Hand Outlined in Rainwater on the Front Window

by dhalgren99

In the wake of really awful night, Grissom has a dream where he tries to find who took his daughter. Except she may not be really missing. "Post-fic", if that's a category, taking place after chapter 4 of TriplePirouette's "Innocence and Beauty"

Full title: Hand Outlined in Rainwater on the Front Window, Thursday 2AM
(it all didn't fit in the title box and I'm picky about such things)

Author's Notes: I've been making my way through TriplePirouette's impressive epic "Innocence and Beauty" (go over and read her story, tell her what you think so she'll finish it faster!) and to sometimes to mix things up I'll write the comments in the form of a story if I feel the situation warrants it. Here, it seemed to, so here we go.

For those who haven't read the story, it tells the secret history of Grissom's daughter. There's much more to it than that, but trying to keep the spoilers low. This takes place after chapter 4: still in LA and before he joined CSI, he's trying to cope with the mother of his child moving to Las Vegas. He's coping very poorly, especially after he misses a call from the kid. This was my attempt to play with the psychic trauma that might arise after he fell asleep. The fact that everything might mean more than one thing is entirely coincidental.

Caveats: I don't watch CSI on anything resembling a regular basis (although I'm familiar with it), so any out of character stuff here you can either attribute to a) me being an idiot or b) it's a dream. Or both, if you're so inclined. Just be thankful none of my characters show up.

In the meantime, let's tip the local sandman and see what happens when really smart people fall asleep after having a really bad day.

---

Staring at the corpse, I hardly need to measure out the scene to know what happened. The blood splatter is textbook, the trajectory drawing what might as well be a neon line from the doorway to the deceased's shattered jaw. The angle of the head is exactly what you'd expect from a neck snapped backwards due to the impact. Even the bone fragments are scattered about with an artist's eye, flowers in the field of the couch's gaudy upholstery. I could have written the script for this myself, it's the kind of scene they tell you about in school but you never expect to come across in the real world.

Still, it doesn't stop the corpse from trying to tell me what happened anyway.

"Listen, officer, you're missing the big picture here . . ." At least that's what I think he's saying, the words garbled by the cracks in the jawbone grinding together.

"Ssh," I tell him, as gentle as I can. It's just us here, I'm working the scene alone, but keeping track of the details is easy. Efficiently I catalog all the stray bits, use a Q-tip to get some blood samples, do my best to find the bullet where it should be lodged in the wall. All the while the checklist is going off in my head. From the loose way the body is draped over the couch they didn't see it coming. The door shows no signs of forced entry, so either the door was never locked or the murderer had a key. I make a mental note to look into that.

"I'm telling you, I appreciate the attention but it's not about me here. It never will be." The bullet's passage loosened one of the eyeballs in the socket, causing it to droop lazily, staring at me with a sinking plea. I can see my own reflection in it, translucent and rounded, close without getting closer. His face is covered in dried blood, one of his lips burst and smeared it all over his skin, like a tomato thrown at a bad comedian.

"Sh, just rest, all right?" They're always trying to talk to me. I used to think it was because they were trying to make me feel better, to make the scene not seem as despairing. Death as just another familiar voice. But I've been on speaking terms with death ever since my first body, since the moment I realized how many possible ways the human body could go wrong when someone wants it to. And that the how of it going wrong could lead to every answer I need. I still believe that. "I'll find out who did this to you. It's going to be okay."

"You don't understand." After a while, it came to me that that they don't talk for me. They need to feel they're making a difference, that they can somehow reach out from the beyond and help solve their own demises. "You've got all the wrong facts. The useless ones." This one is oddly insistent, though. Hopefully it won't take advantage of its own rigor mortis to grab me, although it's been some time since that happened. "I got shot, right? You know this. I was sitting here and he came in the door and shot me in the head. I never even saw it coming. Broke my jaw, sliced an artery, busted open my face, I mean, the bruising pattern is classic. I know this and you know this."

The effort of saying all that turns the edges of his voice into a crackle not unlike walking over a carpet of dead beetles. I really have no need to hear any more. I've got enough evidence to process back at the lab. That's where the real work gets done.

"But all the pieces of my skull you scrape out of the wall ain't going to tell you where the bastard took your daughter."

I pause, not letting myself meet his lopsided gaze. Then, very deliberately I close my processing kit, the sound of the clasps clicking shut the only noise in the room.

"Okay, I think we're done here." I wait to see if he'll say anything else but apparently he's said his peace. That's fine with me. "The ME will be along to bag you up and take you back. Once we're finished with the autopsy we'll let you go, okay?" I don't need to talk to him like a child but I find myself doing it with them from time to time. Does he have me rattled? I doubt it. All the problems in the world are just a matter of putting the right pieces together in the proper order. That's what I do. What I know how to do best. What else is there?

I'm at the door when I hear his voice again. "When . . . when you see her again . . ." it's a fading rattle, cotton shoved down a collapsing throat. I can't even imagine how much effort it must take to get it out. "Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her I wish it could have turned out differently. Okay? Please?"

I've got one hand on the doorframe, the light from outside washing out the landscape beyond. The room behind feels possessed of shadows and grey tones. And the body, a splash of impressionistic violence, colors without proper names.

"I will," I say, without turning back, maybe too softly for him to hear. There's another murmur like he might speak again but I'm out the door and gone before he has the chance. I can't spend all day there, after all.

It's brilliantly sunny out here, the kind of brightness that strikes you like a swarm. It's raining somewhere though, perhaps out east, toward the desert. You can see it in the clouds, the way the ambient gnats cycle in counterclockwise spirals, in the ever-present scent of funneled dryness. On the lawn next door, old Mrs Wilson and her husband are watching us work, although there isn't much to see. They're a pair of strange insects, in his case literally so. An epidemic of the Kafka virus swept through here a few years back, leaving him as a fine specimen of Cyphochilus assamensis. His shell is so white he's hard to stare at on a good day and with the sun so strong today it's nearly impossible. His wife tends to wear sunglasses all the time, even in the house.

"It's a shame, isn't it, Harold?" she's telling him. He's gnawing at the grass, trying to find some nutrition. Ever since they got aluminum siding for the house, he just hasn't been the same. Rumor has it she's trying to starve him so she can collect the insurance money. But we don't know if that's true and in any case I can't do anything for him until he's dead. "The poor child, left all alone like that. I saw this coming, I did. Such a darling child, too, never made a fuss."

Harold chitters somewhere around her ankle. I'm pretty sure his name isn't Harold, she just wants everyone to think he's a visitor. We all know better. I start to go to my car but at the last moment decide that walking is easier. It's a nice day, if a little warm.

She nods sagely. "I know, where are they? That's what I keep asking myself. You start to think that this world is just nothing more than a series of people upping and leaving. If we stayed in one place we'd be better able to keep track of each other, right?"

Of course, I'll find her. I always find what I need, when I need it. Ever since the first day when the kid down the street lost his baseball and I noticed that if you followed the trajectory of the hit you'd have no choice but to be led right to it. It's just a matter of finding out what shape the evidence makes.

"Even when we're listening, you have to wonder, what's happening in those moments that you can't hear? What exactly are we missing?"

I hear the screeching of wheels a second before I see the tire tracks in the middle of the road. Racing over, I can see the car peeling out toward the end of the block, already growing smaller. Is that a face pressed against the back window? I can't tell. I don't know who it is. It whips around the corner too fast for me to get the license plate, although I get a glimpse of light blue mountains capped with distant snow. But it's too far, too fast and gone. Even the roar it made is a memory, the air refusing to hold it and spitting it back out onto the ground, dissolving like a snowfall in a season too early. Scattered into crystals now, all over the pavement. If you stepped on one it might burst open and emit a tiny fragment of that pulled growl. But it's evidence and so I tread carefully.

The tracks are stretched, a string yanked too taut for the tension. They were trying to get away quickly, the accelerator was hit right away. No signs of skidding, they knew where they were going from the moment the key was in the ignition. It probably had been planned for some time, although the actual instance was probably a surprise to anyone watching. Just some residue left behind, the barest trail. I couldn't even follow it if I wanted to, the ends of it already fading as unraveled twine.

A wet cough about five feet away reminds me that he's there. A rasping rattle emerges from his throat as I go up to him, his fingers are twitching against the asphalt, nails breaking as he scrapes at it, trying to keep hold. "Ah . . ." he says, a trickle of blood running down the side of his mouth. His body is twisted diagonally, the tire tracks tracing a path over his legs and stomach. "Ah," he says again, face burnt into a grimace as he turns toward me, chest heaving. He's doing his best to make eye contact, switching between me and staring into the sun.

I crouch down and wait. There's a nice example of a Tettigonia viridissima crawling along the ground, its shadow like some kind of ancient catapult. You don't get to see much of it around here these days, so many things are disappearing and we barely have a chance to even get to know them. Every morning I wake up and I have to wonder what's vanished from the world this time. And what I'm afraid of is that I'll get used to it and accept it. But what's the alternative? A raw wound torn in the stomach, all your organs compressed and threatening to spill out at sideways angles? The acrid taste of the previous day in your mouth, caustic and pervasive. Spitting could just make it worse.

On the ground he jerks again and starts breathing rapidly, the hoarse shallow kind punctuated with sharp moans. The sun's high, warmth slamming down like a barrier. Slowly his panting ceases, he stiffens and gives one last spasm before relaxing entirely. A bubble escapes from him that just might be a sob.

Finally. I go to work immediately, tracing out the scene, sectioning off the area. His head is facing toward me, but the eyes aren't saying anything. There's a little bit of vomit mixed with the blood in his mouth, gradually spreading out like drool. One of his femurs snapped entirely from the weight, a bulge in the leg speaking to a compound fracture. Heavy car then, and with the angle it was clear that she either never saw him or just didn't care.

"You're just wasting time here." He has to speak through encrusting blood. The angles of his fall are strange, was he on the ground before the car hit him? I'm looking for a bruising pattern that might suggest he was hit and then run over. "I'm not the victim here, not in the way you're thinking. I was just standing in the way. It was nothing personal, I can understand that."

"Don't talk like that," I warn him. "You're all important. Every single one." I'm trying to keep my voice calm because there's no point in yelling. Anger just keeps you from being focused and I need to be that here.

"Accidents happen, Gil. Come on, now, all the reasons don't have to connect."

"It's not about that." I stop extracting a piece of glass from the pavement to face him. "It's not about solving a mystery. I can live with the world being unexplained, I always could."

"What's it about then?" For a second I think he's genuinely curious. Which isn't right, they never get curious, they're past that point.

"Justice." The word snaps out of me from somewhere deep in my chest, tasting oddly bitter on the way back up. "Because nobody ever has to die. Not you, not anyone. And the people who caused it deserve to pay because nobody should be able to get away with it. With anything. The world isn't fair, it never will be fair, but we can make it as fair as it can be. Do you understand? Do you?" It hits me that I'm shouting, my voice ricocheting off the placid houses. Exasperated, I make myself stop. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd like to finish here." I step over the body to examine how his wrists wound up at such an angle. Maybe he did fall?

"Gil, she looked right at me. I saw her."

I won't let him see me react. The best I do is give an "Mm-hm" and note the flattening of his stomach. When we finally do move him, all the bone fragments will slosh around and cut him up further inside. All sense of tightness gone.

"She was going but it's not where she wants to go. She wants out."

"I know that," I said, my throat suddenly dry. His punctured frame blurs before me and I wipe at my brow. It's too warm out today, we've got to finish this and get him covered before he starts to stink. Before the bloating begins.

"I was standing here and she looked right at me, for like a second we made eye contact. Then I got hit by something heavy and all I saw was the sky, just this arc and I went all loose inside. The world was roaring and it went right over me, like I didn't even matter."

"You're talking too much," I tell him. "You have to stop now."

"I can't even stand up anymore, I'm all broken. How can I even-"

"You're corrupting the evidence," I snap at him. I'm standing up and I don't remember enacting the motion. Sunlight curves at the end of the street in flowing tatters. "You can't tell me these things because I can't prove them. All right?" He doesn't answer, and for a second I wonder if I hurt his feelings. "Listen, it's . . . if I know it but I can't prove that it's real . . . what good is that? What good is knowing something if you can't make anyone believe in it?"

"She didn't stop," he murmurs. One hand is stretched out like he might have hoped to halt what was coming. "She didn't stop, Gil."

"I know. The lack of any skid marks suggests that the driver didn't apply the brakes at any point." I have to stay on-point. We're wasting time here, we've got two dead and someone missing and I'm standing here debating facts that I already know for certain.

"Nothing was going to stop her. Not me, not anyone. She had already decided, I could see it in her face." There's a low grinding quality to his voice, a face being immersed in hardening mud. The evaporation of water from a fly's wing. He's going, soon. I'm running out of time. "It didn't matter who was in the way. When you're set on a goal and it's so far away, do you ever take the time to see what's right in front of you?"

I've seen houses go down like tinder and secrets unveiled as open wounds. I've seen the sky set on fire and people running under it, afraid of the consequences of their own actions. I've seen a man go down with blood leaking from between his fingers like a punctured can of paint, and never say a word. I've watched someone cry like a lost child when just the two of us are around, knowing that I know what they've done and proving it is just a matter of connecting the dots.

"You can't tell me this," I say, somewhat coldly. It's the only way. "It's not admissible. It's nothing I can prove."

"Can you prove love? Can you sketch out the exact contours of desperation? Can you put a need to escape in a bag and tag it?" Suddenly I can't look at him anymore. Fluid seeping from split skin is beginning to soak into the tire treads embroidered on his stomach, starting to erase them. I wipe at my face, feeling sweat congeal. I thought I was used to the heat after all this time but my throat is so dry. This city is pulling everything out of me.

"Did anyone see . . ." I mutter, shaking a need to get away even as I find myself giving into it. Witnesses are the most unreliable evidence but it's all I got. All these houses, someone had to get even a glimpse. Just a hint of why it was done. The house across the street sports large picture windows, the curtains not entirely drawn. Someone could have been looking, someone might have seen. Just a reassurance that I'm not the only one out here. I'm not, there's two children playing on the adjacent lawn, throwing a ball back and forth. They don't even see me, concentrating on the game. I have to admit I don't fully understand the rules.

"What's more important, Gil? The where or the why?" He's calling out but I'm doing my best not to listen. It's all just circumstantial, really. We never truly know what's deliberate in cases like this until we capture the people involved. It's really that simple. It can all be broken down into the basic parts. There are three distinct components to any insect. But from that starting point the variations outnumber all the people that ever were. Never forget that and the rest is easy. Nothing is ever complex at its heart.

Nothing. I can't forget. It's etched like scars on my brain.

Concrete crunches under my feet. The door is inches away but I'm slowing down. Just ask them. Open the door and tell them who you are and ask them the simple questions. I feel the words lodging in my throat as expansive blocks, all odd corners and misshapen perimeters. There are three distinct parts to any insect.

Reach for the door, Gil.

The hum of a cicada winks in the dense summer air. There are three

Just take the door and-

Before I can make any kind of move it swings open with barely a creak, forcing me back a step. A man's already standing in the doorway, wearing sharply pressed pants and a tweed jacket. A rumbled hat sits on his head. He's staring at me with an expression somewhere between sternness and fondness. It's a look I've had memorized ever since I was a child. That I've stared back at from dozens of photographs.

"Well, Gilbert," my father says, taking his hands out of his pockets, "shall we go and get started on the case?"

*****

A ball thwacks into a child's hands. "Where does all the missing time go?"

I'm not moving and the world is receding. It's become the consistency of melted ice and it's all running down a hole tilted away from me, leaving me standing at the tip of it watching everything I know go down.

Thwack, and return. "Are you going to start with all those silly philosophical questions again?" Shadows flail like flattened spheres. Clouds slumber overhead as passing swarms. My father is standing in front of me.

"Dad, what are you doing here . . ." my own voice sounds lost and too young, flung into a hole and buried with all the discarded parts of yourself that you think you've forgotten. But I need to remember here, what am I trying to remember?

My father adjusts his hat. "Come on, Gilbert, we talked about this."

"It's worth talking about. After all, you were younger, once."

"So were you." Back, with barely a rustle.

"It's Take Your Father to Work Day." He steps out into the sunlight, hands in his pockets. Glancing around, he adds, "It's all you've been talking about for the past month. I thought it would slip your mind, you've been so unfocused lately but . . ." he stares past me, eyes narrowing. "Is that a corpse in the middle of the street?"

"Yeah, it's, ah . . . it's a recent homicide. We're still investigating and . . ." I blink hard, as if the sudden imposed darkness might shift the world. "Are you sure you want to do this, Dad? It's not a typical day, it's . . ."

Thump-thwack. "I looked away and you got older somehow. Is that how it happens, it's really that easy?" They're charcoal scrawled on the grass.

Fwish. "Oh, yes. It only takes a second. Then it's all different."

He gives me that indulgent smile. "Of course, I do, son. All the science you're always telling me, I wouldn't miss that for anything." He goes like he's about to put his arm around me but stops. I don't know what stops him. Maybe it's me. "Besides, would you pass up a chance to work the scene with your father?"

Ba-thump. "We're in different grades now, in school, and I don't see you. Not all the time, like I used to. And all this stuff is happening to you in those times when I'm not there. It's changing you and I can't see how you're changing."

Fa-whoosh. "Come on, name one way I've changed."

I can't look directly at him. He's pressed up against a lens that fails to distort him but there's a sharpness to his features that causes an ache in my forehead. "No. I guess I can't." The air is shimmering as the sunlight drips down clear glass. I've got a humming in my ears, all the words jammed together and trying to escape.

"Good, good," my father says, stepping out and going past me. There's hardly a breeze in his passage. He's rubbing his hands together in that questioning fashion of his, attacking a problem the way one prepares to devour a largely satisfying meal. "I know it's not really my field but the advances you've been talking about . . . I find it fascinating, son. I really do."

For just a moment he turns nearly transparent, a paper worn too thin. I blink and he becomes solid again. It's the light, we're all just tricks of the light. It's pouring down as syrup, sticking to us and slowing every motion. Except for my father, in all matters he moves freely.

Ta-ting. Stumbles and nearly drops and recovers. "You never used to wear that color. You never even liked it."

"Well, I like it now."

Ping-pa-ping. "And that's the thing. Now you like that color and I don't know when that happened. You changed and it wasn't there for it."

"You're on the cutting edge of science out here. We've come far from the days when you just beat someone until they confessed, whether they did it or not." He's gone to the edge of the sidewalk, the tips of his shoes hanging off the curb. He's staring down at the fallen man. "Soon nobody will be able to get away with anything."

I come up behind him. "People will still escape." The road is a slack ribbon, dipping subcutaneously below the horizon. The mayflies will be out before the sun goes down, trying to immolate themselves in the dying light, burning through their lives in a matter of days. "You can't make a net narrow enough for everyone, or you'll catch too many. You'll catch those who won't deserve it."

He frowns. "And you'll let those go who never should have gone." I can't tell if he's agreeing with me or not. Dust drips with haze, refusing to cling.

I don't want to talk about this anymore. I glance back at the house, seeing that the door's still open. Inside is nothing but a straight hallway, leading much further than the outside depth of the house would suggest. Concave and receding, it goes on forever, until it reaches the end. "Is Mom coming?"

Grass rustles under shifting stances. "You're making too much of it."

My father raises an eyebrow. Sideways, his body ripples like a sheathed stiletto. "No." A light cough. "I don't think she's coming." That deflective smile again. "We wouldn't want to abuse the generosity of your job, now, would we?" His eyes aren't meeting mine. He always did this. Does this. Did.

Plonk. "It's a small thing. One small thing. But what if there's another small change that I don't see? And then another. And another."

He keeps talking. I don't prompt him at all. Tipping his hat forward and scratching at the back of his head, he adds, "Besides, lately, she's seemed . . . distracted. I talk to her, and it's like she's hardly listening to me sometimes."

"Until you've changed so much that I don't even recognize you."

I step into the street, give my father a smile that's little more than a glancing blow. "She's been real busy lately, especially now since it's just . . ." I trail off, unable to finish the sentence for some reason. It's just what? What is just? "It'll pass, it's just a moment. There's nothing she can't recover from." The words taste like ashes and undigested dinner and I can't explain why. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

The ball drops, rolls between us while bouncing timidly. "I'm sorry, but it's going to happen anyway. And there's nothing we can do about it."

My father stops it with a foot. He bends down to pick it up and offers it to me. Both our reflections are in it, flattened along the curve and far too solid, the edges reaching toward each other without actually touching. There are clouds passing through his face, drifting to obscure.

"No." It comes out suddenly and sharply and I turn away so quickly that I feel the muscles pull in my back. Out of the corner of my eye I see my father shrug and fling the ball up into the air. It never comes down, or I never hear. Maybe it's still rolling ever upward.

"No?" He's clothes without a man for a second, an empty suit standing there with the hat tilted in a slight question.

"It's not evidence." I say it like I'm so sure. Maybe it's all evidence. Maybe it all adds up to the big picture. "It's not going to lead us to the answer."

Shadows merge in a field of green. "But you're already so far away."

He sniffs, all together again. "Then we need to go, son. It's not going to solve itself, right? Besides, I've never seen you in action."

"There's not much action, really, it's mostly-"

The gunshot rings out as a burst balloon, and he's off running before I can even stop him.

"And I'm just so afraid-"

*****

Forms blur as bells and we're inside. It's a step and a day. I'm right behind him and he's already across the room, a thin scorch mark in a textured dimness. We're walking through rows of chairs, all of them empty. There's a heaviness to their spaces, the impression of stuttered voices. Words written on the seats, gouged and played. The clopping of soft steps haunts the corners.

He's almost up to the stage. The auditorium has no air conditioning and the air tingles as if coated in burrs. I can hear his breathing even as I reach him, the sound of rapid respirations forcibly being slowed down, the gaps longer and longer.

"It still smells," he says, without turning around. He's got his hands in his pockets, standing in front of the steps leading up to the stage. I can't go past him for some reason. "Reeks of gunpowder." He shakes his head. "Never liked the smell, it's like someone tried to turn a car inside out. After I got back from the war everything smelled like it, pillows and candy and the dog, everything but your mother. I think that's how I knew we were meant to be together."

"Dad . . ." I'm speaking without saying. There's a body crumpled on the stage, face down and draped in ropes.

He chuckles quietly. "I know, I'm an old romantic. Bet you never knew that story, eh? Don't know why I never bothered to tell you."

I'm up the steps while he keeps talking. The body is back away from the center and I can already see she's been shot in the back of the head. The hole gapes like a dark mouth that her light hair can't hide, blood spreading out from underneath her face like an abstract map of violence. None of it touches the dress that fans around her in delicate folds. She was shot here, it's clear. Sometimes the person is killed and dumped somewhere else, to throw us off. But you leave traces wherever you've been and wherever you go. I know this and I try to let it keep me going.

"I was never any good with mechanical things. I think that's why I became a botanist. Let nature put it all together and puzzle it out later. I wanted to deal with a world that didn't smell of smoke and tears." His voice is echoing in the vast space, the words a second behind themselves. I look at her and she's so young and she's not breathing anymore. The last smell she must have experienced was of her own blood.

The curtains are half-closed, the scene must have been ending. Maybe it stopped when she stopped, or did the production continue all around her demise? It has to go on and that's the problem. We have no time to linger and ask why.

"Parents aren't allowed on the stage just before the show," she says to me and there's bubbles in her voice.

"Even in death there's a beauty to plants," my father is saying. He's got one foot on the steps and suddenly I don't want him to come up here. I don't want him to come into this world. "The colors they turn, the fading flush of their decay, the way that they mold back into the cycle and fuel nature further. It's all so elegant." Stop, please, you don't belong up here.

And then his footsteps are scuffing the stage right by me. "This, though," he says, sadly, "this is a waste."

"If you saw her, sir, you'd think she was brilliant." Sometimes they get formal, or maybe that's just the way she was. There's no way to tell, really. We're just piecing it together after the facts. Chasing after the facts. "Just a natural, she looked so cute."

"She struggled." My father is walking around me in a lopsided circle, tracing out moves I can't relate to. "There's marks all over the stage, all these black smears."

"No, that's right." There's bruising on her knuckles, maybe she had tried to hit them before it went down? But then how was she shot in the back of her head? I'm looking at how she fell and trying to see if she was running when she did, or if she was standing still. There's so many hints in our postures that we're not even aware of. "The stage was used for dancing, the marks are from all the performances and the recitals." It's how we all know that you were once there.

He gives me a curious look. "Should I ask when you became such an expert on that? Unless they've started putting on plays based around bugs."

"Alice Farley's 'Black Fire' . . . it was lovely." Immersed in solace, there's a liquid cast to her tone. "Neil took me, I didn't think he even knew anything about it. Surprised me, he wouldn't tell me where we were going until we made it there. I thought he was lost, he always got lost. He must have mapped it out beforehand, made the trip a few times to make sure we got there right."

"No, I've been here before." I can see myself sitting in the audience, my face acting as its own beacon. I never tend to recognize what I look like, sometimes I spy myself in the mirror and see nothing but a stranger. "My daughter danced here. I've watched her."

"I don't think he got it at all, the whole night he had just this quizzical expression on his face. We went for a walk and it had been raining while we were inside, the whole city was glowing, like through a screen of silk. Afterwards I asked him why he went to all that trouble if he had no idea what he was even watching."

"Daughter?"

I trace the edges of the wound with my fingers, the hair so fine I can't even feel it. "Whoever shot her was almost as tall as she was, look at the angle. If she was standing up straight then they were completely level with her." He's staring at me so hard it's the crest of a wave bearing down. "Yes, my daughter. I have a daughter."

"Huh." He walks to the edge of the stage and looks down. A breeze from nowhere keeps ruffling his jacket, taking pieces of him away. He's fading into the shrouded light, it's pulling him out. "Why did I never hear about this?"

You weren't here. I don't say that. It's not true, of course it's not. We forget, sometimes and the details elude us. "She's missing now," and that serves to answer no questions. There's room for that type of inquiry here. "Someone took her and I'm trying to get her back. That's why we're here. Following the trail."

His breathing rattles in the rafters, we're inside a skeleton made of motion and it's ossified. A whale swallows you and you become the exhibit in a hall constructed of its ribcage.

"He said to me, he told me that I never looked more beautiful than when I enjoying myself, when I was happy. And it was enough to just see me that way." She's got pants on so I can't tell if there's bruising on the knees, that would tell us how she went down. How exactly the collapse was engineered. The blood on the stage is congealing, thickening in that way that makes it more like fingerpaints instead of a fluid that too easily flees. It's been a long time but not long enough. "I asked him how I looked just then, I said I must look . . ." her voice goes somewhere without depth, divers scraping against distant rocks, the water eating up the echoes. Sound travels faster but only if you're around to listen.

"Why are people dying then? Why are we turning a kidnapping into a homicide?" He's walking along the thin edge, one foot each step going into bare emptiness. And I want to grab him and stop him but he's past me. He won't fall because he can't. We've all got this precise balance.

"Sir, are you going to show me to him? Sir?" It's plaintive and weak, compressed and seeking.

"Because they don't want anyone in the way." I want to sound grim but I just sound tired. I need a break from this but I haven't slept ever since I woke up. My father's face is ruddy under the stage lighting, he's rocking back without reeling. "Because they're trying to escape and everybody is in their path."

"Please, sir, don't. Please? Just tell him I'm gone, that's all. Just say I went away. You should have seen his face when I told him that I loved him." She can't be crying because that isn't possible. The air itself might bleed before that, cracked skin flailing against dryness. "I must look so hideous now. I don't want him to see me like this."

My father looks down, chewing on his lip. "That doesn't explain the crooked path. Where would they take her? Why not just take the direct route?"

She looks so delicate, a strong breath might dissipate her into the thin air. We hold ourselves together and it takes so little for all the connections to come apart. "I don't know," I say, my voice level. "Even if there's an explanation, it may not be a logical explanation. At least, it might not be logical to us. But a motivation always exists."

"That's just elementary psychology, son." He wipes at his brow, flexing his shoulders. "I thought you were going to show my some real forensics work today." There's a spark of amusement in his voice but it stirs a facet in me, a disused crack discovering it's not fully fused. That push we all need to strain for our potential, the pressure that I never felt. The pressure I always tried to keep on my daughter, to show her that the world was not just what it was, but more and worse and better and that we could fit ourselves into any niche. That we weren't limited by what we saw, but by what we wanted to be. The world itself could conform and it wouldn't be easy but it was possible. "She's been taken, three people are dead, we're inside an auditorium. Where do they go from here. What's the goal?"

"Don't, please." Almost under the floorboards now. "Don't let him see me like this." Was that a bird in the ceiling, fluttering amongst the darkness and dust? You can shake it loose but all it does is displace.

"To take her away from me. I thought that was the only goal." I want to turn her over, get a better look at the exit wound but by now it seems pointless. The bullet, if it passed through her face, would have lodged in the floor. That's the elegance of physics, the simplicity of unimpeded motion. But we don't have that kind of time. "But apparently I'm missing something." The heat clings to me and I run my hands over my face, the moist saltiness acting like sandpaper. "I can't do this on my own, Dad."

"You don't have to. You never had to." He bends his knees like he wants to sit down but decides against it. He's orbiting me, a position I never thought I'd be in. "But you always insisted on doing everything by yourself." He's flushed into silhouette, his body colored black with all the details removed, the edges gone sharp, a picture cut out with a razor and inserted into the scene. Just the essence of a person pacing the stage. He doesn't even rate a shadow. "I never knew why, I just assumed you kept to yourself. I'd find you playing outside, examining bugs on the sidewalk or running little experiments and it was just you. And I'd ask you where your friends were and you'd just shrug and go back to exploring."

"I could never find anyone who understood. Who knew how to look at the world in the same way." I've stood up and I'm listening to the refraction of my own voice, the flattening of the peaks. I should be sectioning off the area, preparing it for further processing, Making sure I don't step in the blood. But instead I'm just talking. We're all just talking.

Her voice rustles like newspapers caught in a subway grate. "Can I keep just one thing, sir? Just one moment?" I don't know who she's talking to anymore. There's more to this world than anyone can ever see. "That's all I want. One to take with me, to keep."

He clucks his tongue at me, the old chastising way. "Now, is that the fault of the world or your fault?" He won't let me answer and even then I'm not sure what I'd say anyway. "Besides, you have a daughter, don't you? So clearly someone understood you, or was at least willing to try."

The sigh escapes me before I can stop it. I never liked that sound, like a part of you released that you could never hope to regain. "That's what I thought, once. But it wasn't the case."

"We called a cab to go back to the train station, we were standing on the curb. And I, I must have been standing too close, maybe a little into the street, so that when the cab came it nearly hit me. It was going to, but he pulled me back. He put his arm around me to do it and even after the cab was parked we stood there like that for a minute, the whole city just bustling around us, moving and shifting and never stopping. But we just stood there, he had his arm on me and it was the first time it ever felt right, for someone to do that." There's a low, longing moan underneath her words, the drone of the airplane passing too close to your home. Sunlight squeezed to its smallest and sharpest point.

He's examining the curtains, flapping the heavy fabric as if it might release old ghosts. Dust darts into the shafts of cold light, spearing him without impaling or penetrating. "I'm sorry," is all he says at first.

"It's okay . . ." although the weight in my chest keeps screaming at me otherwise.

"No, it's not," he replies with a sudden fury that I'm not prepared for. A single sharp tug sends a tight ripple across the curtain, a snap that reverberates like a dismissive slap. "I know you, son, I know how you are. When your passion is struck, you throw yourself into it fully, completely. I watched you spend hours tracing anatomy guides out of textbooks so you wouldn't have keep going to the library." He stops, swaying a bit on his feet although the action is so fast it barely registers. When he speaks again, there's a dryness to it that flutters into the shrouded and escalating ceiling. "I used to imagine you as . . . as a kind of ivy, wrapping yourself around the things you loved, keeping it close without suffocating it. Growing around it to try and learn its contours, memorize it by feel." He touches his forehead, just once, just lightly. "And the only way you could be separated was to tear you off completely, even if it meant destroying you." He's staring at me the same way you examine a tree to see if the rot has set in, and I can't stand it.

"I told you, I'm fine," I say, by way of running askew of his flank. "I got through it."

"It must have been hard." I can't tell if he's asking or saying. That was always a problem with him, scientists don't ask questions, we surmise and then try to prove ourselves wrong later. I have the same problem when I've found myself wishing that the whole world had a focus button like a microscope's so that all the blurred aspects could be brought into a sharper view. He's moved to the center of the stage, in front of the only way out. Light creeps around his edges, a sunrise dimmed or a flock taking to the sky as a solid rippling mass.

A hush settles through her as an evacuation. "And I kissed him then and it, it was wonderful. We were the only two people in the world, the cab driver was honking and people were trying to jostle us, I looked down and saw the reflections of the buildings in a puddle and they seemed to go up forever, stretching toward the moon. And it was just us. And he smelled like pine, and unused time." I think she would cry if she could. I'm almost glad she can't. "I could have stayed there forever."

I almost don't say anything. I don't want to. There's traces of dirt on the soles of her shoes, a certain reddish clay that only comes from one section of the town. It's in her dark hair, too, and under her nails. I can't believe I didn't notice it before. She wasn't killed here. Or maybe she was but they had her somewhere else first. But he's just watching me, studying my every move and at first I label his gaze as the kind you give an infant when he's taking his first steps, that note of pride you take in both the child and yourself, even though you really had nothing to do with it. Ultimately, we all learn on our own.

"I want to keep that, if I can. Sir. Just that one minute. To hold when the dark comes." The stage has her voice, its probing the edges of the wings, trying to find a way out. But there is no way out, you leave the stage and it's just another room in a different color. And outside, it's just more boxes. Nothing ever escapes and thus nothing is ever truly lost. I tell myself that, on the nights when it's all closing in.

I look at my father again and I realize that what I first saw isn't really there. He's staring at me with the studied intensity of a man discovering a flower at the bottom of the world. Staring to memorize every feature because you never know when you're going to see it again. If you're ever going to see it again.

"The . . ." I swallow and taste bile and don't know why, "getting in wasn't the hard part. It . . . the leaving was." I'm in the back of the stage, the two of us poised opposite each other. He could leave at any moment and refuses to, while I want to walk away as fast as I can. But there's nowhere to go.

"Can you tell him that?" She has no audience anymore. The spotlight won't point at any one person. We're all players and we're in the wrong theatre. "Make sure he knows. Please. Because he'll want to forget. Because it will hurt so much."

"You were never one to form connections." From the angle I'm seeing him he's superimposed on the rows of seats, rising back and beyond him like sliced open teeth. He doesn't fit into any of them. Even I've sat there and found some kind of comfort.

"I've always walked a . . . a step apart from the world. From everyone. Just a second off, out of phase, I slipped right through people and they never noticed me. Which I was fine with, because I was always that way. It's all I knew." My beard is days old, it's growing even as I stand there. There's sweat curled in my hair, I need a breeze, we all need a breath of cool air. "But, somehow she saw me. I was just a ghost to her, a spark seen against bright sunlight, but she still noticed. And more, she reached out." I look at my palm, the uneasy color of the skin. I can name all the bones in my hand. I wish I could see them right now. I need the reassurance. "And somehow, I became more solid. That's when it was good, for a while. Better than good." Memory scrapes at the inside of my skull, thorns attacking fallow soil. It all wants out.

"And he'll want to forget. But he can't. You can't let him. Promise me that, please?"

I want to tell her everything will be okay. But even I don't believe that anymore. The world is too big, even when the walls are bent inwards. "But it . . . we couldn't stay together. It wasn't going to work. It was like . . . a set of wings on the wrong body. Even when the potential is there for something beautiful, it's just not possible. You can't ascend, the gravity isn't there. It wasn't the right world for it." My father coughs and he goes translucent, hardly held together. It's only my vision. "And since then I've been trying to . . . sort of fade back. Bring myself back out of phase and dissolve." There's shooting pains in my neck, my back, like I've fallen from a great height. "But it's all going wrong. Once you've been brought in, you're connected. And pulling back out, it . . . hurts." I can almost see the pockmarked scars on my too loose skin. "I didn't think it would. Not like this." I wrap my arms around myself to suppress the shudder. I don't want him to see. It happens anyway but I don't know if he notices.

His voice is an old radio freed of static. "She's keeping you in. Here."

I blink so hard the world goes out for just a second. "No, we're finished, the two of us, we're-"

"Not her. Her." Suddenly I'm a child again and he's explaining how flowers point toward where the light is. How they can tell even when the clouds cover everything. But I'm not even sure if that's true or not. It's not my field. "Your daughter."

A muscle twitches in my face. I touch the skin to still it but I can't catch it, I'm already too late. "She's . . ." the words lodge and then dislodge, coming out so quickly that it might lacerate my throat, invert my stomach in its wake. "She's all the good from . . . from us. Distilled. She has the potential to be everything we were, but better. The parts of myself that I can bear and the parts of her mother that I fell in love with and still see, sometimes." I've heard of automatic writing before, the pen moving without conscience or reason but its my voice that feels automatic here, the sentences piling on top of one another. I can't stop it and I don't know how. "Messages written on the bathroom mirror condensation, the book on entomology hidden under the bed because she didn't want me to know she was reading it, listening to me explain the life cycle of a butterfly and how one day we were going to get one for our daughter, because I thought it was something she needed to see." I don't want to keep talking. I don't even know if any of this ever happened. It's all wrapped in haze, in summer heat, the sunlight blasting away all detail, superlit with the colors washed away. Gone white and gone blind. "She has none of our pettiness, our vindictiveness, our inability to meet halfway and try to understand each other. We did one thing right and it was her. And even though we gave up, she won't. She'll be better than that." Are the curtains closing? No, that's just the metaphor. That's just my father, and the angle of the light. It's changing on its own, it's not because I'm falling. I am not sliding. I am not shaking. The wall grates at my back.

"Promise that he'll be okay without me, no matter what."

"Oh my." My father takes a step forward, one hand out. But he's too far away and it's far too late. "Look at you. I've never seen you this exposed." The quiet fear in his voice could destroy me.

"I've precipitated." There are shards of rods rammed into my chest. They move every time I try to breathe and the only alternative is to stop breathing. And that's not an option. "I never meant to. I've precipitated and I can't go back into solution." I don't know how else to say it. That's the saddest part.

"You know you can't." He could be leaning down, looking down the length of the body. Does he look a little more drawn, a tightness around the lines of his face? Or is it just me, refusing to see. "You can't take her with you. She'd never be able to blend."

"I know." The admission comes as easily as any chemical reaction. "I know."

He's eyeing me with a slightly narrowed gaze. "So what are you going to do?"

Grimacing, I lever myself up. "Find her." I'm a little unsteady on my feet, or maybe it's just the tilt of the stage. My father goes faceless from a light that isn't there, the sudden brightness obliterating his features. The way that old photographs take you apart and make you seem that much less real. "She's not here, so she must be somewhere else." Is it really that simple?

I walk forward, finally bridging the gap. My father rocks back, steps back, his shadow pointed outward like a hand keeping track of the wrong time. I've got this weight and it's dragging me down, all the things I've wanted pulled away from me faster than I can keep them near. I've laid there with my legs useless while my hopes receded into the distance, until I started to forget what made them hopes in the first place. Until I started to forget what exactly made me want to chase after them. The further a thing gets, the less you start to want it, because it's the nearness of it that drives you. I've never been able to stare at the furthest star and say, get me that, get me there no matter what the odds. It's too distant for me to care. I've been fascinated by objects so small that a million of them would be a flicker in the eye, loved so closely that I've felt the breath of it wash against my face, hot and true. I can hear my daughter's voice even when I'm not looking and it will always be this way. I don't have a choice. With her, I've never wanted one.

She speaks one more time before I reach her. "I so wanted to take him back. And now it will never happen again." Too flat and at the end her voice fizzes out, stream flung into the ocean. She's gone, just like that. We don't have time, we have moments. Is that all we get, I hear, without sound in her voice.

"But where did she go . . ." I mutter, bending again over the corpse. My father is standing over me, hands jammed into his pockets, his expression pensive. "You need to tell me exactly where she went."

"How would she know?" he asks.

"Everyone knows." All the answers are written in the runes of the world, in our postures and the scrawled wreckage of our sensibilities. "We all have pieces, it's just a matter of putting them together. Like her, like here." I stand up, stride out toward the edge of the stage, letting my voice fly out careening. "This place is empty . . . there was no recital today. Why was she here?"

"Maybe she stopped by to prepare?"

I point at the body, the rumpled jeans and sweatshirt. "She's not dressed for it. Look at her, she was outside. She was somewhere else first. If she was here to set up, where's the equipment, where is everything?"

My father tilts his head slightly. "Are you saying she was lured here?"

I suck on the inside of my cheek. "Invited, maybe. Maybe, maybe the class was supposed to be here and whoever asked her to come here expected her to . . . to have someone with her." It's falling into place, the way that snowflakes eventually become a blanket of white, the pieces all connecting. "She fell outward." I'm pacing the length of her body. I never realized she was so short. I don't know if we've ever met. "Whoever did it was behind her, but you couldn't sneak up on her. Not here." I stamp my feet, then try to move quietly. My steps ricochet against the back wall and clatter downward. "The acoustics are all wrong for it. So she knew who it was and she knew enough to think she could turn her back."

"But you know all this already." My father has gone rigid, a locked procession. "Why are you going over it again?" He sounds so small. But it's not his world, he doesn't know how the rules are arranged.

But my confidence outstages him, overwhelms all attempts. "She came here to get my daughter but my daughter wasn't here. Once she found that out, she had to leave. It's that simple."

"But where would she go from here? How are you supposed to find her?" Oh, Dad. If you weren't around to ask these questions, I don't know what I'd do. Because everyone thinks what we do is mysterious, that tricks are involved and special skills. It's not, it's none of that. You just have to know how to look and you have to be able to explain.

I don't smile. In other times I would but not here. "Why, like this," I answer, bending down over the body one last time. There's a piece of paper clutched in her hand that's been there the entire time, of course.

"And . . ." he says, each word a bitten hook, "I thought you daughter was gone before this. I thought we were already on the case. When did we start again?"

I unfold the paper casually, making sure to preserve every inch of it. I hold the creased squares up to the light, up to him. Through it he's become a blob, melting out of shape. We can't risk losing definition, or this world will reconfigure us without remorse.

The paper snaps down and he's back again, not at all narrower for the loss. Standing up, I give him the smile that almost every rookie sees at least once from me, when all the pieces have interlocked and I'm just waiting for them to catch up with it. The final sprint toward knowledge, the notion that nothing is out of reach and that cases only get cold because we let them. Because we don't possess the will.

In his eyes I'm certain I see that realization.

"We follow the evidence."

And in my head I hear his voice, and the words are just the same.

*****

Structural angularities rise up, take heed, and collide. Shadows touch down as grids, as broad sweeping curves, as rectangles dangling from the flimsiest of strings. The pavement's gone flat and rough from the constant stamping of feet that have no weight. Trees ring the grove but far enough back that they could be sentinels waiting to see if anyone escaped.

It turns out that no one escaped.

The playground spreads, a breeze cycles through without dissipating the heat. My father is standing near the monkey bars. He's got one hand on it and he's leaning heavily against its complex array. Without moving he's seeing everything, his eyes moving constantly but slowly, forcing himself to take it all in.

The wind whistles as it brushes against me, ruffling the fabric of my shirt. It's trying to shove me away, outward on some other trajectory that isn't level with this plane. But I'm planted firmly here, I've put down roots and nothing is going to drag me free. I owe it to them. To everyone who got in the way without meaning to.

"Mister?" He's on the slide, maybe about halfway down, friction somehow holding him in place. His torso's bent, draped over the side of it and his eyes are still open, staring forever downward at the milling ants buried in the sand grains. There's no blood anywhere, which I'm partially grateful for. But it is going to make this harder.

"They went on a field trip." I need to hear a voice amidst all the desolation, not even the birds are singing now. It's just the shimmer of sibilant, and us. "The teacher wanted them to go outside for once, because it was such a nice day. So they weren't at the school and she wasn't there. She was here." I shield my eyes with one hand, glance around the rest of the playground.

"Why did it stop hurting?" He's wearing a shirt with a cartoon character on it that I don't recognize. My daughter never watched television. She never seemed inclined to and I never encouraged it. "It hurt so much and now it doesn't."

"And so were the rest of them." I measure out even steps, shoes crunching on the loose rock. She's crumpled near the see-saw, fallen near the center as if it had been up when it happened and she slid to the middle before tumbling. Her dress is dirty with dust. I can't see her face. There's a dampness underneath her that I don't dare place.

"Have you seen my sister? I don't know where she went." Her voice goes high, trilling just on the edges of worry. "She's going to be so scared."

My father doesn't answer at first. His face has gone pale, fading back into the color of dried bones. His eyes are fixed on a pair of sneakers peeking out from a bush, one shoelace untied as a forgotten detail.

"Where are all the parents?" he asks in a voice gone hollow. The interlaced bars manage to catch it and entrap it inside their cage. His words don't leave the immediate orbit of his body. Somewhere behind him, stuffed inside the lattice, is the shadow that might have once been a person, bent and crumpled as if someone was trying to fit them in a space even smaller than they were.

"We're the first on the scene." It's a hard truth but it's one he needs to know. "You get there and it's clean and it's roped, like we've arranged it that way. Like it's some kind of exhibit." Even the sand refuses to hold my footprints. "But we've been there, we've processed the dirty work, cataloged the blood and triangulated the violence. We've mapped it out so all you have to do is mourn."

This one must have gone down while running. His pants are torn and it looks fresh. One hand is grasping a handful of sand, like he was going to throw it at whoever was behind him. The grains are still trickling out from between his fingers, an hourglass set to the wrong schedule. "We show you what paths are safe to walk."

"None of them are coming. I don't hear them. There's no one around but us." He's resting his forehead against the metal of the bar, eyes half-closed. It's no cooler than the rest of the scene. There's a feverish sheen to his face and I should know about that but we've all made our decisions.

"Did I get anything on my shirt?" I don't know which one that is, I can't place the voice. Maybe it's the one by the swings, lying on his back with his arms flung outward. "I can't see it, and I hope it's not dirty. She warned me not to get anything on it and I don't want her to get mad at me. Can you see it?"

"How can this happen and no one comes running?" My father is walking along the bars, one hand gripping them tightly. His legs aren't wobbling, it's just the haze refracting. "All these kids and no parents around." He's not gasping, it's just the fallow rhythm of his speech. "And you . . ." he's staring at me and he's so old in that moment, his hat fallen over his forehead so that the umbra of it touches just the top of his eyes. They're shining dully, the way that grayness does when struck. When no other color is brave enough. "You're the only parent here, and your kid isn't."

"I made a promise. Just tell me."

"Everyone thinks you don't need to leave witnesses." She's hanging off the swings, stomach flat on the board. She must have kept swinging for a while afterwards because her fingers have left tiny clawmarks in the sand, parallel lines as half-formed arrows. I think she's whispering, but the syllables are just dropping to the ground without leaving a mark. "That if you get rid of everyone who's ever seen you that somehow that will erase everything you did. It doesn't work that way." There's a clump of her hair on the ground, the strands blonde and fragile. It was torn out and discarded, unneeded. "Eyewitnesses are the worst because no one can ever get their stories straight, they're always trying to embellish, their brains are always adding new details that just makes the investigation worse."

"Right." My father wipes at his face, stares intently at his hand, lips pulled tightly together.

"You take a person out, it's not clean." One child must have fallen and rolled, the dipped impressions marking out the stumble, the tracks of a sidewinder. I follow the trail into the thicket, find him curled up against the fence. His arm is twisted unnaturally, he must have been trying to climb when it got him. And thus he went down. He came down. "You can't tear someone out without leaving pieces behind. And it makes more of a mess than just letting them go about their business, giving conflicting stories." He's whimpering quietly, afraid. They often are, right after it happens. Especially the younger ones, they don't understand that nothing can hurt them anymore.

"You seem to . . . excel when a mess exists." He's so distant, seen through a clogged filter, his shape sliced into striations that are a tiny inch off.

"The more of a mess you make, the more it gives us to work with." My father needs to know these things. It's not just magic, what we do, it's finishing off stories and letting people walk away without any attachments. To be able to say, it's over finally. "In a way the dead can tell us more than the living ever could." The dryness assaults my throat again, but I cover it with a cough. The noise echoes against the tree tufts, captured and swatted down. "The living lie, even when they don't mean to. They misconstrue, say things they don't intend, change their minds and pretend it was always that way." There's barbs hidden in my words, I can hear them scraping against my tongue as they exit. "The dead always tell the truth. They don't have any choice."

"But the dead can't make amends." My father is standing in the sand, one hand wrapped loosely around the swingset chain. He looks slightly winded and the links clank together quietly, out of tune windchimes, ringing atonally in time with the rocking of his breathing. He appears to have stopped sweating. "Can they, son?"

The shadow of the swing hovers just an inch over his silhouette, a hammer just waiting to fall. I can't look at him directly, it's too bright out here. "That's our job, to make amends for them. The living can take care of their own business . . ." It's that sodden feeling again, not drowning but heavy with moisture and the taste of stagnant water. I don't know where the surface is, I've lost all sense of direction. Even the sky is wrong, like I'm seeing it from the wrong side. "Tie up all the loose ends so they can move on, taking only what they want with them." I am not saying these things. "And what they don't take, what they don't . . . apologize for, it's just one of those things that isn't going to get said. And you can never tell if it's because they don't want to or because they can't." I lick my lips and it's only salt. "It's just a silence you have to piece together afterwards. That's what we have in common with the dead."

His shadow hits the edge of the grass, disintegrates. "But unlike the dead, the living always have something more to say."

It hits me as a quickening, that sharp pain in the chest that suggests your heart has started beating sideways, where there's less room. We squeeze to expand into the places we can't go. That's what being human means, sometimes. I reach out for the fence, stop myself just inches from it, the distorted shadow of my hand cut into pieces. "She's not coming back, Dad." I've said it with my eyes closed but even if I could see I wouldn't be looking.

"And would you even want her back?" It's just the softest rustle.

It takes me a second to answer. "I don't know." The voice I learned to use when we needed to argue without waking her up in the crib. When the words couldn't wait. And now I have all the time in the world. And I can't think of anything to say.

"Or do you want to feel like it was your decision?"

I turn around so quickly I can feel blades of grass snap beneath me. "She's not here," I growl at him. He only watches as I pass him by, my strides long and not taking me far enough away. "But this is where they must have got her and the longer we wait here, the colder the trail will get. We've got to find other places where she might be." Already I've got leads forming in my head as fractals, as honeycombs, possibilities branching toward the solution. A swarm of gnats part to let me go by. I won't be stopped, I'll finish this before anyone gets hurt. Before I-

"Who loses their child, Gilbert?" And his voice reels me back.

He's standing in a near triangular stance, his shirt pressed flush against his frame. He's so thin, thinner than I remember. When he talks its the sound of autumn descending, a thousand leaves finally realizing it's okay to let go. "I lost you once, at a museum. You were seven years old and I was trying to explain to you how ferns hadn't evolved from the time of the dinosaurs, how they didn't need to. Because when you're perfectly adapted you don't need to change." He looks down, lets one foot scrape against the soil. "You walked away when I was talking. I was so caught up in my explanation that I never even realized it. And when it hit me that you were gone, I tried to think back to when I last saw you." He rubs the skin under his nose. "I couldn't. I couldn't remember what you were wearing or even what side of me you had been standing on. And I just stood there, I didn't even know where to start looking. Everyone was staring me like I was the new exhibit, the Horrible Parent, and I still couldn't move. I was convinced in that second you were gone forever. I thought of all the stupid, useless things I wanted to say to you and how I'd never get to do it."

"I'm not walking away now, Dad." I don't know what makes me say that. "You can say whatever you want."

He smiles thinly, but I can't tell if it's because of me. "Turns out you weren't lost at all. Your mother knew where you were, of course. She always seemed to. You had found the crime exhibition, you were standing in the center of it all. Enraptured by magnifying glasses and fingerprint kits and strands of hair on glass slides. Blood samples and photographs of the scene."

"I would have come back. I would have found you eventually. I knew you wouldn't leave without me."

He only shakes his head. "You were staring at one exhibit, a plaster cast of footprints. The description went on about how you could tell how tall a man was by the shoe size and the length of the stride, all the basics. But when I found you all you were doing was shaking your head." He tugs at the skin on the back of his hand, stares at it and frowns before smoothing the area he had just touched. "I didn't even notice at first, I was too busy hugging you and chastising you for walking away. But you never took your eyes off the cast, at the footprints captured on it."

My father laughs, the sound both aborted and sad. "You said, finally, you said, They're never going to catch him. Just like that, you said it. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And I grabbed you by the shoulders, because I wanted your full attention, I wanted to memorize the sight of you. But you stared right through me, even as I demanded to know what you were talking about. And you said that the police would be chasing him in the wrong direction." He plants his foot firmly in the soil, lifts up a heel. "The prints were weighted toward the heel end, you told me. Whoever it was had been walking backwards to try and throw them off the trail. They'd have to backtrack or they'd never find him." He takes his hat off, folds it in half and the places it back on his head. It looks no different. Birds wheel overhead, the flock shaped as an arrow, a knife trying to cut open the clouds and bring down the rain. "I knew then, what you were going to do for the rest of your life, even if you didn't. And that as long as you never lost sight of that, I'd never lose you. It wouldn't be possible."

"My daughter didn't walk away." I want to sound angry about it but the best I can do is this wavering tiredness. "She was taken. I woke up and she just wasn't there anymore."

"We don't lose people, Gil," my father is telling me, one hand running along the seam of his coat, looking for a pocket and failing. "What happens is we let them go."

"I only wanted one of them to go." I barely hear myself. It's all in my stomach, the moment when the car leans off the edge of the bridge and you realize that for all your hoping gravity isn't on your side. "Just her, she never had to stay. We decided that, together. It was the way it had to be. But . . ." I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to keep it all in, as if that might somehow halt the pressure. "I didn't let her go. That wasn't supposed to happen. That's not what I wanted."

"What did you want, then?"

"Not this." It explodes out of me, the spark finally breaking through the wall of the powder keg. My father flashes and briefly goes negative, all the people who stood too close to the bomb thinking that if they faced it without flinching it might not hurt them. That's wrong. That's the world. It hurts the good and the depraved and the unjust and the blessed all together, without being partial. The shockwaves don't discriminate. "I want my daughter, here, I want to be able to see her, I want to hear her laugh, I want to be there in those moments when she realizes the world isn't everything she thought it was, but better. I want to be there when she cries so I can help fix it." I'm stalking across the playground, cutting crooked paths out toward the trees. The leaves are turning already, we've got that kind of summer where it's all drying out. Colors as rockets, the reds and browns overwhelming the green. New and renewed. Or the promise of it. "I want to be able to explain things to her, I want her to be able to surprise me."

"Son." He says. I can't turn because he's so far away. Sometimes it's like I haven't heard his voice in forever. "Son. You're going about this all the wrong way."

"No." I spit the word out with enough blunt force to dent the air. "No, I'm not." That should be enough, to just say that. It needs to be, because I don't know how else to put it.

"Yes, you are." It catches me in the back, that tone, the way he always spoke when he knew I wasn't listening. When I'd stop in the middle of the street to examine a colony of ants and not notice the oncoming cars. "You let her go, you let her get taken-"

"No!" My shout echoes across the expanse. There's a girl nearby, near my feet, her arms and legs pulled into herself, into a tiny ball. Trying to ward off what was coming. But that couldn't be stopped. She's got hair like my daughter's, bred for summer and softly gleaming. But she's not my daughter. My daughter isn't here. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I only looked away for a second." The admission is caustic. The wind ruffles her hair too gently, the edges of her sleeves billowing. For a second you might think she was alive. But there's wounds you can never see that run the length of the body, and they drain us. No matter how much you try to keep it all in. Then a fly lands on her face and breaks the illusion. "That's all, it was just a second. As soon as I realized I tried to fix it, I ran. Dad, you don't know how fast I ran. And I heard her, she was calling my name, calling for me, wondering where I was."

"This isn't how you told the story before." I don't know who says that. All stories are true, somewhere.

"And I got there, I got back, I got home, and she was gone." The inside of my mouth is coated in dust. "She's always been gone." The trees are forming pathways and valleys, leaves descending as idle flyers and turning the grass into a quilt. "And I don't know how to find her."

Dead plants crunch behind me. He's coming. He's limping, each step is labored. It's been a hard day for us all. I shouldn't have brought him. But I needed him here, I wanted him to see. "Gilbert, I told you, I . . ." he goes out of breath again, his words wrapped in sand. The tide has gone out past the horizon and we don't know how to get it back. A signal, maybe? A plea to the sky? "I've been watching you, this whole day I've seen how you . . ." What, Dad, what? I want to escape the borders of this canopy, but I can't break through. "All you do is act after the fact. You wait until the injustice happens, then you do something about it. You're always trying to explain, without trying to figure out how to stop it from occurring in the first place."

"It's what we do." I can't even sound like I believe it anymore. I put a hand against the nearest tree, the bark scraping at my palm. I could drag my hand across it until blood ran down the trunk and it might not even reach the ground. I might not even feel it. The stinging could arc across the nerves until the body decided to shut it down. It's a defense mechanism. It's how we keep going. "We can't be pre-emptive, it's not that kind of job, it's not that kind of life-"

"But not everything can be put back together again after it's broken." There are bodies scattered in the grass, in the sand, fallen in silent poses, all of them still. I don't know any of their names. I want them to start moving again. I don't want them to stay like this. I don't want to stay like this. "How much do you see . . . coming before you finally start to do something about it?" He's forcing each word out through collapsed lungs.

"We were over, there was nothing I could-"

"How long before it ended did you know . . ." He's got nothing to lean on. His shadow is tilted, barely attached to the ground. "You knew where it was going and you didn't know how to stop it."

"I tried, I really tried." I'm not convincing anyone.

"You let it happen." He's not accusing me. He doesn't have the strength. "You knew she was going to leave. You were going to let her." He wheezes, the sound of heat rushing through the smallest gap. "But . . . you didn't think she was going to do it alone, did you?"

There's a child lying at the base of the tree. He's on his back, but he's not looking at me. Some scattered leaves have fallen onto his chest, forming a cluster right over his heart. His eyes are open and in his pupils is a reflection of the splendor overhead. But it's lost all color in his gaze, gone transparent and fading. The ghost of autumn falling.

"I . . . I don't know how to get in the way of things." I want to find my pulse just to remind myself that it's still there. The clouds overhead are weighted, suffused with grey. The cold will come eventually, but not here. Not today. The slick skin of the world is trying to suffocate us. "I only know how to stand aside and travel in the wake."

"Then, Gilbert, it's time you learned . . ." I can't put words onto what that costs him to get it out.

"Goddammit, I know that!" It comes out as a near-scream, acid poured across a table that refuses to scar, dissipating even before it reaches the edge. My whole body is shaking but the surroundings are taking my words and muffling them, capturing them in hands made of barbed air and broken prisms, smothering and wrestling them back to the dirt. "Do you think I like this, I spend my day walking through silent fields and seeing nothing but corpses. Do you think I like waking up every day knowing I'm going to be too late?" I'm doing my best to cajole the stillness but it isn't working, nobody wants to get up. Nobody cares enough to put things back the way they were. "I'm tired of this, Dad, I am so tired, I want to be able to save someone who can thank me. Do you know what it's like to have to react to everything all the time?"

"We're scientists, Gilbert. It's how science works, you either . . . have to explain why something happened after the fact or . . . guess what's going to happen and wait for nature to confirm your guess." He sounds whispery, like leather left too out long, dried and paper-thin. The sheathe removed from his words. "It's what we know."

"It's not good enough anymore." I think I hear my voice echo, coming back to me as fractured chants, lost in the sun and turned into furious snow. Gone before it hits, until you only have the hint of moisture and the ghost of possible weather. "It's bleeding into my life, I keep finding myself treating it all like it's some kind of . . . experiment." The honesty is carving grooves into my bones that the rainwater can fall into, riverbeds gasping for new air. "It makes it easier to treat everything as a variable, I don't have to . . . engage with it. I can pretend that I'm watching it from the outside, sitting back just to see what might happen." I swallow hard, as the season accelerates around us into a whirl of dying color. "During our worst arguments I would just . . . switch off, I'd find myself saying things to her to prove that I knew how she'd react. Out of curiosity. It's all I have, sometimes. My damn curiosity." Clouds streak by overhead, torn apart as they're flung across the sky. The tatters refuse to realign and that makes it worse, to see them broken. It needs to be night. It has to be night somewhere. "I knew we were collapsing, but I wanted to know why, so I let it happen. I did so I could study it later and see where I went wrong. I didn't have a problem with that." There's an injection in my voice that's red-hot. My hand goes up to slam against the tree but stops just in time, hovering just inches from impact. "Do you see, Dad? Do you see what I've become?"

"I see . . . I see a man who didn't know how to cope and did so in the only way he knew how." It's not a comfort, not in the way he intends. "That doesn't mean you're a bad person."

"It didn't stop there." There's a ragged cough that I suppress at the last second. Test tubes jockey with distillations and caper with endless displays of butterflies in my brain, all of them churning and marching in the name of science. Where there's no room for feeling, for love, for the tender notions that cushion us from the nights when logic and reason fail. "My daughter, she . . . she's the best thing in my life. The absolute best thing that's ever happened to me. I want you to know that. I love being a parent, it's like they've sewn an extra heart into my chest. It hurts because there's barely any room for it, every day I wake up and want to explode, I'm too full of everything. But I'd never get rid of it because now that I've got it, I feel more alive, all the extra blood in me I want to . . ." I laugh and I'm not sure how it comes out. The trees quiver, I'm seeing the world in a shower of slowly falling vibrant leaves, in locked segments obscured. "I want to shout and, and sing, I want to pick her up to dance with her, I don't care what the song is. I want to give her everything I have, even though I'm afraid it isn't enough. I watch her sleep and I have to keep convincing myself that I helped create her. I tell her all my dreams and I tell her to make her own dreams and . . ." I bite my lip, just to feel the sensation of it. Blood never tastes like blood. It's bitter and carries the flavor of loss. "I'm a parent, Dad. I never thought I would be and now I couldn't ever give it up." A leaf falls into my hand and I close my fingers around it, feeling the lingering dryness of it, the way it crinkles at the touch.

"That's good, Gilbert, that's . . . good." I'm boring him, he sounds so tired. There's a name carved into the trunk, letters and numbers and the year isn't now. Maybe it's my daughter's initials, put there by some punk I won't like from the instant I meet him. Maybe it's just random marks I tell myself mean something.

"And it . . . it scares me. It really does." I have to get this out. From the corner of my eye I see my father's shadow take its hat off. He looks so small that way, like he's contracting. Or maybe it's the playground. I can't even see the edges of it anymore. There were sidewalks once, under the grass. You can never fully overcome. "I think I . . . that I doubted myself. That what I felt wasn't real, it was just another . . . reaction. I was just doing what I thought I was supposed to do, to consider myself a parent. Going through the motions." The leaf is gone. Either I let it fall or it was never there. Or maybe it passed away, into another time. You can fall fast and you can fall far but we always fall free. "And I think to convince myself I . . . I let her go. Just like you said, Dad." He murmurs and it might be agreement but I can't tell. I have to go on, regardless. "I knew she was going to be taken, I watched all the variables line up, like the good scientist I am. I knew the experiment could only have one outcome. But I needed her gone so I could . . . so I could finally see that this was real. That it wouldn't go away with her not there. Because it didn't go away, it got worse, it . . . it's an ache in every muscle, from the moment I wake up, it pulses in my dreams, it . . ." my voice drops, no louder than the plunge. Is this how I really am? This calculating? It took me this long to finally see? I'm both disgusted and relieved. "I want her back. More than anything else in the world, I want her with me. To grow up, to learn, to be herself." Maybe there's a chance for me after all. "Is that too much to ask for?"

"No, Gilbert." The leaves are falling faster around me, drifting end over end, a shower of burned colors. Silently, a curtain yanked from the air. "It's not." I can barely hear him over the changing season. He's lightness thrown over snow, desperate to avoid leaving an impression. The sun has gone long, casting a fiery haze over the playground, pulling at the shadows until they seem caught in a strong wind. "You just have to . . ."

He trails off into a murmur, the words collapsing into a bare sigh. That's what warns me.

"Dad?" The question quivers between us, there's layers packing the spaces, the leaves pushing my movements into slow strobe.

"Is it me . . ." he says, with a gentle hiss.

I'm turning. I'm turning. The cast off debris of the tree is grasping at me with limp hands. "Are you . . ." I'm trying to ask him, I want to ask him. He always used to answer my questions. He always did. That hasn't changed. It never will.

". . . or is it . . ." I don't hear him crumple. I don't know what that sounds like.

"What's . . ."

The scene blurs, the details smear.

". . . too damn . . ."

The dead child nearest me suddenly bursts into vapor.

My father's shadow compresses.

". . . warm . . ."

Just in time to be too late, I see him go down.

"Dad!" It comes out of me as a misfired musket, damaged without a target. The trees have gone bare, branches scratching at the sky with gnarled fingers. I'm wading through a sea of muted colors, friction clutching at my legs and trying to hold me back. I dive forward, almost jumping, hearing the crinkle of crushed leaves with every movement. My father isn't moving. In the distance I see another puff of smoke as another child goes, another body disintegrating. They're going up into the air. Into the too thin air.

I reach him when he's on his back. His eyes are closed but fluttering. The back of my hand brushes against his face and he's so warm, he's gone feverish. But he's not sweating. "No, no." It comes out of my mouth as hardly words at all. The rest of the playground is starting to go, streaks of sand being driven upwards like funnels, tornadoes pulling it all away. "Dad, you can't . . ."

"It's okay, son," he's telling me and I don't even know if he can see me anymore. His hand tries to find mine and his skin has gone so dry, I want to grab him but I'm afraid he'll just be torn. He rustles like he's got old newspapers inside of him. There's no weight to him at all. His hat has fallen off and he looks so old, he's gone bald and his skin is stretched so tightly, the lines on his face seem to go on forever. But he's my father.

"No, it's not." I keep saying this like it might be true. "It's not okay, you can't go. Not like this." I squeeze my eyes shut tightly, trying not to let myself inhale, as if I could save more of the air for him. "We have to finish here. It's not done."

"I'm glad we did this." He's smiling, it's weak and he's evaporating as we speak. I'm too young for this and he's too old. He can't go, not on a day like this, with the sky so clear and the sun so strong. A bicycle rattles by, the bell ringing like an alarm. I could carry him but we'd never get past the fence. I know this, I know these things. I know too many damn things that won't help me here. "You and me, son. You and me."

"But it never happened." What makes me say that I don't know. His breathing is coming in staccato leaps now, and getting slower each time. The spaces growing larger. No, please. Don't do this. Don't let this happen to me. I don't have much, I can't afford to lose any of it. "You never got a chance to see any of it."

"I saw . . . enough." He coughs. His pulse, it's so fast, oh God. Rapid and soft and fluttering, that last bird failing to take flight. There's too much light, we're drowning in it, the background reduced to abstract shapes.

"But you didn't. You never saw anything." I'm talking so fast, I can't even hear myself. I'm a man who chooses his words carefully, who never speaks unless he has to and each word is being torn out of me bloody and fresh, still screaming at being cut loose too soon. "You were supposed to see so much, where I worked, what I did, my whole life. We've been here and you missed all of it." I've got his hand in both of mine as if that might hold him to this world. But his edges are dissolving, his features starting to bleed away. No, no, just a few more minutes. Don't do this. "You never got to see me succeed."

"Ah." The noise comes right from the back of his throat. I can't listen to this anymore. I can't let him go. "It's . . . ah. We did our best. What else can you do?"

There's a hook in my chest holding me down and it won't let me move. "You had to be there when I found her."

"Gilbert." He says my name like a cushion, to speed him on. "Listen, it's going to be . . ." His free hand lifts, tries to reach my shoulder. It's trembling so hard, I can see his muscles almost splintering with the effort. "It'll be . . ." His arm drops heavily inches short of the goal. "I'm sorry," he says, as a whisper. "But this is as far as I can go."

His back arches slightly, trying to gather more air, but it's not enough. We're too late. We're always too late. Relaxing, he sighs, even as I try to keep talking, trying to keep him here. "I knew you'd be proud of me but I . . . I wanted to give you a reason. Wanted you to see me solve this."

"Of course you will." He's barely here. I'm looking at him and he's not there. "Of course you . . ." the rest won't come.

"But Dad, Dad . . ." I want to shake him, I want to grab him so hard that he breaks if it means that I can keep him here for even another second. "I don't know if I can, that's the problem." I'm screaming it at him in the park, alone except for the vanished and the falling. Us and the pleading air. The day's gone auburn and it will take us. "I don't know if I can do it on my own. Can I?"

"Oh . . ." he shudders again, the last vestiges. His lips pull back and his gaze goes to the sky, to the too bright air, his muscles going stuff. "When you see her . . . give her a hug for . . . me." His eyes close as the lights go out. He barely speaks again. "I wish I could have . . . met her, she sounds . . ." His pulse sputters in a burst of machine gun fire and falters. Fails.

My father falls silent. I want to rouse him, call his name, but I know better. There's nothing else. A single leaf falls down, maybe the last one, dodges me and drifts in a crooked path to land on my father's mouth. It doesn't stir and neither does he. I let it rest there, let him go.

I stand up as he goes transparent, goes vaporous, the wind taking him and scattering what he is and what he was to the ether, so that nothing remains. His smoke goes up until it becomes the same color as the air and I can't see it anymore. I keep trying to listen for the sound of his voice but even that's gone, slippery and lost the more I try to keep it.

"Where are you?" I ask no one at all, I ask the one person I have left to care about. The playground has rearranged itself, the sand covering most of the ground, nearly burying me to my ankles. Beyond me in the pale fading light I see my father's footprints and mine, leading us right to this spot. Measured and even, they're so clear. Part of me wants to go over and just obliterate them, get them all away. I want all of this gone, I want everything discarded. What good are paths if they lead you here? To this place and these times?

"God dammit." The word comes out with more vitriol than I expect. Stepping onto the sand, I put a hand over the closest footprint, ready to sweep it away, to smooth the sand out and pretend that it doesn't exist. Make it all go away. Just make it-

At the last second, when I can almost feel the grains on my skin, I stop myself. Maybe it's the angle of the light, a chance scent on the breeze, it's impossible to say. But it makes me pause and in that moment I realize what I was about to do. And the notion freezes me up a little inside.

I was about to erase evidence. To take the record and wipe it clean. I almost back away in shock, ashamed of myself. It goes against everything I know, everything I've ever learned or tried to impart. You look first. You look and you study and you deduce and then you decide. Not before.

So I look at the footprints one more time. I run my fingers along the edges, noting the stride and the size and the-

Oh.

I feel like that little flicker inside of me, for the first time in a long time and I almost smile. Because they're normal footprints, of course. Just two people walking. Casually, the stride will tell you that. Average sized men, the length will tell you that.

But the depth. The depth. What does that tell you?

It's deeper in the heel.

Backwards. They're going backwards.

*****

Backwards, out of the playground. Stamped down in the softened mud, one set, two sets, it's impossible to say. Outside and the whole sidewalk is made of new concrete, the impressions glisten in reverse. I'm running in the street and there's two kids sitting on the edge of a river of pavement. The brother's trying to convince the sister, he's got a handful of wet concrete and he's holding it out to her.

"You put this on," he's saying, "and nobody can hurt you." The nearest tree is covered in oozing amber, the fading sun catching it obliquely and forcing it to bleed like stained glass, suggestions of fractured shapes shifting inside. There's a fly crawling on top of it, its feet making tiny concentric waves. Before long it'll be stuck and we'll find it a hundred thousand years from now. Or maybe it will escape just in time. We can only hope.

"But if I wear that, I won't be able to move."

Which is the weird fact about studying the past. The only specimens we have to look at are the ones who were stupid enough not to get out of the way in the first place. It's the survivors you want to emulate. But they're so hard to find.

"You'll be protected." He's assuring her, but which of us needs to know that it's going to be okay? "Nobody will be able to get in and that's what matters." He bangs the chunk against the wall of the nearest house. Dust rains down but nothing breaks.

"Of course you can." She takes it from him and bangs it harder against the wall in a rapid sequence of repetitions. At the end of it she holds the block up and the shape of it has changed slightly. "See? All they have to do is keep chipping away it."

"But it will take quite a while," snatching it back and holding it a little above his head. He's got a smile that could scar satin. "And the person dedicated enough to want to do that is the person you need to let in."

Footsteps run to follow, tracks quick-stepping along a world made malleable, where every mark we make can be seen and never goes away. A hand against skin, struck too strongly, the dent in a body that a shout can cause, the blurred scratch your face creates on the air when you've flinched. The solidified ripples that hover still, inches away, in the wake of your departure. We've captured the path but we never know what it leads, we fool ourselves into thinking that knowing direction is enough. There are footprints twenty thousand years old that are hanging up in some museum. A record that you've been there, that some part of you possessed weight. That history held a bit of you for the future. But what does it tell us? Did you sing while you walked? Were you thinking of the coming night and how cold it might get? Or maybe you cried, just a little bit, for reasons we can never understand. Wiped the tears away before they hit the too soft soil so that nobody would ever know. Or perhaps you let them fall, but sorrow's too light to make an impression on time. It carries on regardless, smoothing it away and making us think that you all walked with heads held high, brightly forward into our distant future.

The ground compresses beneath my feet but I don't look behind to see what kind of mark I've left. It hardly matters. I'm going backwards by walking ahead. I know this neighborhood, the edges of it are coming together for me, all the shaken puzzle pieces finally settling. The ambient scrapes of his rhythms catch my ears in just the right fashion, sparking memories that eject as solar prominences, arcing out into the dark before fading into the greater brilliance.

It doesn't take long to see exactly where the footprints are going. Around the corner, skirting past the square corners of the lawn, up the spongiform stairs leading into the building. The door opens easily, the hallway beyond featuring nothing but rows of doors, all of them the same except for the brass numbers. The floor sighs as a meadow, strands holding the shape. This is the spot, this is the origin. Just down this hall, I can see where they end. At a door. Right at a door.

Carefully I stand in front of it. I push slightly on it but the door is clearly locked. Putting my ear near I listen for any sound. Nothing but a faint rustling, but that could be the pipes. They tended to rattle late at night when the water inside was settling. And there was a tree outside the window that when the wind was right tapped at it, a sign from the world that it wanted to get in. I don't know why I know these facts. Of course I know why I know them.

The door's locked. The footsteps lead away from it, which means I have to go in. I could stand out here for hours and nothing would move forward and it would solve nothing. Sometimes you wonder if life is just a series of choices made for you that you rationalize as yours after the fact so that you can maintain some semblance of control.

Well, then I choose this. From the very start. Reaching into my pocket, I take out a key. It fits perfectly into the lock and turns just as easily. I knew it would. After all, it's my apartment.

The door swings open.

The man on the couch stirs. His head had been bowed, arms on his knees and hands folded together, but he looks up at me at the sound of my entrance.

His face immediately breaks into a tired smile.

"I have to say," Grissom tells me, "that it's really about time."

"Shut up," I say instantly, harder than I intend. There's a cold anger rising within me, I didn't think it would happen this quickly. But staring at his face, I just want to throw him up against the wall and scream into his face until I get what I want. "Enough of the games, where the hell is she?" I let the door close behind me and go deeper into the room, this old familiar terrible place.

Grissom sighs. "I don't have her, you know that." He looks just as I always remembered, the softly piercing eyes, the first hints of a new beard, the calculating slant to his face.

"Now, you don't," I snap back. "But I know you had her, I know she was here." I point to the wall. "Look at this." The newly painted walls are covered in tiny fingerprints, from all different fingers at all different angles, bled out in a variety of colors. "That's her, she made those." I pivot back to face him, trying to stand over him by way of intimidation. It feels wrong, I was never one for getting physical with people. I have to trick him into telling me the answers, I have to outmaneuver his mind. I'm good at that, it's what I do. So why do my hands keep clenching into fists?

"I never said she wasn't here." He's so calm, but there's a shine off his forehead. He's sweating. Sometimes he does that when he's lying, or it could be a sign of pressure. But that's unlikely. He's always handled pressure well. "I said that I didn't have her right now."

"And why is that?" I'm standing before him again.

Grissom runs one hand across his full beard, the hairs rustling under his touch. "Because," he says, so calmly, "I sent her away."

"Where did you send her?" I can't believe I don't shout that. There are strands of hair on the arm of the couch. They belong to her, I know it. "Why would you do something like that?"

"What other choice did I have?" There's a hint of pleading in his eyes but I don't let it move me. That's what he wants, to make me see things his way. They all want to drag you into their rationalizations. "I was barely here, getting too wrapped up in my work. I was trying to find the balance but there just wasn't one."

"Maybe you just didn't try hard enough." It comes out as almost a snarl.

He rubs his forehead with a finger and a thumb, looking somewhat diminished. "Maybe," he admits, his voice ground down. He looks up and his temples are graying at the edges. "Anyway, it was all a long time ago."

"No, no it wasn't. You have to tell me where you sent her, I have to know where she is." I will not lose control here. I have to keep the situation operating on my terms. That's how it always works. You're the one who dictates how it goes, not them and you only let them think otherwise to steer them where you want to go.

Grissom runs his foot over a stain on the carpet. "Hm, juice," he says, his voice quavering. "Never did get that out." He looks back at him, blinking filmy eyes. "Tell you where? Why would I do that? So you can drag her back into your life?"

"It's where she belongs." I'm so certain and yet so hoarse. "You know this."

"Do I?" Grissom laughs and its sandpaper on glass. I don't even recognize it. "You don't know the first damn thing about raising a child. You bring her here and what is she going to do . . . look at pictures of corpses and microscope slides all day? Face it, what you know is what you know and you don't know children." Streaks of silver are taking over his hair, and when he talks the lines on his face deepen. He glances away, staring out the window, one hand partially covering his mouth. "It was better this way."

"That's not true." I get so close that I nearly grab him but something stops me. I don't know why I let it.

"Is it?" A white eyebrow goes up. Gravel infects his voice. "You're not like most men. Most people, they go and put down roots in a place. But not you . . . when you put down roots it's in a thing. And this . . . these forensics, these bodies, these bugs, these are your things and nothing is going to take you away from them. I think it's what keeps you alive. You don't know how to be any other way."

"I can change." I plant one hand on the couch next to his shoulder, letting it sink it deep, bringing us nearer to each other. "I've been changing, I've been trying all along. For this, for her." There's a doll crumpled in one corner of the room, with pretty red hair and a dress that went out of fashion ten years ago. It's covered in dust but that isn't possible.

"Don't kid yourself." Grissom swats at the wisps of hair left, liver spots now covering the exposed parts of his head. He expels a breath of fetid air, revealing yellowed teeth. His eyes go cloudy, staring at some place that it's intersecting with me. "It wasn't so bad, not after a while. The first couple days, maybe even weeks, you notice. It seems a bit more quiet, you find yourself talking to people who aren't there expecting them to answer. Eventually you aren't surprised to not hear a greeting when you come back home." He swallows, grimacing. "You don't start automatically look around for toys to clean up." Grissom looks up at me, grinning with lips that have gone too fleshy, his clothes seemingly too large for his body. "I got a lot more work done, it turns out. Had a promotion within the first six months."

I'm breathing faster, harder. Grissom's breathing has gone wizened, particles rattling around the container demanding to get out. "No, you made a mistake. Just tell me where you sent her. We can fix this, it's not too late."

"Every so often she'd call," Grissom says, pulling at the skin that hung too loosely from his neck. His knuckles are misshapen from years of arthritis, popping with every bend. "Sometimes I'd call her back, but it was just a formality, I could tell. We were becoming strangers to each other. Eventually the times were just longer and longer apart. One day I looked up from writing a report and realized that it had been eight months since I had last spoken to her. That's how fast it goes by. It makes it so much easier."

"Dammit, stop this. Where is she?"

Grissom emits a chuckle lodged in phlegm. "Imagine me, raising a child. The thought's just absurd-"

His voice breaks into a croak as I grab him by the front of his shirt, lifting him a few inches off the couch. He feels like his bones are about to slide free of the rest of his body, like gravity is affecting them differently. "You son of a bitch." I'm so close that I can almost see the skull beneath his skin, his face has receded that much. "No more of this, I want to know where you sent her-"

"She's in a better place . . ."

"That's not good enough." And I shake him so hard that I feel the shock of it through my arm. My other arm is holding a gun on him, aimed right at his chest. I don't have a gun, I hate guns. I've always had a gun. It's what they give me. For protection. I'm holding it on him and the trigger is cocked and God knows I might do it this time. But my hand is empty, I don't have one. I might put a bullet in him, finally. "Listen, the why, I don't care about. I don't care about the how or the when. I just want to know the where. And you are going to tell me."

Grissom puts one hand on the one holding him, the lined veins acting like infected tributaries. His fingers are so cold, his eyes are set back in his head, he's looking dehydrated. His voice comes out as a rasp of dust. "There's nothing to tell. I sent her away because anywhere was better than this hell. She'd spend her life living in your wonderfully crafted cage, having everything she ever wanted but never being able to leave, knowing only what you gave her and what you showed her." Grissom lets go of me, his skin sagging, the whites of his eyes turning to flint. "And you would have stood there the whole time and told yourself what a wonderful parent you were while you choked her and bled her and turned her into the worst thing in the world . . ." His flesh is turning yellow-green, he's starting to inflate, becoming bloated.

"No, you're not right, I would have . . ." The gun's cold in my hand. I don't have a gun. I'm so close to finally pulling the goddamned trigger. "She could have been whatever she wanted."

"Now, she can." Its spread to his face, I can barely recognize him. The grin threatens to split the skin. "If I let you have your way, she would have turned into you."

"You bastard-" I push forward, letting the gun lead but he coughs and something noxious emerges, forcing me to stagger back. "I could have-"

But he can't hear me, he's too busy laughing, a wet sound, a face scraping along wooden slats in the rain. He might be talking but I can't hear him anymore, his whole body is turning black, the sodden heavy kind that absorbs all light and reflects nothing back.

"Please, just tell-"

His laughter fills up the house like a leak, even as the skin starts to slip from his face, running down like melted wax, the skull revealed first, the smooth bones, the eyes distending and oozing down deeper, his mouth curved into something beyond mirth as it follows the rest of his flesh.

"Just tell me where-"

The mouth going toothless, a hollow husk, the holes where the eyes used to be laughing at me too, the useless skin cracking and crackling, dissolving away and revealing the permanent grin of the bones, black spots in the remaining yellowed flesh showing swarms of all the names I know. Isopoda. Formicidae. Araneae. Protura. A litany of all the wasted facts trapped in me.

On my knees, I hold out a hand to him but there's only a skeleton now, somewhere beyond laughter. But even that's starting to crumble, all of it going to dust. But is there a flicker in the empty spaces?

I lunge forward, arms outstretched desperately.

"I just want to know she-"

And the last thing I see is the skull losing all structure, falling away into nothing, into less than nothing, as I plunge straight into that endless, segmented chortling it's following me as I go and I don't know where I'm going but I'm tumbling through my house through my big empty useless house that's just me it's always just me it'll always be me in the echoes in the hollows oh my girl I've looked for you all over but I sent you away and you're gone where is my I'm sorry you're not here sorry where please just I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm so goddamned sorry-

*****

Grissom opens his eyes with a skipped breath. Only darkness greets him at first, and he blinks a few times before his vision finally starts to adjust. The finer resolution tells him nothing else except that he's at his home.

He takes a few deep breaths, exhales slowly. Wincing, he rolls himself off the bed, trying not to notice that he's wearing the same clothes he went to work in. There's a dark stain on the front of his shirt that he doesn't want to acknowledge, with a smell he's doing his best to ignore. Mostly he's concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, both arms out to brace himself on either side of the hallway, staggering his way across the apartment. The light's still on in the bathroom, knife-edged and sickly. The toilet seat is up and there's a glass on the sink, tipped over and with a dark liquid gradually trickling out.

Near the kitchen, he stops, grunting and shaking his head as if trying to ward off a kind of swarm. Grissom resumes his motion, almost falling into the room. Somehow he makes it over to the sink. There's a cup already out, with a tall clear bottle sitting right next to it. He takes the glass, sniffs at the residue inside and looks at the bottle with a tired air, tilting it toward him as if engaged in a battle of wills.

"No," he says, just like that, and softly. He's got one hand braced against the counter and then leans against it with his whole body. Grissom reaches for the faucet and rinses out the glass a few times before filling it with water. Taking a step back he downs it in one near gulp before immediately filling it back up again.

Grissom stands there for a few seconds, his gaze drifting all over the apartment, still organized in its disarray. His face betrays nothing beyond the surface, although ripples churn beneath his eyes. The various sounds of the building come to him, the hollow banging of the pipes, the chugging grinding of passing cars, the footsteps on the higher floors, voices that he can't quite make out. He stands there for a few minutes, forcing himself to take even breaths.

Finally he pushes himself away from the counter and walks back down the hall, his steps leaden and lacking in some precision. Partway down he stops before a short corridor that leads into another room. This door is only slightly ajar and what can be seen is museum sharp, a neatness going above and beyond the rest of the house. The leg of a teddy bear can be seen poking around the doorframe, like it's had a rough evening.

Grissom makes a motion like he's about to go into the room but decides against it almost in the same moment. Instead he takes himself and his water into the living room. It's dark in there but he doesn't bother turning on any lights, feeling his way about by touch. There's a single window in the room, opening out into the city. The sky's got a dirty brightness to it, stacked down in gradients of orange-brown and it's impossible to tell if it's a factor of the day ending or the dawn regaining itself. Los Angeles can do that to you, blurring the distinctions between. Everyone operates by instinct here, all the primal engines. It's infecting him, slowly, the smog is starting to taint his skin.

He looks out the window for seems like a long time, sipping at his water. His eyes are drawn down and to his right, to the phone sitting on an end-table. There's an answering machine on it, one of the new types according to the kid in the store. He just got it, he never needed one before.

The red light on it is blinking, telling him that he's got one message. It's the only light in the room, shimmering on and off in the dark. There's papers and books scattered around the table, a haphazard chaos out of the step with the rest of the decor. The phone is just the eye, placid and quiet.

Grissom leans up against the window frame with one arm, staring out over the city skyline, out at what he thinks is the east.

"This isn't working." His lips barely move.

He stays there and watches the distance for a while, for what could be a long time, until he finally wakes up.

- MB

September-October 2008

RP