The Suitcase

I cannot get rid of his suitcase. It’s old and charcoal-gray, hard plastic from the ’60s, unusable now in 2015. The locks don’t work. Well, one of them does, but the other doesn’t close unless it is properly aligned to the nanometer. It smells. I have tried, unsuccessfully, every method known to mankind to get rid of the smell: vinegar, disinfectant, baking soda, coffee grounds. There is a divider consisting of a plastic latticework grill attached to fabric, on which a name is written, that separates the two sides of the suitcase. I even tried cutting the divider out to see if that would get rid of the smell, but no luck. There are a number of factors that may have contributed to the musty odor: sitting in a damp Midwestern basement, acrid Indian pickles, or the absorption of tropical mold on the fabric divider.

Under my father’s name on the divider is written a Los Angeles address that does not exist anymore—I know, because we tried to go there years ago. The parcel of land has been split up into multiple plots, and we encountered a friendly Asian American couple who live near the location where my parents’ rented home was. According to my parents, it was a dilapidated mansion that once belonged to a famed Hollywood director. Lest anyone think it was fancy or glamorous, they said it was something right out of The Munsters. Their friends, an engineer and his wife, rented another part of the house. All that remains is a crystalline doorknob that my parents kept for posterity.