Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

IT’S A GOOD DAY, or maybe even a great one, although it will be impossible to know for sure later.

You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.

Alarmed, Olive wants to shout: Don’t they know that if they touch the butterflies’ wings, they’ll die? Did no one teach them to Leave No Trace? She looks around at the overflowing trash cans, the parents wielding aerosol sunscreens, and worries that this is why there aren’t more butterflies here today. Or is it global warming, pesticides? So many potential reasons why the monarch population is declining precipitously; she should really get her mother to plant milkweed in the garden.

Olive stops and presses her hand against the cool glass of a display case to stabilize herself.

“Olive,” she says with a note of disappointment in her voice. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”

underclass girls believe there are secrets to a better life that will someday be unlocked, like the upper levels of a videogame, once they are able to drive a car or procure alcohol or get their braces off.

“Olive.” A voice yanks her back to the present. Her eyes fly open to see Mrs. Santiago, the school counselor,

I would stand around at parties on South of Market rooftops, my hoodie pulled up against the fog, and make proclamations like “There’s no real freedom until all information is free” and “The true democracy of the digital revolution spells the end of traditional power structures.” And when I sat down in front of my computer and wrote these things down, they got published and read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that somehow made them true. I was twenty-six years old in the new millennium and the whole world was changing and I was at the very forefront of it.

Dig nom

in Billie, I felt like I’d found a missing part of myself, someone whose bold life complemented my own intellectual bravado.

If this was what love was—the feeling of giddy expansion mixed with raw vulnerability, the sense that someone finally understood the texture of my heart—I knew I would be crazy not to seize it.

I must have forgotten my vigilance. Because in the end, I didn’t manage to keep her safe at all.

Half a million views. He wasn’t initially aware of this fact—having not posted the video himself (he still hasn’t figured out which of the four hundred memorial attendees did it)

“It could be a memoir about your marriage to this modern supermom icon, and how your love was torn apart by tragedy,” the agent, Jeff Freels, told him. “Like a modern retelling of Love Story, but true.”

“We need to put notices in several national newspapers, notifying Billie that we’re looking for her.”

“Let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. We’re supposed to put messages in a newspaper for a dead woman to read?”

“Even if Billie were alive, she wouldn’t be reading classified ads. A newspaper classified? Do they even still exist? Has no one in the court system heard of Craigslist?”

“You can look it up, if you like.” Her voice is apologetic. “Code 12406(b)(1). Diligent search and inquiry. It specifically says newspapers.

Something along the lines of”—she pauses—“ ‘If you have any information about the whereabouts of Sybilla “Billie” Flanagan’—what was her maiden name again?” “Thrace. But she never used it. She was estranged from her parents,

And then ‘please contact’ with the phone number of the police.

Jonathan feels his precarious edifice collapsing around him, what little hard-won recovery he’s managed dissolving like a castle made of sand. What is going on? Is this some belated emotional fallout from Billie’s death? Should he get Olive to a therapist? Or, Christ—what if it’s a brain tumor?

it’s hard to give up hope. It took me a long, long time to accept that she was gone, that we weren’t ever going to find her.

It’s possible she’s still alive, right? They never found her body. That’s why they won’t issue a death certificate! They think there’s a chance she could have survived.” “That’s just the standard legal process.”

“They do that for any case where there’s no body, as a matter of procedure. It doesn’t mean that anyone believes that she could still be alive out there. Not anymore.”

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

I’d think of my own mother, worn down after the death of my sister—sweet but defeated; supportive but incapable of really understanding me—and

“I always wanted a secret hideout when I was a kid,” she said. “Once I built one in my bedroom, and you know what my father did when he found it? He knocked it to the ground and then took me down to the basement and shut me inside.

Perhaps we were not doomed to echo our parents after all; perhaps we truly had the ability to write our own life stories, to change the endings if we wanted to.

With Billie, I felt the freedom in this possibility.

Flotsam of little importance—just stuff—and yet together it somehow added up to a human being, each worn-out sandal or solitary earring a moment, a decision, a reflection of taste and opinion.

grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)

the laptop’s electronic eye blinks slowly,

she feels herself swell with the wonder of it all—the world is so vast and so beautiful and so forever—and

her eyes are enormous and rheumy behind thick prescription lenses.

Sure, she’d been flirting with a mutual friend right in front of me, but I had been included, so what was the harm?

In the tech industry, one’s sex appeal is predicated entirely on the mysterious wiring of one’s brain (and its subsequent ability to generate profit).

His friend lumbers through the world with the grace of a man who knows that he has been blessed: blessed by being the right kind of person, with the right skill set, in the right city, in just the right era.

he wonders if the cube purports to answer all the world’s questions or if it is intended as a repository of universal doubt and anxiety.

The victorious white spire of the new Bay Bridge passes overhead; in the distance, the cranes of the Port of Oakland crouch like praying mantises, surrounded by the carcasses of empty freight containers.

dream research scientists: The mind is neither sensible nor scientific. As the quantum physicist Max Planck once wrote, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

Dm

Olive looks at her father. Behind his glasses, the skin around his eyes is tender and raw, and for the first time, Olive wonders why her father does not seem as excited about the possibility of Billie’s ongoing existence as she is. Does he know something she doesn’t? She is trying to figure out how to ask him when he starts the car and, with one final flick of his eyes toward the motel, pulls back on the interstate. The moment passes.

Maybe love comes down to your issues aligning with someone else’s, tongue into groove. Your neuroses, all that baggage from your past, somehow the perfect match to theirs:

You need someone to take care of, and they need to be taken care of. You long for someone creative, they need someone stable. And so forth.

Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

Jonathan hung his favorite Graham Greene quote over his desk: A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

The job of a writer, he’d learned over time, was not to try to tell a story in its entirety, but to tell an inevitably abbreviated version in the most interesting way one could. Giving shape and direction to something otherwise formless and elastic.

Isn’t life itself kind of a hallucination? Just atoms clumping together and then coming apart, firing into life and then falling away again.

The classroom doors bang open one by one and release a murder of Claremont Girls, skirts flying in their haste to raise their blood sugar levels.

Her hair circles her face like a halo, wild and out of control, clipped haphazardly over one ear with a kid’s butterfly barrette. Olive looks at the barrette admiringly—Natalie never seems concerned about what anyone thinks of her—and then takes a bite of her sandwich, resisting the urge to reach out and smooth down a particularly unruly curl of Natalie’s hair.

Something in her mother’s hand: a match.

Her mother had looked at her sideways: “Whatcha think? Should I do it? Burn it all down?” No, Olive thought. Don’t. But it was too late, because already a wall of flames was jumping across the horizon, so real that she could have sworn she felt the heat of it pressing her backward.