Frank Morris. The Bureau of Missing Persons. The action takes place here. Stacks of case files on his desk, each representing a body someone is looking for in this manuscript. Bodies, people who have gone missing, disappeared, vanished. Some to other, unknown regions of the manuscript – perhaps, unwritten realms. Others, in cases of fatality, are gone for good, lost from the manuscript. Heaps of bodies, ascribed to the dustbin of history as bureaucrats, doctors, engineers, laborers, a whole army of office workers, hordes of characters in the health care sector, in the service sector. All with individual destinies, each with their own story.

These missing bodies affect the narrative progression of the manuscript, since their disappearance from where they rightly belong disturbs its unity. Disappearing bodies can erode institutionalized and informal hierarchies, which then become more difficult to establish with full functionality – which, in turn, has its effect on the establishment of a whole series of customs, laws and regulations. Moreover, familial bonds are broken and child support obligations breached. That is why the Bureau’s job is to make sure these bodies are found again and put back in their place in the manuscript, so the narrative can move forward without further difficulties. With the duties thus described, therefore, the Bureau may be called, with some justification, a sort of narrative police.

In addition to the employment contract that Frank Morris signed, which spells out what his duties are to assist the Bureau maintain the narrative order in the manuscript, he is reminded every day of what is expected of him by the near and dear of those gone missing from the manuscript. They are popularly known as the Bureau’s ”clients.” Recently, a number of these clients have been putting more and more pressure on Frank Morris, taking a seat outside his office, settling down with blankets and sleeping bags, staying overnight to obtain an audience with Frank Morris to discuss their case. Every time he leaves or arrives at the office, he has to listen to their grumbling that he is not efficient enough, that he doesn’t seem to be looking after their case.

Lately, the hallway, where the clients congregate, has begun to exude a peculiar smell. The cleaning leaves much to be desired with so many people waiting out there – the halls are gradually filling up with empty bottles, cartons with leftover food, popsicle wrappers. If Frank Morris didn’t know better, he could almost believe that a horde of hoboes was camped outside his door, and it was only a question of time before they moved into the office itself. But he is well aware that he is the reason for their presence. His indifference to those near and dear to them, missing in the manuscript. And he cannot say it doesn’t bother him – this visible pressure from the clients. A pressure that disturbs the peace and quiet he needs to concentrate on the cases in front of him on the desk.

Frank Morris is lost in reverie, staring at the stack in despair. It is not to his credit. Not in this plot, where he is Frank Morris – detective superintendent for The Bureau of Missing Persons. A position of confidence, a central position in a manuscript, where he and his colleague William Brunswick, along with other trusted staffers at the Bureau, keep tabs on the manuscript, see to it that everyone sticks to the narrative progression, make sure that anyone who, through some unfortunate incident, slips out or disappears is picked up again. Some are dead in the water, so to speak; others opt out, want no more part in it. But, strictly speaking, it is not Frank Morris’ job to make an assessment of their individual, subjective motives for disappearing. He has to be objective, listen to the explanations of the next of kin, form a picture of the missing person, draw psychological profiles, and, from these files, try to track them down and put them back into the ever-progressing narrative sequence of the story in the manuscript.

But he is only one person; he is only one body and, consequently, can only be in one place at a time. The hitch is that, as a harried and conscientious worker for The Bureau of Missing Persons, it is all too easy to let your emotions run away with you, incline you to empathy – with the result that he gets mixed up with all the lives that are temporarily de-narrated. Confuses different features about them, makes a lawyer into a barber and a barber into a gardener and, after a busy morning, he gets lost in the labyrinth of case files and forgets who he is himself. Frank Morris stares at the pile of reports on these unfortunate denarratives and feels lost. The case files are a bureaucratic ocean of data with mistaken and missing identities from which it is his duty to bring the shipwrecked safely to the shore. Every so often, he feels like he is about to go down in a manuscriptural shipwreck.

A blonde woman on the other side of the desk is smoking a cigarette. Frank Morris stares at the cigarette smoke, wafting over his desk with all its case files and diffusing into the office toward a window that is open a crack. For one frivolous moment, he watches this smoke and lets his thoughts float along with it over the case files, out into the office, out of the window, out into the world. He hears the sounds of cars driving away and, in a conscienceless daydream, he sees trains departing from stations, he sees planes lifting off from airports for faraway destinations. He senses the ease with which he as Frank Morris could exist in this world that his thoughts comprehend. He drifts away with this smoke and these thoughts toward the clouds and forgets his case files. He imagines all the places he could be in the world, when the train arrives in foreign cities, when the plane lands in distant, exotic airports on continents far outside the framework of his manuscript. Frank Morris feels a lightness in his body, there in his office, with this narcotic subjunctive in which he levitates in his mind with the smoke from his place in the text. His consciousness fluctuates, unbound, and he forgets for a moment the responsibility that has been put on his shoulders as one of the many monitors of the manuscript in which he finds himself with the story ascribed to him. In his thoughts, he is out to lunch.

“You are the man!!”

The blonde woman on the other side of the desk rouses him with this sentence. As though with the bang of a kettledrum, he is ripped away from his conscienceless subjunctive, rushes back to his place, and abandons in one stroke all the distant skies to which it had led him. He is the man – Frank Morris, detective superintendent at The Bureau of Missing Persons – and she is Gloria Nicole Morris and, as a client of the Bureau, she has a right to his attention, to his devotion to duty and readiness to serve, when she reminds him that he has an obligation to find her missing husband, the real Frank Morris.

Detective superintendent Frank Morris awakes with a start to the world that is his, as if something had congealed in the moment he was gone. With the bang of a kettledrum, everything is alive again, all hierarchies re-established, all regulations in effect again, all statutes in their place, all child support obligations duly endorsed, and all familial bonds remembered, and the manuscript progresses according to its laws again. And there she sits, the abandoned wife of the real Frank Morris, Gloria Nicole Morris, asserting her rights. And he himself, detective superintendent Frank Morris, is the person in the Bureau responsible for her case. He looks at the case file in front of him and at Gloria Nicole Morris. The responsibility is his. He is the man!

It seems to him that he must show authority and determination and get Gloria Nicole Morris to accept that the case is closed for good in the manuscript, as there is a metaphysical problem. Frank Morris has neither the authority nor the competence to delve into that sort of case, which, as such, is not within the Bureau’s area of responsibility. There are other authorities to whom cases like these are assigned. He says that the case of the missing, real Frank Morris has been closed and filed as solved for reasons Gloria Nicole Morris very well knows. He will gladly repeat them for her.

The case was opened, when she, Gloria Nicole Morris, reported her husband, Frank Morris, the real Frank Morris, missing on the seventh day. Four days, exactly four days later, the case was closed, when they identified the body of a certain Frank Morris at a hospital morgue in Albany. According to the case files, they found a witness who had been present when the said Frank Morris died, though the witness, as such, was mute. The witness was a cat named Papusj, owned by Simon and Cora Papadopoulos, the proprietors of The Turnpike, an inn north of the Hudson. The innkeeper couple did not themselves witness the suicide of the said Frank Morris; but, according to them, he had come to their inn late in the evening, been let in and served a meal, had behaved boorishly and threateningly despite their solicitude, and had at one point demanded that the proprietor Simon Papadopoulos hand over his gun. Neither of them had provoked the said Frank Morris and had showed him only hospitality. Simon Papadopoulos had placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder, when she came out to the restaurant from the kitchen, and he had said that he had been lucky to meet his wife. Suddenly, the said Frank Morris had gotten up and, with threats, demanded the weapon. At first, they thought he wanted to rob them or do them harm, but after he assured them this was not the case, they told him where the gun was kept, a 44-Magnum, the largest handgun available on the market. He was directed to the cat box. He walked resolutely out of the restaurant with the gun, followed by the couple’s pet, a five-year old tom cat named Papusj and, a bit later, they had heard a shot outside The Turnpike. As suddenly as he had arrived, he was gone.

The couple went outside to see what had happened. They found the body on the grass beneath the neon sign, with the cat sitting beside him, apparently completely untouched by the tragic event. The authorities in Albany had been called and informed of the incident, and the corpse was brought to the morgue of the same city. But Frank Morris had already related this story once before. Now, he has told it again. It doesn’t make the case any better, less tragic, or open to alteration. What had happened happened, and he told it like it was. The funeral had taken place. What does Gloria Nicole Morris want from him, Frank Morris? He is not authorized to change these things. Nor is it within his power to do so, even if he wanted to. He can, for what it is worth, tell her the story one more time. He can describe the facts of the case, but this would only be yet another repetition and would not budge the fact that they are facing a metaphysical problem, in which neither of them can meddle. There were things you cannot meddle with. Sometimes, you simply have to respect the manuscript as it is, and you can’t for one reason or another try to tinker around with it. That only leads to a muddle.

Anyway, she herself, Gloria Nicole Morris, had testified that the corpse was the real Frank Morris. He can see this in the affidavit in front of him on the desk – it bears her signature. Of course, she had not seen the body itself, at the suggestion of the Bureau, since the face was missing. And when the face is gone, there is nothing to see. There is nothing to recognize. So, that sort of thing would be a waste of time for her and the Bureau. She had to accept this and have confidence in the Bureau, when she learns what happens when you are hit in the face at close range by the biggest handgun available on the market. So, she, Gloria Nicole Morris, also had to accept that she had to identify the real Frank Morris through the shoes he left behind. She had seen the shoes, and she had to admit that they belonged to the real Frank Morris. That was all; there were no more details. And now, just now, she had gone through them again. She can go through them once more, but they – he, Frank Morris, and she, Gloria Nicole Morris – would get no further in the narrative sequence of the manuscript on that ground. It would just be a repetition, and there it remains. But she can also see the shoes again, because he, Frank Morris, keeps them in the closet behind her. But exhibiting the shoes would change nothing in the plot. That’s the lie of the land.

Frank Morris picks up the sheet from which he has just paraphrased, puts it into the folder, closes the case file on the real Frank Morris, and stares at Gloria Nicole Morris. He spreads his hands out on the surface of the desk to indicate by this gesture that the ball is now in her court. The Bureau has done its job and done it in the only way in its power.

However, this – to Frank Morris’ mind – exhaustive, matter-of-fact presentation of the case does not satisfy Gloria Nicole Morris. Without bothering to make an argument or bringing new information on the case, she insists that her husband, the real Frank Morris, is not dead; he has not disappeared from the manuscript but is out there somewhere – and with that sentence, she looks out the window of Frank Morris’ office. Out there in the unwritten realms where he lives according to unwritten rules. That, at any rate, is how Frank Morris interprets her assertion and gesture. She wants him to do something. For is he not detective superintendent Frank Morris of The Bureau of Missing Persons? A strange rhetorical question, he thinks. She knows perfectly well that he knows this. Just a way of filling the manuscript with empty, rhetorical-polemical sentences.

(A fragment from a Lenny Tristano's novel which is to be published by Alexandria Press in October 2006)

Copyright©Lenny Tristano, 2006