Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

I’m aware of that possibility, Emma said, though in truth she was aware of it only the way a person might hear a faint rumble of thunder on a dry day and find its menacing sound exciting without believing there was any real reason to go inside.

The shadow figure lurking in the alley behind the cinema felt so uncharacteristically contrived, a device out of a Sue Grafton murder mystery—S Is for Shadow. She kept waiting for Beatriz to subvert the cliché.

In response to this confidence, Beatriz had brought up a poem by Hilda Hilst, a wonderful line about a woman unwilling to keep to the room where her lover wanted her to remain. The line had tendered as much understanding, or more, as any reciprocal confession.

All you other authors out there in Rio, please, please stay out of the trees!

Rocha shook out the last greasy cashew from his in-flight snack mix and crumpled up the bag like so much fiction. With his other hand, he set the milk in his coffee awhirl.

The world made no exception for lovers.

She’d put it into Rocha’s hands, and now everyone she’d ever met was going to know she wasn’t supposed to have happened. How long had it taken her mother to find that error beautiful, or at least the daughter who had come of it?

For so long, she’d willfully sought the in-between. She’d thought of herself as fated to live suspended, floating between two countries, in the vapor between languages. But too much vaporous freedom brought its own constraints. She now felt as confined by her floating state as other, more wholesome people were to the towns where they were born.

Even if she did find her mother, the conversation, or lack of it, would be excruciating. Beatriz would fix her gaze on some gloomy incongruity on the beach—a plastic spoon jutting out of the sand, the hand of a broken doll, some dying bird. Raquel would see her mother looking away and would want more, much more, and who could blame her? Didn’t he want more from Beatriz? Didn’t everyone?

To hold on to this certainty the way one holds on to a coat or a word. To have made a coat of words and cloaked yourself in it. To have lifted yourself into an almond tree.

But Beatriz had told him and he’d missed it. She’d said the island was the right place to end and he’d read the sentence only as it pertained to him and the book of hers he’d published, as her gracious way of letting him know she was not appalled by what he had done with her pages. He’d read the note only for what it said about his skill, his worth to her as an editor.

But he had done it. He’d hired a murderer. Several of them. He was a man who kept to his principles at the expense of other people’s lives but not his own. Not his lover’s. And now there was nothing to do but watch this worthless, sooty footage of a burning building on the TV along with everyone else.

Whether you’re listening or not, my friends, whether a beautiful sentence moves you or leaves you cold, Brazilian literature has lost a piece of its soul today. Beatriz Yagoda may have gambled too much and hid from her own children, but she wrote like the room was on fire, and so it went down. At nine this morning she burned to death in a hotel on Boipeba. The flames, my friends, were started by a cigar left burning in her room. Smokers, take heed.

And if her fingers failed to comply, if what she wrote wasn’t worth typing up, who would ever know? She was alone with all the hours of her life.

A man who knows how to be silent, Beatriz wrote in her third novel, is a man who knows how to begin. But begin what? For whom?

If they had considered how quickly bamboo lit and could fill up a room with smoke.

If the whale. If the boat. If the rain.

If Emma had known her at all. If she’d asked better questions. If she’d asked fewer. If she’d sat, just once, with Beatriz on the balcony without getting so nervous she had to string a new curtain of literary inquiries between them. If everyone will please turn to page one hundred and ten. To page one twenty-three. If you will please give your attention to Raquel, who has chosen a passage from—

her mother gone and nowhere left to look for her except in a fog of sentences like this one.

It was only about the sentences, her breath matching the give-and-take of the cadence, the rhythm filling her chest, and for the first time in days she did not feel empty.

there was little that Emma could predict with any consistency. In that regard, it did not feel at odds with the rest of her life.