The Man Who Dissapeared

The desk was a cluttered mess. Just as it had been for the past five days, the past ten months, and the past ten years, five months, and three days. His wife had left everything as it had been the day he left and never returned.

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Flynn Aris, also known as the man who was never found, left for the airport in a bright red toyota corolla ten years, five months, and three days ago. He was on his way to Paris from San Francisco for business. Flynn was in the private wealth management sector of finance and was on the way to meet his French client when his flight was canceled and he was last seen. Now ten years later, me, Tom Aris; his son, is left with the mystery of how my father disappeared from the face of the planet.

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I myself was only a few years old when my father disappeared. Six years old, to be exact. I learned of his disappearance extremely late; exactly one week after he was last seen. The reason for this was that nobody realized he went missing. My father left his phone behind, and my mother was extremely busy with work, so she never questioned the fact that he wasn’t responding to her very spaced-out text messages. My father had told her when he left that his cellular connection might not have been very good when he got to Paris either, making it even less worthy of worrying for my mother.

My mother only questioned his disappearance when he didn’t return from Paris. He was scheduled to return from his trip after a week. After hearing nothing from him and after him not returning, my mother panicked. She reached out to his clients in Paris, and the airline to hear of his flight’s status. After receiving no response from the clients or the airline, she went to the authorities. The authorities, unlike the airline and the lawyers, tried to be helpful, but after months of nothing but dead ends, the authorities eventually gave up the case, deeming it on pause for the time being. It’s been seven years more, and now that I’m 16, I’m ready to find out what happened to my father.

There were very few rules which my mother set for me. As an only child, I was often left alone at home to my own devices. My mother had a good but demanding job as a lawyer at a San Francisco law firm so she was pretty busy. There was one rule which she was very strict about, however; and that rule was “never touch anything that belongs to your father.” She always spoke of my dad as if he were still alive as if he was still out there and one day he would just show up like nothing had ever happened.

For a long time, I listened to this rule. One day, however, the day I’m recounting to you right now, my curiosity got the best of me. I walked into my father’s study and observed an untouched room, with nothing in it except for a dust-covered, cluttered desk, a rocking chair, and a bookshelf. I walked toward the desk, passing the bookshelf, lightly dragging my fingers across the spine of each book. When I arrived at the desk, I stared at the pencil shaving, paper, candy wrapper-ridden desk. There was nothing about the desk that was organized. It was simply an explosion of writing utensils and paper. I had already far broken my mother’s rules by going into the room, but I suddenly felt the urge to go through the papers. So I did.

As I leafed through the pages, I saw printed emails, most likely from clients, data tables of clients’ assets, and miscellaneous news articles which my dad had kept from the daily paper. One thing caught my eye, however. Under the stack of news articles, I found a photocopy of a ticket for a flight. The ticket was for a flight on the exact same day that my dad went missing. It wasn’t to Paris though. It was to a place called “Saba.” I’d never heard of Saba, so as any person of the 21st century would do, I took out my phone and googled it. “Saba,” I read, “a Caribbean Island owned by the Netherlands.” What was he doing with a ticket to a Caribbean Island, and why did he have a photocopy? Does that mean he had the actual ticket? Did my dad leave us for the Caribbean?

That was the day when I learned that my dad wasn’t gone.

Instead, I learned that he just wasn’t coming back.