Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

  Outside the bathroom, the apartment was so quiet she could hear the thrum of cars along Rua Barata Ribeiro, or perhaps it was something closer: the persimmons and maracujá softening in the kitchen, or the murmur of her author’s books on the shelves, questioning when she might return.

  On her last trip to Brazil, Emma had stood next to Beatriz just outside this bathroom and confessed that she hadn’t been quite as dutiful in her last translation as in Beatriz’s earlier books, and Beatriz had replied that duty was for clergy. For translation to be an art, she told Emma, you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an artist makes.

  With Beatriz gone, what might qualify as a necessary transgression was even less clear. In coming to Brazil in her author’s absence, she had put herself on trial. In the bathroom mirror, Emma stared at the reflection of her hand, the brush in it that was not hers but to whose bristles she had just added a layer of her hair. In her mind, a medieval courtroom appeared. The walls were made of stones and her view was from the stand. Dozens of spectators were squinting at her, and looking down at herself, she saw why. Her hands and arms had turned hazy at the edges. Her legs, too. When she reached up to touch her face, it was like passing her hand through vapor. Yet everyone in the gallery was staring in her direction. They could see her, or at least found her legible enough to be tried for her alleged crimes.

  Emma tried to think from what book or movie she could be recalling such an odd court scene. Unless perhaps the image hadn’t come from elsewhere and was hers, something she’d been storing up for some time but hadn’t been able to recognize as her own until she found herself alone in this apartment and had lifted this brush to her hair. Until she’d heard the snap of her own strands trapped in its bristles.

  Raquel picked up her phone to call her boss then decided against it. Thiago had become more than her boss in the nine years they’d been working together, but how much more varied unpredictably. To call him when she was this upset could be a mistake. He might think she couldn’t handle the brutes running the strike up in Minas and he’d give the negotiations to Enrico.

  She sat down on her bed. She could always call Marcus but knew she’d hang up feeling lonelier. They’d just disagree again and most likely he was already on the ferry with Emma. Raquel objected to the trip. She’d admitted that she didn’t have any better ideas about where to search, but that was no reason to take a trip based on some story her mother had written twenty years ago. Emma was like all her mother’s pretentious admirers who thought they had a special understanding of her mother because they’d studied her books. But they knew nothing of her mother’s days in bed after calling the aunts in São Paulo for rent money or occasionally for no reason her mother could name. She’d just go on lying there, still as a crocodile with her reptilian-green eyes, listening if Raquel spoke, but unwilling, or unable, to answer.

  If her mother was hiding on an island, Raquel was certain it would be one much farther away. Ilha Grande was too close to Rio and full of bourgeois bohemians. Her mother wouldn’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of bobos in flip-flops smoking pot while they texted on their iPhones. The government had dynamited the prison years ago. Raquel had watched the explosion on the news with her mother. As the prison fell, her mother had pointed out the birds flapping upward out of the trees and said, Look, the birds are collapsing into the sky. Raquel had looked reluctantly for the birds through the smoke. She would have liked to have spoken with her mother just once about what was actually happening. A demolition.

  When people asked what it was like to be the daughter of someone who came up with such peculiar stories, Raquel told them the truth. She’d never read her mother’s books. She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?

  True to the nature of public transportation in Brazil, the ferry to Ilha Grande was running an hour late. Emma, true to the nature of anxious travelers everywhere, took the opportunity to head to the nearest Internet café. Her inbox contained two messages from Miles but she didn’t open them. She’d paid for only ten minutes and wanted to search for the genus of toad she’d discussed with Marcus in the cab. In English it was called the red-belly.

  Scientific name: Melanophryniscus montevidensis.

  In Brazilian Portuguese: Flamenguinho, after the Rio de Janeiro soccer team Flamengo, its colors red and black.

  Toxic alkaloid/poison level: Highly variable, often fatal.

  The esteemed literary publisher Roberto Rocha liked to test his steaks to see if the meat was worth what he had paid for it. The test had to do with the density of the smoke once the steaks began to sizzle. With the works of fiction he selected for his press, he tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.

  He had not come across such a manuscript in years. Everything that appeared in the stack on his desk bored him within the first forty pages. Even the works he agreed to publish struck him as cheap, dry cuts now, something synthetic in their flavor. He wished someone had warned him that devoting his life and inheritance to a literary press would leave him this overweight and cynical. Of course, if they had, he would have written off that person as an imbecile and a philistine.

  Senhor Roberto? His assistant, Flavia, knocked on the door and ducked her head in. The mail came. There’s a letter from your cousin Luisa.

  That’s nice, he said, since I don’t have a cousin named Luisa.

  Maybe it says Laura Flaks. Or Lourdes? The handwriting is a little odd. Flavia pushed up the thick dark-rimmed glasses all the literary girls wore now and handed him the envelope.

  The surname Flaks did ring a bell, though not for anyone in his family. Rocha was fairly certain it was Jewish.

  Caro Roberto, the letter began, I hate to ask this, but I hope that given the circumstances, you would be kind enough to help a cousin in a hard spot hide out for a week at the hotel below.

  How perfectly bizarre, Rocha said.

  And then it came to him: the bubble bath scene in the opening pages of the novel that had put his press on the map. Luisa Flaks with her head back, her long wet hair spread out like a spider web against the porcelain of the tub. Sensual, ordinary Luisa reclining in the bath, or not quite ordinary, as she’d had the nerve to resist turning off the faucets, had let the water spill steadily over the edge of the tub and across the tiles and seep into the apartment below, had let the spill go on until her skin had shriveled at the center of her fingertips and her toes and she could no longer feel her backbone against the porcelain. Rocha had been concerned that the scene was too extreme, that the descriptions dragged on too long, but Beatriz had insisted that was the point: to push everything—the amount of water, the details. To take all of it too far.

  The novel had been the only book Rocha had ever published that went into a second printing within a month. After her next book won every major award in Brazil, he’d encouraged Beatriz to leave his press for a larger, international house. He hadn’t wanted to hold her back. He’d hoped she might continue to share her drafts with him, and she had. Every one.

  In the other desk, he said to Flavia, is my checkbook. Would you bring it here?

  A light rain began to slant across the deck as Emma boarded the ferry. Despite the drizzle, two boys by the prow were taking out a pair of battered-looking guitars. Others, including Marcus, had taken advantage of the benches under the roof to stretch out and nap through the ride.

  Emma was too exhilarated to rest. She sat down at the end of the long bench where Marcus was sleeping so she could keep watch over his bag. Pittsburgh, Miles, her job—all of it felt like a skin she’d shed on the plane. Even English and who she was in it felt discardable, or at least until the long-haired boys at the prow began strumming the chords to “Redemption Song.” A girl with a necklace made of brightly painted beans started to sing the lyrics. Before long,
a whole group was crooning “No Woman, No Cry” at a decibel and tenor that were impossible to tune out.

  Emma turned to share her dismay with Marcus, but his eyes were closed. All across the open deck, people were making pillows out of each other’s laps. The rain was blowing more sharply now, and Marcus had stretched out along the bench in such a way that his head was nearly touching her bare knee.

  She tried to slide down to a more appropriate distance but Marcus just stretched out longer, moving toward her in his sleep, or perhaps it was more intentional.

  What she did know was that no 10K run with Miles would ever lead to a ferry ride in a mist like this. The thought arrived just as Marcus tipped his face back, his full, soft mouth so close she could feel his breath against her thigh. When something flashed brightly off to her left, she thought, Lightning.

  Bom dia, Brazil!

  Here at Radio Globo we like to get the morning rolling with some news about love, and Rio’s new heartthrob, Marcus Yagoda, has found it, my friends, in the arms of his mother’s translator. The still-missing author was a sizzler once herself and we’ve got the photos to prove it at globo.com.

  Why her son was seen on a ferry off to holiday on Ilha Grande instead of looking for his mother in the trees of her fair city, we don’t know. But let’s wish him well, my friends. He is a son in strange waters, which seems as good a reason as any to fall in love.

  Raquel opened the newspaper to the gossip page to look at it again. She’d gone out earlier for some fresh pão de queijo but had no desire to eat now. In the photograph, the rain and low gray sky over the ferry made her brother and Emma look like refugees fleeing a civil war, surviving a storm on passion alone.

  Raquel had texted Marcus ten times, though she knew he wasn’t likely to be awake yet. With all the press their mother was getting, he should’ve considered that there might be a journalist on the ferry, and to fall asleep on Emma’s lap that way was bound to result in a headline like South African Author Still Missing, Son Rests on Her Translator.

  She’d seen enough women gaze at her brother’s face to know what would happen next. By tomorrow morning, the two of them would be searching for Emma’s underwear in the hotel sheets instead of searching the island. They weren’t going to find her mother there, but regardless, it was the reason they’d left Raquel here to sit panicking alone over the bounced checks and overdraft fees multiplying with each mail delivery. The debt was far beyond anything they’d ever asked the aunts in São Paulo to cover, and Raquel couldn’t bear to call and hear what they would say.

  This morning, before the paper arrived, she’d broken into her mother’s online poker accounts. It hadn’t taken long to figure out the password. Their mother used the same combination of birth dates for everything. The amount of money her mother had bet and lost was staggering. It had gone on for over two years, and most of the loss was under the name O Sapateiro, the Shoemaker—what her mother’s father had become when the money he’d brought from Johannesburg ran out. Raquel could remember sitting in his shop, watching him stare mystified at his own tools. In South Africa, he’d been a lawyer, but his limited Portuguese had made that impossible in Brazil.

  Now his daughter had created an even more impossible situation. Reading through the mounting losses in her mother’s accounts, Raquel felt a shrinking inside her. She should’ve gone ahead and called Thiago yesterday. Now it was Saturday and she couldn’t. He would be with his wife and their sons. She’d followed him to PetroXM, thinking that they’d have an affair eventually, but Thiago seemed too decent for that, or feared she would be the type of woman who would push him to leave his family, and he would be right. She would.

  She wanted him here now, slurping a beer beside her, spewing vulgar jokes about her mother’s poker skills, jokes that were so outrageous that she would be laughing despite herself. Even Thiago would have known to lay off when the amount of money lost passed half a million and her mother hadn’t stopped. In a panic, or goaded by Flamenguinho to recover his investment, her mother had gone on playing as if gambling online were no more than a tale she had invented, as if she were still a child and didn’t know the difference, still the daughter who made up ghost stories for her father while he resoled the boots of strangers.

  The thought filled Raquel with resentment and longing. It was like sitting in the hot car again, waiting for her mother to return. Once, the wait had been treacherously long. The temperature in the car had gone on rising until she felt dizzy, the hot seat painful against her skin. Her eyes kept getting drier, her thoughts blurring in her head. When her mother finally rushed up to the car, sweaty and upset and apologetic, Raquel assumed she’d gotten lost. Her mother didn’t explain, and Raquel had been too afraid to ask.

  Marcus jumped up from the table. That was her, he said. That was my mother. I’m sure of it.

  The rain was shattering down outside the restaurant as if someone had smashed a glass pitcher. Marcus ran into it anyway, and Emma felt obliged to follow. The first two times he’d been convinced he’d seen his mother on the island, both women had turned out to be tourists from Germany. Now, around the corner, Marcus and Emma startled a small freckled woman from Australia.

  I’m sorry, Marcus said as they returned to their table, water dripping down their foreheads into their eyes.

  It’s okay. It’s hard to see in this rain. Emma mopped her face with one of the napkins from the dispenser on the table, but it was futile. Like the napkins in all cheap Brazilian restaurants, they were plastic-based and made her feel like she was wiping her face with a garbage bag. She had lost her stamina for startling foreigners in the rain. If Beatriz was on this island, it was going to be on the other side, where the ruins of the prison were, and where none of the boatmen would take them until the storm passed.

  I’m getting cold, she told Marcus. Don’t you want to put on some dry clothes?

  I don’t mind. You go ahead. I’ll keep looking.

  She nodded, swatting at the mosquitoes feasting on her ankles. She hoped she’d get a respite from them in her room, but the mosquitoes were there as well, sneaking in through the holes in the window screens and between the planks of the floor. The only place to avoid them was under the grimy netting draped over the bed. Trapped beneath it, scratching at her bites, Emma opened the various books she’d brought to read but was too itchy to get into any of them.

  She pulled out her notebook. The courtroom scene that had come to her in Beatriz’s bathroom had continued to return. Each time, her mind took her a little further into the scene and the images wouldn’t let go of her until she’d written them down. She didn’t know if she was embarrassing herself by taking the scene seriously enough to record it, but what did she have to lose? She was so good and humiliated already, having insisted on this trip to Ilha Grande with such confidence that she’d led her author’s son to believe finding his mother might just be a matter of running enough times into the rain.

  Hunched under the mosquito netting, Emma uncapped her pen. In the courtroom ceiling above her translator’s hazy head there surely would be a hole. For two thousand years, when it rained anywhere in the world, it had rained over the translator. When it snowed, surely the jury would accuse the translator of hiding behind the snow.

  Emma was just about to begin another page when she heard the slap of flip-flops outside her room. You left your sneakers out here, Marcus called through the door.

  I know. They were too wet to bring inside.

  Well, there are ponds in them now. And some tadpoles swimming around. I could hang them up for you.

  Emma opened the door and Marcus raised her sneakers, so waterlogged they hung from his hand like slippers.

  I hung mine from the ledge above the toilet, he said, and she moved aside so he could carry her sneakers past her with his liquid ease. Above the commode, he lodged the shoes at a tilt, knotting their soggy laces to the curtain. See? This way they won’t fall in the bowl, he said, and, turning around, gestured toward her bed, and sh
e stepped away. He was going to ask her if she wanted to have sex. He was going to offer up the idea as casually as suggesting a game of Boggle.

  But he only pointed to her open notebook on the bed. So you write, too, he said.

  Oh, no, I don’t write. She backed up. I was just, you know, taking notes.

  To: eneufeld@pitt.edu

  Subject: alive?

  Emma, please answer already. I’m sorry I went off like that in the car but you didn’t even tell me before you bought your ticket. I can’t stop checking my email and the cats keep meowing for you at the bathroom door. They think you’re hiding in there, reading.

  More notes?

  Marcus came up behind her on the balcony the next morning in a pair of orange swim trunks, the waistband so low that she could see where the muscles sloped toward his groin.

  Oh, yes, just more boring translator notes. Emma flipped the journal shut. Knocked out of the trees by the wind overnight, dozens of jackfruit now lay splattered on the ground, their insides sugaring the air. Emma wasn’t sure if it was their scent or the wet mangy dog on the balcony that was making her sneeze.

  I don’t know how many more days I can wait out this rain, she said, and blew her nose again.

  We should probably go anyway. He handed her the gossip section from yesterday’s edition of O Globo. Emma immediately recognized the ferry in the photo and the sylphlike sprawl of legs and arms of the man beside her. But what was that look on her face?

  Somebody who didn’t know better would say it was desire—what a man will deny himself until he can’t. Beatriz had written the line at the close of her story “Santiago Martins.”