The Art of Disappearing

by Ivy Pochoda

  When I woke, Leo was sitting in the other chair. He was dressed in a long suede coat lined with fur. Beaded tassels dangled from the cuffs and collar. He wore a large onyx ring on one finger and a sweeping scarf with crystal beads.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What have you done?” Now he laughed a full-bodied laugh that shook the tent. He spoke with a deep baritone voice that reminded me of storybooks and radio plays.

  “I fell asleep.”

  Leo shrugged.

  “This tent is so relaxing,” I said, sitting up and taking my feet off the stool.

  Leo waved a hand in my direction. “So, relax. I see you’ve escaped from those dingy magicians.”

  I nodded.

  “They’ve sealed themselves in a world of magic.”

  “Which is sad, because they can hardly do magic anymore,” I replied.

  “But Toby can,” Leo said with a wink.

  “Toby is more like them than he realizes. His life is dominated by the past.”

  Leo shook his head. “For two years after Erik’s disappearance, I tried to recapture our life together. It doesn’t work.”

  “I saw you,” I said. “I saw you and Erik.”

  Leo raised one of his bushy eyebrows and waited for me to continue.

  “You were there the night Theo’s assistant died.”

  “His wife.”

  I nodded. “In the front of the theater.”

  “Piet has photographs?”

  I shook my head and stared over the lawn at the winter-dried grass running down to the blue-brown river. “It’s an illusion,” I said. “An illusion that lets you look into the past. That’s where I saw you.”

  Leo clasped his large hands together and placed them on his stomach. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “As long as you are only looking at the past.”

  “For Toby, looking won’t be enough.”

  Leo lowered his voice and bent toward me. He locked his eyes with mine. “You must pull Toby away from this trick.”

  I lifted the edge of one of the Berber rugs draped over my chair and examined the pattern. “Toby has had two accidents. He thinks this illusion of Theo’s can reverse what he’s done.”

  “What do you think?”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes I think I’m as much to blame as he is.”

  “How is that possible?” Leo asked.

  “Someone close to Toby once told me that there is something unstable in Toby’s magic. She told me to warn him not to use people in his tricks until he understood this. I didn’t bother passing her warning along. And then the night of his biggest show, he used both an assistant and a volunteer.”

  “And everything went wrong?”

  I nodded.

  “But that’s not your fault.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “What makes you think he would have listened?” Leo stood up. “Don’t dwell on the past. It is human to want to change things, but also foolish.” The designer extended a hand to me. He wore several large rings with dark stones. “And remember, there are consequences to this kind of magic.” I let Leo pull me to my feet. “There is something I want to show you before I lose you to Erik’s studio.”

  We left the tent and headed into the gardens. “We’ve arranged these both by season and by smell,” Leo said, pointing from one end of the garden to the other. Even in winter, the colors that burst from Leo’s plants were more vibrant and exotic than those at the botanical garden. “There’s a small citrus grove in that hot house, and the grasses that grow around it are all lemon-scented.” He showed me a sandy patch where he and Erik had planted Eastern spice plants and another area they’d dedicated to Mediterranean herbs. He told me that the plants that grew alongside the villa, underneath his bedroom window, were fragrant at night.

  We left the manicured lawns and gardens and headed into the woods. Soon I could see a ramshackle building surrounded by chicken wire. From a distance it looked constructed of dozens of boxes piled on top of one another.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “This is what I wanted to show you. It is something I cannot bear to part with.”

  He set off in the direction of the fenced enclosure. As we drew near, I realized that the boxes were actually dozens of stacked rabbit hutches. “Rabbits?” I asked, looking past the fence.

  “Those are Erik’s rabbit ghosts.”

  The hutches were empty.

  “The rabbits were part of the reason Erik was drawn to Theo’s magic. Each night, Theo made a rabbit disappear. Each night it was a different rabbit. Sometimes it was two rabbits. Other magicians would eventually have retrieved them from a sleeve or a top hat. Not Theo. His magic was a one-way street.”

  I nodded, remembering Theo’s performance at La Gaite and the chill I felt when the rabbits vanished.

  “Erik always wondered where the rabbits went. So he built homes for them if they came back.”

  I wound my fingers through the fence.

  Leo removed my hand and held it. He looked me in the eye, “You know as well as I do that those rabbits are gone.”

  I nodded.

  “After Erik disappeared, I started coming out here. I used to daydream that one day he’d reappear with his ghost rabbits.” Leo shrugged. “But I cannot wait for him. There is no point.” Leo continued up the path into the woods. “However, there is one thing of his that I do want brought back to life.”

  “His fabrics?”

  Leo wrapped an arm around my shoulder, pulling me alongside him.

  In a few moments, we came to a tiny saltbox house with shingle siding. “Erik’s studio,” Leo said, opening the door. Inside was a large drafting table and numerous art supplies, including a silk screen and several cameras. Fabric swatches were pinned to one wall.

  Leo unlatched a large cabinet and pointed inside. “Silk, felt, wool, chamois—who knows,” he said. I turned around, taking in the contents of the studio. “You can do whatever you like,” Leo said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Leo looked at the contents of the cabinet. “Erik put so much into his textiles, it seems a shame that his absence should ruin them for the rest of us.”

  He took me by the shoulders. “Bring them to life. You said fabric sings to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, take your time. I cannot bear the silence. Cut, sew, whatever you like.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to.”

  I laughed. “I’d love to.”

  The designer stooped down and kissed my cheek. “I don’t know what to expect. But I expect something great.”

  The moment the door closed, I pulled a stool from underneath the drafting table and looked out the window. A long thicket of ferns reached from the studio to the winter pond. Their fronds were thicker and rougher than their deciduous cousins. Beyond them, I could just make out the river. I closed my eyes and listened to the arboreal silence. Then I stood up and opened one of the large cabinets.

  Bolts of hand-dyed, hand-printed, computer-printed, and embroidered textiles were immaculately folded and stacked from my feet to high above my head. I reached up and let my hand run down the bolts like a pianist testing a keyboard. After a moment, I sat down with my back against the bolts. Then I heard my brother’s voice.

  It was Max’s land voice, dry and crystal clear, and it was rising from the bolts behind me. “Lapsed water baby,” he said. “Mel melts the snow,” he chanted. “But will she ever understand why?”

  “Max?” I whispered.

  “Mel who swam with a whale.”

  His voice was coming from the bottom of the pile. I reached my hand into the bolts, lifting and removing some of the fabric until the voice became clearer. “You should try it sometime. Sometime you should try to swim through the surface of the moon.”

  From the bottom of the pile, I pulled out a velvet. It was turquoise with dark blue and green paisleys. It had the colors of the open
sea, from the crystal blue water that hovers at the surface to the murky green that lives in the lightless middle ocean. “Someday you’ll join the boy who swam through the moon.”

  “You know,” another voice above me chimed in, “you know, I never really believed in magic. It’s totally for little kids. Like, who really thinks that a rabbit can get pulled from a hat, right?”

  I leaned into the cabinet.

  “But I’d do anything not to have to wear that stupid uniform anymore. Who wants to be remembered for working in a diner? That might be cool enough for my friends, but I went out with a bang. I was the girl who died center stage. That’s how you live forever. Wasn’t it amazing? Wasn’t it magic?”

  “Yes,” I repeated despite myself. “Yes, Greta, it was amazing.”

  “You gotta have guts to do what I did. Sure, I’m gonna miss the prom and stuff like that. But I’ll get more pages in the yearbook than anyone else in the history of the school.”

  Greta’s voice was chirping from above my head. I stood on my toes and pulled out the bolts until I came to a yellow cotton printed with red polka dots. As I withdrew the fabric, I heard a distinctive gum-snap. “I wonder what sorta stuff my friends are up to.”

  Then Sandra spoke up. “Aren’t you the lucky one to tame a magician. Never seen anyone hold on to her man as well as you did. Had all the Vegas ladies in knots. He’s a keeper, all right. Just don’t let him wander off. Might transform into I-don’t-know-what and never come back.” A deep sigh resounded from a coral pink cotton-spandex blend. “Now wouldn’t that be a shame.”

  “Loving water,” Max’s voice whispered from my feet, where I had placed the paisley velvet bolt, “doesn’t mean you need to ignore everything else. Maybe I loved water a little too much,” he sighed. “I didn’t know what else to do. It claimed me first.” I reached back into the cabinet and withdrew six more bolts in variegated blues.

  “Snow,” my mother’s voice cried from a white sateen. “Don’t forget where you come from. It’s dangerous to forget where you come from. Look at the mess you got yourself into in the desert. You might as well spend your life on drugs as spend time in a desert. All that heat melted your brain.” The white sateen clicked its tongue. “Might as well get hooked on drugs.”

  I gathered the bolts in my arms, listening to the voices from my past, and some I thought were calling to me from my future. But none of the fabrics spoke in Toby’s sawdust circus voice. I placed the fabric around the drafting table and wondered what was going to happen next. The voices kept talking, their words overlapping, swirling together. And finally, when I feared their stories and explanations would deafen me or drive me mad, I picked up my scissors.

  I’ve been here and there in my life with fabrics, but they had never spoken to me so clearly and never had they spoken with familiar voices. My fingers were thrumming. The velvet paisley fabric was in my hand. And then I heard my brother’s voice once more as the paisleys took the shape of waves, crashing over one another, each one dissolving inside the next. They became the surf and the undertow. They were the currents and the tides. Max ducked and swam inside them. He dived and crested on the worktable. He submerged for minutes before coming up for air. The paisleys became rivers, then my family’s river. They became creek beds and estuaries. They transformed into harbors. And in all of these, I saw Max swimming, riding over the rounded crests of the paisleys, diving down into their valleys, and then ascending to their pointed tips. Several times, I thought that I’d lost him in the whirls and whirlpools of the pattern. But he always resurfaced, bobbing up and down on another shape. And then in the middle of the clearest blue of the pattern, Max waved good-bye, pointed deep into the fabric, and disappeared.

  While I had been watching my brother, I had been cutting the blue fabrics, reducing them to squares and rectangles of various sizes. I found a needle, threaded it, and without regard for pattern or style, began to sew. My hands went their own way. The needle struck its own rhythm as it wove in and out of the fabric.

  I have no idea how long I sewed, but soon I had created an underwater patchwork world. I shook off my thimble and dropped the needle. I held the quilt to the light and stared at the motionless water created and trapped by my hands. The paisley print that spoke with Max’s voice flowed in and out of a host of different blues and greens. Among these was a chintz printed with algaelike flowers and a brocade with twisting plants that could be mistaken for seaweed. In addition to the familiar waters of my youth—the Delaware River and all the pools I had never dared to swim in—I found dozens of bodies of water that I hadn’t ever known or imagined.

  I peered closely at this quilt and imagined joining Max’s water to the fabrics from my last hotel job. I reached under the drafting table and withdrew several red bolts. Some of them whispered with Eva’s faraway voice; others simply sounded like the wind-whipped sand. Soon these were cut and ready to be joined to the oceanic blues. First, the desert of Tonopah and Intersection where I had met the magician and watched him work his imperfect magic. This was the desert where we had been blown together along with the sand and tumbleweed. These patches were the dirty red of distant mesas and sacred kivas. They were red with the burn of the relentless sun and the blood of the gum-snapping girl. The fabrics were scratchy and rough—coarse linens, poor felts, even frieze. While I had been watching the colors and the textures of the desert, she appeared—the yellow-and-red-polka-dotted Greta. I looked down at my hands. I could feel the familiar depressions from the scissors loops on my thumb and middle finger. My fingers didn’t stop. A new desert began to emerge with all the colors of Las Vegas. Boisterous sequins, relentless polyvinyls, plush terry velours exploded from my scissors. My needle, threaded with fire-enginered thread, began to join these newcomers to the scratchy fabrics of the first desert. I strip-pieced the pattern that the wind etched into the sand. The desert that I was piecing together hummed with the voices of the fabrics I was using. Finally, my hands shook off the thimble and dropped the needle. I looked up. Night had fallen. The river had been claimed by the dark. The only light was a distant glow from the villa.

  I left the table and ran toward the house, passing the ghost rabbit enclosures. I found Olivia sprawled on a sea of shearling in the main hall in front of a roaring fire.

  I grabbed her hand. “You have to come.”

  She staggered after me. I pulled her through the woods, her scarf catching on branches and brambles as we went. We arrived at the studio, breathless.

  “What?” Olivia asked, her hands on her knees.

  “Look.” I pointed at the quilt I’d draped over the worktable.

  Olivia straightened up. “What is it?”

  “A quilt.”

  She bent over the mysterious patchwork. “Where did it come from?”

  “I made it.”

  Olivia gave me a look. “When?”

  “Today.” I rubbed my sewing hand. “Or maybe it made itself.”

  “These are Erik’s fabrics. How?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s wonderful. There’s some rhythm to these patches that I don’t get. I know it’s there, like a song you can’t quite remember. When the melody is just out of reach.”

  I took the quilt from Olivia and spread it on the floor. I motioned for her to sit next to me on the ground. I wrapped my hand through hers and led her fingers to the first square of the quilt. “It’s my story, my time line,” I said. “The only thing missing is Toby.” I squinted at the quilt and wondered when Toby would appear. In none of the squares that described my desert life could I find a trace of the magician. His actions, his desert magic, were visible, but Toby himself was absent. “But the story is there anyway.”

  “Story?”

  I opened my fingers. Olivia did the same. Keeping my hand on top of hers, I began to trace the patches of the quilt. “I married Tobias Warring at the Silver Bells All-Nite Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas,” I began. Then the story flowed from my lips as seamlessly
as the quilt had emerged from my fingers.

  When I was finished, Olivia curled up on the patchwork. “What comes next?” she asked in a distant voice that seemed to be nearly lost in a dream.

  “I don’t know,” I said as the quilt carried us off to sleep.

  Thirteen

  I returned to Piet’s just after breakfast. The house was silent with an air of abandonment, like school corridors during the summer. I noticed that Piet’s walking stick was missing. I was not surprised to see Toby’s coat. Something told me that the magician was both home and away.

  I was curled up in bed with the quilt that I had taken with me from Nevada, wondering how these patches would connect to those I’d left behind at Leo’s, when Toby appeared.

  “Still sleeping?” he asked.

  I was dressed in yesterday’s clothes with raindrops threaded in my untidy hair, but Toby seemed unaware that neither of us had slept in the attic yet. I nodded, not wanting to explain that he was not the only one who didn’t make it into our attic last night.

  “Come,” Toby said, extending his hand.

  I hesitated.

  “You said I had one more day to make it work.” Toby paused. His face relaxed, and I saw relief rise to the surface, overtaking exhaustion. “I did.”

  We stood at the entrance to the Dissolving World. I looked at him uncertainly as he opened the door. Toby smiled and urged me forward. We took two steps into the box, which stretched out before us as before. Soon I felt that same inward suction, followed by a massive release, as if all my cells were being packed together and then redistributed. Inside my eyes, I saw the snow-blind blur of TV static, and my ears rang with dozens of weak radio frequencies all fighting for stability. I lurched to one side.

  Toby caught me. “Open your eyes,” he said.

  I braced myself against his arm and did as I was told.

  We are standing on the banks of the Delaware River. Not the part behind my parents’ house. Somewhere farther upstream. It’s cold out. A spiderweb of ice is starting to form over the river.