The Art of Disappearing

by Ivy Pochoda

  “Go on,” Toby says, “You can touch the water.”

  I shake my head. I never go near the river until it’s frozen over. Not even inside a magic trick.

  The magician hands me a coat. “It’s your favorite time of year.”

  “It is,” I say with a shiver. But there’s something strange about the river. As I watch the current slip underneath the thin ice, I realize that it makes no sound. In fact, there isn’t any sound at all. I breathe deeply, exhale loudly, to shatter the quiet.

  “I don’t know where you live,” Toby says as we begin to walk along the riverbank.

  I squint downstream. “Ten miles from here, I guess. I’m not sure.” “I can’t believe it,” I say. “How did you do this?”

  “It was easy. I just needed a little practice.”

  As we walk, our steps are the only noise. No cars rumble across the rusted bridges. There’s not even the shatter of fresh ice colliding on its way downstream.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  “Who did you expect?”

  “Where is everything?”

  “It’s all here. What I remember of it.”

  The silent river makes me shiver again. Toby thinks it’s the weather that’s making me cold. He wraps an arm around me.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home.”

  Toby and I tuck our hands into his jacket pocket. Eventually we turn away from the river and walk across a small backyard to a one-story house. An enclosed porch, twice the size of the house, extends from the left of the building. As we draw near, I see that the porch is crowded with four baby grand pianos.

  “Your home?” I ask Toby.

  The magician nods.

  He slides back one of the screen doors and the glass door behind it, and we are in Toby’s childhood home.

  Like the river outside, the house is not just silent, but emptied of sound. Toby leads me past the pianos, three black and one white. I want to stop and examine them, but it’s clear that the magician wants to move on. We climb three steps covered in mustard shag and are in the main house.

  “This is the day I left,” Toby says, peering into the kitchen. Orange ceramic canisters in the shape of pumpkins line a shelf. “Ernest had already died. And Pia was making stew. It was cold for March.”

  On the stove is an orange pot. Next to it on the counter, a cutting board with vegetables and a knife. But there is no smell of cooking. I turn around, expecting Toby’s stepmother to return to the stove.

  “I think it took her a few days to notice I’d gone. She’d stopped whatever she was doing in here to bang out some Beethoven. At the crescendo, I ran away.”

  “To join the circus?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I try to picture the house filled with music. I want to imagine Beethoven pouring from the music studio, disrupting the unnatural silence. Toby senses my discomfort. “It was always like this. Music or silence. The silence was unbreakable.”

  We leave the kitchen. The living room has a conversation pit in front of a small fireplace. Framed photographs on the mantel show a small woman with her arm around the shoulders of several different children—none of them Toby. The living room has a subtle musical theme—a lamp made out of a clarinet, cocktail napkins with bass clefs, brass paperweights in the shape of trumpets. There is nothing to suggest the presence of a teenage boy. There is only music and its absence.

  Toby is still looking at the mantel. “Pia kept exactly one photo of her husband after he died. And one of me.”

  “Playing the piano?”

  “I was terrible.”

  At the back of the living room, near the sliding glass doors that lead to the yard, there’s a well-polished dining table. “Holidays only,” Toby says, pointing at the table. “And recitals.”

  We pass the table and enter a small room at the far end of the house.

  I clap my hands. The sudden noise startles me. “Your room.”

  “You’re the first girl I’ve brought home.”

  “Ever?”

  “Absolutely,” Toby says with a wink. “And my parents are away.”

  As I knew it would be, Toby’s room is unlike the rest of the house. There are several books on a table next to the bed. One is a child’s edition of Gray’s Anatomy. The shelves that line the walls are cluttered with objects—from someone else’s family photograph to a small antique hand mirror. I pick up the mirror.

  “The collection of a young magician?” I ask.

  “All of it,” Toby says, gesturing toward the shelves. He picks up a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. He opens the largest doll and finds the smaller one inside, then a smaller doll inside that, until he comes to a doll so small, it doesn’t open. He replaces all the dolls in order, then reopens the outermost one, only to find that it is empty. “Pia loved these. There’s a set in every room. I don’t think she knew what she was getting into when she gave them to me.” He places the nested dolls on the shelf and lifts the top half of the outermost one again. The smaller dolls hop out of the big one like an orderly army. “I spent hours with these. It made my stepmother nuts when she’d open one to find it filled with pennies or soap bubbles.”

  “I always wondered whether there’s something hidden in the smallest one,” I say.

  “There might be.”

  Among the knickknacks are two identical blocks. Toby and I notice them at the same time—though, of course, he must have known they were there.

  “My blocks.” The magician gathers them into his hand. Then he flops back onto the single bed and beckons me to join him.

  “And now I have a girl in my bed,” he says. I can’t see Toby’s face, but I know he’s smiling.

  I close my eyes and feel Toby’s hands start to move through the air. There’s a comfortable rhythm to his movements, like a pianist playing a favorite piece in the dark. With his shoulder, Toby gently nudges my chin. I look up and see his blocks floating over the bed. With one arm wrapped around my shoulder, he reaches into the air. His fingers fan wide as he conducts the blocks. They orbit each other. They inscribe invisible spirals and loop into figures of eight. Then he snaps his fingers. One of the blocks disappears. The other still floats. The hand around my shoulder wiggles, and I feel the pressure of smooth wood.

  Toby tosses this block into the air, and together the small wooden cubes resume their dance. Sometimes the blocks become one. Sometimes they multiply. Sometimes they disappear and then reappear between my feet, beneath the small of my back. I want the trick to go on forever.

  When it seems the blocks have gone for good, Toby lets his hand fall to his side then reaches over, pulling me on top of him. Next he covers my mouth with a kiss that fills the emptiness of the Dissolving World. The kiss breathes life into the silent objects staring at us from the shelves. And in this timeless world, this kiss lasts so long, I fall asleep, perhaps for hours. When I wake, the blocks are back on the shelf. It is quiet again.

  Toby stands up and pulls me to him. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To your house.”

  “Ten miles?”

  “Distances can be as close or as far as you wish,” Toby replies.

  “How will you know which one is my house?” I ask as we step outside. The winter trees are swaying silently in the silent wind.

  “You will tell me.”

  How can you describe a visit to a place that exists in someone else’s imagination? Once we leave Toby’s part of the river and head downstream, details become fuzzy or misaligned—the rapids are out of place, a bridge is too far north. But others are perfect, like the boat houses I’d always admired when I was young. We are walking out of the magician’s memory and into his imagination.

  “Tell me about your house,” Toby reminds me.

  I begin by describing the porch that overlooked the river. I tell Toby about the leaky roof, the unsealed basement, and the sunken picnic table. I describe the rusted iron gate that led to the small path down to t
he riverbank. I tell him how my bedroom was next to Max’s. There was a drainpipe between them. That was how Max escaped at night to swim with whales or whatever else he did. In the middle of my story, I turn to Toby. “How do we get out of here?” The silence is so heavy that I’m worried I cannot crawl out from under it.

  Toby doesn’t reply.

  “I told you that I always liked it best when it was cold. From my bedroom window, I’d watch the river freeze.” As I’m talking, the air gets colder.

  The riverbank changes. And soon a white house with a porch and a drainpipe is visible uphill to my right. From a distance, it looks like my house. But some of the details are blurry. I understand that unless I’m clearer in my description, we can’t approach it. I also know that like the rabbit hutches, my house is empty. It’s not just empty; it’s filled with emptiness. The house both comforts me and makes me homesick.

  I turn away. While we’ve been talking, the river has frozen over. The ice is thick enough to drive on.

  “Now?” Toby steps onto his Delaware.

  I follow. I look upstream and downstream. We have the river to ourselves.

  “So what do you think?” Toby asks, opening his arms wide, trying to encompass all that he has created in the Dissolving World.

  “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know if it’s real.”

  “At this moment, it’s real.”

  Carefully we walk along the frozen river. I miss the low groan of shifting ice. But I don’t mention this to Toby.

  “The last time I walked on the Delaware was the afternoon before Max left for the second time.” I kick the ice, testing its solidity. “He hated winter. He always thought the river was trapped by the ice. Somehow that day I forced him to come with me.”

  It is hard to imagine that my walk with Max along the frozen river took place roughly where Toby and I are standing. Maybe because Max left the next day, every sound, every detail of the river during that walk is still clear to me. I remember the low moan from the ice that punctuated our conversation. I remember how long a car had idled on the iron bridge or where I was standing when an ice skater fell nearby.

  “Ice makes the river blind, Max told me. I told him it made it safe.” I explain to Toby that Max and I had this disagreement every winter. Then I look down at the ice and for the first time, I think that Max was right, the river is blind. But this is not the real river, I remind myself.

  “We can leave whenever we want?” I ask Toby for the second time.

  “You want to leave?”

  I shake my head. “I just don’t want to stay forever.”

  I imagine a hint of disappointment crossing Toby’s face. I kiss him with cold lips. “I knew that I couldn’t keep Max out on the ice for very long. He felt suffocated by the trapped water. He kept telling me how dangerous ice is. Then he reminded me that my birth had melted the snow. Melt Snow. He said it over and over. I put my hand over his mouth to silence him. He was so pale then. A pale boy against the pale ice. He had been slipping away from us for so long. He looked like an underwater sea creature. Then he stepped in front of the sun. And for an instant, the light eclipsed him and Max vanished.” I spun in a circle on the ice. “Of course, he was still next to me. And he still wanted to go back to the house. I agreed, but only if we explored a jagged inlet where the frozen river wound through a collection of rocks and trees.”

  As I expected, as soon as Toby and I arrive at the riverbank, the rocks and trees are there and the frozen river is laced between them. The inlet is not exactly as it was in my memory. But it’s close.

  “This is my favorite place on the river,” I tell Toby. “At least it was. When the river was frozen, I imagined that with all the rocks peeking out and the tree roots just beneath the surface, I was looking at the surface of the moon.”

  “Isn’t that what your brother was looking for?”

  I nod. “But not in winter. Max was done with the river. And he headed to the shore. I ran in the opposite direction, back into the center of the ice.” Toby and I return to the middle of the river. “I kept calling his name. All I heard in response was ‘Melt Snow. Melt Snow.’” I paused. “Max was walking up the path. He was in a red coat climbing up a small brownish hill.” I closed my eyes for a minute, pretending that the house up the hill is really my house. “I held my arms up in the air. Max didn’t turn around until…” I stop talking. But before I know it, I’m finishing the story. “He heard the crack. It was like a spinal snap as the ice opened and I fell in.”

  The river trembles. The ice beneath my feet starts to move.

  “Toby, no.”

  With one hand, he’s reaching out for something only he can see. The ice parts. I fall in as Toby grabs my hand and pulls me through the other side of the Dissolving World.

  The cold water stung my feet and legs as I slid onto the floor of the workroom.

  “I’m sorry,” Toby muttered. “I didn’t know. I just wanted to give you ice and sunlight.”

  I wrapped an arm around him. “It’s all right.” I took a deep breath. My mind was still on the frozen river.

  “It’s just a trick,” Toby said, patting the box. “Not real.”

  But I had fallen. My head was numbed, my arms and legs would not pull me back to the surface. In the darkness, a whole world had emerged—mysterious rock formations, intricate underwater plants swaying in the current, even, I imagined, schools of slippery fish gliding past. I’d rolled over and stared at the distant, ice-blurred world above. I don’t know why I didn’t panic. Then I’d opened my eyes to see a long shadow stretched on top of the ice. Max’s face had peered into the crack. His long white arms had reached into the water and pulled me out.

  Fourteen

  As Max and I got older, his nighttime departures became more frequent. He would slip down the drainpipe three or four times a week. My parents, heavy sleepers, never noticed his nocturnal disappearances. But I could detect the slightest movement in my brother’s bedroom. Driven by his swim team discipline, Max went to bed every weeknight at ten. Just after eleven, the rattle of the chain on his bedside lamp told me that he had gone to sleep. I’d wait a few minutes, until I could hear the first bass notes of his deepening breath, and creep into his room, slide into the empty chair at his bedside, adjust the chair’s angle toward the window, and make sure that Max was safe inside his dreams. On the nights when the rain was riling the sleeping river, I shut the window next to his bed to protect him from the water’s call. Just after midnight, my vigil ended. I’d readjust the chair and walk out of the room, keeping my eyes on my brother until the last possible moment, memorizing the shape of his sleep. But I was always an imperfect guardian, for I knew that after I left, he would wake up and vanish into the night.

  When I learned about the whale and the purpose of Max’s night outings, my own sleep started to come quicker and snatch me away faster. Soon my vigil grew shorter and less diligent. The beep of my brother’s alarm at 1 A.M., the opening of his window, his descent along the vines and drainpipes, the soft thump of his feet on the grass, and his eventual return a couple of hours later were camouflaged by my dreams.

  By the time Max entered his final year in high school, he had metamorphosed into a strange sea creature. His skin was not the healthy tanned hue of a beach bum, but pale and translucent, an odd bluish white that came from spending too much time underwater. He passed through our rooms carried on his own current. His appearances at the dinner table or at picnics in the backyard were fleeting. He often disappeared from family outings, lured by a nearby river or lake. Max slipped away gradually. Until the day after I fell under the ice—then he vanished altogether.

  After that, the house seemed to shrink inside its foundations. We circled around his room, his chair, his pile of flippers and bathing suits. During the first days of his absence, I blamed myself for his escape. He had vanished on my watch. After many false starts, the moment that I had trained for had come and I had let my brother slip away. I waited for him to
call or write, but grew bored with my vigil. It was hard, I learned, to create an engaging routine out of absence—out of the phone that didn’t ring, the mail that didn’t come, the empty bedroom that never creaked. And when the quiet of Max’s room began to lull me to sleep rather than keep me awake, I stopped listening for my brother’s return. I knew not to make the same mistake twice, not to sink into a myopic observation of Max, or of his absence. So I began to look elsewhere, at the interlacing branches on the trees, at the new tiles our mother ordered for the kitchen, at the school windows streak-stained with steam from hissing radiators. And one day I noticed that I wasn’t waiting for Max at all. This might sound heartless, absorbing Max’s disappearance into the everyday. But it became clear to me that, in the absence of a coherent or pleasant pattern to his disappearance, I had jumped the gun once again. Max’s leaving was not the vanishing I had been dreading since the night he jumped into the river. He would wash ashore somewhere.

  Two months after Max left, his correspondence started. At the beginning, his letters were stubborn and jerky. His first postcard came from Florida, where he was working with a group of marine biologists in the Everglades, studying plant life. Two weeks later, we got a letter saying that he would be sailing up the coast, creeping under piers and crawling along the bottoms of ships to examine the effects of pollution on barnacles. As Max slipped further underwater, shrugging off dry land for the deep sea, his letters began to arrive in waves. After barnacles he dived deeper to study the sleep patterns of flounder and halibut. Max began to live upside down, his feet pointing toward the sky and his eyes combing the cool darkness of the lightless sea. He was a mountaineer whose thrill came from reaching the lowest point. Max described his undersea world with cartographer’s clarity, painting maps of sea caves and the interlacing networks of tidal beds.

  Max described the different sounds of the deep ocean—the heavy murmur a hundred feet down, the light buzz that hovers around large reefs, the delicate whistle that skims along the surface. He believed that he could hear a storm in the distance as it drummed back and forth between the waves. He told us how mollusks and seaweed tasted fresher when eaten in the sea and that eating an oyster underwater was like kissing a mermaid.