Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

“Go in the house, Olive,” her father says. But she stands rooted in place, since she’s a little queasy, anyway; that sensation has returned, as if there’s something inside her about to burst through her skin. The world slightly too bright, shimmering around the edges. An aura pulsing in and out with her breath. Her mother, nearby.

  The guy sips from his coffee cup, seemingly at home in their front yard. The barista has Sharpied CINDEE on its side in loopy handwriting, with a smiley face. “You really need to fertilize your camellias,” he says. “Try Dr. Earth. It’s organic, lots of probiotics.”

  Her father has a puzzled expression on his face. “Why are you here?”

  “I got your note,” Sidney says to Olive’s dad.

  Her father’s hands are sticking out slightly from his sides, as if he’s keeping them at the ready. “How did you know where we live?” he asks.

  The man grins. “There’s this thing called the Internet. You’re all over it.”

  “So are you,” her father says darkly.

  “Not very up-to-date, though, is it? That’s what happens when you spend a few decades in jail. You vanish. It’s like to the outside world, you’ve stopped existing altogether.” Sidney puts a fist up and then opens his hand, his fingers flying out—poof. “So what’s up?”

  Olive can’t stand it anymore. “What did you do to my mom?” she demands. “Did you kidnap her?”

  As the words come out of her mouth, she realizes how ridiculous they sound and how unlikely the scenario is. If this guy absconded with her mom, why would he show up at their doorstep? Nor does the guy really look like a hardened ex-con. He’s skinny-fat, his shoulders sloping in his faded T-shirt, a paunch jutting over the top of his Goodwill jeans. He’s wearing a string shell bracelet around one wrist, the kind she used to make in summer camp. Honestly, he looks more like someone’s aging hippie uncle, the kind of guy who spends his weekends trying to register Green Party voters outside the medical marijuana dispensary on Telegraph Avenue, the kind of guy who slices your goat Gouda at the Cheese Board Collective.

  Indeed, the expression on Sidney’s face is one of utter bewilderment. “Kidnap her?” he repeats.

  “Olive,” Jonathan says under his breath. “Please let me deal with this.”

  Sidney’s brow furrows with confusion. “Is there something I’m missing here? She’s dead. I saw it on TV. I came to the memorial.”

  Her father squints at Sidney, sizing him up. Finally, he seems to realize that his hands are still dangling in midair, and he shoves them in his jacket pockets. “Yes, of course, right, you’re right,” Jonathan mutters. He’s quiet for a moment, thinking. “OK. Tell me this: Why did my wife come to visit you last year?”

  “She told you about that?”

  “No. I figured it out myself.”

  Sidney seems to relax. He sits back down on the edge of their porch, facing them, his jeans rising up to expose hairy ankles. “Well, I called her after I got out of jail. I wanted to catch up, reminisce about old times.”

  Her father remains standing, stiff as a plank. “Like how she fled town after you blew up a dam and killed a bunch of horses?”

  “Wait, what?” The words burst out of Olive’s mouth.

  “I didn’t kill the horses!” Sidney objects. “Jesus!”

  “Olive, go inside,” her father says.

  “No way,” she says, riveted.

  Sidney tilts his head, looking a little embarrassed. “What do you know about me?”

  “I read the news clippings from when you were convicted.”

  Sidney laughs. “Then you know nothing at all. The biased idiots in the corporate media didn’t get anything right.”

  Her father crosses his arms, plants his feet, settling in. “Tell me.”

  Sidney hunches over, cradling the cup in both hands. He stares at his feet, in tattered TOMS, for a long time before he starts to talk.

  “Billie—well, I first knew her as Elizabeth Smith. That’s the name she gave me when I met her in Los Angeles all those years ago. I was hanging out with some friends down there, post-college, and I saw her at a party and thought, Wow. I knew she was a runaway—the name was fake, that was obvious—and that she was underage to boot, but I didn’t really care.” He laughs. “She was a quick study; she took it all so seriously. This beautiful girl from nowhere, marching right into town like she owned the place. Soaking up every word I said until she was even better at it than I was. It was flattering, you know? Three weeks in and you’d never know she hadn’t been there forever. New haircut, new clothes, whole new persona. I turn around and suddenly I’ve got this girlfriend, and how the hell did that happen?” He shakes his head admiringly. “Sheer force of will.

  “I helped her out. I knew people who could fake documents.” He flicks his eyes at Olive. “You meet a lot of people when you deal drugs. Don’t deal drugs, OK? It’s bad news. I had a degree from UCLA, you know? And then I fell into that—because, well, philosophy major, what else was I going to do?—and now look at me.” He stares morosely at the coffee cup in his hands. “Anyway. We bummed around L.A. for a year or two, until she seemed to get restless. Saying that my friends and I were acting like a bunch of posers, sitting around on our asses, talking about changing the world but mostly just smoking too much dope. And that’s when she said it was time to move to the Pacific Northwest, where the real action was.

  “Thing is, she was right about the Pacific Northwest. We got up there just as the whole scene was starting to take off.”

  “Like Nirvana?” Olive asks tentatively.

  He makes a face. “No, not Nirvana. Jesus. No, it was radical up there. Yeah, you had your emerging grunge scene and your gutter punks out to fuck shit up, but there were also legit activists up there. We were closer to nature, you could see what was at stake, we wanted to make a real difference. Civil disobedience, right? Making a loud enough stink that the world would see what really mattered. Stick it to the man.” He makes a fist with one hand and drives it into the air for emphasis, managing with the other to splash milky coffee out of the hole in the lid and onto his T-shirt. “One of the first things she and I did when we got up there was chain ourselves to a tree in this old-growth forest in Cascadia. There were fourteen of us, chained together for three months, living on gorp and pissing in buckets, really making a statement!” His smile falters. “Yeah, OK, they eventually cut the forest down anyway. But still.

  “We lived like that for a long time. Kind of itinerant. We’d head into Bend, or Olympia, or Portland, and I’d deal acid or pot or heroin to the local college kids, save up money; and she’d get odd jobs, paint some pictures, maybe audit a few classes. She liked to do that.” He screws up his face, remembering. “We’d help stage protests in town, these kind of theater sit-ins, with costumes and everything. And then we’d hear about some urgent action out in the woods, tree-sitting or protestors lying down in front of logging trucks, and we’d head back out.”

  Olive smiles, imagining her mom trussed up in craft-paper feathers, living in a redwood tree, but her father interrupts: “We know most of this already. Get to the point. To the part where you start setting things on fire.”

  “That was Sparrow’s idea, actually.”

  Her father stiffens. “Her idea?”

  Sidney smiles. “Yep. We were up in Oregon at another protest, against this new dam that had stopped the salmon from swimming upstream to their breeding grounds. Standing around dressed up like fish, giant signs that said ‘My Existence, Your Subsistence.’ And a few days in, Sparrow, she yanks the salmon head off, and she looks out at the government hacks, who are totally ignoring us, and the one local newspaper journalist who’s still there, and she says to me”—he raises his voice in a painful mimicry of Olive’s mom—“ ‘This is getting us nowhere. If we want the dam to go away, we should just blow the stupid thing up.’

  “So that’s what we did! Got together a little group, along with my friend Vincent—he went by Pangolin, you know, after the anteater—an
d put together a plan. It was shockingly easy, actually. Sparrow got her hands on a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, which taught us how to assemble a firebomb. We did some surveillance on the dam for a few weeks and then sneaked out there in the middle of the night when no one was around. And bam”—he slams his hand on the porch stair, jolting Olive upright—“the motherfucker was toast.”

  “My mom did that?” Olive feels dizzy: the charming tree forts and paper feathers suddenly incinerated, replaced by crumbling concrete and shattering glass.

  He winks at her. “Your mom was a natural, you know? She was the one who figured out how to do it right. How to set up a ‘clean room’ where we made the firebomb: basically just a camping tent we’d set up in a motel room, but we had to wear a surgeon’s mask and a shower cap and gloves whenever we went inside. So we wouldn’t leave fingerprints or DNA on the bombs, see? And then we just gave the tent to a homeless person, and presto! No trail, and we helped the disenfranchised!” He smiles at this. “Next we targeted a wild mustang preserve, which was selling the older horses as meat to a Moldavian sausage factory. We released the animals and blew the place up. That one was my idea.” His eyes glitter darkly with the memory. “It was pretty spectacular. Those beautiful horses, finally free, galloping away into the woods, lit up by the flames.”

  Olive tries to imagine this, but mostly, she keeps seeing her mother like she was in the vision that Olive had on the steps of school. The match in her hand: Should I do it? She reaches out and clutches her father’s arm, fighting off the wooziness that is threatening to buckle her knees. Her dad reaches his arm around and covers her hand with his own.

  There’s a thick hot ache in her head, as if someone has poured pea soup in her skull. She can’t wrap her mind around these stories. On the one hand, isn’t it just like her mom to have done something so badass, so extreme, once again trumping Olive’s own timid efforts to make the world a better place? Then again, this guy ended up in prison for doing the same things. Why didn’t her mother?

  Could it be true? she asks herself. Is this guy lying to us because he hates her for some reason? How would we even know?

  Sidney is still talking. “After we freed the horses, we had to go off the grid for a while. We were out there in this cabin in the Oregon woods, the three of us on top of each other, kind of driving each other nuts, frankly. Pangolin, well, it was starting to grow obvious that he was not mentally all together. He would conduct long conversations with people who weren’t there: just him and Bakunin and Nietzsche, sitting by the fire, having a long chat about nihilism and social change. As for me”—he glances at Olive—“let’s just say that I had my drug use under control for a while, and then I didn’t. I wasn’t at the top of my game.

  “Meanwhile, we learned that the actions we’d taken hadn’t really had the impact we’d wanted them to. The feds rebuilt that dam within months, made it even bigger. And the mustangs we freed—well, they rounded them all up, and this time they slaughtered them all because they no longer had a preserve where the horses could be stashed.”

  He sighs. “So, yeah. I was arguing that was why we needed to do something even bigger this time. Get the man where it hurts, you know? His pocketbook! There was this fancy-pants ski resort upstate that was clear-cutting an old-growth forest in order to build more ski runs. Killing these ancient trees so that some rich assholes could get their adrenaline fix, right? I said, ‘Blow that fucker up.’

  “Anyway. We had everything all prepped, and then right before go time, Billie got sick. Throwing up. So Pangolin and I left her behind. The plan was, she’d clean up the cabin where we’d been living, gather up the cash we had stashed—which, by the way, was about thirty grand, those U of O undergrads loved their hallucinogens—and meet up with us afterward in Olympia.” He takes a sip from his coffee and makes a startled face: Cold. “So, anyway. Pangolin and I head out to the ski resort, but just when we’re almost there, we get pulled over. Broken taillight. The cops ask to inspect the van—which of course was packed with incendiaries—and I’m, you know, not so sober, maybe not making the best decisions….” He stares at the camellia bushes, remembering, his face slackening. “See, I thought, if I just…drove away.” His voice drifts off. “Well, that didn’t work. I ran over the cop—which, don’t believe the press accounts, was not intentional—and broke both his legs. They slapped me with attempted manslaughter on top of the arson and conspiracy charges. Oh, and the drug charges for the five sheets of acid I forgot I’d stashed in the trunk.” He shrugs: Oops.

  “It turned out that Pangolin was schizophrenic; he ended up in a psych ward, talking to the walls. I got twenty-five to life. And Sparrow—for a long time I thought she’d gotten away. That she’d somehow made it to Olympia with all the cash we’d stashed, and the feds had never figured out that she was involved. I was glad she made it out, see? No way in hell was I going to turn her in.”

  He makes a wry face. “Life goes on, right? I’m doing my time, it’s not so bad, I started a meditation group and got to work in the prison garden. And then a few years ago, I’m on the computer in the prison library, clicking around on Decode—it’s the site’s twentieth anniversary, lots of pictures of their big gala—and there’s this woman in one photo who looks familiar. She’s on the arm of some normalish guy, she’s laughing, not even looking at the camera, she’s a middle-aged brunette. But I could tell.” He wags a finger. “The caption read: ‘Senior editor Jonathan Flanagan and wife.’ I couldn’t stop thinking, Wife? That’s all she is now, someone’s wife? It didn’t seem like the Sparrow I knew. So conventional.”

  “We’re not conventional,” Olive bristles.

  He laughs, reaching back to tighten the elastic on his ponytail. “Well. Comparatively speaking, let’s say. Anyway, I searched her out, sent her a letter. She never answered. So when I got out of jail, I headed down to the Bay Area to find her. Just friendly-like.”

  “Friendly-like.” Her father looks skeptical. “Even though she’s the one who turned you in?”

  “You know about that?” Sidney frowns. “She told me you didn’t know anything about what was really going on in Oregon.”

  Olive looks from her father to Sidney and back. Where is this coming from? “I’ve been made aware,” her father says carefully.

  Sidney looks like he’s trying to decide what to say, but Olive is having a hard time paying attention. She’s feeling weirder by the minute; she’s pretty sure she’s about to have a vision—and increasingly she wants Sidney to stop talking and go away. She has a feeling she’s not going to like what he has to say.

  Sidney carefully places the cup on the ground next to him. “OK, well, yeah. She turned me and Pangolin in. Took all our money and split. Maybe she was trying to save her own ass; she told me that she suddenly grew a conscience about what we were doing. Regardless, she really screwed us, you know?” His eyes light up with a flash of anger. “But it wasn’t until after I got down to the Bay Area that I even found this out. An old mutual friend filled me in. Pretty fucked up.”

  Her father sighs as if he’s come to some conclusion. “So that’s what you were fighting about,” Jonathan says. “You weren’t, say, threatening her?”

  “Dude, I’m a pacifist.” Sidney looks wounded by the very suggestion. Then he looks Olive’s dad up and down, taking in his jeans and sneakers, the cable-knit fisherman’s sweater that Olive gave him last Christmas. “You’re a nice guy, aren’t you? Straight as an arrow? Bet you never even dropped acid. Bet you’ve had a steady job your whole life. Paying your mortgage. Supporting your family.”

  Her father looks like he’s trying not to hit the guy. “Yeah, and? What’s your point?”

  “My point is…” He sighs. “Billie never told you anything about what really happened up in Oregon all those years ago. And of course she didn’t. Because what would she have had to gain? Billie never did anything unless she stood to benefit from it.” He glances over his shoulder at their house, giving it a quick assessment. �
��Like you. She found herself a good provider, didn’t she? Someone who wouldn’t ask tricky questions. Someone who would buy into her Saint Billie act. A chump. That was her MO even back then.” He twists his mouth into a wry smile that doesn’t look amused at all. “Sorry to say that about your dead mom, kid, but it’s true.”

  Sidney’s insults seem to hit her dad like a physical blow. He takes a small step back. Olive feels a burst of sadness for her dad, can feel the soft things inside him bruising like fruit. She doesn’t like this guy and his stories; doesn’t like them at all. Sidney clearly doesn’t know where her mom is—which is a good thing, right? she wasn’t kidnapped, she’s not in danger, at least not from him—and yet the things he’s saying about Billie feel like someone shoving splinters under her fingernails. Her mom, some kind of snitch? Turning her friends in to the authorities and then taking off with all their money? She shakes her head, as if this might dispel the unpleasant mental image of her mother that Sidney is painting in her mind, but it just makes her feel dizzier.

  Sidney studies Olive’s father, looking gloomy. “Hey, don’t take it personally. I was her chump long before you were,” he says, and something in his voice breaks. And then Olive understands: Sidney was in love with her mom once. Like, really in love. She watches as Sidney hunches over and turns his head, pulling the ponytail aside so they can get a good look at the tattoo covering the back of his neck. Olive peers at it: It’s blobby and misshapen, a pretty bad interpretation of the real thing, but Olive recognizes it anyway. It’s a sparrow.

  Looking at the tattoo, the stringy graying hair in its sad little ponytail, she feels sorry for him. Maybe he used to be cutting-edge once, but now he just seems pathetic. Like he’s trying to relive his glory days of anarchy and rebellion because he doesn’t have anything newer to cling to. Of course he couldn’t have kidnapped Mom, she realizes. Mom is stronger than he is. She broke his heart, moved on to bigger and better things, and he hasn’t forgiven her.

  “See, there’s other things about her—” Sidney begins, but then he stops, as if transfixed by something he’s seen over Olive’s shoulder. He abruptly stands up, the empty coffee cup clattering to the ground. “Well, shit. What are you doing here?”