The Art of Disappearing

by Ivy Pochoda

  That night, on my way to bed, I pressed my ear against the bathroom door, listening for gurgling. But there was only silence. I got into bed, and my mother wrapped the covers around me. When I closed my eyes, I imagined the gnashing teeth of the hungry river. That was the first night the water teased me in my dreams.

  Until then, I’d always dreamed of dry land. That night I was dreaming of the botanical gardens, with their lanes of cherry trees winding away and doubling back, making room for busy traffic that shouldn’t have been there. As I wandered, a distant note like a muffled trumpet began to slither among the trees. Then the mute was removed, and my ears filled with an orchestral roar. I heard the water before I saw it. It spoke a foreign language, filled with sibilant sounds. I tried to cover my ears. But my hands slid to my sides, as if they, too, wanted to listen to the unfamiliar music, to touch it, to let it slip between their fingers. And when my hands fell, I heard the water call my name as it licked the bark with its wide tongue—the soft M’s rising and falling among the invisible ripples, the M’s that I imagined looked like waves. I felt the water before I saw it—the smooth tickle of its lips on my ankles, a buttery touch that made me want to fall into its embrace. I started to shake when the water, now visible, began to rise, bringing with it a carpet of fallen cherry blossoms. It reached my ears and began to repeat my name, a velvet calling, an invitation. And ignorant of how to behave underwater, I opened my mouth to reply, and the water flowed in, cascading down my throat, bubbling in my lungs. I sputtered, coughed, and woke up.

  I bolted up in bed, forcing the water that wasn’t there out of my lungs. I could still hear my name, as sung by the water, hovering in the room. My window had blown open in the storm, and my cheeks were splattered with rain. I could hear the river howling in the distance. Hungry, just as Max said. So I ducked back under the blankets and covered my ears.

  Perhaps my mother sensed the treachery of my dream. Or maybe she believed that the water had leaked into my head, intending to drown me as I slept, because only moments later, she was sitting on the edge of my bed. “Mel. Are you under there?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  Then she ran her hand across my face and felt the cool traces of the raindrops. She sprang up and closed the window.

  “Mama? Why does Max love the rain so much?” I asked.

  “Max,” she said, considering her oldest child’s name. “Max,” she repeated, springing up from the bed although she had just lain down. “I forgot to tuck your brother in.”

  Thunder pounded near the house, mimicking my mother’s rising panic. “Max?” she screamed. The thunder cracked again. My mother reappeared in my doorway. “Do you know where your brother is?”

  “No,” I replied. I followed her into the bathroom. Max’s towel was gone.

  “Max!” she hollered, trying to outdo the thunder.

  We stood on the steps of the back porch, which ended on the flagstone path that led down to the river. My mother was counting aloud, never quite getting to the number three that would send her out into the storm. Then she took a deep breath and held it, preparing to dive into the storm. She didn’t move.

  “Is Max by the river?” I asked.

  That did it. She took me by the arm, her human lifesaver, and we plunged into the darkness. It was my first exposure to a thunderstorm, a hot swirling assault that cut maniacally through the August night. This was not the dangerous calm of the water in my dream, but an active aggressor that blinded my eyes and swam up my nose. The whip-crack thunder urged the storm forward, driving it around the final post. The rain and wind that shook the trees resounded in my ears like breaking glass. And in the distance, I could hear the angry stomach growl of the river.

  We crossed the lawn, now a plush swamp of muddy grass, and arrived at the gate that divided our backyard from the dirt path to the river. When my parents first moved into the house, they had scrambled down this muddy path, picnic basket in hand, to eat by the water. But as the water became their enemy, their picnics retreated—first to a blanket spread just inside the gate, then to the middle of the lawn, and now to a modern picnic table a few feet from our back door. My mother had not been down to the river or even opened the gate since I was a year old. Only Max, during his forbidden solo explorations of the riverbed, had prevented a rusty arthritis from immobilizing the latch.

  My mother’s legs and hips banged against the gate. Over the pounding rain—which sounded more like the emptying of buckets than like the simultaneous splatter of individual drops—we could hear the deep snarl of the river as it rushed past us, chewing up the bank and swallowing rocks and tree branches. This was not the water of my dream, which had held its hunger at bay. This water was insistent and unwilling to compromise. And although I tried to listen for the song that Max heard in the rain echoing in the swirling river, I disliked the water’s angry voice. I knew that if I fell in, it would chew me up and spit me out against the shore. My mother sucked her breath in again and pulled me down the muddy path.

  We half walked, half slid as the warm, soft mud cushioned our tumble. The river had already devoured most of the bank, leaving less than two feet between the bottom of the path and the edge of the water.

  “Max!” my mother shouted, her voice melting into the wind on its downstream course. “Max!”

  “Max,” I cried, my voice not even penetrating the storm’s outermost shell.

  “Flashlight, flashlight,” my mother said, frantically patting her pockets. “Oh, God,” she cried, discovering that she was unarmed.

  We squinted over the riverbed, trying to separate the rain from the dark. The thunder cracked hard and close. My mother counted the seconds between each thunderclap. Ten seconds. Nearly overhead. As the thunder approached, chariot driven, its horses madly pawing the earth, it brought with it sheets of lightning that electrified the whole riverbed, illuminating it with a phosphorus white.

  Another sheet of lightning shocked the storm to life, showing the spidery outlines of the tree branches, the tumult of the water at our feet, and a small white rock bobbing in the middle of the river. When the next white sheet descended, the rock was gone. My mother gripped my hand. Her other hand seemed to be groping in the dark, either reaching out into the river or looking for a light switch to keep the storm’s electricity running. It was him—the next flash of lightning showed—floating in the river. Max seemed to be both fighting the storm and delighting in it. One moment, his arms would churn wildly, searching for some stability in the fluid madness—and the next, he appeared to be lying calmly, waiting for the river to sweep him along.

  My mother let go of my hand and crept into the water until it reached her knees. I moved backwards onto the shrinking shore and held on to a tree branch that protruded from the small slope. “Max!” she shouted. “Max!”

  The sky lit up, and we saw Max turn toward us, his face contorted with a look of surprise.

  “Max!” my mother cried, taking two more steps into the river. “Stay there.” Then the thunder cracked, and she whirled around, looking for me on the muddy bank. “Mel! Mel, are you holding on?”

  Tears choked my reply as I watched my brother’s head devoured and regurgitated by the black water. My mother retreated to the bank and extended a hand to me. I could feel Max’s eyes penetrating the ferocious storm. Then my brother blinked and allowed his head to be swallowed once more by the blackened water. “He’s gone,” I wailed, flapping one hand in the direction of the river.

  “What?” my mother screamed. She turned again to the river, but her water baby had disappeared. She extended her arms out into the water, hoping they would reach where her feet would not take her. Max’s head resurfaced. He stretched out his body, relaxing on his tumultuous water bed, and began to make his way downstream, gently carried by the manic water.

  Our mother fell back, buffeted by her own fear. She sat in the river as it gnawed her legs and back. She sat, quietly counting between the thunderclaps as the eye of the storm passed overhead, and she allo
wed the rain to cry for her.

  Four

  As Toby had promised when we first met, he trapped me with magic, wine, and—now that I remember my Homer properly—sex. Las Vegas had everything necessary to make me forget the world beyond. Our hours were punctuated by the scheduled eruptions of the Mirage’s volcano and the performances of the Pirates of the Caribbean spectacular at the Treasure Island. At night we were mesmerized by the pillar of light shooting out of the Luxor’s pyramid. Las Vegas seduced us. It was equal parts Circe’s island and Land of the Lotus-Eaters.

  When my workday was over, I loved accompanying Toby down the Strip to Fremont Street, marveling at the exploding multicolored fountains and improbable buildings as if he had created them just for me. We lost ourselves among the gaping tourists, watching them as they mistook Toby’s magic—a handful of new flowers, for instance, that burst from one of the Bellagio’s impressive bouquets—for Vegas’s own. The town seemed to summon Toby’s craft, and tricks tumbled from his fingers. The deep lines in his face, the ones I thought were forged by frustration and worry about the limits to his art, had vanished, and for the first time, Toby seemed not to care who took notice of his art.

  One Sunday, we decided to leave the lights and glitz of Vegas and drive into the desert, an expanse that I no longer associated with loneliness, but with color and possibility. We headed east until we came to the westernmost edge of the Grand Canyon. Just off the road where a Navajo woman was selling blankets and jewelry, we parked and watched a distant thunderstorm develop across the canyon. By the time the crack of thunder reached us, it was muffled and distorted. Lightning danced along a distant rim, descending from isolated black clouds. When the storm ended, vanishing to an invisible region of the canyon, Toby and I headed back to the car, passing a display of native crafts.

  I’m not often enticed by these stands that pop up along all the well-traveled roads in the West. Mass-produced knickknacks like coasters and picture frames decorated with Southwestern motifs have replaced traditional artisan work. But here the blankets caught my eye. They were not the usual Mexican serapes, but authentically Navajo. I picked one up, drawn to the colors that mirrored the rusty canyon and the blue-black storm in the distance.

  Toby nodded his approval. “I knew you’d pick that one,” he said.

  “Did you?”

  He fluttered his fingers over the blanket, “You know sky and sand, or water and sand.” He tapped the blanket’s opposing colors. “How could you resist?”

  I smiled. “Obviously I can’t.”

  As I got out my wallet, the vendor tried to interest me in several other blankets, but I shook my head. “Okay, okay,” she said, placing my blanket in a bag and handing it to me. “This one is a good choice. Navajo marriage blanket. Very beautiful.”

  I reached over to take the bag from her, but the woman didn’t let go. “If the marriage does not work out, the blanket must be cut,” she said. “This is very important.” Her dark eyes darted from me to Toby. We both laughed. “Very important.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “This blanket is too beautiful for cutting,” she continued before letting go.

  “I know,” I replied.

  Toby wrapped his arm around me as we walked back to the van.

  We drove away from the canyon, back into the desert, where we found a convenience store on an empty stretch of road. While Toby went inside to buy beer, I watch a rusted FOR SALE sign sway in the wind. Several miles up the highway, we parked and walked into the sand. When the road had faded sufficiently into the distance, I spread the blanket on the ground, and we lay down.

  Soon Toby propped himself up on his elbows and looked away from the highway and into the desert.

  Before I could stop myself, I asked, “You’re still looking for her?”

  The magician shook his head.

  “Then what?”

  “Habit.”

  I nodded. “I know. Even when you suspect someone will never turn up, you keep looking.”

  Toby turned away from the desert, popped open the beers, and stared at me.

  As we watched the lightning in the distance, I was reminded of the storm that stole my brother. “I know my parents didn’t expect Max to return from the river the night he went swimming in the storm,” I said.

  I took a sip of beer and cleared my throat.

  “That night on the riverbank, when I clung to a branch and watched the storm,” I began.

  Toby leaned back on his elbows.

  I let my mind return to the moment when the storm had watched us with its unblinking eye like a liquid Cyclops. Satisfied, the eye closed, dried its tear ducts, and released us from its stare. “The wind continued whipping through the trees, hurling raindrops from their leaves. There was no lightning left to illuminate the blackened water or the disappearance of my brother.” All there was, I remembered, was a contented, rhythmic grumble coming from the river, a sure sign that it was delighted with its digestion of an eleven-year-old boy.

  “My father brought my mother and me back to the house and called the police,” I said. “We remained inside while he joined the search party. Eventually I fell asleep. The last thing I remember seeing was a single tear trapped in the corner of my mother’s eye. I still wonder why it didn’t fall. Finally, when the last of the afternoon light had disappeared, a fireman arrived, carrying Max, drenching our floors with mud and water. Max’s arms looked translucent as they swung free from the fireman’s hold. His dark brown hair, matted with mud and small sticks, was caked in a helmet around his head. My mother moaned and slapped her hands against the sofa. Before she could speak, the fireman told us that Max was sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?” Toby asked.

  I nodded and smiled. “My brother had some extraordinary talents. Sleeping in water is one of them. The fireman told us that he found Max in a little creek two miles downstream. He said it was a miracle that the water hadn’t pulled him under. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. Not even a mosquito bite. I think the fireman wanted to tell us that that was a miracle, too, but my mother would not listen. She didn’t want to encourage Max’s water-lust.” I spun my beer bottle in my hand and looked directly at the magician. “You know your pattern of watching and waiting here in the desert.”

  Toby nodded.

  “That night, my own vigil began. I was so worried that Max would return to the river that after he fell asleep, I crept into his room and sat in the rocking chair next to his bed and watched him.” I sipped my beer. “I woke him up and asked him why he’d gone down to the river. He told me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, that he’d gone there to swim through the surface of the moon.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  I stared at Toby. “Maybe it does now. After that, I returned to Max’s room nearly every evening, trying to prevent his escape. I tried to keep Max as close to me as possible. And when I couldn’t, I guess you could say that I memorized him.” I laughed at the memory. “After the night he spent in the river, Max’s hair turned a light straw color. Within six months, the color deepened, acquiring a rich gold hue that sparkled in the sun and glowed in the dark. My mother thought the river had leaked inside his head.”

  “Maybe it did.”

  “I think so.” I finished my beer. “Soon after his hair changed, Max experienced a strange growth spurt that not only made him taller, but also disproportionately elongated his limbs, fingers, feet, and toes. My parents are compact, and when he was young, Max had been a miniature version of my father. But then his arms and legs grew until he looked like a monkey puzzle tree. His hands and feet followed, until we had to compare them to flippers. Eventually his skin paled to a translucent opal. I learned so much from Max. The only thing he couldn’t teach me was to love water. So I couldn’t follow him when he finally left.”

  “And here you are in the desert.”

  I looked over the canyon and nodded.

  “Did you try looking for him?”
>
  I shook my head. “Despite all my watching and memorizing, it took me years to figure out that Max never really returned from the river that night.” I dug the bottom of my beer bottle into the soft earth. “But that doesn’t prevent me from expecting him to turn up around every corner.”

  Toby looked off across the empty canyon and said nothing.

  In the month that I had been working for Sandra, I began to catalog her suits and became convinced she rarely wore the same thing twice. Today it was a coral pink number that gripped her waist, chest, and rear with magnetic force. The 2 percent spandex content of the fabric caused it to emit country music squawks each time she sat. Of course, she couldn’t hear this. All she knew was that her new suit felt like a second skin and deepened the dark leather hue of her tan.

  “You’re the one who knows about fabric and all,” she said, pulling the bottom of her jacket so the neckline plunged to a dangerous low, revealing the turquoise lace trim of her brassiere, “but these synthetic blends are a gift from God. Sometimes I feel like my old linen suits hang on me like garbage bags. They make me feel like a pioneer or a settler—dowdy and homespun.” She gave her skirt a little twist. “This might be the desert,” she continued with a flick of her wrist, “but it’s not the prairie. No choice but to look good.”

  “Spandex and nylon add shape,” I said, “but they don’t breathe as well as natural fabrics.”

  “Breathe? Who needs them to breathe? Who goes outside? Everywhere has air-conditioning.”

  This was true. Moving sidewalks and towering skywalks transformed the Strip into a synthetic biodome. Like moles, we traveled through cooled tunnels from parking lots to hotels and from movie theaters to shopping malls. Monorails ushered us from one casino to another, while gallerias and promenades sheltered us from the high midday heat. Everyone—locals and tourists alike—worshipped the heat from a safe distance. So, when Sandra wondered aloud for the second time that morning, “Who really goes outside, except to the pool?” I just nodded and examined the skin on my forearms.