Disappearance


     Two lots on our street were still empty seven years after the fire. Once in a while, when the weather was just so and my husband in the mood, we rode our bicycles around the neighborhood, counting lots that still lay bare. We divided them into corner lots and not-corner lots, because I felt more corners had been left empty. But that turned out not to be the case; I lost my bet. We hadn’t bet any money; it was worse.

     Then last February, several properties were quite suddenly filled with manufactured homes of the cheapest sort, large gray rectangles, with low roofs and badly poured front steps. Instead of occupying the midsection of the parcels, they all stood to one side, leaving some space for a possible carport perhaps. My husband wondered why the city allowed these structures; there hadn’t been any before the fire. Instead of two empty lots on our street, we now only had one, which the owners sprayed twice a year to keep the weeds in check. For several weeks, everything would be brown and black, but each time, the weeds came back, larger and hardier and misshapen, grimacing at us. I always crossed the street when I came to the lot on my way to the park.

     As sudden as work on the manufactured homes had started, it also ended. For a while an excavator was parked next to the one on our street and then it disappeared, and instead chain-link fences went up, our view blocked by green tarps. Our neighbors said they’d seen several police cars parked out front.

     I’ve subscribed nine times to our local paper, which covers stories from our county and those reaching all the way to the Oregon border. Nine times I’ve canceled that subscription. You want to support your community, you do want to read about break-ins, school knife attacks, and you do want to read about elections, but most articles are poorly written and lack basic understanding and information. I may be unkind, but it’s the truth. If you really want to know about a local issue, you have to hope a national paper will cover it.    
 
     But during the few weeks I still had that subscription, the Free Independent reported that a body had been found on the lot down the street from us. That was all the police would say, no further comments were made. Two weeks later, though, work on another modular home two blocks away was also halted. The same kind of chain-link fence went up, the same kind of tarp kept us from seeing what kind of business the police was conducting.

     Frustrated by the lack of information about the first lot, I had already canceled my subscription, but now the local NPR stations were ready to jump in. A second and third body were found, badly decomposed, possibly years old. It did not appear as though the bodies had been placed there recently, but only a complete autopsy could reveal how long the three bodies had been in the ground, and whether they had been put there pre- or post-fire.

     My husband’s feet are very flat. Not his fault, they just are. He likes to put his feet on the coffee table while sitting on the sofa reading a magazine or book. He works hard, and he’s very patient. He’s very quiet and very patient. With his very long, flat feet on the coffee table, he read me passages from the San Francisco newspapers, and even one from the Washington Post. Nobody had much to say about the bodies, and nobody had come forward missing three bodies. We had a surplus of bodies.  
 
     We don’t have kids, my husband and I. He’s grossed out by them, grossed out by them coming from women’s bodies. If he could undo his knowledge about where babies come from, he would. On our second date, he said, “I will never have kids. Not ever. If you insist, we can adopt a child.” I just nodded. The announcement was too sudden to make any sense. We hadn’t done it yet, what was I supposed to answer?   

     What made me marry Travis was that I couldn’t figure him out. Even now, after almost twenty years, I have no idea who is sleeping next to me when the lights go out. During the day he looks familiar, he is like a complicated machine an engineer might show to you. It does this and that, it needs maintenance and power, but in the end, do you really understand how it’s working and why? I know my husband requires food, drink, and sex, but his inner workings I have been unable to understand. I don’t enjoy his feet, though his hands are quite nice. He has a good face, and above everything else, he’s tall. Big too, and in a shapely way. He is agreeable, and I love the life we have made, and I don’t know if I can trust him.

     I like kids when other people have them. Most days I’m glad it’s just Travis and myself. Our house is small, where would we put two or three adolescents? When Travis said he couldn’t have kids — he had taken care of that at the age of twenty — I spent a few days, plus dates three and four, mulling it over. I was afraid what another being might do in my body’s cavities. I feared it might eat me from the inside out; my belly would open with a loud tear or a smacking of lips from the creature inside. I’d be left feeding the entirety of my body to this wildling, while Travis would observe the spectacle with a detached air, like a driver watching a car go up in flames by the side of the road.   

     For weeks we didn’t hear another word about the three corpses. Then construction on a lot closer to the railroad crossing restarted after lying dormant for several years. That particular property appeared haunted. Travis and I had looked at it while searching for our own home. It had been elegantly furnished, a two-story thing from the 80s, in good repair. But after nearly paying a deposit, we pulled out. The place made us uneasy, but at first we couldn’t admit to it. We felt childish; the house was a bargain and why wouldn’t we jump at the opportunity? But the night before we were to pay the title company, Travis made this weird sigh that seems to come from somewhere deep inside his belly. It’s almost a belch, but not a belch. And I knew something was bothering him. We confessed our fears to each other and then bought a different house. Less attractive, smaller, but without the aura of despair. They both burned down though, so whatever was going on in that house by the railroad wasn’t some kind of warning that a year later a fire would rush through our neighborhood and consume it.

     After the fire, the owners of that house near the tracks decided to rebuild but then one thing led to another and suddenly they were locked in a battle with the contractor, the mortgage company, and the insurance. When finally things got settled and the excavator rolled onto the property to dig holes for the piers, they found four bodies interred some five feet deep.  

     On the night of the fire, several people died in their homes. An old woman burned in her sleep just around the bend in our street. In the section closest to the vineyards, an elderly couple didn’t make it out of their garage. The house collapsed on top of their car. While natural disasters have long ceased to feel natural, we all know why these people died, and when they found a charred body in the rubble of a house on the main road leading into our neighborhood, we understood. These new bodies, however, were a different matter. Had somebody discarded dead people on the remaining empty lots? What for? We have lakes, rivers, mountains, deep forests; why go to all that trouble of burying the dead in a community still reeling from a wildfire and an arduous rebuild? That was what I wanted to know, and that’s what our neighbors wanted to know. Especially after several teenagers, on a drunken night in April, armed themselves with shovels and started digging in an empty lot close to the elementary school. By early morning they had come upon the remains of a woman and child wrapped in clear plastic. But they didn’t find out about what they had unearthed until after neighbors heard their feral screams and called the police, and after the liquefied remains were taken away and examined by the county coroner. After that night, all the empty lots were closed off to the public. Razor wire topped chain-link fences.

     During the pandemic, Travis and I had crossed the street every single time someone came towards us on the sidewalk. Do you remember the first weeks after everything shut down, the calm that settled over our streets, the sound of birds audible even on cold mornings, traffic from the 101 no longer barking at our yards? Do you remember how suddenly people started to walk their streets instead of driving to work, to the store, to school, to sports? Do you remember the heavenly quiet? We only talked to the neighbors we knew best, from driveway to driveway, no closer than that. I was scared of the virus, of course I was, but Travis stayed home all day and cooked for me, and after the first drink of the night, we made love in the backyard. I’d get naked and unzip him, urging him on, not giving him time to throw off his clothes.

      The first identification was a shock. The body found on the lot in our street was that of a Mexican immigrant who’d never arrived at the house of her brother’s family up in Eureka. Nobody knew who she might have called on in our city. Nobody had seen her arrive in Santa Rosa. She had stayed a week with friends in San Diego, then had disappeared on her way up north in the fall of seven years ago.

     Two teenagers, a college student and his trans girlfriend, had been buried sometime between February and June of the year after the fire, while the owners of the lot had still been struggling to find a contractor who would build them a house, any house, for the amount their insurance was paying them. They hadn’t upped their coverage in a decade; who would have thought that an urban neighborhood could fall victim to a wildfire, a fire that had started miles away near Calistoga? The students had left Reno before the start of the semester in January, couch-surfed for several weeks in San Francisco, and then vanished from view. 

     Several of the dead have still not been identified. The mother and her child have not been claimed, and a bag full of ashes and bone fragments will never give away its secret. An unhoused man was identified by his son, who lives in Marin and once a month drove to our city to visit his dad. When the picture of the deceased was posted online, I recognized him as the man who’d sat on the creek path I took most every week on one of my morning runs. I never failed to greet him and often thought about bringing him food, though I never did. I was afraid he would reject the food. I didn’t want to come off as condescending. Instead, I donated to the food bank. The man had not died in the fire, his son was certain. He had visited his dad, who suffered from tinnitus and sat near the air-conditioning units of a warehouse, the only place that offered some relief, several times after the destruction of the neighborhood. Almost a year had passed since the fire when he arrived in Santa Rosa to find the spot his dad had occupied for three years empty.

     These discoveries silenced our neighborhood. Not in the way the pandemic had — outwardly, you couldn’t feel any difference. But if you took the time to walk the cracked sidewalks and blistered streets, you felt the questions building up and choking people in their sleep. You could feel our neighbors fall silent during dinnertime, only the television keeping up its incessant nonsense. Of course, we should have suspected it. After the rubble had been cleared away by FEMA, it was easy to steal into the neighborhood after dark, at a time when all streetlamps and power lines had been destroyed. Every block lay empty, completely abandoned. I imagine it must have been easy to rent a van, or better a large delivery truck, and bury ten to fifteen bodies a night without raising any suspicions. Come to think of it, it would have been even easier to do so during the day. Give everyone involved a bright-orange vest and a hard hat, put up some traffic cones and orange plastic barriers, and you can dig all you want for as long as you want.

     The flags that people put up during the rebuild are quietly disappearing, the lawn signs that advertised our strength and resilience have been packed away in people’s garages. The conversations in driveways and on porches have come to an end. Because the questions keep multiplying, like a virus in infected cells. Where did the bodies come from? Who went to all that trouble to bury them in our neighborhood? Why did so many bodies go unidentified? Why did nobody care to retrieve them? And after the questions had built up and taken over every nook and every cranny, until you could barely move through our houses without bumping your head, legs, and feet, we all arrived at the final question. What would we find underneath our own houses?

     The murders are being investigated. Reporters accost us on the streets, drive around the neighborhood in white SUVs and roll down their windows when you open your mailbox or weed your front yard. What do we think about the murders? Who do we suspect of dumping the bodies? How do we feel about voices that call for a complete survey and search of every street and every cul de sac? How do we feel about certain voices that call for an end to the scrutiny and demand to leave us, the fire victims, in peace? Haven’t we suffered enough?

     I don’t get naked these days, even though the temperatures are in the high 70s. We get drunk in the backyard, but I don’t unzip his fly. Travis doesn’t offer to shave me down there anymore. We don’t stop after the second cocktail, and once the darkness is complete, we drink more inside, where we can’t be watched by the dead coming alive and wandering our fenced-in properties. For them, fences don’t exist. We don’t want to be watched with greed and hatred.

     Travis has bought two spades and shovels, and he says he needed to drive to three different stores to get them. Shovels are in demand. After he comes home and before he opens the bourbon, I can see him walk along the perimeter of our yard. Where will he start to dig? And why is he so sure that I will take the second shovel and help him now that the Diablo winds have picked up once more and the soil is hard, and cracks are opening up everywhere around us?

                               ___________________________________

Stefan Kiesbye is the author of eight books of fiction, including Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, The Staked Plains, and But I Don’t Know You. German newspaper Die Welt commented that, "Kiesbye is the inventor of the modern German Gothic novel." His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Kiesbye teaches creative writing and literature at Sonoma State University.