The Art of Disappearing

by Ivy Pochoda

  Olivia picked up a sandwich and went to a small chair in the far corner of the studio. “Now what?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. I guess we wait.” I unfurled the patches that had sprung from my hands last time I’d been in the studio. I threaded my needle and began to join the two quilts together.

  “Do they tell the same story?”

  I leaned in close to the quilt. “I don’t know. The first part has never said a word.”

  Olivia finished her sandwich. “Well, if you made it, I’m sure it has a lot to say.”

  I laughed.

  When I’d finished joining the two parts, I ran my fingers over the whole, wondering when Toby would appear. His actions, his desert magic, were visible, but Toby himself was absent.

  Olivia finished her sandwich. “I think I’d better leave you alone.” She touched the quilt on her way out the door.

  I continued to look for Toby. But instead of hearing the magician, a new voice piped up. It came from the first part of my quilt, the part I’d begun in my early days out West. I located the patch, a tangerine bouclé taken from a Southern California hotel.

  “He said he loved me, but I never really believed it. We were young. He was a magician. I was an assistant. I’ve read all the books. The magician falls for someone else. Well, that’s not exactly how it went down.” Eva paused. “At first no one noticed, you know,” she scoffed. “Everyone was so distracted by how great his trick looked that no one in the audience imagined I was gone for real. You know the rest. And you could have stopped him from doing it again.”

  Before I had time to reflect on what Eva had said, a familiar voice piped up. “It was cool for a little while, being dead. When they heard about it back at my high school, everyone was talking about me. One girl even said that she saw me in some parking lot. Like I’d be hanging out in a parking lot! But then—” She snapped her gum again. “—then people sorta started to forget. Something else happened. Some local girl made it into a movie or whatever, and no one thought about me anymore. It totally sucked!”

  When these two fell silent, I folded my hands and waited for my magician to speak. Just as my hand grasped a package of needles, I thought I heard his voice. It seemed to be coming from the Navajo marriage blanket—the scratchy wool a perfect vehicle for Toby’s voice. I leaned in close, but the words were indistinct. I let the red-and-black wool rest between the scissors’ blades, wondering if the woman who sold us the blanket had been wrong and that the only way to save my marriage was to destroy the blanket. I look a deep breath before letting my scissors race through the blanket, disrupting the geometric patterns, severing the cloud colors from the desert colors. It didn’t take long to reduce the blanket to strips and squares. I wondered how these shapes would work their way into my patchwork. I kept cutting.

  Finally, I reached for a needle and thread. I started sewing. The needle flew in and out of the fabric, creating a pathway of stitches that drew Toby and me together again in the dark desert. There he was, as he was meant to be, arriving at my table in the Old Stand Saloon. It was as if my patchwork had been waiting for his arrival. It seemed to shine and come to life. The glittery fabrics of Las Vegas sparkled, the desert reds hummed, even the oceans—Max’s domain—vibrated.

  “I’d been waiting for the two of you to come along.” My needle trembled. My hand paused, allowing me to look at the patchwork maze. A black-and-white-checked fabric had appeared among the desert reds. It spoke with the voice of the waiter at the Old Stand Saloon. “I’d been waiting and I’d been hoping. Magic doesn’t come to town twice in one week.” When his voice faded, absorbed back into the fabric, my needle resumed its pace.

  Soon the pieces of the marriage blanket were scattered among the desert squares. They stood astride the glittering, synthetic casinos and beneath the torpid swaths of sun. And from a square where the blanket intermingled with patches of white velour and red Vegas sateen, I heard a new voice. “They come and go, the couples. I don’t really take no notice anymore. Maybe they in love. Maybe they drunk. Maybe she pregnant. Joo know? But they pay, they marry.” The white velour from which the voice was coming gave a rattling cough. “But joos was different. Joos was meant to marry. Marry and then some. I say to myself, I’ve been waiting for a couple like this.” Then the priest fell silent.

  My needle had come to a rest. The patchwork continued to vibrate. I shook off my thimble. “So,” I said to a scrap of the blanket, “I’m waiting” I tapped one of the Navajo scraps.

  “I was waiting for you that day. And you made everything better.”

  “Until I couldn’t.”

  “It’s not important how we came together. We fell in love.”

  If you can conjure me, you can send me away, I almost told the quilt. But these were words meant for Toby.

  When Toby fell silent, I turned to the Max shapes, hoping to be comforted by my brother’s voice. I let my eyes run along the quilt, watching Max’s story unfold. I saw his escape into the river. I saw our swim with the whale. And then I came to the patch that told of my fall through the ice—a patch I’d sewn during my last stint in the studio, capturing the muddy brown of the hill and the cherry red of Max’s coat. This patch looked different now, fuzzy and unraveled. Unlike the Max patches that led up to this one, my sewing seemed careless here and imprecise. I closed my eyes, trying to remember both the patch and the day it recalled. My recollection was just out of reach. I folded the quilt away and ran toward the villa. On the pathway, I collided with Olivia. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  “The rabbits,” she said. “The ghost rabbits. They’re back.”

  We arrived at the hutches, where Leo and the Christophs were staring at three rabbits snuffling about the enclosure.

  “Just three?” I asked.

  Leo folded his arms. “Erik always expected more. I expected less.”

  Now a rustling came from the woods behind the hutches.

  “I indulged him. I always thought that this was some sort of joke.” Leo looked at the three lost bunnies. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  I was about to share Toby’s theory on coincidence, when the rustling grew louder. Then came a rolling wave of white, not from the sky but from deep in the pines. It poured through the trees and slipped over the carpet of needles.

  “Rabbits,” Leo said, dropping his arms to his sides.

  Hundreds of rabbits were gliding over the ground like mercury. They came in waves. They slipped around tree stumps and hopped over roots.

  “The rabbits,” Leo said again.

  Soon the hutches were teeming with the ghost rabbits.

  “They’re real,” one of the Christophs said, pulling a woolen hat over his ears.

  “Where do they come from? Where were they?”

  Leo looked at me.

  “I wonder if Toby found the rabbits,” I said.

  “Toby?” Olivia asked. “What does he have to do with the rabbits?”

  In the low light, the rabbits’ fur was ghostly white. Their outlines melted into one another.

  “I think Toby’s magic is confusing the past with present.”

  The forest was silent once more. The rabbits were snug in the hutches.

  “How did they know where to come?” Olivia wondered, picking up a rabbit.

  “They’re lucky,” I said. “Someone was waiting for them.”

  “Leo,” she called, “come. They’re soft, like pom-poms.”

  Leo wasn’t listening. He was staring past the hutches and into the woods. “He knew. Erik knew they would come back. I wonder.” I looked into the pen. The rabbits’ pink eyes had taken on a piercing glow. Their shifting forms made me uneasy. Leo was still staring into the woods. “The rabbits came.” He took a deep breath. “They came like a blizzard. But he’s not. He shouldn’t.” Leo wound his fingers through the fence. “He left by choice, wandered off in the middle of a hiking trip. We are from a flat land. Erik should have known better to fool with mountains. The leade
r of the expedition simply said that when he turned around, Erik was gone. I’m not sure whether he wanted to leave for good or he simply got lost. All I know is that he’s not coming back. But the rabbits, they never had any choice. They were sent away. Whatever magic claimed them doesn’t last forever. There’s some comfort in that.” Leo watched three rabbits squeezing into the same hutch. “Somehow Erik knew.”

  I nodded. “Maybe there are no perfect tricks,” I said, thinking how the cocoon of magic that trapped Eva on her mesa slowly began to dissolve.

  “I wonder where they’ve been?” Leo said.

  “I have an idea,” I replied, wondering what words to use to describe the intermediate world of Toby and Theo’s magic. “It’s not a happy place. But one that can be escaped. Had Toby found the rabbits as a way of atoning for his mistakes, or was their return just a by-product of his explorations of the Dissolving World?

  Leo put an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go back to the villa. You will have a bed to sleep in instead of the studio floor.”

  A fire was blazing in the main hall of the villa.

  “Something happened to my quilt,” I said to Olivia when we were alone. “Some of the images of my brother are fading. They’re taking my recollection of Max with them.” I bit my lip. “My memory is all I have left of my brother.”

  “Why is it happening?” Olivia sat forward in her chair.

  “Toby’s playing with the past. He doesn’t think it will affect the present. But it does.”

  “He’s making your brother vanish?”

  I told her about the Dissolving World.

  Olivia had only one question. “Where was the last place you saw your brother.”

  “In the ocean.”

  “So, tomorrow, that’s the first place we’ll look.”

  Sixteen

  Olivia and I set off early the next morning into an escalating storm. We took the train through a countryside that was stretched as flat as a fitted sheet. It had been placed on the ground with impeccable care in a palette of greens, browns, and grays. Rows of perforated depressions that marked the path of the harvest ran perpendicular to the canal and bike path—a drab Mondrian print bordered by slate-color roads. Two-story farmhouses with red-brown roofs sprang from the dull land as if from the pages of a pop-up book. Each disruption of the flat landscape surprised me. But soon the appearance of the houses established a rhythm that fell into sync with the clatter of the train wheels—simple chords that marked time over its persistent drum roll.

  Olivia and I rode in silence, letting the train cut through the advancing storm. Finally we arrived at the beach town and found a tram that would bring us to the sea. The tram rattled through half-deserted streets. The swelling storm gave the city a hollow sound. As we approached the beach, the air grew damper. Sand, borne by the wind, dirtied the tram windows and crusted our lips. The beach seemed to be coming to us—the sticky mix of salt and sand that I hadn’t tasted in years.

  The tram deposited us in front of a grand hotel, asleep in the off season. The pennants flying from its towers danced madly in the rough wind. The sea was hidden behind a wall of shuttered surf shops where towels, visors, Frisbees, and sunscreen hibernated until late spring. A promenade of more empty stores inside a dirty glass atrium led back to the beach. Iron grates were pulled across the arcades. The video games sat blindly in their cages. Seaside souvenirs smiled sourly inside the darkened stores. As we walked, our footsteps echoed like the march of giants.

  “I’m not really comfortable around the ocean,” I said, catching sight of the gray sea for the first time. “I haven’t been near it since Max left.”

  Olivia took my hand. “It’s going to be fine. This is the best place to show you that Toby can’t control everything.”

  I looked through the salt-sprayed window of the atrium at the furious water and wondered if I dared to look for my brother, I could retrieve the memories that were slowly fading.

  Olivia didn’t let go of my hand as we left the atrium and headed down the boardwalk. “I’m sure your quilt is every bit as powerful as Toby’s box,” she said.

  “It’s just a quilt.”

  “It’s better than magic. It’s real.”

  “I always thought of my quilting as some sort of map or time line,” I said, my voice trying to outdo the wind and crashing surf. “Toby ruined that.”

  “No. I’m sure you’re wrong. We’re going to find some new memory of your brother that will bring the old ones back.”

  Since the day Max swam off, I’d always turned away from the water. But now, I knew I needed to face it. And maybe if I understood what remarkable force called him off, I would know how to find him before he swam further from my mind. I’m not sure how Olivia understood this. When I asked, she simply told me that she’d learned it from my description of my quilt.

  To the far left of the horizon, a vertical funnel of storm clouds rose. It arched over the sea and the land until it disappeared into the city at our backs. As the black clouds started to move toward us, the wind kicked up the sand in stripes. Waves of sand crashed from the beach onto the boardwalk. I looked at the furious water. The ocean was devouring the beach—the waves curling across the shore in the same direction as the thrashing pennants flying from the hotel’s domes. I couldn’t imagine Max forsaking land for such a forbidding climate.

  Across from us on the boardwalk a long, two-story covered pier ran straight over the sand, and then out over the sea, before forking into two cupolas. We started down it, but as we prepared to cross the border of sand and sea, I stopped. In the distance, a pair of kite surfers were being swept into the air by the wind. Once airborne, they twisted and flipped, before crashing back into the ocean. The sea nipped and growled at their feet. It tore and gnashed against the rocks and poles on the pier’s underbelly.

  “You see,” Olivia said, leading me into the pier, “you’ll be safe from the water.”

  I looked out to the point where the water melted into the sky. Like Bermuda, where the turquoise water was sewn to the turquoise sky, the North Sea was joined to the somber Dutch heavens. We arrived at the end of the pier and stepped out onto a ledge. At that moment, the thunder cracked, shaking the pier. I watched the kite surfers running for cover.

  “Okay,” Olivia said, “let’s see what charmed your brother.”

  I tried to listen to the call of the water above the screaming wind. I watched the waves merge and crash, duplicating and reduplicating into dozens of patterns. The color of the water changed from dark to light as the waves approached the pier. I wondered what it felt like to be wrapped in the arms of the stormy sea. I was sure that Max knew how to submit to the water’s power.

  I gripped the handrail and forced myself to look deeper into the water, searching for his slippery shadow. I took a deep breath and let the wind tangle my hair. Soon I grew accustomed to the arrhythmic chomp and swirl of the waves. And for the first time, I could see the possibilities of the ocean. Like my quilt, it was a breathing creature, evolving before my eyes.

  Within the tumultuous waves, I now saw patterns of foam and undertow. I was able to tease out a variety of shades from what I thought was a uniform gray. I knew that each of these shades would sing to Max the way my fabrics sang to me. I imagined him weaving his way between them, summoned by their songs to explore deeper parts of the ocean.

  I closed my eyes as the memories of Max came back, rushing like the return of the ghost rabbits. I leaned forward, letting the spray brush over my face and the salt sting my eyes. Then I felt Olivia take me by the waist and lead me back into the covered pier.

  “You see,” she said.

  I nodded. We sat on a bench, and I took out my quilt. The Max figures had all established themselves in their places, all except for the one that told the story of my tumbling through the ice. This figure and the details of that day were gone for good.

  “Let’s go,” Olivia said.

  “No, I’m not ready. I want to get closer to the water
.”

  We left the shelter of the pier and walked back to the beach. We crossed the sand and came as close to the water as we could without being struck by the pounding surf. I pulled Olivia to the ground and wrapped the quilt around our shoulders, protecting us from the flying sand and sea and wind. Olivia uncorked a bottle of wine, and while we drank, I listened for the first time to the songs Max loved.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “About Toby?”

  She nodded.

  “The magicians were wrong when they told him he conjured me to his side.” I watched the foamy tip of a wave crawl toward our toes. “I’m sure we were meant to meet that day, but it wasn’t solely his doing. Toby needs to understand that not everything he touches is magic.” I dropped my head. “I miss him, but even when we are together, I feel lonely. I’d rather be alone.”

  Olivia inched closer to me.

  “Toby and Max think they are incapable of loving me, or anyone, as much they love something else. I watched for years as my brother slipped away until the day he left for good. I thought that there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I didn’t try to pull him back. I won’t make that mistake twice.” We sipped our wine and watched the waves tangle with one another. “He’s fading,” I said. “Like the Max figures on my quilt faded. I need to bring him back or I’ll lose him for good.”

  Olivia squeezed my hand. “I hope you understand that it isn’t you they are escaping from.”

  From the corner of the street, I could make out a person in a puffy red coat standing in front of Piet’s house. Even from a few feet away, I detected the scent of pot and wasted time that billowed from Amsterdam’s black-lit coffee shops on a tide of trippy music.

  “Can I help you?”

  The red coat turned, and I thought I recognized Jimmy, Greta’s boyfriend. “The magician’s friend,” he said.

  “Wife,” I corrected.

  “Sure. Whatever.” Jimmy’s eyes were glazed and red. He looked at the ominous gray of the sky. “Does it always rain so much here?”