Negative Space

you get more milk like I asked you to?”
“They were out of one percent, so I got two. Hope it’s”—gasp—”okay.”
Karen went to the fridge, pulled it open. Gratified moaning filled the air.
“One-percent?” Karen barked. “I told you to get soy milk!”
“Oops—oh God yes, yes yes, oh oh oh right there—”
Karen shut the fridge door and motioned for Max to follow her into her bedroom.
He did so, with alacrity.
“They’re having sex,” he whispered.
“Fuckin’ idiot,” Karen hissed, “Can’t remember a single fuckin’ thing I fuckin’ tell her.” She picked up two bras and a pair of panties and tossed them into a bulging hamper.
“What the hell’s going on?” Max asked. “Who are they? Your roommates?”
“Vivian’s my roommate. That’s her boyfriend, or at least this week’s.”
“Does she always just do it right out where anyone could walk in?”
“Pretty much.”
“And the guys don’t care?”
“Nah, they get used to it, with the amount of times she goes at it.” Karen shook her head. “I think she burns through a whole marriage’s worth of sex in like two weeks.”
Karen threw aside more clothes and books, some of which—such as Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols—looked old and beaten. At the end of her search, she lifted something heavy: a photo album.
No family photos inside, however. No trips, no boyfriends, couples, or birthdays. No candid moments. Instead, page after page of aged newspaper cutouts, and a swarm of the same word that held ominous reign over Max’s studio wall.
Missing.
“I collect them too,” Karen said.
Words amassed in Max’s head, lost their identity. He had no idea what to say.
“I’m not as artistic as you,” she said. “But I think we do it for the same reasons.”
“We do?”
“Sure. Because of him. If we look into the world of the missing, maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of him. If we scour articles, publications, flyers, anything, we might stumble upon something. Maybe your artwork is like glorified Have You Seen Me? flyers you hang in galleries and in people’s homes. You want these people found. You want him found.”
“But why do you keep a book full of strangers?” Max asked.
“Same reason, I guess, as you do...to give them a home.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Thing is, I think he’s done this a lot,” Karen continued. “I think he starts families all over the country, maybe even all over the world, and runs. And maybe I’m just hoping to snag the next report of a missing father or husband and bingo, catch him in the act.”
“So if that’s the case,” Max said, “You’ve probably got tons of brothers out there, and, maybe, I have a lot of sisters. Why come to me?”
“Well, for one thing, I think it was your family he left when he started mine.”
“Excuse me?”
“He left when you were, what, seven? In 1970?”
“Yeah, around then....”
“I was born in 1973.”
“Look, I don’t know what to tell you,” Max said. “I’m sorry. I don’t have much more info than you do. And there’s no proof at all that we had the same father.”
“You probably don’t have any more info than I do,” Karen said. “Because I have these.”
Pulling out a drawer full of folders and loose papers, Karen riffled through them. She unearthed a clipped-together stack of papers which she handed to Max. They were drawings. On seeing the first one—a cowboy on a horse, rendered in child-like crayon—his eyes widened.
“I did this,” he said. “It was one of my Lone Ranger drawings.”
He flipped through them all. Some were drawings of friendly-looking monsters, some of Biblical scenes, some of dinosaurs, many of cowboys. Karen had about ten of his childhood drawings. Scrawled proudly on the back of each one, in his mother’s handwriting, was his name, age and the date.
“I haven’t seen these in over twenty years,” Max said. “How did you get them?”
“They were part of my father’s stash, I guess,” Karen said. “Honestly, I’m not sure. According to my mom, he would get occasional letters from California. She once got suspicious and opened one of them and it was one of your drawings.”
Chills through Max’s bones. His hands clammy. He had produced hundreds of drawings in his childhood, ever since his four-year-old hand first picked up a crayon with serious intent, yet throughout the blaze of creativity he’d never kept track of his stuff. It was very possible that, unbeknownst to him, his mother could have snuck some away.
But she didn’t know what happened to dad, either. She had no idea. She claimed he must have done something, that God must have plucked him from their lives because—
—because—
“Your mom,” Karen said. “Was she very religious?”
—baby God is here with us and we need no one else—
Max nodded. “Why?”
“Mine was too. Pentecostal. From the moment I could speak, I couldn’t stand it. Weird, huh? I don’t know what it was. I had an inborn aversion to it. My mom denied I did. I denied I did. I went along with the rigmarole, though, until I just...couldn’t stand it any longer. I remember being scared and hating God for what he’d do to her at church. It freaked me out how she would break down in tears, mumble. She spoke in tongues. I was terrified. It was like a psychosis, I swear.”
Max was quiet.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your mom, by the way,” Karen said. “I don’t think any kid, or anyone, should have to go through that, seeing their whole house, their whole world, collapse like that.”
“The house didn’t collapse,” Max said. “That’s just what I told Mr. Ritter. My mother was murdered by a small band of vagrants that wanted shelter from the storm. I barely escaped.”
“Oh my God....” After a slow, digesting pause she said, “You know I didn’t expect you to fill in any more holes, Max. On our father, I mean. But finding each other is at least something, a step we can share. So I guess it does kind of fill in something.”
“You still haven’t answered—”
“What I’m sort of jealous of,” Karen said. “Well, I don’t know