How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  “Well, fine,” Elisabeth said, moving to pick up the split pieces of wood. “If you really think that’s what’s happening, then let’s think about what we can do to change it. How can we change things? What can we do?”

  “For one thing,” John said, raising his eyebrows, reaching for another log, “we should stop letting psychotics stay at our house.”

  And just like that, they were at it again. Never mind that it was Alfred alone who had done the thing he had done. Never mind that it could have been Elisabeth and Margaret in place of Mack. And never mind that it had been John who left them behind that week, John whose job had brought them to Alaska and obliged Elisabeth to host a stranger. Somehow, despite it all, when John talked about Alfred, he talked in a way that assigned the fault to her. You could have turned him down, he had said once. You’re lucky he didn’t come after you, he’d said another time. It always came back to that. You, he’d say. You could have done this. You should have done that.

  “Ah,” Elisabeth said, tossing pieces of split wood onto the pile. “So it’s my fault you’re losing students. I see.”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “It’s what you implied.”

  “It’s what you thought,” John said, snapping at her. He beat two fingers against his temple. “It’s what you heard. It’s what you wanted to hear. I said we. I said we.”

  “But what you meant was me. What you meant was that I’m the cause of all our problems, because you want someone to blame other than yourself.”

  “Brilliant analysis,” John said, leaning his weight against the ax and glancing off to the side. “We’ve found Dr. Freud’s successor, but I’d really prefer it if you didn’t tell me my own thoughts. I can think for myself, actually, as much as that might surprise you. I know what I meant. And I know the cause for all this well enough.”

  “This?”

  “Yes, this,” John said, and now he propped the ax against one leg and gestured all around him, both hands waving at the world as if he had suddenly gone blind. “This,” he said, “this. People looking at us funny. Treating us funny. What are we talking about, Else? Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

  “Fine, yes,” Elisabeth said. “You don’t have to be—” And she stammered for a moment, fumbling for the right word.

  “Don’t have to be what?” John said, centering another log. “Please, darling, speak your mind.”

  You don’t have to be such an ass about it, she wanted to say, but then Elisabeth stopped herself. “You don’t have to be so dramatic,” she said. “Besides, I’m really not sure it’s that at all. Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to why you’re losing students.”

  “Then it’s what? Coincidence?” John swung the ax again, harder now, and the log split into three uneven parts. Its bark came loose and dropped away like a flank of peeling skin. “I bet I’ll lose three more students yet, maybe four—who knows?”

  “Well, what’s the difference?” Elisabeth said. “What does it matter, really?” She paced around the yard, gathering up the splintered wood and cradling it in her arms. “Your class has several students fewer now, and that’s good, don’t you think? It’ll be that much easier to instruct them all. In a way, it’s a fine thing to happen, no matter the cause.”

  John was silent.

  “Isn’t it?” Elisabeth said. “Am I wrong?”

  John had set another log in place, and now he was leaning against it with both arms, his head hanging low, his body bent forward. For a second, Elisabeth thought that he had hurt himself, but then he stared up at her. His lips were slack; his eyes were wide, his cheeks flushed with redness. Elisabeth had seen this face before, seen it a thousand different times, though it had taken two or three years of marriage for it to make its first appearance. He wanted to erupt, but instead he was restraining himself, and he was keen to make a show of it. You’re lucky, this expression seemed to say.

  That was its intended message, but Elisabeth had long ago learned to steel herself when she saw this face, and now the only thing she could see was its artifice, a face that was nothing more than a petty little act. Don’t look at me like that, she always wanted to tell him. You look stupid. But she held her tongue time and time again. Why? She couldn’t quite say, though she knew that it wasn’t because she feared his reaction, not as she once had. If he was going to hit her, let him hit her. She wouldn’t even flinch at it. She wouldn’t give him that.

  “Just drop it,” John said, speaking slowly and tightly, three separate sentences crammed into one. Just. Drop. It. He pushed himself upright again, no longer looking at her.

  “I’m only trying to help,” Elisabeth said. I’m a teacher, too, she could have added. Or I used to be, before we moved here. But then she didn’t. Why bother? Why say a thing that would leave her accused of baiting him? They’d go on for another ten minutes if she said a thing like that, and Elisabeth didn’t have the will or a reason to continue any longer than they already had.

  Perhaps John didn’t either. He was quiet, and a few moments later a familiar purr was driving through the air. The mail plane, Mr. Glaser’s plane, back to its usual routine. In a rush, the plane’s distant drone made Elisabeth think of summers back home, of Junes and Julys defined by the relentless buzz of insects in the grass and trees. The summers in Alaska had their own orchestras of droning insects, but here that noise was different than it was in Pennsylvania—raspier and shriller—and the simple knowledge of this difference made Elisabeth feel suddenly, immensely close to John, if only because he would know this difference, too.

  Then, just as soon as the moment had come, the moment had gone. John took a step away from the stump, and he raised the ax for another strike.

  “Could you please just get the mail?” he said.

  * * *

  —

  In six short weeks, this was what Elisabeth had come to associate with the mail and Mr. Glaser: failure, frustration, one dead end followed by another. She had spent the last month and a half feverishly searching for details about Alfred Seidel’s past. With every free minute of every passing day, she wrote letters, wired messages, scoured page after page of assorted documents. She was searching for any connection between Alfred and her sister, and she knew that this search could be conducted in one way only: by piecing together as much information about Alfred himself as she could. She didn’t believe what Sam York had told her about Alfred’s immigration record. Sanctioned or unsanctioned, permanent or temporary, he had been living in Pennsylvania in 1921. This was more than a hunch. This was fate itself.

  But she needed more. She wanted to know where Alfred had lived and when, what he had done for work, who his friends and cousins and siblings had once been or still were. She’d spent each of the past five weekends in Fairbanks—Walter Glaser was happy to accept a little money for toting her around—and soon the staff at the Fairbanks Emerald Hotel knew her as well as one of their own bellboys.

  Yes, hello, she would say, hunched over a telephone in the Emerald’s stuffy call room. I was hoping you could tell me what your library has as far as newspapers go.

  Which newspapers do you mean? was always the response.

  Regional papers.

  You’ll have to be more specific. The Lancaster Inquirer? The Intelligencer Journal?

  Anything you’ve got.

  Well, just come on in and we—

  That’s very good, Elisabeth would say, as kindly as she could manage, but I’m afraid I can’t come in. You see, I’m some miles away. I’m doing research for a historical project. What kind of archives do you have?

  How far back do you need?

  At least twenty years.

  Oh my, the voice would say. I’ll have to check. Can you hold on a minute?

  Certainly.

  And so on. She called Philadelphia and Lancaster County libraries, colleges, Masonic lodges, courthouses,
and police stations. She called Lititz-area restaurants, hotels, banks, and doctors’ offices. She perused entire years’ worth of local newspapers, her eyes keenly scanning for the last name Seidel. Surely, she thought, if he’d been there, someone must have known him. Yet every Seidel she spoke with said one of two things:

  No Alfreds in this family, least not in that generation.

  Or:

  Why, yes. Would you like to speak with him now?

  Dead ends, one after another. Of course, she also wrote Alfred himself, and twice she tried to visit him in jail. Both times she had been turned away.

  “He’s in keep lock,” she was told.

  “For what?”

  “Infractions.”

  The prison’s receptionists gave no clarifications. Whatever the reason for the lockdown, Elisabeth could only assume that Alfred’s unresponsiveness through mail was related. She had written him four separate times, each letter with its own tone and tenor—one pleading earnestly for answers, one spitefully, one menacingly, one ruefully, each of them manipulative and cunning in its own way—but the letters had proven as futile as her own methodical detective work.

  York, as Elisabeth expected, gave her almost nothing. He confirmed with the territory’s postal service when Alfred had started working for them—1939—but beyond that, York had gleaned nothing about Alfred’s past. He clung to his assertion that Alfred was merely posturing, citing again and again the supposed immigration record. John, naturally, agreed with York’s conclusion.

  “The guy’s getting off on it,” John had told her. “It’s a power thing. He’s toying with you, and it’s pleasuring him. You’re pleasuring him.”

  And there it was again. You, he had said. You.

  But for all her discouragement, Elisabeth was undeterred. Alfred was involved. He knew something. Perhaps he knew everything. She had waited twenty years for answers; a few months of setbacks weren’t going to sap her in the least. She was driven. She was tireless. She slept only a handful of hours each night, and her lessons with Margaret dwindled to almost nothing.

  “Can I come with you to Fairbanks?” her daughter asked.

  “No, I’ll be working on my project.”

  “Can we do that lesson on volcanoes today?”

  “No, sweetie. I’ve got to work on my project.”

  That was what she called it, her project, as if all this research was nothing more than some stuffy bit of genealogy, hardly a thing that a child would enjoy. And although it did pain her to tell Margaret no—day after day, lesson after lesson—in truth it stung Elisabeth only briefly. She had to work. She had to sacrifice. For the first time in many years, she had to use her time for herself.

  Elisabeth was getting close to a breakthrough; she could feel it. She dreamed about her sister almost every night now, though her dreams were always the same: She saw herself chasing Jacqueline through a vast, golden wheat field. She cut through the paintbrush grains like a swimmer through water, legs pumping, arms reaching desperately forward. Yet her sister stayed always in front of her, ten stubborn feet that Elisabeth couldn’t close no matter how hard she ran. Finally, never breaking her stride, Jacqueline would glance over her shoulder and smile, and in that implicit way that dreams work, Elisabeth would realize that this was all a game, not an anguished chase but a simple bit of fun between the two of them.

  Come and get me, her sister seemed to say. Just keep running.

  And so she did.

  * * *

  —

  By the time that Elisabeth reached the landing strip, Mr. Glaser had already wheeled his plane around to take off. The box of mail sat on the gravel of the runway, the air around it swirling with a mist of sparkling dust. More often than not, Mr. Glaser’s deliveries went exactly like this; he would land and unpack his cargo without a second to spare, and then he’d be gone again, no rest, no cigarette, no chitchat. When Elisabeth planned on flying out of town with him, she had to wait with her bags on the landing strip. If she didn’t head him off, he’d fly away without her. He had always been hasty, but recently his deliveries had become more frequent—in August, the post office had arranged for twice-weekly visits in lieu of once every Monday—and Elisabeth guessed that Mr. Glaser’s stringent efficiency had something to do with this.

  From a distance, Elisabeth watched his plane pulling noisily away, its tires pelting gravel and dirt in every direction. Then it started climbing, and the plane was gone in half a minute more. Elisabeth walked forward and began sorting through the delivery.

  The box was filled with only paper mail today—no packages or cans or specialty orders of any kind—and what mail the town had received didn’t amount to much. Two letters for Teddy; three for Mary Alexander; five for Father Ingraham and his wife, Rita; a copy of the National Bellas Hess catalogue thrown in for good measure. On the cover, a husband and wife—smiles wide, shoes shining, clothes crisp, waists narrow, shoulders broad—were pushing a stroller down a tree-lined city street. Their feet, Elisabeth noticed, weren’t even touching the ground. Through fault or design, the pair was actually floating down the sidewalk. Arm in arm half an inch above the ground, they were literally walking on air. Though she couldn’t say why, the illustration filled Elisabeth with contempt. She dropped it back in the box and reached for the last few envelopes.

  Skimming through them, Elisabeth moved her eyes quickly, hardly reading the addresses at all. She had written to the Immigration and Naturalization Service some weeks ago, hoping to gather more information about Alfred’s wartime service in Germany, and with every delivery she expected a response and was invariably disappointed.

  She flipped through the envelopes so hastily, so presumptuously, that she almost missed it altogether: a slim letter the size of a postcard. It was adorned with crisp, leaning script and a decorative flourish beneath the address. Elisabeth Metzger Pfautz, it read. Tanacross, Alaska, and the return address—a stamp of purple ink—read Territory of Alaska Penitentiary System, 3500 Winston Avenue, Fairbanks, AK.

  Floating, Elisabeth watched her hands split the envelope open.

  CHAPTER 13

  My dearest Elisabeth,

  First, an apology: I know you have been attempting to reach me, and I have wanted to respond, but until now I have been unable. I deeply regret this, and I sincerely apologize. I am an unwelcome man in this cage. My fellow prisoners hate me, and fear me, and they have not taken well to me. My captors neither. Our kind — yours and mine — is not welcome in this land anymore. Perhaps we never were. And day and night, my captors and fellow prisoners pit themselves against me, and often they send me away without light or food or even water, and certainly without human contact as gentle and good as yours.

  But, for now, I am free. I received all your letters at once, and I relished each one. Even the third one? you’re wondering. Even the one in which you’re so angry?

  Yes, Elisabeth, even that one.

  You can be angry with me. You can insult me and threaten me and abuse me, and I’ll never hold it against you. I don’t blame you for such feelings. I understand them, and I understand you.

  Let me write that again: I understand you, Elisabeth Pfautz. And I know that, deep down, you understand me, too. You may not realize it yet, but the Truth is that you and I are Gleichgesinnte. Kindred spirits, one and the same. You will know this, Elisabeth, in time.

  I have a proposition for you. What I told you in the cache I’ll tell you again: I cannot reveal everything I know about your sister in a single sitting or conversation or letter. Why not? It’s very simple: I am desperately alone, and in my own selfish way I want to ensure our correspondence for as long as possible. We have to cooperate, Elisabeth. All I want is to talk to you. I want to see your writing, to read your words, to feel your presence. Selfish, yes, but is that really so awful? It’s human, Elisabeth. I am flesh and blood and bone, and I need you.

 
; And you need me, too. You want the same things that I do. You want to feel connected. You want to carry on with me for as long as you can. Yes, you want to be reunited with your sister, and I will help you do just that. You want to know what happened, and I will help you know just that. But you also want a kinship much larger than yourself and even Jacqueline, and in that respect I will help you, too. I will provide.

  I am here for you.

  My proposition is very simple: I am going to ask you for three gifts, and for each gift you deliver, I will take you one step closer to Jacqueline. I will reunite you, incrementally, with your sister, until at last you and she are together again in the flesh and blood.

  But a caveat comes with my offer: You cannot involve the police. If you involve them in our exchange, that exchange is over. These are my slavers, Elisabeth, and they are not to be trusted. This is a matter between you and me. This is a matter between Countrymen. You are my sister, my lover, and my daughter, and I do not think it’s unreasonable to ask for this to be a private matter.

  I await your acceptance or declination of my offer.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alfred H. K. Seidel

  * * *

  —

  She read the letter four times. Her hands quaking, she pored over every word. She sat on the edge of her bed, and she felt like a woman sitting on the edge of a bridge, ready to drop and fall away. Fall into what, she didn’t know. But she was teetering.

  An exchange. A cooperation. Three gifts. Reunited with Jacqueline. Elisabeth could only guess what gifts Alfred might want from her, but she was certain that they wouldn’t be gifts she’d enjoy giving.

  It’s a power thing, she remembered John saying. It’s pleasuring him.