• At the college library, Billy, surrounded by disintegrating brown books and looking homely in a narrow blue cardigan sweater, studied harder than ever, hoping to finish his criminal law degree two years early.
• Caroline, recently sixteen, took ill and remained in bed for weeks at a time, mysteriously heartsick with the onset of late pubescence, as her doctor diagnosed it. For months, Caroline lay under her goldcolored sheets, listening to records by Joan Baez and the Carpenters, staring at her detective diary and then, all at once, and quite uncontrollably, she would begin crying.
• Young Fenton Mills became dangerously overweight, ballooning up to well over three hundred pounds, his body impossibly expanding in all directions, like an overinflated blimp. He was featured on several talk shows of the afternoon variety and developed a nearly religious following among housewives and cleaning ladies. His photo at the time frequently appeared on
Fenton FOREVER
T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Instead of passively enduring her continued depression, Caroline, once again exhibiting her ambiton and courage, decided to follow in her older brother’s footsteps. Her first case was investigating strange rumors of ghoulish moans and wails at an abandoned cave, which had at one time harbored the city’s ancient stockpile of mustard gas and had been promptly closed for public health reasons. Caroline, alone, crept past the opening of the barricaded cavern, with signs which read, Danger! and No Trespassing! treading lightly through the poorly fitted boards into the strange mischief of the dark night.
She was, sadly enough, unable to ever solve the strange case on her own. Shortly thereafter (
and here we are just speculating
), perhaps out of humiliation, pride, or defeat—or so badly missing the wonderful life of adventure and companionship her older brother had always made real—poor Caroline did a terrible thing.
As she stood naked in the family’s grimy white tub, black candles burning, her tape player warbling “Yesterday” by the Beatles, the shower issuing a woozy, constant stream of steam, Caroline slowly slit her bared and tender wrists with a razor blade snapped from a pink disposable Petite Lady Shaver, the plastic formed in the factory not more than a mile down the street. In a moment, then, the girl collapsed with a terrible thud, her head hitting the faucet, her body falling limp against the tile flooring.
The sound of their daughter’s fall interrupted Mr. and Mrs. Argo’s studied reading of their respective newspapers that evening. Lowering their pulpy pages and looking at each other confused, they knew at once there was some significant trouble. Within a few moments, there was a panicked phone call, then their firm hands were under the girl’s willowy neck, and Caroline was being wheeled out on a wobbly silver stretcher, Mr. and Mrs. Argo walking beside her, trying their best at comfort but only actually talking to each other nervously.
—It will be all right.
—It will be better than all right. Everything’s going to happy once again, you’ll see.
—Let’s just hope for all right.
—Yes, yes, I’m sorry.
Caroline survived the tragedy, but was never the same fine, carefree girl ever again. No more running in fields or investigating caves; no longer was she ever barefoot. Instead she grew into someone else, asking her parents to now call her “Patient 101174,” and refusing to remove the plastic bracelet the hospital had forced her to wear. Caroline began draping herself in black clothes and black makeup, becoming something much more miserable, much more distraught, much more blank-eyed than she had ever been.
If only after this first incident the boy detective had been called, if only Caroline’s secret had then been told, the end may have come out differently, but no. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Argo decided it would be better to keep mum Caroline’s mistake, not wanting to unduly worry Billy, who was at the time carefully composing “Secret Criminal Plots in Abandoned Amusement Parks,” the subject of his first semester’s final paper, the grade of which we all now know was merely a C-, the lowest the boy detective ever received in his academic life.
No, it was all kept hush-hush from the boy detective for his own good.
Within a few months of that first incident, Caroline found herself lying beside a bevy of strange, pimply faced boys, French-kissing them in the nearby field—the one she had traipsed through as a younger girl—whispering dirty words to them in the vacant woods, following them into the privacy of her own empty bed and empty room. Caroline, taking off her see-through black top and short vinyl skirt, would wink at the boy once, and then, at the end of their tryst, would smoke a cigarette and laugh to show how little she cared about any of it. But secretly, she hated each and every boy, and they simply stared at her terrified and then awkwardly left.
The day Caroline let a boy named Butch, a dopey fellow with a peach-fuzz mustache, have his way with her, pinning her against the door of her closet, the metal hook on which she hung her schoolbag jabbing into the back of her head again and again, she closed her bedroom door and cried one last time, and her detective diary remained shut once and for all.
Some time later that same week, the boy detective’s sister was expelled from Villa Victoria Private Academy for pulling the fire alarm and calling the principal a “turd.” The very night Billy Argo was finishing up his second quarter exams—specifically, a test on “White American Serial Killers”—Caroline found herself very alone. Standing naked in the tub, she slowly slits her wrists once again.
There were no records or candles this time.
Within her left hand, there was only a piece of torn paper inscribed with the message
abracadabra
. And then a fall: a final, startling collapse.
Mr. and Mrs. Argo were not on the premises that evening, having been invited to accept Gotham’s award for Truly Above-Average Parenting.
The moment he found out, the boy detective began to reconstruct the crime scene in miniature, determined to prove that sister Caroline was the murder victim of some masterly plotted and nefarious revenge scheme.
It could have been the work of the Thinker, no doubt, had the Thinker still been alive,
he told himself.
Perhaps Dr. Menace.
Using a darling diorama and several small paper dolls, he was still unable to dissuade the police coroner, a Mr. Thorn, to rule that the tragedy was anything but a suicide.
—But look here, Mr. Thorn, the window was left open. And these strange red markings along her neck.
—Billy, I wish there was something I could do.
—And the message. Certainly she knew she was in danger from someone.
—Yes, I’m terribly sorry, Billy.
At the funeral, Billy, unsure of what to wear and so deciding on his owl tie and a blue cardigan, stood at the coffin crying beside his boyhood friend, Fenton, who was more enormously overweight than ever and had to walk with the assistance of two sturdy steel canes. Neither one said anything to each other. Mr. and Mrs. Argo themselves would not come near the pale white casket. They hovered around the expensive hors d’oeuvres and bickered about why their eldest son, Derek, had decided not to show. In the measured silence of that room, the boy detective could not refrain from mumbling the same, repeated,
Why? Why? Why did this happen? Who is responsible? What kind of strange plot was the cause? What villain was behind such a terrible act?
It was a mystery that would not lift its veil for a single moment, something so murky and unclear that Billy felt himself beginning to disappear into the profound darkness of it simply standing there.
The boy detective turned finally in his grief and, in whispers, began to blame his lifelong friend Fenton for not having looked after Caroline while he was away.
—You. You are to blame. You let this happen.
—No.
—You ought to have told me she was in danger.
—How was I to know?
—How were you to know? Look, look at her now. How can you look at her and ask that?
—But how was I to know? How was I to know?
The boy detective, thin and frail in his blue cardigan sweater, his owl-eyes wide as saucers, his small white hands open and shaking, continued yelling at Fenton, who in return could only continue sobbing, the pasty white funereal flowers getting drenched under the large boy’s interminable tears. In the end, Billy simply but angrily pointed his finger at Fenton, who accepted the blame and cried helplessly into his own hands as an apology. It was the last time the two ever spoke in person.
So distraught was the boy detective that he was unable to finish his schooling at the university. He moved back in with his prize-winning but guilt-ridden parents, who, as best as they could, offered guidance, advice, and book after book about learning how to grieve.
Many months passed like this—crying in bed, lying on his stomach, listening to his sister’s Carpenters records, caressing the fingerprint set—until, soon enough, Billy Argo, heartbroken boy detective, decided he would follow his sister into the most profound, irreversible, and unperceivable mystery: death. Billy stood in the tub, his skinny chest shaking, naked, holding a razor blade from his father’s traveling kit against his wrist. He then made the incision and collapsed with a similarly terrible thud, which reverberated throughout the house once again.
The sound of their son’s sudden mistake interrupted Mr. and Mrs. Argo’s somnambulant evening. Both now on Quaaludes and familiar with the aching noise of that particular kind of crash, they lowered their newspapers and looked at each other grimly. Within a few moments, an ambulance siren was wailing, Billy was being wheeled out on a wobbly silver stretcher, his parents walking beside him, trying their best at comfort but only blaming one another nervously.
—You let this happen.
—No, you let this happen.
—No, you did.
—No, you did.
Unwilling to make the same mistake again, and truly worried for Billy’s happiness, the Argo parents decided it would be best if the boy detective was temporarily hospitalized upstate at the St. Vitus Institute for the Infirmed and Mentally Ill. Soon enough, Billy found himself sitting in St. Vitus’ placid green dayroom on a plastic-covered couch, feeling his own bandaged wrists and listening to the steady hum of foreign soap operas on TV and the strangely calm voices of the interminably lost beside him.
All around the dayroom, at small brown card tables, various mental patients in various states of mental illness spent hours putting together a variety of jigsaw puzzles—pictures of kittens, national monuments, historical figures, all in various states of disarray—their faces very serious, their hands very busy. Without a thought, Billy would often look up from his damaged wrists and turn, offering his help. Soon enough, Lincoln’s beard would be restored, a Great Dane would find its legs, the Pyramids their third side; all the available puzzles in the room quickly solved.
In the end, the boy detective’s stay at St. Vitus lasted more than ten years. The truth was this: At first, Billy did not want to go back home and purposefully failed any kind of examination meant to evaluate his readiness for readmission into the outside world. But then, it should be known, after being administered enough Thorazine, Billy became as unresponsive as the next overly medicated patient and simply disappeared into the slumbering universe of his own grief.
A decade later, with state-wide budget cuts and the appointment of a new hospital director, Dr. Kolberg, St. Vitus’ unnecessary psychoactive medication therapy soon dwindled, and patients once thought to be profoundly comatose began to again register all the symptoms of life. Billy rose from his drug-induced stupor, gripped the silver-framed sides of his bed, scratched at his strange, bearded face, and began howling Caroline’s name. It was a single thought the boy detective carried then, in his blood and head and heart: Discover who had brought about Caroline’s death and punish them with equal parts terror and despair.
Within a few days and after a welcome shave, Billy passed all the required tests and a hasty, if not entirely accurate, prognosis was made, at which time the state board saw no need for the boy detective to remain at St. Vitus, and so Billy was released. The hospital staff—a matronly nurse with red hair named Mrs. Hemmings, in particular—were helpful in finding him a room at Shady Glens, a state-sponsored assisted-living facility, and a productive job in the city so that he could find a way to negotiate the rest of his life within a world that he continued to see as dangerous to strangers and heartless to the friendly.
The boy detective once again waved goodbye to his parents, who came to see their son off as he climbed aboard a bus bound for downtown Gotham. Billy was thin, his face gaunt, and he wore his faded blue sweater. His head was nearly shaved, two circles of baldness glowing above each ear, the skin made clean for a final bout of electro-convulsive therapy. The boy detective climbed through the door, found a seat beside a window, and watched as his parents slowly and momentously disappeared. Looking down into his lap, Billy touched the thick white scars on his wrist, then felt the two bare spots on his head. He looked up again and waved, though his parents were no longer anywhere in sight. Instead, off in the distance, across the great river, and growing more faint each moment, were the silver and green searchlights of the mysterious and unwelcoming metropolis of New York City.
It was like that.
In the end, it was not so very strange.
And yet still Billy Argo could not have known how unexpectedly this boy detective’s life was about to change.
What do people think of the boy detective?
The bus driver: always punctual.
The mailman: very polite.
The police chief: an uncanny eye for clues.
The schoolteacher: has a very large vocabulary.
The banker: found my daughter’s missing leg.
The rocket scientist: quite bright.
In our town—our town of shadows, our town of mystery—it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything.