IMMOLATION

000: GNITSOHG EHT

The Ghosting, Old Jim called it, how he lost his daughter, and only him the one losing her,
and he figured he would never know the why and that’s why she’d done it that way.

So she would never have to talk to him again. When the thought made his heart constrict
and Old Jim’s breath came rough and uneven, like he might die, he tried to remember he
didn’t deserve it. Unless he did.

Eleanor Cassandra Kavanaugh, the first name from her mother, French for “shining light,” the
surname a construct for Old Jim’s cover. Little Light when she was younger. The way at age
eight she had held the spatula out like a flyswatter to turn over a pancake shaped like a butterfly.
The frown into smile as she ignored his advice at twelve playing miniature golf and made a hole
in one. That time she tried to run off with a pig at the petting zoo and had been trotted along the
fence line, the porker protesting the tight leash, until they’d caught up. Where had she been
going?

Eleanor Kavanaugh held weight, but by her teen years she’d gone by “Cass” or “Kavanaugh,” as
if it made her seem more serious, and Cass had stuck over time. Cass as college undergrad who
took poetry classes and published poems, but had graduated with a degree in animal science. But
turned aimless, left jobs abruptly, took other ones, started over. It became a tougher life for her
over time than he’d wished for her, but he was proud of her.

Most of the time during her childhood, Old Jim was a spook, far from home, reliant on his wife’s
updates. He’d met Genevieve in the service, which is why they’d never married, just played
pretend. Old Jim’s boss, Jack, had this intense idea of family to go with allegiances within Central
that made it work, for a while.

What it meant to tread foreign soil on some pulse-pounding secret mission, receiving
communiqués from home that seemed benign, senseless, benign again. Checking for enemy
surveillance along a dusty roadside … while reading about 4-H clubs and prizewinning
chickens. Central had him hooked by then, or he just liked the adventure of the job and used
that as an excuse.

Then, that period of domesticity when, despite bouncing around between home and overseas, he
took Cass to soccer matches and for a time he was driving this chatty teenager to regionals and
exploring the mysteries of small talk with the parents on the sidelines, commiserating when they
lost and celebrating when they won. Then he’d been called overseas for a longer stretch, and for
a handful of years Cass had lived with a great-aunt.

By the time Cass left him for good, Gen had been gone eighteen years, the time they’d had
together so short. Everyone was so grown up, Cass closing in on thirty and Old Jim used to a
haggardness in her eyes as each new opportunity crumbled to dust, and he couldn’t parent her
into something better at that point. She had her poetry. She wasn’t out on the street. She just had
a life that hadn’t hit its stride, but he thought she knew he had her back.

ABSOLUTION

The day she left Old Jim remembered as being in November, dead leaves on the lawn of his
upstate New York house that Central had bought him as a prop. He’d been stateside for
some time, Central using him to trap domestic terrorists. A few meetings in public places.
Arrests months later, after he’d been forgotten, not a loose end but a thing that hadn’t
worked out, a person they’d barely known.

A burnt hint of winter in the distant smoke from a premature fireplace. But maybe that was his
mood remembering it. Perhaps it had been late summer and the generator had just died, but he
couldn’t recognize the glimmering hope of that.

No, it was a day you don’t forget. In November. The dead leaves on the lawn he left all winter
until the snow covered them. She had ghosted him but was still around. Traces over time. Bills
that arrived, forwarded—by her. All her mail came to him for a year, then nothing.

In its sparse, impersonal quality, the mail almost broke him, even though he opened each new
envelope as if the advertising within would, miraculous, reveal a message. As if he were still
receiving her over the transom, if only he could read the signs. Was light. Was matter. Washed
up in the sea wrack of some distant shore.

No hospital had held her. No hotel had booked her. No airline had received her. But, then, she
was her father’s daughter. He’d not let slip the specifics of missions but had entertained her,
perhaps too much, with a beer in him, in the art of espionage.

Had she asked him for specifics? He couldn’t remember.

At first, he had just a spy’s intuition that something was wrong, because her usual letters never
arrived, and they’d settled into a good, solid routine with that. But, two weeks after their last
lunch, he opened the car’s glove compartment … and found her note. Not even in an envelope,
just scrawled on a lined piece of eight by eleven notebook paper, ripped from a spiral binding.

“Don’t follow me. Don’t try to find me. Don’t contact me. Sincerely, Cass.”

Sincerely crushed him. Her handwriting, hurriedly scrawled, even if the time delay had broken
the chain of evidence, and so he entered his first loop: That someone was running an op on him.
Some Central faction, an agent he’d caught with a hand in the till back in the day, or one of
the domestic terrorists he’d set up, but, no, they lacked the subtlety. There would’ve been a
ransom note, some other sting in the tail. The note felt real. It felt real because it hurt him so
badly.

Don’t follow me. Don’t try to !nd me. And that was him, too, in a way, cashing in his R&R with
Central and slipping their gauntlet, flush with cash and driving a different car. Catch me if you
can, but for a long time they didn’t bother.

A forwarded letter from a friend of Cass’s, early on, he pored over for clues but found nothing.
Juxtaposed with unearthing a box of memorabilia that included baby photos and elementary-
school essays, crayon and watercolor images she’d made for classes. Green parrots she’d never
seen flying across a blue sky, as if predicting an idyllic moment from Old Jim’s secret missions.
Such a happy child, with such a huge smile. Everything he felt in that moment, looking through
the box, was a cliché, even though it cut so deeply.

What did that mean about details of lives, real or made-up? That Central could’ve made this up,
too, if he didn’t remember her drawing it? A casualty of his career, these thoughts. Because
he’d been so many people, for Central. Out in the field, then as a fixer or enforcer.

Her apartment at the edge of a city forty miles from the house … barren, gutted, and after Old
Jim’s first visit, that De-

ABSOLUTION

cember, slipping the landlord a twenty, rented out again, so anything forensic receded into the
past. Returning the night of his visit, Old Jim had run a black light across the floor, the walls, the
lone futon left in a corner.

What had he expected? Blood spatter?

After he was done and sitting in his pickup truck, in the grips of some dark emotion between grief
and rage, he hated himself for turning her disappearance into another special op. Sneaking into
buildings after dark with night vision goggles. To trudge the world looking for traces of someone
who didn’t want to be found—who had decided to become a ghost. What next? Would he
construct theories from torn matchbook covers, like a bad noir movie?

The details that became a description for other people as he widened his search. Long brown
hair, hazel eyes with dark liner, small upturned nose. Freckles, with a slight flush to her cheeks.
The mouth that tightened into determination when she clenched her jaw. Just under five ten and
a swimmer’s body. Bitten nails with chipped red nail polish.

As weeks became months and the feeling he’d had when she’d missed two regular calls, usually
after group therapy, became a constant weight in his heart, his stomach, like a cancer spreading
… he couldn’t take it anymore. No relief from the sadness, the confusion, the sudden
disconnection, shocked by the force of these emotions, how they sustained themselves.

He slid past the date on the calendar that he thought of as marking the end of Central’s tolerance.
He slid into drink, like a natural, like a pro. It was easy enough—it had been the escape that got
him through many a mission, in moderation, doled out as a reward or to screw his courage to
the sticking place. Just upped the volume on it, to stop hearing her voice. Because her voice
came to him at odd times, from different times, so the cooing of Shining Light became the
castigation of a teenage rebellion into activism and the arts. And the shame of it: Gen receded
even further the longer Cass had ghosted him, as if the two were connected and, both undead
in their separate ways, cast loose from memory, reeled back in.

Inadequate, fuzzy, shimmering moments came back to him— his sense of his own daughter.
Memories he had to work at, reinforced by old photographs. Here she was right before the
petting zoo pony stepped on her foot. There she was staring at the camera in costume for some
high school event.

He ate too much, to keep up the drinking, or he ate nothing, to punish himself, until he felt weak,
fuzzy. He left the house and spent a month in a crap motel sleeping most of the time and
roaming dive bars in strip malls late at night. Got used to the smell of piss from dirty bathrooms,
the curling grin of vomit. He wanted to pick fights—with fellow drunks, with rangy men in
backward-turned baseball caps playing pool. He couldn’t say what held him back.

Instead, Old Jim had conversations with himself at the end of the bar. Except, it wasn’t Old Jim
he spoke to—he spoke to Cass, reliving the last conversation they’d had, that last Monday. He’d
been driving through her area after visiting a hardware store, so it had been by chance, except
maybe she’d meant it that way. For the last time.

At a busy diner pretending to be a café, in a booth with cracked plastic covers, with the
comforting burnt-grease smell and the line cooks grumbling, tetchy and sharp in the open
kitchen. They both drank hot chocolate.

Old Jim had told her about his physical, that he’d “passed it with flying colors,” a term that now
seemed meaningless. By which he meant he didn’t care, but he also didn’t know what “flying
colors” meant, as he dissected each moment later. UFOs?
ABSOLUTION

Flags? Less or more? Some old way that made sense back in the day.

“That’s great, Dad,” she said, and she never called him Dad, did she? Or did she? Her face was
open to him—and the smile, it seemed genuine in the moment, but what lay behind it?
Something else had had to exist behind it.

But he’d been caught in the reverie of relief of getting through another physical, which she
couldn’t know had meant a trip to Central, along with a full psych eval, too. A process he
dreaded. Then, thinking about the things he could not share with Cass for security reasons, and
did that mean he’d never been able to share enough, been too on guard, to ever really be her
father?

He just hadn’t seen it coming—the way they’d laughed and joked with each other for a few years
now. How they’d been in such easy contact for most of her middle to late twenties. They’d had
one bad argument, yes, a couple of years before the ghosting, but he couldn’t even remember
most of it. Something emotional, but her shouting at him and him shutting down as a result.

“Don’t talk to me that way,” he’d said, because of her shouting.

“Something isn’t right,” she’d said, “and I don’t know how to fix it.”

But they had fixed it. They had fixed it to the point they had been fine later that day. He
recalled a nice dinner at a steak house, where she could get a robust salad.

What if he could have focused on what was moving through her, absorbed the hurt, asked a
question? Was that it? This strong impulse? If only. If only he could travel back in time and fix
it.

But he couldn’t.
U