Erased From Memory (2 page)

I don’t say so but I agree. I worked in the animal lab at school and later I witnessed some fatal events at Daddy’s retirement home; I know about death, too.

The director of the museum, a man named Egon Rothskellar, arrives at this point. Under normal circumstances Egon is jumpy and fluttery; now he is close to incoherent. “Oh, good heavens. Oh, I cannot imagine.” He tries to embrace my father, but can’t figure out which cheek to kiss first. He approaches the furious, static Rita and tells her, “Dr. Claus, Dr. Claus.” She stares at him so stonily that he mutters a few incomprehensible conciliatory noises and backs away into the hall toward a door labeled ADMINISTRATION.

I ask the guard if I can take my father to the bathroom.

She says, “Sure, but somebody goes with you,” and she delegates a scared-looking blond youth in a turban who accompanies us as far as the door of the men’s room.

I go right on into the men’s room. The hell with sexual restrictions.

This restroom is made of marble and brass and has Egyptian-type fixtures, including a fountain serving as a urinal. I face my dad. “You knew that woman?”

“What woman, dear?”

“You called her Rita.”

He sighs. “Names. Lots of names.”

Most of the time he doesn’t remember names at all. “And who was the man? The one on the floor? Is that somebody that . . . Somebody from Egypt?”

Daddy stares at me intently. “The son of Isis is injured.”

“How do you know him? Or her?”

“Know her? Did I say that?” He reaches for a soap dispenser that looks like an Egyptian canopic jar. “Why do you suppose they put metal on this?”

“Daddy, come on. Phase in. Please. What was happening there?” I debate telling him we’ll camp in this restroom until he comes up with an explanation.

He squirts soap onto his hand. “This jar was supposed to have intestines in it. Part of the burial process. Interesting.”

Back in the Great Hall we sit for a while and then we sit for a while longer.

Conversation is restricted. Our group consists of my father, me, Daddy’s accuser, and three female visitors who got caught in this event. We stare at each other.

And finally the sheriff arrives, bumping across the marble, trailed by a following of one doctor with a black bag and two deputies with collapsible platforms and tool kits.

Director Rothskellar returns to bob up and down and make hand motions. “Sheriff. Yes. Oh, my goodness. Can’t understand.”

This sheriff stares at him and says, “Where?”

This sheriff is someone I know. He’s been in office only two months but has already become my enemy, having arrested me for speeding. He said I was doing eighty; I said sixty. His name is Sheriff Munro; he is small and wiry and perhaps handsome, if you like the quick suspicious type with eyes too close together. The old sheriff, who left to go live in Alaska, had dandruff and brains, and didn’t care how fast I drove. He and I were friends; I miss him.

Sheriff Munro scans the room and fixes on me. “Don’t try to leave.” After that he includes everyone. “Don’t anyone leave.” And he and his entourage go off toward the Edward Day Room, shutting a pair of nine-foot-high folding cedar doors behind them.

The Edward Day Room is a small exhibit room, which normally contains nothing except a display case with Daddy’s coffin lid and some explanatory literature. No sprawled bodies.

We in the big room shift and wiggle and listen to muffled sounds from next door. A thump (something has hit the floor?), a mechanical squeal (maybe the stretcher is being dragged). I picture events from television programs. The body is probed, turned over, listened to. Its jacket is removed, shirt removed. Belt undone, shoes, socks. Maybe they cut the rest of the clothes off. Oh, nuts.

“Are you all right, Daddy?”

“Why, fine, dear.”

Maybe they’re zipping the body up in a black plastic bag.

“I think I knew her,” my father says.

“Rita,” I prompt.

“Danielle. There was a Danielle.”

 
 
A while later the sheriff has led my father and me into one of the small museum offices. We aren’t the first people to be pulled in. Both the bristle-haired accuser and the security guard got it first.

The sheriff addresses me; he says he doesn’t care whether my father has Alzheimer’s or not; he is going to interview him. “You sit here and he will sit there.” He indicates a chair several feet away from me. “He can answer questions; I’ve seen him do it.”

Daddy takes a small white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabs at his mouth. “You need me to sit there?” He does so. “This chair, you know, is not a real Egyptian chair, only an inaccurate copy; the real one would not have had—”

“Dr. Day, listen.” Sheriff Munro clears his throat and tries to pitch his voice low; he’s not totally successful. “What was your relationship with the victim?”

“The victim?” Daddy looks troubled. “It would probably have had animal feet.”

“Huh?”

“But not always. Are you on your way to Egypt, young man?”

The sheriff has tilted forward. He fusses with the pages of a green-bound notebook. His firmly ironed tan pants stick out as if they’re made of metal. “Please pay attention. The guy . . . man. On the floor. Lying on the floor. You
knew
him.”

“Were you one of my students, then?” Daddy sounds pleased at this idea.

“You are pretending. Faking incompre . . . faking not understanding.”

“Tired, yes. A little tired.”

Sheriff Munro turns to me. “Impeding justice. Obstructing an investigation.” He squints. His little, too-close-together eyes waver and get unfocussed. “I have a reliable witness. She saw him. He was assaulting that man.”

I try to be mild. “I think he was trying to help.”

“Help? He had him by the throat.”

“No, no. He was loosening his collar . . .”

“He had his hands
around
his neck. This witness is highly reliable. She’s sure what she saw.” He turns back to my father. “You got to pay attention. I can arrest you. Insanity’s not an excuse.”

Daddy reaches toward me. “We can leave now, I think.”

“You’re accused of
a serious crime
.” The sheriff offers this flatly. Maybe I’m just imagining a coating of pleasure on the statement.

Daddy sits poised, arm out.

“You understand me,” Sheriff Munro pursues. “Dr. Day, listen. The man. The one that you . . . The one on the floor.”

“There is no million years.”

“You knew him.”

“The cavern is opened for those in the abyss.” My father offers this neutrally, his only sign of disturbance a tremor in his outstretched hand.

The sheriff compresses his lips. He leans forward and his pants creak. “I can put you in jail. Do you understand?”

Daddy sighs. “That’s difficult, isn’t it? Understanding. There have been arguments about the nature of understanding. When I was at the university—”

“You’re not at the university now.” The sheriff is half off his chair. He reaches out and snaps his fingers in front of my father’s face, the way you do to get an animal to behave. “Are you listening? Are you letting it get through?
Jail
. That’ll stop this garbage. Jeezchrist, what’s the matter with you?
Jail.
That’ll give you something to quote poetry about.”

 
 
I later tell a newspaper reporter that my father didn’t strike Sheriff Munro. He was simply showing him a kind of Egyptian exercise.

The reporter accepts this.

“Look at him,” I say. “He’s famous. Learned. A well-known archaeologist. And gentle. He
couldn’t
strike anybody.”

The
Chronicle
reporter regards my gentle, quiet father, who is picking his way through a bag of peppermint Jelly Bellies. He agrees. Obviously I speak truth.

Which I do not. My father did strike Sheriff Munro. He raised his arm above his head and brought it down fast and tapped him with the side of his stiffened hand. He said, “I cleanse this area of evil influences.”

I don’t think it was the hand-tap that Sheriff Munro reacted to so violently. That couldn’t have hurt much. It must have been what my father said.

“Cleanse? Evil influences?” Sheriff Munro yelps. “Old man, what in hell is the matter with you? What the fuck do you mean?”

Some people go all rigid when you recite at them like an incantation. I guess the sheriff is one of those people.

“I mean what I mean,” Daddy expounds.

That’s it for the sheriff, who pulls out his cell phone. “Jerry,” he tells somebody on the receiving end, “get back here and get into it, this old idiot has gone completely off his fucking rocker,” and then he clicks off the phone and grabs one of Daddy’s wrists and wrenches it behind his back.

Right then is when I lose it.

 
 
I have enough sense not to grab hold of the sheriff, much as I feel like it.

But I do try to free my father’s arms, and that’s a no-go. Jerry arrives with a sidekick and they get into the action. They are strong guys, one big one and one small one, each with muscles and biceps and a tan uniform; the big one pries me loose from my dad; the other helps Sheriff M. get both Daddy’s hands high up and backward behind his shoulder blades; after that they screw his wrists together with a plastic handcuff.

I begin squawking and jabbering. “Let go of him, you bastards. Let him loose. Undo his hands. You’re hurting him. I’ll call Elder Abuse. I’ll call the ACLU. I’ll call my lawyer. I’ll call the newspapers. I’ll get you demoted.”

Meanwhile I’m trying to wrench myself free.

“Dad, Dad, don’t let them take you. Go limp. Flop down. Sag on the floor.”

Of course, he has no idea what I’m talking about. “That hurts a little,” I think he’s saying.

“He’s sick; he has a heart condition”—as far as I know this isn’t true—“he needs medication; I’ll sue.” The goon holds me tighter each time I speak.

My father somehow manages to look brave, shoulders back, turning his head inquiringly, like a little bird.

 
 
Eventually I resort to Rape Defense.

The main move in Rape Defense, in which I took a one-day Santa Cruz course, is the knee in the groin. I apply this move now, up and hard, and the goon precipitately lets go of me to bend over saying, “Jesus Christ, you fucking bitch,” and grab his testicles.

While I stand free in time to watch my poor dad be hustled away, stumbling slightly, murmuring something indistinct.

Chapter 2

My father and I have a complicated history.

He’s not now the concerned, responsible father that some women dream about. But then, he never was.

“My dear,” he would say, looking at me in puzzlement when I had some early grief—a lost pet, a classroom argument. “
Why
, my dear.” He would stare, puzzled; he would frown for a while. And then do the best he could. His idea of how to take an eight-year-old’s mind off her troubles was to teach her some Egyptian archaeology. “This is the way they did the face,” he’d say, showing me a photograph of a mummy. “With a plaster mask. They painted it to look like the dead person.” He surveyed the photo, a gray, smeared encyclopedia reproduction. “Sometimes a little better than the dead person, wouldn’t you think?”

After all, Daddy was old to be the parent of a third-grade child; he had been sixty when I was born. He seemed fairly baffled that I existed at all, but he also gave me the feeling that he liked me. In fact, despite his confusion about how it had all happened, that he loved me.

My mother didn’t make me feel loved. She was the opposite of my father. Almost completely. Reserved where he was responsive. Organized where he was scattered. Ambitious where he was indifferent. So unlike him that I often wondered how they had gotten together. Except for the fact that they were both archaeologists, they had little in common. My mother was programmed, calm, and, the archaeology journals said, brilliant. She was also very handsome, which didn’t interest her at all.
Removed
was the word for her.

Not that she was neglectful of me, exactly.

She would lower her book, watch me analytically, and suggest some noninterventionist remedy. The library? A long walk? Thinking about it further?

I had clean dresses and adequate meals. When Mother was away, there was a capable child-care person, a nice lady, I am told. I don’t remember her.

Actually, Mother was away an awful lot. She was off at conferences in London, Paris, Rome, Helsinki, where she debated the dates and authenticities of the markings on the Phrygian brass pots that were her specialty. She was off at archaeological digs in Turkey, working carefully with a small spade and whisk broom to uncover more pots. When I was ten years old, she simply remained in Turkey. There was a productive site and a colleague named Dr. Hakim Kasapligl. I think she is still there, in Turkey, digging up her pots, although perhaps Dr. Kasapligl has been dismissed.