The Vanishing Read Free

by a sense of familiarity, although full recognition remained frustratingly out of reach.
    The damn thing was even creepier on second viewing.
    He’d never gotten the hang of the office’s phone system, so he called out to Amy and asked her to give his dad a call and patch him through. A few moments later, she knocked on the doorframe and poked her head in. ‘‘I’m sorry. He’s unavailable.’’
    ‘‘Who’d you get? Tyler? Janeane?’’
    She shook her head. ‘‘He hasn’t checked in today. No one knows where he is.’’
    Victor thought of the e-mail. In the back of his mind was the vague thought that his dad might be in trouble, that there might be something wrong, but he dismissed that possibility almost immediately. There was nothing Tom Lowry couldn’t talk or buy his way out of, and if there’d been any sort of medical emergency, he would have instantly found his way to the finest room in the finest hospital.
    Maybe he was having an affair.
    The idea made Victor smile. He couldn’t imagine his straitlaced old man doing any such thing. Hell, he couldn’t even imagine him with his mom.
    ‘‘Well, try again later,’’ he said. ‘‘I need to talk to him about something.’’
    Amy nodded. ‘‘Okay.’’
    But there was still no sign of his father at lunchtime when he left. He grabbed a couple of hotdogs from his favorite Farmers’ Market stand and then went to Amoeba to look for new music. Hooking up with a few friends, he spent the rest of the afternoon just chilling, and forgot all about his dad.
    There was a concert he wanted to see that night at the Wiltern—a retro pairing of Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren, with the opening act Ethel to attract scenesters—and he scored some scalped tickets outside the venue after picking up Sharline at her apartment. They’d parted on bad terms last week after a very public fight at the SkyBar, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it—either that or she was so desperate to partake of some nightlife that she was willing to completely tamp down her true feelings—and when they had a couple of drinks at the bar across the street before going into the theater, everything seemed fine.
    The concert itself was amazing, the performers exhibiting a virtuosity and breadth of styles that made him nostalgic for the eclecticism of the 1970s.
    Not that he’d actually been around then.
    Victor wished he had been born twenty years earlier, that he’d been a teenager or young adult in the seven-ties. He’d missed completely the artistic ambition of that decade, experiencing it only thirdhand, but he still found it compelling enough that he actively sought out music and movies from that period. As critics never seemed to tire of pointing out, even all these years later, there’d been overreaching, but Victor found that vastly preferable to the complacent mediocrity with which he’d grown up. Francis Ford Coppola, not content with his Godfather success, had striven for even greater heights with the vastly more ambitious Apocalypse Now. Woody Allen built upon Annie Hall with Manhattan and then the truly daring Stardust Memories . Rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Renaissance incorporated symphonic textures in their music and toured with their own orchestras. Even hard rockers like KISS put out simultaneously released solo albums in which they followed their own muses.
    What had happened to those sorts of aspirations? Why was everyone now content just to coast within the easy parameters of their abilities?
    Why was he?
    This always happened when he attended concerts he really enjoyed. He always ended up thinking about the unbridgeable gap between perfection and reality, between the way things ought to be and the way they really were.
    He forced himself to clear his mind and concentrate only on the music.
    Afterward, he took Sharline back to her apartment and did her quick and hard on the floor of the living room, finishing in her ass though he knew she