The Shadow Catcher

I explain the story (leaving out my personal involvement) to a man who says he’s the public relations officer and then he asks if he can call me back after he relays my story to Personnel and I tell him no, I’d rather hold. After a while another person comes on the line and says, “I understand you’d like to speak to Colonel Curtis?”

“Yes, please. It’s a family emergency.”

“Please hold while I connect you—”

Are you kidding me? Is this a trick—?

“Colonel Curtis’s office.”

Um…

“—hello?”

Sounding like a prattling fool, even to myself, I give my name, my occupation, my nine-digit Social (am I paranoid?), my cell phone number and a brief description of the reason for my call (“I have information pertaining to the current whereabouts of his father”) and am told with icy dispatch that my message will be passed on to the Colonel.

I put my cell phone down and stare at it because as everybody knows, that will make it ring.

Ten minutes go by, while I eat my salad. Fifteen.

Guy probably has a busy schedule.

Flying planes around.

Maybe, god forbid, he’s in Iraq.

I pace, and think of other things I could be doing. I didn’t handle this well. I should have left the number of the hospital. The important thing is not for me to talk to the Colonel but for the Colonel to talk to his father. But what if he doesn’t want to? What if, after thirty years, he’s made up a story in his mind about why his father disappeared, a tale that permits him to forgive or to accept the fact? Why would he want to hear a different tale — a counter-story — at this point in his life? We tell ourselves the things we want to hear, not necessarily the things that are the truth, and it’s selfish of me to want to know what story the Colonel has manufactured for himself in the name of mental health.

Or what story Clara Curtis or any woman, for that matter, married to a man with more than one sexual identity manages to tell herself on those dark nights when the unspoken truth must be too obvious.

I don’t love you.

Or perhaps I love you but I love someone else as well.

I love another way of being and this life is killing me by inches and I need to get away from here or die.

What did the Curtis children — Harold, Florence, Beth and Katherine — think about their father’s disappearances? I know the stories that they told themselves had at their core a classic mythic entity — a larger-than-life Father, the Father as a Hero. I know they created for themselves the story of a spiritual antithesis, even if it wasn’t true, of what a modern kid might do, of a false deity, a modern day Flat Daddy. For the Curtis children el jefe, the Chief, could do no wrong, even when wrong was all that he was doing. So I wonder how it was for this Air Force Colonel, and yes my self-investment drives my curiosity because I had to do a lot of magical explaining to myself in the years after my father’s suicide and I’m frankly curious about how others — we, generic humans, as a tribe—create whatever stories that we need to just so we can cope.

At four o’clock my cell phone finally rings and it’s Lester calling from the pay phone by the nurse’s station to say that things aren’t looking good.

“Heart function,” he attempts to fathom as he speaks: “They’re saying that he doesn’t have enough.”

“Where’s Clarita?”

“She’s here. I’m going to take her home. Then I’ll come back and stay with him again tonight.”

I tell him that I think I’ve found the son.

“That would be the miracle. To see the two united. I’ll go tell the old one not to die just yet.”

I call the general number for Nellis Air Force Base again and ask for Colonel Curtis Edwards. I get an answering machine with a female secretary’s voice and this time the message I leave is a winner for its clarity and precision — I identify myself and say the Colonel’s father is dying in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas and leave that number.

Done.

Tomorrow I’ll go home.

I walk up to the Strip and lose myself in the crowd, trek all the way to the Venetian for the kitsch pleasure of prosecco by the fake canal, then wander back down to the not-so-hip Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris for an early dinner of moules frites where I can sit street-side on the Strip and watch the crowd and catch the water show at the Bellagio across the street.

By ten o’clock I’m back in bed at the Alexis, sound asleep, too exhausted to even dream, because that’s just the kind of Vegas party animal I am.

At six forty-five a.m. my cell phone rings. CALLER I.D. BLOCKED. A resonant male voice. Am I speaking to Miss Wiggins?

“You are.”

“This is Colonel Edwards of the United States Air Force.”

And I guess I did dream, I dreamed the speech that I would make to him if he called back because I find myself sitting up in bed and reciting a coherent argument for him to meet with me.