer. He was thirty-eight years old. Unmarried. Just tenured. And pissed off.

  One late-August afternoon, lying on his unwashed sheets, he began to hear the far-off voices of young teenagers returning from a day at the public pool. As their voices grew closer, he began to distinguish them not only by pitch and audibility, but diction, by the way they said certain words and phrases. By the emphasis of letters and how some words ran together and others seemed separated by more than a mere breathy pause. (Angela, cudid OUt! YOU cuDID out!) Arthur sat up in bed and listened. He began to wait for these kids each day, to listen for them, with a notebook beside him. He never saw the faces of the children, but their voices became as familiar to him as his own mother’s had once been. He listened for the rhythmic properties, the frequency and pitch, and tried to create a visual analog, a sort of written language, for the sound of a voice. The girl, Angela, seemed to front-load her sentences, emphasize the beginnings and then trail off. Her friend—Linda was it? Lynn? She spoke more quietly, but rose in tone the longer she went on, as if gaining confidence at the sound of her own voice. John ran his words together and had staccato phrasing, sometimes separating a two-syllable word with as much time as wholly separate words. Arthur ignored how words were spelled and instead wrote how they sounded, not phonetically so much as rhythmically. He realized, one day, that maybe this could be his purpose, maybe hearing the world in a whole new way would someday justify going blind. He brought his ideas to the dean and she was supportive. The college gave Arthur disability pay and a small pension to continue his “research,” and he never taught another class again. He learned he was also eligible for more disability pay from the federal government, and for Medicaid, and so, before the age of forty, Arthur found himself semiretired and spending his days listening to the voices of the world around him. That was twenty years ago. He’d managed to publish one small and not par
ticularly well-received textbook—really just a vanity project—on his research. He called it, unsurprisingly, The Music of Language.

  • • •

  Now, the police milled around in Arthur’s house, and Detective Wasserman took Arthur by the elbow to lead him downstairs. Arthur needed his glasses. The light was sharp, stinging his eyes. He was so rarely on the first floor of his home in the afternoons. He had hired Mary McPherson, his teenage neighbor, to clean once a week, but her cleaning afternoons had turned into reading sessions—she was unwittingly receiving a literary education as Arthur enjoyed the sheer pleasures of language and story. She’d read The Invisible Man and Encounters with the Archdruid, and he’d gotten her to start Anna Karenina, though after the first three days she’d put her foot down at that one and they hadn’t cracked a Russian since. The downside of this arrangement, of course, was his continued existence in filth.

  “Terry Gross was speaking with Oliver Sacks,” Arthur said to Detective Wasserman. “On her show.” Arthur squinted, blinked repeatedly. He saw flashes of dark uniforms like apparitions. “Her guest. The neurologist. The famous neurologist.” He pictured the pattern in his mind: herGuest. (the)neurologist, The famous NEUrologist.

  He overheard one officer say to a second, “These kinds leave shit for evidence.”

  Arthur held a blank form given to him by Detective Wasserman.

  “It’s called a supplementary property list,” Wasserman had told him. “You’ll need to fill out what’s missing and bring it by the station.”

  “You really need to keep those doors closed and locked,” one policeman said. “It’s an invitation. I’m not blaming you. The victim. Sir. But really. You’ve got to keep your doors locked.”