I Am Brian

Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.

The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.

Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.

You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.

You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?

How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.

It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.

Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.

You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.

My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.

My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.

First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.

My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.

Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.

Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.

Return. He does return.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.

The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.

Either way, the rooms were cold by then.

The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.

Whoever came in, felt the cold.

Oh Puhleez

I was looking at a list of people who have gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

I was particularly taken with the ridiculously quick "resolution" achieved in the disappearance of Guma Leandro Aguiar.

The family got him declared dead after less than three years when the usual legal requirement is seven?

That boat driven up onto the beach totally looks like a set-up. His body would almost certainly have been found if he went overboard that close to shore.

This article has the GPS info (see the embedded video) showing he almost certainly jumped from one boat to another.

Note the reassembly of Aguiar's "team" in the Netherlands.

This man is almost certainly alive.

I'm sure he was declared dead so soon because the rich generally get their way in court.

It sounds as though Aguiar was having a really hard time of it with bipolar disorder. Maybe he needed a way to exit a marriage that wasn't working for him and find a space to clear his head.

It would have been so easy for him to secret away funds in any number of overseas accounts or to have had friends hold money for him. It's also possible that he is acting in collusion with certain members of his own family. I suppose it could all come down to fiduciary and other financial forensics. That's probably where the answer lies.

P.S. Guma, call me. I avoid people a lot too, know what it's like to be bipolar, and I would love to have a bowling partner I could hit up for the occasional ten thousand dollars "until next Friday." I know you're not swimming with the mermaids.

Real Steal

The worst thing that ever happened to Steve Touloumes was the disappearance of his girlfriend Karen Byers, when he was seventeen and she was sixteen.

They had been technically camping illegally in a forest, not an official campground, a pretty piece of private property at the base of a mountain, less than ten miles from their hometown. They had fallen asleep in the same tent after getting sloshed on some whiskey Karen had stolen from her older brother's stash. Steve woke up the next morning and Karen was gone. Forever. The true story was as simple as that. But few believed it. There were detectives (and many others) who went to their graves convinced that Steve had gotten away with murder. They had spun the usual, predictable narratives and clung to them. It's worse to think some boogeyman in the shadows can just swoop in like that, isn't it?

Steve had gotten away with nothing but a stone in his heart and a lifelong regret that he had ever stolen away with a beautiful young girl all those years ago. He was sure then Karen had been abducted and murdered, as sure then as he was today.

Steve would still think of Karen whenever he saw a young woman who looked the way she looked that summer, or when he looked at his own daughters growing up and worried about their safety and counseled them with an urgency they might not see in other fathers warning their daughters about what to do or not to do in a world of strangers.

But Steve's daughters were all women safely ensconced in their own complicated lives in other towns, other states, that day he walked into his favorite Salvation Army store, located in a strip mall not five miles from his home.. Home now lay in a town a mere thirty miles from his original hometown.

Della, a whie-haired comedian who worked the register, liked to greet Steve and joke with him. She knew his preferences.

"We've got a bunch more old cameras in. Film, not digital. Woo-hoo. You're probably the only person on the planet interested, if you are up for more of that Stone Age tech. You know where. The usual aisle."

Steve called out his thanks and made a beeline. Photography had become a passion for him over the past decade.

Once he reached the aisle with the mostly junky old cameras, his eyes zeroed in on an antiquated little Minolta. This one seemed to be in pretty decent shape. It didn't appear to have been used much at all. Steve smiled when he remembered all the old commercials back in the days from this now defunct Japanese company, which was actually one of the best makers of cameras for decades. "From the mind of Minolta," the commercials would always intone somewhat portentously. Minolta had launched in Japan (in the thirties, was it?) but it was a cooperative venture back then with German lens makers. You got the best of both worlds, as you couldn't beat the German lenses at the time. By the time the camera Steve was now turning over in his hands had been produced, the company had begun making forays into digital and had begun incorporating those advanced features into their cameras. This little camera was just such a hybrid. It was still a film camera, but it had a few nice digital features. It had a decent zoom capacity.

Then Steve noticed there was film in the camera. He smiled. It was always fun to drop off these rolls and peer into the lives of strangers. Quite possibly these people were no longer walking the planet. But here were their most cherished moments, on a dusty thrift store shelf. Film would keep those memories safe for half a century if need be, possibly longer. Because every found roll Steve had ever dropped off for developing had come out fine. Heat could damage an old roll of undeveloped film, but you'd still usually be able to see what was photographed through the colorful distortions which heat causes. No doubt about it, film is a small miracle of memory.

The camera was a real steal. They always were here. Della was right. Steve was one of the few who even gave these old machines of yesteryear a second glance.

On the way home, Steve dropped the film off at at a CVS that had an in-store lab. He always made it a point to tell the girl (rarely it was a young dude) behind the counter that it was found film. Just in case it turned out to be naked photos of someone's girlfriend or boyfriend. You could never be sure what you were getting. It had never happened to Steve, but he had heard the funny stories.

Steve hadn't yet gotten around to stopping at a battery supply place to find the specialty batteries the Minolta required by the time he picked up the developed film two days later. He sat in his car with the windows down and opened the film packet and entered another world as soon as he looked at the first print.

His head began to spin. He felt a tightness in his chest.

The first photo was of himself. He was in the woods. Camping. He had the long hair of his youth. There was the tent. The tent. He had never gone camping again after that Friday night and Saturday morning when his life changed for the worst, forever.

The second photo took away any doubt. There was Karen sitting on a boulder beside the creek in her cut-off shorts. She was smiling into a green space of shadowy trees across the creek, smiling at anything, at nothing. Smiling from the feeling of being sixteen, the feeling of being beautiful and free. Smiling at the feeling of having absconded for just one night, the feeling of being wild.

Almost all of the photos were surveillance photos like this, clearly taken with the little camera's zoom. He could see the primary focus in the photos was Karen.

Steve called his wife and began to explain what he was looking at. She was instantly worried he was having a heart attack or a stroke. He could barely speak. She actually insisted that he not drive anywhere. She made him promise. She drove to the CVS parking lot and they looked at the photos together. They agreed the police must be called. They needed to take custody of this evidence.

It was the last three photos which were most disturbing.

The third from last photo showed Karen in the back of a van, wearing a long green dress with a floral pattern. It was not like anything Karen would have owned or ever have worn. It looked like something you would see Loretta Lynn wear back in the day. It was the look of terror in Karen's eyes that really turned a screw somewhere in Steve's heart. It was an image he would carry to the grave.

His wife kept asking him, "Are you sure it's her? It looks like you, but I can't even be sure about that. Maybe we're both crazy. It certainly does look like you. But is it really her?"

The second from last photo showed a prayer service that had been held for Karen in the early days of her disappearance. Steve could see the back of his own head in the photo. This guy had clearly been enjoying this whole torturous process an entire town had been going through.

"We need to give these to the police, Steve. Do you think they can trace who dropped off the camera at the Salvation Army store? You didn't handle the camera much did you? There might be, well not fingerprints, but DNA? Can DNA last that long? Maybe he handled it recently when he donated it."

"He's probably dead," Steve said flatly. "That's probably why the camera was donated. The bastard probably slipped away."

The last photo was the worst. Somehow even worse than the photo of Karen in her terror. Though it would seem nothing more than a pretty landscape shot to someone who casually glanced at it. If the photo were not seen in the context of the roll.

The last photo showed a little pond in the woods with two sticks in the shallows making a rude cross. They had been lashed together with string. Just stuck in the mud. They would be long rotted away. They would not be there anymore. Steve knew that much. He also knew that's where she was. That's where Karen is, he thought. He knew. Her lonely, watery grave.

But now Steve's wife was second-guessing herself about the police. "They're going to be suspicious of you. All over again, babe. Should we even do this. It won't bring her back."

"I know. We have to. It's the right thing. If there's even the slightest chance..."

So that's what they did.

And the local police and the FBI were suspicious of Steve all over again. The DNA was a dead end. The photos went viral on the internet and still the case would not crack open.

The greatest hope lay in the chance that someone would recognize that little pond where the two crosses once were, but where, by now, there would be nothing.

Hundreds of leads poured in, but the resources and patience grew thin and nothing ever came of it.

After that, Steve felt trapped into searching the Salvation Army store not just for the cameras that came in, but any other possible clue that might surface. And then he began going from one thrift store to another, manically searching. He would often be there when the stores first opened their doors. He would virtually interrogate the employees about new arrivals of donations to the point of making himself a nuisance. He knew Monday mornings were important because that's when so many donated goods would be put out on the shelves. It consumed him. Once, he thought he recognized a comb that had belonged to Karen. There must have been millions like it produced. Then it was a t-shirt that proved to date from a period long after Karen's disappearance. In brief, he began to lose it all over again. He went back into therapy.

His marriage was strong but it ended. Karen was back again. His own children pleaded with him to let it go, but he knew this time he was back with her, his first girlfriend, to the end. On his bad days, he wished that day godspeed. On his better days, he had hope that the impossible thing would happen. The walls of this darkness would crack open. But he knew in his heart that the man was dead. That Karen would never escape that pond. And that he would be living that day all over again on the day he died. Little by little, he became a ghost to his own family. And you know how people will eventually push a ghost away. No matter how much it was initially loved.

Maybe Nicholas Barclay is Alive

Just watched the excellent documentary The Imposter (I'm sure I saw parts of this before) and had my mind blown (again) by this stranger-than-fiction true life tale.

It's like something David Mamet would dramatize.

I felt that sad certainty that the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay would never have a happy ending, that this was a child abduction or that perhaps the child was murdered by one of his friends or enemies. He was a street kid and got into some hairy situations.

Well, that was what I believed while watching the documentary. That is because one very interesting piece of information about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay was not included in that documentary.

While the nearly quarter of a century that has elapsed since the child's disappearance certainly does not bode well, there is this one bit of information I learned just now online that gives me pause and makes me wonder. This paragraph struck me:

Nicholas' mother said that her son occasionally displayed aggressive behavior in 1994. He has a juvenile criminal record after he broke into a convenience store and threatened a teacher. His court hearing to determine his placement was set for June 14th, a day after Nicholas vanished. A possibility for Nicholas was for him to be placed in a group home which he was opposed to.

That timing has to make one wonder.

And several family members were heroin addicts at the time (in recovery a long time now) so the home life was contentious and probably threatening.

It might be only a sliver of hope, but I think there is a possibility Nicholas might be a thirty-five-year-old man living his life somewhere.

If he is alive, I hope he finds the forgiveness to contact his family.