Z Special Unit

My parents slept in the master bedroom at the rear of our house, at the far end of a long corridor. French windows overlooked the garden, where a rectangle of grass delimited by plots of hibiscus, hydrangea, and gardenia flowers occupied most of the terrain. Ivy gourd cleaved to the common fence dividing our property from the neighbor’s. Every summer, in mid-August, we hung pastel paper lanterns with picture wire, laid lauhala mats down on the teal-colored lawn for our annual luau. Couples arrived at our doorstep in garrulous, and sometimes tipsy, waves. Many of the men were veterans of the Second World War. My father himself had served as a commando in the South West Pacific theater. He only ever referred to the experience to complain, with an air of mild abstraction, his eyes blurring with reminiscence, of the mud and humidity in the Bornean jungle. “Always muggy and festy in that bloody war,” he’d tell us.

On luau party nights, which I recall so vividly from my childhood years, a caprice of memory I can’t explain, after the guests had eaten their huli-huli chicken and downed plenty of Mai Tais garnished with pineapple spears and crinkly paper parasols, people danced to the vinyl records my father spun on the hi-fi turntable. The ruckus overwhelmed me as a boy, with the brass of big bands bursting from the speakers in the living room, and laughter erupting sporadically throughout the house and backyard. The festivities revealed facets of my father’s character he seldom exhibited under other circumstances. At times, I felt I was living with a stranger to see him huddled with his cronies, cocktail in hand, naked to the waist, a carnation lei hanging from his neck like a fallen halo, beneath the softly swaying lanterns, or choosing albums from the personal collection he rarely touched otherwise.

We lived in California then, on a placid cul-de-sac lined with fan palms. Strangely, on that night, many cars appeared out of the obscurity. The darkness rendered difficult the perception of the occupants behind their windshields. The glare of headlights blazed like cannon fire upon my retinas, blinding me. The shadowy vehicles cruising past evoked a fleet of vessels sailing the meanders of some gloomy waterway. I kept looking up from my homework to see if my father might be dropped off by one of them. He’d gone for an after-dinner stroll that had grown disquietingly long.

Near midnight, I left my bedroom and joined my mother, who sat erect and reflective on the edge of the living room sofa. She said nothing as I installed myself beside her, only glancing at me with an expression I was unable to construe. She had yet to remove the apron she’d donned hours before to prepare the evening meal. No one in our family had ever been accused of volubility.

Perhaps incited by my presence, she rose, padding into the entryway, and picked up the telephone sitting on the console next to the coat rack. I observed her compose a single digit on the rotary dial. Asking the operator who came on the line to connect her with the authorities, she described my father and the routine events leading to his disappearance to what I assumed was an apathetic civil servant.

A hiker discovered the body the following morning. It seemed my father’s heart had simply refused to beat further. He lay in the arroyo below our home, which funneled the transient streams that formed during rare and drenching rains. Ours was an arid region, generally, and we’d seen no precipitation in months. It was bone-dry when I went searching answers to that sandy wash that very afternoon. A desert willow in bloom, the perfumed air reeking of lavender flowers, struck me as a cruel and paradoxical luxuriance. I thought I had a notion in the end of what my old man may have been seeking there in the middle of the moonless night.