Missing Persons

36

I hadn’t been on the University of Colorado campus for a while. January wasn’t my favorite time for a visit, and the Duane Physical Laboratories wasn’t my ideal destination. But when my 11:15 appointment canceled on Thursday, I recognized that if I added the newly freed time to my midday lunch break, I had a seventy-five minute hole in my day. I decided to make the short trip from my office to the university.

The physics building is a large, angular, modern complex on the east side of the Boulder campus, segregated by roadways and by design from the cluster of lovely brick or flagstone structures that form the Mediterranean architectural core of the original university. The newer academic buildings surrounding Duane were, like Duane itself, looming, cast-concrete forms faced with just enough flagstone and roofed with just enough red tile to pay wink-wink homage to the Tuscan soul of the place.

I’d been aware of Duane for years; the tallest structure on campus, situated right across Colorado Avenue from the Muenzinger Psychology Building, it was hard to miss. But, given my arm’s-length relationship with the physical sciences, or at least my arm’s-length relationship with the study of the physical sciences, I’d never had reason to go inside Duane. Once I did make my way into the building looking for Bob, my initial impression was that Duane was state-university big and anonymous and that the notices on the bulletin boards were mostly about things I didn’t understand and, more to the point, until that moment didn’t even know that I didn’t understand. A professor was looking for a research assistant to study femtosecond optical frequency combs. Another lab needed help developing microcalorimeters and bolometers based on superconducting thin-films cooled to 0.1 K.

I didn’t know what any of it meant, not even close, but I was almost one hundred percent confident that I wasn’t their man. The students wandering the flavorless hallways-students who likely deserved my respect because, unlike me, they might have a prayer of being able to translate the bulletin boards-seemed a bit more serious than those I was accustomed to running into in my usual haunts on campus.

A big, anonymous building full of serious students? I suspected that Bob had gravitated to the physics department by unconscious design and had ended up burrowing into an environment where he could survive-thriving for Bob wasn’t really an option-for the many years he’d been putting in his time waiting for whatever would come next.

After a few false starts going to the wrong offices, I learned that Bob was actually a clerk/secretary in the office/lab where plasma physicists did their incomprehensible things. It turned out that Bob’s boss, a middle-aged woman named Nora Santangelo who was shaped like a chunk of water main, was as curious as I was about Bob’s whereabouts, and had a terrific intuitive sense of the parameters of Bob’s peculiarities.

When I introduced myself I omitted the doctor part. I told Ms. Santangelo-she didn’t strike me as the type of supervisor that a subordinate, or a visitor like myself, should call “Nora”-that I was a friend of Bob’s and that he had missed a rendezvous we’d planned for the previous evening and wasn’t answering his phone.

She responded suspiciously, “You’re his friend? I didn’t know he had any.”

Point, Ms. Santangelo.

It had taken some effort on my part to refocus her on the fact that I didn’t know where Bob was. “I called here this morning. The person who answered his phone told me he was out sick. But he’s not at home, either. I’m concerned.”

“Well, to be honest, I am too. I hadn’t called his home-that’s not the sort of thing that Bob… appreciates. He missed a day of work back during the spring blizzard in 2003, but that’s the only other time I can remember.”

Bob’s previous absence was undoubtedly excused: The infamous March 2003 blizzard had dropped almost four feet of snow on Boulder. “He didn’t call in today?”

She shook her head. “Or yesterday. Bob usually eats lunch at his desk. Puts his nose in a book or plays games online. Scrabble. Sometimes chess. He never hangs with the rest of the staff. Never. But Monday? Around eleven in the morning he told me he was going out for lunch. Came right up to my office, walked right up to my desk, and said, ‘Mrs. Santangelo, I’m going out to lunch.’ I was so surprised-and so pleased, really-that I told him to enjoy himself, to take a whole hour.”

“Did he?”

“Sure as heck did. He never came back at all. Didn’t call in. I still don’t know where he is.”

“Well,” I said, while I digested the news that Bob’s vanishing act had started even earlier in the week than I’d suspected.

Ms. Santangelo and I were standing in her office and I was finding myself increasingly distracted by the tubular shape of her. I would swear that her thighs, hips, waist, bosom, and shoulders were all the exact same measurement. She wasn’t particularly heavy; she just looked like she’d been forced to spend her formative years hibernating in a sausage casing.

“Listen,” she said. “Bob is… different. Different-different. I inherited him when I came over here from Hellems-the history department? I used to think those folks in history were peculiar, but these physicists? Don’t get me started; they’re something else. And Bob, he’s the oddest ball in the rack. Excuse my honesty, but if you know him then you know that already. He likes to keep his distance. He can be difficult for people to deal with, people who aren’t sensitive to his… shall we say, tendencies. But he does his job. No more, mind you, not a scintilla more. Bob does just his job. And I’ve finally found him a desk in a lab where everybody seems to get along with him okay. What I’m saying is that he’s not on a short leash like some of the people here. I’m not going to fire Bob for whatever… this is.” I watched her expression as her imagination took her someplace she hadn’t previously considered. “Within reason, of course.”

“Ms. Santangelo, it sounds like you know him well. Do you have any idea where I might look for him?”

She thought for a moment and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, as she took a step toward the door. “But you’ll call me if you hear anything? I am concerned. Bob grows on you.”

Like a mushroom, I thought. Or a truffle. Something parasitic.

“Of course.” I scrawled my pager number on a Post-it that I spotted on the desk behind me and handed it to her. “Will you do the same?”

She said she would and I headed out the door. Before I’d cleared the threshold I stopped and turned back to her. “Did Bob take his begonia with him? You know the one I’m talking about?”

She smiled at me. “Of course I do. You do know him well. But I don’t know the answer to your question. Why don’t you and I go down to his desk and see about that darn Christmas begonia.”

As she led me down the hall toward the administrative area that included Bob’s desk, I allowed myself the suspicion that Ms. Santangelo had quite a mouth on her when she was younger, but that a lot of ambition and some determined self-discipline had turned her from a damn-and-hell young woman to a darn-and-heck middle-aged one.

The Christmas begonia was sitting in what his boss said was its usual place on the corner of Bob’s desk. The plant’s presence told me one thing, but it told Ms. Santangelo two. She explained to me that if Bob anticipated being away from the office for an extended period-anything more than a long weekend constituted an extended period-he would carefully transport the begonia home with him. The transport was an elaborate process involving a beer-case flat and tented brown grocery bags. She also explained that if he anticipated being out of the office for a period even as long as a full day but not longer than three, he would move the plant and its pebble tray from the corner of his desk to the top of a waist-high bookshelf that sat beside a southeast facing window at the far end of the room.

“Always?” I asked.

“Always,” she confirmed, without hesitation. “He never puts the begonia in direct sun. And he always watered it from below, you know, from the pebble tray. He knows what he’s doing with it. Bob manages to keep the thing in bloom like that from Thanksgiving until spring break some years. People always comment on it, always.”

I’d already noted that the begonia was healthy, its blossoms prodigious. I stated the obvious: “Bob didn’t expect to be gone for this long, did he?”

Ms. Santangelo reached down and caressed the petals of one of the delicate begonia flowers. “No, he didn’t. I wonder if I should move it over to the bookcase so it can get some light while he’s gone. Bob would. I know he would. I just don’t know if he would want me to.”

I’d followed her hands to the desktop and was scouring the surface for a clue that might tell me something about Bob’s destination when he’d left work to go out to lunch on Monday. Other than the Christmas begonia, though, his desktop was devoid of anything personal. I asked, “When Bob plays games, does he use this computer?” I was pointing at the less-than-state-of-the-art machine that filled a third of his desk.

“No, he doesn’t. He has a laptop, he brings it with him to work every day. He asked me a long time ago if it’s okay with me for him to hook it up to the university’s network over lunch to play his games. I told him to have at it. Bob doesn’t cheat. If he’s unsure about a rule, he asks.”

Her response deflated me a little. “He took his laptop with him to lunch?”

“I don’t know, heck,” she said, and started rummaging in the drawers of Bob’s desk. From my vantage the drawers appeared to have been arranged by a demonic closet organizer.

“Don’t see it,” she said. “He must have taken it.”

“Do you know anything at all that might help me find him?”

“I wish I did,” she said. “I really wish to heck that I did.” She made her hands into fists and lifted them so that they came together just below her chin. “A few of my people here are totally reliable, you know what I mean? But some of the rest? Flakes. If they were gone for the amount of time that Bob’s been gone-a couple of days-I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Par for the darn course is what I’d think. Par for the darn course. But Bob? He’s not part of either group. He’s not regular, he’s not a flake. He’s…

“You know what? I’ll just say it: I don’t really like Bob, but I… like him. Do you understand? I do hope he’s okay.”

I understood.

I crammed in a quick stop at Mustard’s Last Stand on Broadway, inhaled my hot dogs with only a small side of guilt over the indulgence, and made it back to my office with just a few minutes to spare before my next appointment.