How to Disappear Completely

by Melody Ann Ross

  He had his salesman grin on and looked at Anthea long enough to wink at her. She smiled.

  “Alright, Doctor Schock,” she chuckled, “As long as you’re not harming anyone, I approve. I will go anywhere in the world with you, as long as we do this first. And… thank you. I haven’t had a chance to say that to you yet. I don’t fully understand why you’re helping me, and sometimes I worry that you’re setting me up for one of your long cons, but regardless, I appreciate that you’ve dropped everything to help me. Really. Thank you.”

  Cyrus was both touched and hurt.

  “You’re welcome. But I want to make two things very clear: I am helping you because you are my friend, and because you are my friend, I will never use you as a… resource. Never. Bea mentioned this in front of you and I thought perhaps you would catch it, but I don’t know what effect, if any, my particular brand of immortality has on the people that I trick. Whether it shortens their own life in some way, or worse. And I prefer not to find out, which is why I stick to small tricks on the living, and save the larger ones for the dying. End of discussion. I will not compromise in this.”

  She was surprised. So this is what Bea had meant by ‘struggling with belief again’ when they’d first greeted each other. And why Cyrus was so adamant that Anthea have her questions answered by another immortal, and not just relying on him.

  “So, if you’re afraid of my belief, who is going to teach me earth magic?” She was half joking. Even after all she’d seen and learned, she didn’t expect him to actually have an answer and was surprised when he responded matter-of-factly.

  “That depends on where we go,” he said, and left it at that.

  Possibilities finally began to dance in Anthea’s mind.

  “After we visit… her grave,” Anthea couldn’t bring herself to say mother yet, “I think I’d like to see the Northern Lights.”

  “Wonderful!” Cyrus chirped. His mind was dancing with all the ways that they could meander to the northernmost parts of the world, how they could leave confusing traces, or no traces at all. It was a wonderful idea.

  “Let’s stop and get some flowers before we arrive. It’s tradition, after all,” Cyrus added gently. Anthea nodded in agreement, and they wound their way into the foothills of the Rockies, back to her past.

  Chapter 20

  Re-written

  Bea looked up from his writing desk and sighed. The night had closed in around him without his noticing, and a sudden hunger pang hit him with surprise. He hadn’t felt hungry in many centuries, and while the sensation was interesting, almost nostalgic, it also raised a vague alarm in him. Something must be stirring.

  He carefully dried his stylus and sanded the papyrus he was working on before walking out onto the wide balcony of his personal chambers. He looked down on the darkened city below and took a deep breath. The usual steady pulse of belief that flowed into him was disturbed by quiet snaps of abandonment and apathy. What was causing this?

  From this height, he could see the great Roman ships hulking in the harbor and the ships of Ptolemy’s blockade packed in tightly behind. The children of Ptolemy were squabbling again and a foreign prince had become involved, but it was nothing to Bea. These princes and kings and poets and magicians relied on him, above all others. The strength of regencies stood on records. The continuation of dynasties was decided by technicalities. War created paperwork, and paperwork could perform magic. His library of secrets had stood for six centuries, and would stand for a hundred more. Bea was larger and more powerful than any mortal god. He not only created truth. He was truth.

  But in this lifetime, he was merely Dubsargallus of Mesopotamia, also called Zikrum the Magician, head librarian of the great library of Alexandria, and he had a question to answer. He turned his back to the disquiet in the city and settled onto a cushion to meditate.

  Methodically, he turned his thoughts and awareness into himself until his present consciousness fell into the many-faceted being to which he belonged. That connection, that belonging, that wholeness suffused his senses with pleasure and he sank deeper into the pull of the collective until he was no longer he, but plural. Together now with their many selves, They explored the psyche of their workers. Below Them, in the recesses of the library and its vast grounds, the sons of dignitaries from around the globe, priests of great renown, and a small army of scribes and servants slept or read peacefully, unaware of the thoughts that troubled their master.

  Bea Who Is They skimmed through the city to the warehouses and harbormasters and markets. Piles of tablets and scrolls tucked away into corners pulsed a hopeful golden aura toward their god, but Bea ignored them and continued their search.

  Across the emptiness of deserts and oceans, through remote hills and fertile valleys, along narrow roads and wide flood plains, Bea spread Their consciousness. They touched Their network of unwitting devotees as They searched, but still found nothing out of the ordinary. The world was operating as it should, steady pulses of taxes and tithes and trade moving along in accordance with the ledgers and accounting logs of the world’s fastidious bureaucrats. And Bea was nourished beyond any thoughts of immortality. Bea was simply reality.

  They were jerked out of this unfolding and back into himself by the sudden acrid smell of smoke. Bea rushed to the balcony and saw to his dismay that the Roman prince had set fire to his ships, and subsequently those of the Egyptian fleet. The purple dawn had just begun to bloom from Cairo and the ocean wind of dawn was blowing the flames straight into the city. The wharves were already ablaze. Alarms were beginning to sound across the city and he watched as the people moved toward the harbor, crazily, unsteadily, unendingly, like so many little ants.

  A sound behind him sent his body whipping around. The wick of his lamp had sputtered, sending oily sparks onto his papyrus which set alight immediately, catching the tapestry against the wall and sending flames up the wall faster than Bea had time to draw a breath. Frantically he ran toward the small fire, beating it with his hands and robes.

  Dark smoke choked his words as he called out for help, but his cries of Fire, fire! were drowned out by the panic of the city below. An entire wall of his chambers was now ablaze, and he abandoned his solitary efforts and instead raced down the stairs to enact a plan.

  Seizing the first servant he encountered, he ordered them to begin salvaging the manuscripts in the library below. Because the fire had begun on the top floor, perhaps they had time to save a few thousand scrolls before it made its way down to the lower levels, he reasoned.

  More and more people began scurrying about the library. Impossibly fast, the guards had organized a water bucket chain and were dousing the upper levels before the flames arrived. The never-sleeping laundresses and gardeners were throwing soaked cloth onto the rooftops of the outbuildings and soaking the walls with water. Scribes and other scholars rubbed sleep from their eyes and then immediately, wide-eyed, set to running in and out of the main stacks with armloads of papers. Some had the presence of mind to put these treasures in the stone granaries by the kitchens, but many were just throwing them into piles in the open air of the gardens.

  Bea had a moment to hope as he, too, raced inside and out with as many tablets and tomes as he could carry. Confusion reigned, but the scholars gathered here organized themselves within the structures of their shared purpose. The smoke was getting thicker as the fire reached its fingers down, but scores of determined saviors scurried back and forth. Bea thought they might have as long as another half hour to clear the shelves and save the world’s knowledge from ruin.

  A sudden wrenching scream shattered that hope. The beams of the top floors could no longer support the weight of the roof and began to crack and writhe. They snapped like dried grass. Burning rubble thundered through the central heart of the building, all the way to the ground floor. Sparks and debris whooshed out of every door and window. Walls collapsed inward. The roof was folding in on itself.

  Wild screams rose up through the wreckage as hundred
s of burning bodies struggled to free themselves from their fiery fate. Bea was in the garden when it happened. He had just taken a few steps back toward the nearest door when the sudden heat had seared the hair off his face and sent him sprawling, away from the blinding pain.

  All around him, the courtyards and buildings burned. The fallen building had sent embers spreading over huge distances in the neighborhood, and even the piles of papers in the courtyard had begun to catch fire from their proximity to the inferno. Half the city was now burning, and there was no help coming for Bea’s library.

  From the ground, he screamed in agony as the work of centuries disappeared into smoke and memory. His scholars had discovered the size of the earth, had plotted the course of distant stars, had recorded centuries’ worth of rainfall and crops and births, astronomical events, maps of fantastic places, journeys into the unknown.

  He screamed and screamed into the fire until the smoke choked the air out of his lungs and the edges of his sight began to go black and fuzzy. The guards had all fled and everyone else was a charred husk caught in the bonfire.

  Bea was alone with the product of a moment’s distraction. He was alone, his failure blazing all around him.

  This is all my fault, he thought, before the darkness overtook him.

  Bea snapped awake at their desk. Blinked. Blinked again. They had not slept in millennia. That they had slept at all sent them into an immediate panic. They picked up the nearest phone. Dialed. Hands shaking. Everything shaking.

  Three tones.

  Bea’s own voice saying, “We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. All circuits are busy. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again.”

  They replaced the phone in the cradle and reached for their cell phone.

  No bars.

  No network.

  How long had they been asleep?

  They took a deep breath and began to scan.

  An hour later and several hundred miles away, Cyrus and Anthea were nearing the exit that would take them down a small highway, then up a winding trail into the mountains. They’d covered a lot of conversational ground in the time that Anthea had been awake. She couldn’t bring herself to ask any questions when they’d first fled LA. Her mind had been too tangled up with sadness over leaving Hello behind, confused about who she was running from, why she was running, and a sort of deadness that gnawed at the places in her heart where she’d let contentment and happiness begin to take root. She missed her house, with its stacks of papers everywhere, silly romance novels scattered around, the world map on her kitchen wall.

  Thoughts of that intricate map now flashed in her mind as she peppered Cyrus with questions about, well, everything. Her early questions had been practical and demanding and Cyrus had tried his best to answer them all with good grace.

  Who was Nik? An old friend. Why was he in Sweden? He works there. What exactly were the Northern Lights? Charged particles colliding with the radiation belts that protect our planet. What kind of food did Swedish people eat? Rotten fish and raw cabbage. What was a visa? Wait, really? No, not really.

  But as her interest skittered and bounced from topic to topic, some of her questions became a little more vague and hard to answer.

  If all my supposed relatives have Mexican names, why am I white? You are white-passing, there’s a difference. What am I supposed to do with my life now that I know all this? That’s entirely up to you, and I’ll help you no matter what you decide. Why is Bea a ‘they’ and not an ‘it’? Bea is a complicated creature, composed of a legion of ‘selves’ and to refer to them as an ‘it’ is both dehumanizing and overly simplistic. How did you learn all your real magic? From the fake stuff. No, really!

  Finally, she broached the topic that she was most curious about.

  “Tell me what you know of my… about Agatha,” she said simply. Cyrus took a moment to check the hand-written directions that Bea had prepared for them before telling Anthea of the time he’d spent as a London medium, the fateful weekend in Wales when he’d performed at a spiritualist gathering, the Lady Lamia’s disastrous summoning, and the nightmares that had followed in its wake.

  “Lamia?” Anthea had asked him, “Why Lady Lamia?”

  Not surprisingly, he had an answer ready.

  “I had thought it was from a famous poem that had become classic by the time I met her. Poor Keats, all the poor man needed was a sturdy course of antibiotics. Of course, no one knew that in those days, and, oh. Oh shit…” he trailed off as blue lights flashed in his rearview mirror and he slowed to pull over.

  “Let me do the talking,” he said seriously to Anthea, “We’re within 100 miles of the border and you just never know with these border cops. Get your passport ready, just in case, but no sudden movements.”

  “And absolutely do not say either of our names unless directly asked,” he added. Anthea responded with a small nod, felt for her passport in her pocket, and put her hands in her lap.

  “How’re y’all doin’ today,” he announced in a monotone drawl.

  Cyrus smiled and said, “Just fine officer, how about yourself?”

  This is just like a movie, she thought as the state trooper approached. He even has the right mustache. And those aviators! Do they give them out at the station? Do they have contests among themselves to see who can grow the silliest mustache? Why are their uniforms so tight? Is that a gun? Two guns? What’s his name? Did he go to cop college or is he just an amateur? Do state troopers have to go to cop college? What’s cop college like? Do they have dormitories and cafeterias? What’s the best meal at cop college?

  She was nervous, she realized, and her conscious thoughts were fluttering around trying to distract her from her unconscious fear response.

  She was so jubilant and thunderstruck at this revelation that it took her a moment to notice that something strange was happening.

  The trooper had his weight resting against Cyrus’ car, one arm propped above the door frame, the other on the window sill, nearly leaning his body through the opening. He hadn’t said anything to them for several long moments and appeared to be having a hard time speaking at all.

  Cyrus was leaning slightly back, body turning slowly to put himself between this stranger and Anthea, who was watching the trooper with interest now.

  His face reminded her of a fish. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, over and over. His eyes were wide but blank. Finally, he let out a buh buh buhhhhh and then a HOOO WEEE!

  “There we go,” said a strange voice, coming from the mustachioed mouth, “Sorry that took so long. These damn cops. Honestly, they love being told what to do until they realize they’re being told what to do. Listen, Cyrus, you gotta get out of here, now. It’s more urgent than we thought. We just had a dream. A dream Cyrus. God, and that wasn’t even how it all happened. As if we would ever be so careless. Cyrus, We. Had. A. DREAM.”

  “Bea?” he said finally.

  “Yes, you silly fool,” the voice responded, “now get out of here. We’ll clear the path for you as much as we are able. She’s close, Cyrus. And so strong. And, oh shit. Shit shit shit sh—” the voice was cut off and the trooper made a quick hurk noise, like a cat choking up a hairball.

  He looked at them with such confusion that Anthea would have laughed if she hadn’t been so terrified.

  “Y’all have a nice day,” he finally said.

  “Thank you, officer,” said Cyrus, now looking relieved, “I sure appreciate it. I’ll get that tail light looked at just as soon as we get to Santa Fe, I can tell you that!”

  The trooper tipped his hat and walked back to his car.

  Anthea looked at Cyrus in surprise. “We’re going to Santa Fe?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he let the word pop when he said it, and then blew out a breath. “We’re not going to Santa Fe. But we’re going to have to start lying to everyone. About everything.”

  He steered the SUV back onto the highway and, with a wave to the trooper behind him, sp
eed down the road once more.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said in a softer voice, “We cannot visit Gloria Huerta’s grave. I don’t want to jeopardize whatever Bea is doing to give us time and safety. I will take you there some day, I promise. Can you forgive me?”

  Anthea nodded and tried not to let the sadness settle in too deeply. Just something else she’s taken from me, she thought. The list was getting long. Anthea was getting angry. It made her feel focused. Determined.

  Cyrus cleared his throat dramatically after a moment and sat up straighter in his seat.

  “Aaand now, for my first trick,” he announced dramatically, “Right in front of your very eyes, I will show you how to disappear completely.”

  Acknowledgments

  This novel would not have been possible without the support of my friends and family across the world. I have to particularly thank my incredible partner James, who always reads my drafts, understands that my characters and their lives are real to me, and always asks when I’m going to work on the next book.

  Of course, every story has a story of its own, and this one is no different. How to Disappear Completely was born out of an extremely awkward car ride. James and I, a close friend and her partner, and her partner’s friend were all leaving the open day at the Thai Embassy in Canberra, Australia (slightly the worse for wear from the heat and the Thai beers, it must be said). The friend’s partner’s friend (this would be so much easier with names, but) offered us a ride back to our neighborhood but spent the next half hour in complete rage-silence, along with the friend’s partner, who was in the front seat. Noticing this strangeness but determined not to acknowledge it, James, myself, and our good friend (all chummily crammed in the backseat) chatted about what it would be like if technology truly was magic, and how it would change the IT industry. I did eventually find out why our driver was so furious that day, but that’s neither here nor there, nor any of my business.