The streets of my city felt like a foreign country. The toxic effects of being in a detention center were still with me, because I found out that while I needed individuals, I was terrified of crowds, with an intense physical anxiety that left me hugging streetlamps. What was I afraid of? They didn’t mean me any harm. I suppose I was afraid of their indifference. Believe me, you don’t want to fall over in front of man. He won’t pick you up.

I passed a newsstand and my heart sank- everything had gone public. Dad was officially declared dead. I decided not to read any of the tabloid eulogies. “Bastard Dies!” “Woo-Hoo! He’s Dead!” and “The End of a Scumbag!” didn’t seem worthy of my $1.20. Anyway, I’d heard it all before. As I walked away, it occurred to me that there was a certain unreal quality to those headlines, like a prolonged déjà vu. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt as if I was either at the end of something I’d thought endless or at the beginning of something I could have sworn had started long ago.

The next few days I sat by the barred window and wrote day and night, and as I did, I remembered Dad’s ugly, pontificating head and laughed hysterically until the neighbors banged on the walls. The phone rang nonstop- journalists. I ignored it and I wrote ceaselessly for three weeks, each page a fresh unloading of nightmares that it was a great relief to be rid of.

One night I was lying on the couch, feeling displaced, like an eyelid trapped inside an eye, when I heard the neighbors arguing through the walls. A woman shouted, “What did you do that for?” and a man shouted back, “I saw it on TV! Can’t you take a joke?” I was using up what felt like my last remaining brain cell trying to work out what he’d done when there was a knock at the door. I answered it.

Standing there with enviable posture was a young, prematurely balding man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit. He said his name was Gavin Love, and I accepted that at face value: I couldn’t think of any reason someone would call himself Gavin Love if that wasn’t his name. He said he was a lawyer too, which lent his Gavin Love story all the more weight. He said he had some papers for me to sign.

“What kind of papers?”

“Your father’s things are being held in a storage room. They’re all yours. You just have to sign for them.”

“And if I don’t want them?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I don’t want them, I guess there’s no point signing.”

“Well…” His face was blank. “I just need your signature,” he said hesitatingly.

“I understand that. I’m not sure I want to give it to you.”

Right away his confidence evaporated. I could tell he was going to get into trouble for this.

“Mr. Dean, don’t you want your inheritance?”

“Did he have any money? That’s what I really need.”

“No, I’m afraid not. His bank account is empty. And everything of value would have been sold. What remains of his possessions is probably, well…”

“Worthless.”

“But worth a look, though,” he said, trying to sound positive.

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. Anyway, I didn’t know why I was torturing this poor dope. I went ahead and signed my name. It was only later I realized I’d signed “Kasper.” He didn’t seem to notice.

“So where is this storage room?”

“Here’s the address,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “If you’d like to go now, I could give you a lift.”

We drove to a lonely-looking government building stuck out near furniture warehouses and packaged food wholesalers. A guard in a little painted white cubbyhole had carte blanche on the raising and lowering of a wooden beam at the entrance to the parking lot. Gavin Love rolled the window down.

“This is Jasper Dean. He’s here to claim his father’s estate.”

“I’m not here to claim anything,” I said. “Only to give it the once-over.”

“ID,” the guard said.

I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The guard examined it and tried to equate the face on the license with the face attached to my head. They weren’t a clear match, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt.

We drove to the front of the building.

“You’ll probably be awhile,” Gavin Love said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to wait.”

I got out of the car, and Gavin Love wished me luck, which he seemed to think was pretty decent of him. A small, pudgy man in a gray uniform opened the door. His pants were pulled up higher than what I deem standard practice.

“Can I help you?”

“My name’s Jasper Dean. My father’s possessions are stuffed in one of your airless rooms. I’ve come for a poke around.”

“His name?”

“Martin Dean.”

The man’s eyes widened a little, then contracted. He went into the office and came out with a large blue ledger.

“Dean, Dean…here it is, Room-”

“One-oh-one?” I asked, thinking of Orwell.

“Ninety-three,” he said. “This way.”

I followed him to an elevator. He got in with me. We didn’t have much to say to each other, so we both watched the lift numbers illuminate in turn and I saw that he mouthed each number silently. On the fourth floor we got out and walked down a long, brightly lit corridor. About halfway down he said, “Here we are,” and stopped at a door.

“There’re no numbers on these doors. How do you know this is ninety-three?”

“It’s my job to know,” he said.

That was no kind of job. He took out a set of keys and unlocked the door and pushed it ajar.

“You can close the door behind you if you want.”

“That’s OK,” I said. It didn’t look like the kind of place you want to be closed into.

The room was dark and cluttered and I couldn’t see the end of it- I imagined it stretched endlessly to the brink of existence. I couldn’t think how they’d managed to get everything in here: books, lamps, maps, photographs, furniture, empty picture frames, a portable X-ray machine, life jackets, telescopes, old cameras, bookshelves, pipes, and potato sacks filled with clothes. The space was entirely occupied by Dad’s possessions, everything jumbled up together and in complete disarray- papers on the floor, cupboard drawers emptied and turned over. Obviously the authorities had searched for clues of Dad’s whereabouts and where he had left the money. Every dusty cubic meter was occupied by Dad’s worthless junk. I felt a kind of diluted heartache navigating through the maze of bric-a-brac. None of the anxiety that he had infused each item with had ebbed away. I could smell his intense frustration everywhere. I was taken over by the delusion that I was walking around in my father’s head.

It really was a no-man’s-land. I felt I had stumbled upon undiscovered continents- for example, a large blue sketchbook had me captivated for hours. Inside there were designs and sketches for unbelievable contraptions: a homemade guillotine, a large plastic collapsible bubble worn on the head so you could smoke in airplane toilets, a question-mark-shaped coffin. I also found a box filled with thirty or forty teen romance novels as well as his unfinished autobiography, and underneath a manuscript in his handwriting entitled “Love at Lunchtime,” a nauseating story of unrequited love written for thirteen-year-old girls. I felt completely lost. I felt I was meeting a few more of his well-hidden selves for the first time. Even before the idea of writing a book about him had occurred to me, even before I had set down one line, I had seen myself as his unwilling chronicler. The only thing I was an expert on was my father. Now it seemed there was a life to him I hadn’t known. In this way he mocked me from beyond the grave.

The guard appeared in the doorway and asked, “How are you getting on in here?” I didn’t know quite how to answer the particular phrasing of that question, though I said I was getting on fine.