When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “You can go now,” she told me. She handed Ajay her glue. I guess this was the routine.

  “You need help,” Ajay said to her.

  “You’re my help,” she said.

  I took off at a sprint.

  Some comic book stores sell lunchboxes, drug paraphernalia, and raunchy gag items, but this place was floor-to-ceiling series and action figures. They had a mass of vintage stock in original packaging with a section of graphic novels. Had Cynthia mentioned the graphic novels? I was fifteen minutes late.

  Gator, the guy at the counter, was as lean and wasted as his boss, Peter, was round and robust. Peter wore a leather jacket that barely made it over his gut, and his skinny gray braid switched across his back when he got animated and made big hand gestures. He looked me up and down, adjusted a vintage Rulah, Jungle Goddess in its holder, and said, “Thrill me with how many Comic Cons you’ve been to, and please don’t spare me about how you’ll die if you don’t get this job.”

  With a guy like that, I guess you just have to go for broke. So I said, “My mother’s doing trashouts for a living, my father’s a criminal, and I’m here to give my little sister a chance at normal. I think I’ve memorized fifty comic book heroes since last night. I knew two before that. I wouldn’t go to Comic Con if you paid me, though E3 has some appeal. And I can’t tell you dick about the Franco-Prussians.”

  Ajay appeared in front of the plate-glass windows just then. He was trying to catch his breath from running. I did my best to ignore him. Without looking over his way, Peter said, “That your boyfriend in the deep freeze?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  Ajay was doing a bad job pretending to read the signs in the windows when Gator spoke up, running his fingers against a couple of days’ worth of stubble. “Cynthia says Mona here already knows how to run a register and she’s a good photographer.”

  “Street stuff mostly,” I said. “But I can do tabletop and portrait. I work as a photographer’s assistant.”

  “If you photograph the store and a shitload of covers and stuff,” Peter said, “so I can get some of this junk up on the web, you’ve got the job a couple of nights a week. But leave Tattoo Hero at home next time.”

  “You’ll have to pay me five bucks over minimum if I use my own equipment,” I said, taking a chance.

  “Everyone’s a capitalist. All right, show up on Sunday with your five-bucks-over-minimum camera and lights, and learn another fifty heroes by then, but don’t go too heavy on the Anthros. When you’re just hanging out at the counter, like gorgeous here, you get minimum wage, but I expect to see plenty of sales.”

  I looked around at the empty store and said, “No problem.”

  Ajay was eager to talk as we approached the building. He moved in front of me, trying to get me to stop. “I called her aunt the second I got your call,” he said.

  I wished I had a camera in that moment to rest behind. “I have a lot on my mind,” I said.

  I dropped down the three steps into our basement and unlocked the door to move a load of wash with Lola’s dance clothes. Turning on the fluorescent lights overhead, I watched them go on in their usual pattern, illuminating a new stash of metal objects propped against the walls and stacked in the center of the room.

  “Thank you for throwing her note out. I know it would have been like the other ones,” he said.

  “I didn’t throw it out. I ate it,” I said. “I think it made me a little sick to my stomach.”

  “I’m flattered?”

  I stepped around a pile of grates. I had imagined, more than once, what it would be like to meet him in the basement some night. The sound of the furnace and the water heaters, the storage rooms with their open wooden slats, the way we would sit on the warm dryers, listening for footsteps, and the way we would stop caring about that and push closer, working on buttons.

  He was tracking the things working inside me, but I turned away and got a load of wash out of the dryer. I put that in a plastic basket on the table and pulled the damp clothes out of the washer and threw those in, slamming the dryer door harder than I meant to. Then I went upstairs.

  Geary and I didn’t always agree on photographers. He was big on Fan Ho, someone I liked, but I found Cindy Sherman more interesting. He just shrugged. Maybe Sherman had started to shrug. She spent thirty years taking self-portraits in an unending stream of personas and identities. She did her own makeup, wardrobe, hair, sets, lighting, art direction, and the final shoot. In one image she was a medieval bishop, in the next she was a Hollywood starlet. High society heiress, waitress on the skids, clown, warrior. I once saw almost two hundred photos of her at an exhibit, and I was left with the dizzying sense that we are somehow part of every human being out there and that each one of us contains a million individuals that can be coaxed and teased out given the right situation, buzz cut or updo, no matter. My mother took me to see that show when I was fifteen. I had my first burdensome crush going then and had been reading about romantic versus courtly love in school. As I stopped at each photo the awareness that I was looking at one woman in various poses dropped away, and I began to feel as if I was in conversation with a stream of individuals. From the eyes alone you could imagine that some were more opinionated than others, a few quite shy, some haughty or boisterous, tragic or joylessly innocent, dead or lost.

  I began to think about pure love as if I could get their opinions on this subject, and I felt a kind of silence in the room and turned around and looked at all the other Cindy Sherman rooms we had just passed through until one woman, Sherman as ingénue, laughed at my long, straight face. I had to sit on a bench for a while and shut my eyes.

  I think Constantina held pure love where a lot of other people simply boast. But maybe that was all about glue and paint.

  There were 86,350 hits on the SNAP video. I don’t know why I bothered to check. In the comments, up toward the top, there were a couple of pseudonyms I was sorry I recognized, and very quickly I quit reading the anonymous posts.

  Ajay and I exchanged messages as I made my way home from downtown the next day on the L. He had me laughing about everything and nothing. A couple of people looked at me like I was crazy, but I had already been exposed and overexposed and didn’t care. I put my phone away and turned my camera on them.

  Getting off the train four stops early at Loyola, I walked in the cold for a while. I was on my way back to the apartment when I was stopped short by a storefront. There was a giant palm drawn on the window, and shops and apartments across the street were reflected in the glass. Seeing the price list for having my fortune told, I got my camera out and took several shots in order to show Geary. I put on the polarizing lens to push past the reflections. I found an uncovered table and chairs.

  Lifting my head, I looked into the lens again. A woman was staring me down. If it wasn’t me, she was in every way like me. I don’t mean the driver’s-license version—height, weight, eye color, hair color—but my face and stance, my way of folding my arms across my chest. Only this version, this augur, seemed prepared to make up stories to explain things, while I was trying to record them before they disappeared.

  I was pinned to the spot, studying her, studying myself, when she looked like she wanted me to come in and talk with her. Lowering the camera, I saw that same look in my own face in the reflection. It’s hard to state this exactly, but I felt as if she was something in me that had burst from my head and found her way through the glass.

  I took several steps backward, turned, and saw that the bus was coming. But when I looked at the store again, I clearly saw that I had been peering at a dry cleaner’s, not a fortune-teller’s. A series of hand-drawn bubbles advertised a special: Clean two Pair of Pants for the Price of one. I read the offer for winter storage and the headline for the Ultra-Lux leather jacket refurbishing. A woman was inside, but she was behind a counter with a customer, the overhead conveyor sending shirts and dresses and slacks round and round.

  Maybe that’s how my father s
aw what had happened. It shifted in his mind over time and became something else so he could live with it.

  Once I was seated on the bus I realized I had hardly eaten and found an old protein bar at the bottom of my pack. While I ate it I tried to figure out where the hell I was going.

  To have a terrifying dream without Nitro around wasn’t the same. I was used to his dopey analysis.

  I called him at three in the morning. When he finally realized I wasn’t someone in Japan he got tender and listened.

  “There’s a particular sensation I have when I’m in a flying dream. I see the ground speeding beneath me,” I said.

  I told him about the windbreaks, the large industrial farms, the malls, the houses I saw in my dreams as I flew across the country. “Tonight the sky was a mix of rolling black clouds and bright patches of light that touched the earth at a slant. I jumped each time lightning brightened the ground in the distance.”

  “I can see that,” he said drowsily.

  “I keep going to national monuments. When I went to Yellowstone I saw this geyser called Screaming Mouth.”

  “Maybe that’s what you want to have, a screaming mouth so you can tell your father where to go.”

  “I heard you stopped by.”

  “I see what you’re up against.”

  “Do you think I should turn him in?”

  “Yes. And no,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I listened to Nitro breathing, waiting. And then I hung up.

  Richard

  When I heard Mona come up from the yard, I opened the back door so she’d have enough light to make her way.

  Liz and Lola came home, and Liz got on me about leaving the door open and letting all the heat out until Mona got upstairs with her bandaged hand.

  “A minor lighting thing,” Mona said. “I got a little too close to a lamp. I’m fine.”

  It seemed she had told me something different, but I was at loose ends and wasn’t sure.

  After dinner, which I couldn’t eat—my stomach in a knot—I decided to put my things together for work the next day so I could be up early and out of everyone’s way. Lola was asleep in Liz’s bed. I sat on Lola’s bed and considered that no one had asked how my first day had gone, as if they had forgotten. And maybe that was for the best because it hadn’t gone as well as I would have liked with so much on my mind.

  Liz started on the dog-tag machine again in the kitchen, and Mona joined her at the kitchen table.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you this,” Liz said. “You remember my friend Tom Watts, the artist? The one who helped me with the architecture magazine? And then how he was in a motorcycle accident?”

  I stopped what I was doing to listen to them.

  “You showed me some of his ceramics,” Mona said.

  “I don’t think I told you about the wake.”

  “Hmm, not sure,” Mona said.

  “A lot of our old friends gathered at a bar on the near North Side,” Liz said, “and Tom’s young girlfriend at the time, a slender blonde with anime eyes, arrived carrying a box.”

  “You mean she wore those black contacts?” Mona asked.

  “What? No, it’s just that her eyes were so large and round. Anyway, I told her, ‘There’s a case of champagne. Can I get you a glass?’ Ignoring this, the girlfriend set the box down on the bar, and from its tissues she pulled one of the vases Tom had built. It was one of his best. The walls were so thin they were almost transparent when you placed it in front of a light. At auction, at the time, it would have sold for maybe ten thousand, God knows how much now. ‘I remember when he made that,’ I said, setting a champagne glass in front of her. The girlfriend said, ‘It was one of his favorites.’ With this she held the vase up high in the air.

  “I almost reached out to grab it, you know, with this instinct to protect it. But then I thought this was her way of raising his art up for all of us to see. A moment later the girlfriend let the vase drop to the floor.”

  “You definitely did not tell me this story,” Mona said.

  “We watched it shatter like a crystal wineglass. As the room filled with voices she left the bar. I ran after her and caught her by the arm just as she was getting into a cab. When I asked if she was okay she said, ‘No one loved him more than I did.’”

  Liz described this woman’s tragic face in the lights from the bar. The girlfriend was, it turned out, pregnant with his child. “She pulled the cab door away from me and sped off.”

  “And that was it?” Mona asked.

  “I wrote, but she never answered. I heard she went home to Connecticut, where her parents live, to raise the baby.”

  “Good story,” Mona said.

  “People were upset that the vase was gone. But there’s a funerary rite in some cultures. Something about breaking a pot and releasing the spirit. I kind of got it after I thought about it.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Mona said. “But still …”

  How could that make sense? How on earth could that make any sense at all? There were times when they got together in their own little world and I just didn’t understand.

  I did what I could to stay on track, but the week went from bad to worse. I couldn’t figure out one of the main programs at work and had to keep asking an admin for help. It didn’t help that one hand was bandaged up, making it harder to type. I managed to lose the key to the office, and then I forgot on Thursday night to wash out another shirt, so the one I had to wear had a stain that my tie didn’t cover. I kept my head down. On Saturday, after Lola’s dance class that I couldn’t say I was encouraged to attend, I asked Liz if I could borrow her van.

  She thought over what she had to do and asked if I could be back in a couple of hours, three at the most.

  “Don’t worry about the new sound,” she said. I started down the stairs, keys in hand.

  “What new sound?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. I’m losing a heat shield.”

  It turned out to be a noise somewhere between the air being let out of a balloon and the whistle of ordnance being dropped from a great altitude. I wasn’t sure if it was coming from the engine or a wheel, but maybe she was right. Maybe she had hit a pothole recently and the undercarriage had been torqued, loosening a shield. I got out and looked, but I couldn’t tell.

  I took a different route than our old one but found Euclid Avenue and drove over to Arlington Racetrack. The park was closed for the season and wouldn’t open until May. I went past the fence, gazing at the stables and the wide parking lots, where the snow had been plowed and mounded here and there. I pulled over onto the shoulder. The main building in the distance housed the Million Room and the press boxes, the private suites and the wagering windows, but from the paddock side it was just one large white building with plenty of glass, and I couldn’t even see the track.

  Arlington was a Polytrack now—with its artificial turf and fine wax coat—making it a consistently fast track. Horses took the turns differently than they did when I used to go, when clods of dirt and grass flew up against the jockeys if the surface was wet, sometimes causing a horse to go down. Now if they went down, I think it was more about steroids. I listened to the sounds of cars going by on the Northwest Highway for a while, and when a security car approached, I drove away, taking the more familiar route this time.

  I thought I had missed the restaurant at first. All I could remember was the red-and-white interior and the framed pictures of cows. I was about to give up when I spotted a building with boarded-up windows. Large sections of plywood had graffiti on them. When I looked into a gap in the wood, I saw the old interior, untouched, beams of light coming down from skylights. I imagined Mona sitting in one of the booths. I recalled how excited I was to tell Liz about the money I’d won, and I knew taking my time and getting a solid meal and plenty of coffee would make me fit for the road.

  I let this go and got back to the van and that high-pitched sound. Past the hedges and fences and empty swimming po
ols. The toboggan run was busy. At this point I slowed into the right-hand lane and let any car that came up behind me speed ahead. The water tower was still there, painted in its familiar bright colors. I pulled off and sat there for a while, looking at the ladder going up the side, wondering how my high school buddies and I had ever been brave enough or stupid enough to climb it.

  I drove off again and knew the exact place I was looking for because I remembered the name of the road we had turned off on that day to get to a phone booth. I found an easy opening in the traffic and did a U-turn, driving over the double yellow line to the other side of the road. I let the car rest in the dirt and gravel and blackened snow. When I got out to look there was no giant pole with a sign at top that turned with an advertisement. What I did find was the square of concrete with a rusting circle of metal embedded in the center where the pole had been sheared off.

  The temperature kept dropping. I pulled my jacket in at the lapels and recalled the way our car had angled into theirs. I looked up and back on the road and across to the other side and placed our cars in position. I got out and walked around a little, going into the surrounding forest, my boots breaking into the crusted leaves and ice where water had pooled in the late fall.

  I wanted to find something. A ring or hair tie, a piece of bone or fabric from one of the seats, a door lock. I listened for Dorothy Kaminski’s voice. In my mind’s eye, the face I had once seen with exact clarity had become a combination of her face and Mona’s face and Liz’s face. And the little girl, she was beginning to look like Lola.

  I saw the smoke fill the car, Dorothy Kaminski beating on the window, begging me to help. Her little girl crying, the mother trying every lock, all the windows. I hurried and rifled around in my trunk until I realized I had used the crowbar to pry something open for Liz, some crate, and hadn’t put it back in the car. The tailgate was jammed and wouldn’t open. I saw nothing, not one thing to smash the windows.

  As I turned to leave the wooded area, a branch came down, maybe fifty feet away, heavy with snow and ice.