Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

  For the first time since she arrived in Brazil, she felt a longing for Pittsburgh, for the alphabetical order of the books above her desk and the plaintive meows of her cats, cries that required no more than a can opener and Fancy Feast to resolve.

  She longed for her classroom, for her fastidiously maintained binder of attendance sheets. She even longed for her shared crappy office, to be sitting in a place where passion was nothing more than a conversation, a posturing to be defended behind a desk with a cup of tea.

  If Miles cared enough to come here for her, maybe she would be a fool not to return with him. What was she doing here holding this other man’s ear? She didn’t know if she was in love with Marcus. For now, it didn’t matter.

  Matter: From the Latin word for the woody part of a tree, derivative of mater, mother. 1. Something that can be perceived by one or more senses—an ear, for example, as seen by an eye. 2. A subject to which a person may refer without having to name it, as in: A woman stared at the matter on her lap.

  Emma switched the hotel phone from one ear to the other as she waited for Raquel to respond to the news. Yet however she held the phone, she felt horribly aware of her ears, felt them hotly against her head.

  Raquel, are you there? Should I read… Would it be better if… Her grasp of Portuguese felt suddenly, irremediably inadequate. On the other end, she heard water running, sobs, something clattering against the porcelain of a sink.

  How much more do they want? Raquel rasped into the phone.

  Forty.

  Call Rocha.

  And you’ll call the police?

  Fuck the police, Emma! Ave Maria. They never find anyone who’s kidnapped. They’ll just sell the report to the newspapers. Cops get paid shit here. This isn’t your country, okay? Do you get that? You don’t understand what’s going on! Raquel was wailing now and Emma didn’t know what else to do but go on listening and staring down into the shoe box at Marcus’s ear.

  In the next room, the lovers had turned on the shower and the woman was belting out Marisa Monte’s “O Que Você Quer Saber de Verdade” in a shrill, prickling falsetto. Emma wished she could ask for them to switch rooms, as she couldn’t leave this one. What if Marcus managed to escape and stumbled here, clutching at the bloody wound where his left ear had been? To figure out that it was the left, she’d had to imagine the clotted, withered edge of it against the side of her own face, on which side it would curve in against her head.

  You get Rocha, Raquel told her. Call him right now.

  Emma said of course, she’d call immediately. When Rocha balked at the amount, she clutched the Nike box against her body with one hand and told him Raquel had reached a deal with Flamenguinho. He originally asked for sixty thousand, she lied, but we told him we could only bring him forty and he said that was enough.

  Or that’s what he’s saying until you send the money.

  But he already backed down from what he originally asked for. Her face flushed at her audacity. But what else did she have? Audacious stories were how she had come by her Portuguese. They were what had drawn Rocha all this way to Salvador.

  She asked him if he had another suggestion. If he thought it was really an option to just wait for this man to send Marcus’s other ear tomorrow.

  No, of course not. I’ll wire the money to Raquel’s account again. I hope you’re correct that this is the end of it.

  Obrigada. Emma thanked him, hearing the Yankee clang of her accent in a way she hadn’t heard it in years. She’d learned the language too late to ever get the r’s right. Every time she spoke it was unavoidable: she released a fleet of mistakes.

  Two women who disliked each other huddled on the edge of a hotel bed like sisters. For some time, they had been hunched this way over the tiny screen of a phone, waiting for the alert of a new email to appear. While they stared, one of the women thought of a story the other’s mother had written. It was about a tribe in which no one looked each other in the eye, believing that such avoidance could ward off the arrival of jaguars. After the occasional animal slunk off with a baby in its jaws, the women would meet in the shade to grind their manioc and lower their heads more intently. They would murmur about the heat, listening for the judgment in the others’ voices.

  On the edge of the hotel bed, the two women made a similar effort not to look up from the phone if they sensed that the other had just done so. As is the nature of avoided events, it happened anyway. They both looked up at once, their faces so close they had no choice but to stare into the dilated pupils of the other. They saw the loosened skin over each other’s eyelids, the creases fixing deeper into the other’s brow. They were in their midthirties now and, as at any age, there were jaguars.

  They saw this in each other’s eyes and looked away.

  To: raquel.yagoda@gmail.com.br

  Subject: obrigado você

  GOT THE MONEY, AMIGA.

  I’LL SEND THE ADDRESS FOR THE ALLEY SOON. SOMEONE WILL MEET YOU THERE TOMORROW WITH YOUR BROTHER.

  YOU CAN COME WITH YOUR PRETTY AMERICAN BUT NO ONE ELSE. I HAVE CONTACTS YOU DON’T. CALL THE COPS AND YOU’RE ALL DEAD.

  Once again, Raquel found herself having dinner on American time at a sultry 6 p.m. The only Brazilians around them in the restaurant were the waitstaff. All the diners were tourists, many of whom, Raquel found, didn’t seem to notice that they kept scraping their forks against their plates. Emma had insisted on this irritating hour on the pretext that she absolutely had to be in bed by eight, and she kept neurotically checking the time.

  The way Emma was knocking back the caipirinhas tonight, however, Raquel wasn’t sure whether Emma was going to make it to her room. Why don’t you try and relax a little? Raquel told her. We’ve got a meeting scheduled. We’ve done everything we can.

  But what if my lie to Rocha backfires? What if right before we’re supposed to meet and get Marcus, they ask for more? It could happen. Emma tipped the rest of her drink into her mouth. At every other meal, Emma had been a sipper, bringing the edge of her glass to her lips as hesitantly as a hummingbird at a feeder. Raquel had found that this inhibited way of sipping diminished some of the pleasure of her own drink. But watching Emma now, gulping down a third caipirinha like a glass of water, was even more disturbing.

  Emma, take a breath, would you please? Raquel leaned toward her over the table. Flamenguinho’s going to get his money. We need to act like we trust tomorrow he’s going to do what he agreed to. If you’re going to be this nervous, you shouldn’t come.

  To the alley? I have to go with you. It’s too risky to show up alone.

  Raquel was worried the opposite might be true but didn’t say so. It seemed just as likely that having Emma along would mean an extra liability. Before dinner, Raquel had called Thiago for advice. He said that kidnappers in Brazil didn’t usually bother with gringos and that he didn’t have much patience with the pasty bastards either. He was more concerned for Raquel, he told her, and wanted her to call the cousin of a cousin. He’s the Hertz of handguns, Thiago had explained. He rents them by the day. He’s got a lady’s pistol for you up in Bahia that’s as easy to fire as a cigarette lighter.

  Raquel asked how much something like that would cost.

  Mulher, please. He won’t charge you, Thiago told her. The man is family, and he owes me a favor.

  Emma stepped into the one clean dress she had left. She put on the filigree earrings she’d picked out online for Miles to buy for her last birthday. She used up her hand cream and trimmed her cuticles, grooming herself like a high school girl because it filled the minutes and she was rather inebriated, but also because she could not decide about Marcus’s things, whether to hide them in the closet.

  Until now, she’d been stepping around the red snug-fit boxers Marcus had left on the floor. They were still balled up with one of her sweaty unwashed dresses. She had also yet to touch his backpack, which was still open and leaning against the side of the bed. With each hour he’d been missing, his things and how he’d left
them had accrued more meaning. She didn’t know if she could betray their location for Miles’s sake.

  In translation, this kind of dilemma was known as domestication. A translator could justify moving around the objects in a sentence if it made it easier for her audience to grasp what was going on. She could even change an object into something more familiar to the reader to avoid baffling him with something he wouldn’t understand. It often occurred with food—with a fruit, for example, that the reader wasn’t likely to recognize and therefore whose sweetness he could not imagine.

  The problem with domesticating things this way, however, was the possible misplacement of truth. Emma had made a practice of keeping this dilemma out of mind, of trusting that she was experienced enough now to intuitively know what could be moved and what couldn’t—when the location of an object was, in fact, its meaning.

  Which is perhaps why she tripped over the boxers and hit her face on the dresser when Miles knocked on the door.

  Jesus, Emma, are you all right?

  Miles lifted her chin to see where the blood was dripping from, if it was from her forehead or closer to her eye. You smell like a distillery, he said. How much have you been drinking here?

  Emma pushed past him into the bathroom, her hand over her face. Even with pressure, there was enough blood to pink the towels and the water pooling in the sink. She didn’t feel much pain, although after four caipirinhas she wasn’t feeling much of anything.

  Let me see it. Miles hovered over her in one of his baggy Adidas T-shirts. He was so much taller and more intentional, so much more determined to be right. She didn’t want him to declare the degree of her injury, even if the concern in the set of his mouth was genuine. Or just familiar. Or the familiar thing was more the smell of his aftershave.

  It’s definitely stopping, he said, but your eye’s swelling up. Have you been drinking like this the whole trip? No wonder you’ve lost all sense of reality.

  Miles, please. Just stop. She tried to back away from him but the toilet was right behind her.

  But I don’t understand what’s going on, he said. If you think getting married means we have to have kids right away, we—

  Because everything comes down to having children, right? You’re just like your mother. You reduce everyone to that one decision. You think you have everyone figured out that way, but you don’t. It’s just your own toxic righteousness. I can’t stand it! She pushed against him, through him, whatever she could do to get out of the bathroom. But he stayed pressed up close to her, denying her accusations, until they were out of the bathroom and had reached the red boxers balled up with her sundress on the floor.

  Whose are those?

  Marcus’s.

  Her son’s?

  Emma watched the muscles around his mouth tighten as he scanned the room, looking for other evidence of her betrayal. And it was there: the open mouth of Marcus’s backpack, his green-striped beach pants by the bedside table, one of his sweaty shirts on the floor.

  Miles started to bend over and Emma lunged to retrieve the backpack before he could reach into it, but that wasn’t what he was after. He grabbed the notebook off the bed and held it up.

  Is that prick a writer now, too? he yelled at her. Is that why you’re sleeping with him? So he’ll let you translate him next? You’re fucking pathetic, Emma.

  He doesn’t write. It’s mine. She reached for the notebook but Miles held it higher, out of her reach.

  What do you mean, yours? Can’t you see you’re sabotaging yourself for things you didn’t even write? Who even cares about these weird stories? I mean, come on.

  With the book still above his head, he flipped to a page and tilted his head up to find something to read back to her. She scrambled onto the bed to grab the notebook but he moved away.

  On the bedside table, the hotel phone rang and startled them both. It was Raquel calling with the news that Flamenguinho was going to return Marcus in an hour. If you want to be there, she told Emma, you need to get in a taxi now.

  In all the confusion, Emma saw that Miles had lowered the notebook, and she grabbed it. Could you spell the street? she asked Raquel, writing down the street name just below the passage she had been about to finish, the eternal translator raising the mirror the court had finally placed in her hand.

  To enter an alley in the dark.

  To have to repeat this scenario and tell herself it was not the same. There was not just one way for a woman to enter an alley. She would not be the small gray mouse that meekly surrenders to the jaws of the snake. Thanks to Thiago, this time would be different. If you have to use it, use it, he had told her. The bullets in it aren’t traceable.

  In her hotel room, Raquel pulled out the gun one last time and felt a comfort at its heaviness. For a second, she gently ran the muzzle along her arm. Blushing, she nestled it back in her purse.

  Emma opened the door with her sandals unbuckled. She couldn’t bother with the clasps now, not with Miles pushing at the door, telling her if she left the room now it was over.

  I came all this way, he said.

  She told him she had also come a long way, that she was sorry she had gone in a different direction. She told him she felt ashamed to be doing this to him. They’d run alongside each other for five years, matching each other’s breath for the considerable length of their fading industrial city. To breathe that hard next to someone for so great a distance had felt radical. Yet as often occurred with radical endeavors, the runs became oppressive. After a certain point, they stopped laughing and no longer paused to watch the birds on the bridge. They never lingered in bed instead of running, never read to each other. They’d just kept at it, harder, stopping only to hydrate or for an occasional ache. Emma knew she was likely leading herself toward other, more acute miseries, but she couldn’t consider them now.

  I’m sorry, Miles, I really am, she said one more time as she closed the door from the hallway.

  In her absence, Miles didn’t know what to do. He thought of the slightly tilted porch in front of their house. Of their mailman, Alton, arriving each day and slipping their catalogs and bills through the slot in their door. Of their cats, restless and lonely, tracking over the growing mound of mail. Emma couldn’t mean it. If he could just persuade her to leave here, she would recognize that immediately.

  He took out his lens spray and went to work on the smears on her sunglasses. They were in abysmal condition. Some of the smears were so thick he had to rub at them with his fingernail, but he was confident he could scrape them off.

  And he did—all but one.

  The only light in the alley came from the moon. It was just enough to cast a dim glow over the mounds of trash around the Dumpsters. Emma heard a skittering and then a tinny bang but couldn’t see what creature had prompted it—the actions of a rat or something much larger. The lumpy heaps reeked of all that ended up in alleys: rotting food and fresh feces, the stenches mixing and becoming increasingly toxic in the heat.

  I know you think it’s a bad idea, Emma whispered to Raquel, but we could still call the—

  Raquel covered Emma’s mouth to cut her off and then took her hand. Emma thought Raquel was consoling her until Raquel jammed her fingers into the leather purse she was carrying and Emma felt the metal object inside it.

  Oh, God, she said in English, and all the terror she’d been denying in Portuguese released itself inside her. She’d crossed a significant line in coming here. Raquel had given her so many chances to back out, but she just kept implicating herself further, luring Rocha and his money. She’d had to do it for Marcus, but hadn’t there been, and there had, also the invitation of it, to walk all the way to the edge for once, to—

  Clap!

  A door flew open behind the Dumpster to their right. Raquel clutched Emma’s arm as cockroaches streamed into the center of the alley, skittering over Marcus’s flip-flops as he staggered out the door. His T-shirt was brown down the front with dried blood and there was something tied over his head. A
burlap bag, knotted around his neck with a thin rope.

  Raquel ran to him but Emma held back to let them embrace first. Or because she had already seen it, the shadow of the man emerging behind Marcus, his shape growing larger, his arm reaching into the waist of his pants for—

  the sickening click

  of a trigger

  the first blast and the bag still

  Marcus slipping on the trash

  the wrappers and roaches

  the burlap over his face

  the nature of shadows

  being their lack of detail

  the inability to know precisely how big and near and

  Marcus calling

  Raquel twisting in the man’s hold

  Emma at the wall considering whether to

  If she moved and

  If there’s a gun on the table

  It must go off

  But if the gun is in a purse

  If there are two guns

  And the protagonist is holding neither of them

  If the graffiti is red and large

  on the opposite wall

  LUISA FLAKS YOU WERE THE ONE

  THE ONE THE ONE

  Or the wall displayed another name