Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  There is something in the pocket of his sweatshirt, a sharp edge poking through the fabric. He pulls it out and realizes it’s the Lost Years Polaroid of Billie and her ex-boyfriend, Sidney. Two kids wrapped possessively around each other, staring defiantly out at the future. He glances at it and tosses it aside in the passenger seat.

  …And then picks it up again, struck with a possibility he hadn’t considered before. A different face for that faceless man in his apocalyptic visions: Sidney.

  He came back, didn’t he?

  His mind reaches back to the day, three years ago, when an envelope arrived in the mail with a return address for a correctional facility up in Oregon. Jonathan fished the letter out of the pile of catalogs lying in a heap below the mail slot and carried it, curious, to where his wife stood in the kitchen prepping dinner. He popped it in her line of sight and watched as her mouth went tight.

  “Do you think it’s from Sidney?” he asked.

  “Who else?” She carefully cleaned her fingers with a kitchen towel, plucked the envelope from his hand, and examined it. Then she reached over to the stove and turned on the gas burner, holding the edge of the envelope to the flame until it blackened and ignited. Turning, she walked back to the sink and let the letter burn until it was nearly scorching her fingers before dropping it into the stainless-steel basin. The envelope smoldered for a moment, the neatly inked capital letters of her name and address—MRS. JONATHAN FLANAGAN—flaring bright against the paper; and then it collapsed into ashes. Billie turned on the faucet, sending a sludgy black spiral down the kitchen drain.

  He watched her, shocked. “Jesus. Not feeling very conciliatory?”

  She turned back to face him, wiping her hands dry on her jeans. She leaned against the sink, gripping the edge of the basin behind her. “Whatever’s in there, it’s nothing that I need to read.” There was something false about the calmness of her voice, as if she had to work very hard to stay in control.

  “You aren’t curious?” He was curious.

  “I’m sure it’s some attempt to make amends, one of those Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step things.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I really don’t want to know. All that is so far in the past now, and I’d like to keep it there. So why open a door if I’m not planning on walking through it?” She turned back to her cutting board and resumed slicing bell peppers into neat finger-sized ribbons.

  He lingered behind her for a few moments, strangely disturbed by what she’d done. The way she’d held the envelope to the flame suggested a violence of emotion that surprised him. It felt almost as if she’d burned the letter to shut Jonathan out of some critical part of her past. That’s silly, he told himself at the time. She didn’t even read the letter. She didn’t even know what it said.

  But now, as he stares at the Polaroid—a picture his wife had hidden from him their entire marriage—he wonders if she did know what the letter said. If it wasn’t the first one she’d received. If, in fact, she’d written Sidney back.

  The car behind him honks, rousing him. He accelerates as alarming questions start to fill his mind. How had Sidney even known where to send the letter? Why was it addressed to Mrs. Jonathan Flanagan, her married name? When had Sidney gotten out of jail? What if they’d rekindled some sort of romance since then? Is it possible that Sidney came to Billie’s memorial not to mourn but to check it out and report back to her?

  As he mulls this over, his phone begins to buzz. He glances at the display—it’s an unfamiliar number. Punching Accept, he turns onto College Avenue just as a woman’s voice comes over his car’s speaker system: “Is this Jonathan Flanagan?”

  “That’s me,” he says.

  “The police gave me your number.” The woman is speaking in a rush. “My name’s Cheryl? I saw your classified ad in the San Francisco Chronicle. Asking for information about Sybilla Thrace? And I just called the number and the guy on the other end, the policeman, he wasn’t very helpful. But he gave me your contact information.”

  Jonathan lets the car slow to a crawl. “You know where she is?” he asks. The car behind him honks, and he turns blindly onto a side street.

  “Sybilla? No!” she says. “I didn’t mean to give that impression. It’s been, what, thirty years since I last spoke to her. But she was my best friend, see? Back in high school.” She laughs, a nervous Haw! Haw! “Anyway, I saw the ad and it was like—wow! You know? Memories. And I thought, well, heck, I always wondered what happened to her. So did she disappear again, is that what the ad’s about?”

  “Again?” His disappointment tempered by curiosity—Is this the friend her dad molested? he wonders—he continues in the general direction of Claremont Prep.

  “Yeah. She disappeared on me, too, back then.” The woman laughs again.

  “She disappeared. On you. Oh—when she ran away in high school?” Something about the woman’s laugh—Haw! Haw!—puts him on edge. He realizes he is driving down a dead-end street, so he does a U-turn and ends up stuck in traffic on Ashby Avenue. The back of the van in front of him is papered with bumper stickers. He fixes on one: YOUR IGNORANCE IS THEIR POWER.

  The woman isn’t laughing anymore. “I tried to find her; everyone did. Back then. She really left me in a bad place. I mean, I don’t blame her! But yeah, it was…hard.”

  Another bumper sticker: YEP, WE’RE FUCKED. “So wait,” Jonathan says slowly. “Can you tell me—”

  “STOP THAT PLEASE, GUYS?” Cheryl’s voice is suddenly overly loud in his ear. “HENRY, I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING, DO NOT HIT YOUR BROTHER WITH YOUR CLEATS. PLEASE, GUYS. DON’T MAKE ME BEG.” There’s a muffled conversation in the background, a shrill insistent yapping, and then she comes back on the phone. “Sorry, my kids just got home from school, chaos is breaking out, I gotta run. Maybe we could get together, though? And talk?”

  “Yes, please,” Jonathan says. “Where do you live?”

  “Fremont.”

  Claremont Prep looms ahead, a thicket of cars stretching out into the street, the usual pickup gridlock. He can see a pack of moms clustering together in the parking lot, wielding commuter mugs, steeling themselves for the onslaught. Jonathan slows his Prius to a crawl, wanting to finish this conversation before Olive gets in the car. “Fremont. OK, that’s not so far. I can come to you, maybe tomorrow evening—”

  “No, no, it’s nuts here in the evenings. You’re in Berkeley, right? I love Berkeley. I’ll come up Thursday afternoon, I don’t work that day, and the kids stay at school late for soccer practice. Be nice to have an excuse to get away.”

  “Black Top Coffee, at one? They make a great cappuccino.”

  “Oh, I don’t drink caffeine,” Cheryl says. “But I love herbal tea.”

  He hangs up and pulls up to the school, too late to park, stuck at the end of a line of idling cars. The big shaggy mansion expels girls in clots, their heads bent together over iPhones, uniforms drooping from the day’s exertions. Olive’s far-too-handsome English teacher, Mr. Heron, hangs out at the top of the steps, collecting the bits of wreckage—dropped sweaters, forgotten notebooks—that drift along in the girls’ wake. A pack of junior girls clusters around him, flipping hair, adjusting skirts, testing out their nascent sex appeal.

  Finally, Olive appears in the doorway to the school. Her coat is unbuttoned despite the chill in the air, and she wears her hair in twin braids that make her look three years younger than she is. There’s a wilting daisy tucked behind one ear.

  Olive heads to the top of the stairs, avoiding the gaggle of girls flirting with her teacher, and then stops, as if distracted. Jonathan taps his horn, a soft beep to snag her attention. Every girl at the front of the school turns to look for the source of the sound—every girl, that is, except Olive, who just stands there, swaying slightly, her gaze fixed on something in the distance. Oh, shit, Jonathan thinks, recognizing the expression on her face.

  His daughter takes a single step forward, misses the top stair entirely, and collapses.

  “SEE THIS DARK MASS
HERE? It’s possible that you have some sort of contusion on your right inferotemporal cortex, some gliosis. It might be from your fall on Monday, but it could also signal a previous minor brain injury of some sort that’s causing your visual anomalies.” The neurologist taps at Olive’s MRI scan with the end of his pen. Tick tick tick. “On the plus side, there’s no sign of edema.”

  Olive and Jonathan stand in the dark in the neurology clinic’s exam room, staring at the slices of Olive’s brain hanging on the wall. Jonathan steps up close to peer at the nebulous dark cloud, his face illuminated by the glow from the light-box. He nods as if everything the doctor has said is acutely clear, although Olive, looking at the same scan, sees nothing obvious at all. Gazing at a cross section of her own head, all she sees is a blobby pattern of grays and blacks, like a bloated branch of coral.

  It’s weird to see the inside of your own body, not at all what she expected. You’d think a glimpse of your own gray matter would be mysterious and magical, but instead it feels like Olive is looking at a bowl of meaningless cottage cheese. Even the shape of her head looks unfamiliar, more round than oval, slightly misshapen rather than perfectly symmetrical. Lumpen. Distressingly organic. Is this what makes her who she is? How can an MRI machine possibly capture anything truly interesting about a unique human existence?

  The technician warned her that the MRI would be unpleasant, but she still hadn’t expected it to be quite so awful and claustrophobic, all that science fiction buzzing and banging and grinding just inches away from her face, which was immobilized in some sort of sadistic metal bracket. Trapped in the tube, her eyes winched closed, she tried to imagine the hydrogen protons in her body obediently turning in unison, spinning like tops in response to the giant magnets surrounding her. Mostly, though, she felt like a hot dog in a movie theater’s warming tray.

  She doesn’t understand it: Why does she even have to be here? Yes, she collapsed in front of the whole school; an ambulance was summoned as Mr. Heron stood watch over her, keeping the pack of girls at bay. Of course they had to go see a doctor. But she thought she’d get her routine checkup and then leave; she didn’t expect her dad to take all this so seriously, to make the follow-up appointment with the neurologist and then to tell him about her visions.

  She thinks of what she saw right before she collapsed and feels her heart pick up its pace, thumping nervously in her chest.

  “Olive?”

  She realizes that her father and Dr. Fishbein are both looking at her expectantly. “What?”

  Dr. Fishbein repeats his question: “Any recent accidents that might have caused this? Car collision, sports injury, particularly bad trip-and-fall? Remember anything like that?”

  Her father studies her, his expression masked by the ghoulish shadows from the light-box. “She hurt her head at school a few weeks ago. Remember?”

  “That?” She turns to the doctor. “It was no big deal. I walked into a wall.”

  “She had a pretty big goose egg.” Her father points to the spot on Olive’s forehead where the bump turned purple, then blue, then faded to a sickly yellow before disappearing entirely.

  The doctor frowns. “You might have suffered a concussion.”

  “I didn’t black out.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Stuff can still get rattled around in there.” The doctor raps on his own skull with a knuckle. “Sometimes the damage doesn’t make itself apparent until a little later.”

  “I started seeing Mom before I bumped my head,” she objects.

  But her father and the doctor are back to studying the MRI. “So, there’s nothing there that’s not supposed to be there? No growths, say?” her father asks somewhat cryptically.

  The doctor shakes his head. He taps the MRI with his pen. Tick tick. “You mean a tumor? No. Definitely not. The only irregularity I’m seeing is this mass here, which, like I said, could be scarring. There’s no certainty, of course, but it seems like a possible cause of the visual anomalies your daughter has been experiencing. Maybe it’s triggering a type of temporal lobe epilepsy.”

  “They’re not visual anomalies,” Olive interrupts, looking to her dad for help.

  But he’s squinting at the doctor: “Wait—she has epilepsy?”

  “Temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s possible. Temporal lobe seizures, they’re very different from the tonic-clonic variety; you know, they’re not—” Dr. Fishbein rolls his eyes in the back of his head and begins to jitter in a rather disarming impersonation of a grand mal seizure. Olive wants to hit him. “With TLE, it’s more like visual, emotional seizures. People who have it experience auras, odd smells or tastes, strange physical sensations, déjà vu, even hallucinations. Sounds similar to what you’ve described. So that’s my guess.”

  Olive touches the MRI scan with the edge of her finger, pressing her thumb against the tiny gray blob that Dr. Fishbein has singled out. Seizures? “But there’s no certainty.”

  “Not unless we slice your brain open, no. Perhaps not even then.”

  She doesn’t buy it. That very morning she awakened to the sight of her mother standing at the end of her bed, looking straight at her. “You’re going to be just fine,” she said, clear as day, and Olive felt so relieved that she started to cry. That wasn’t a random hallucination, a misfiring of damaged neurons; it couldn’t be. Because those words were exactly what her mother used to say all the time, typically delivered in the same matter-of-fact tone. A skinned knee, a bad grade, a fight with a friend: With Billie, it was You’re going to be just fine, followed by a little push on the small of Olive’s back, as if she were a baby bird who needed to be tossed right back out of the nest. The thing was, her mom was right; everything usually was OK. The scab fell off, the grades improved, the friend made up. It used to drive Olive crazy. Not so much now.

  Besides, she thinks, even if the visions are a random firing of neurons in her brain, does that make them any less real? Isn’t her whole personality a random firing of neurons, anyway? Just bits and bobs in the gray mass on that MRI, bumping against each other, making her Olive, whoever that is. What makes any of her real? Who says that a vision can’t be as important as anything else she thinks or feels? Isn’t life itself kind of a hallucination? Just atoms clumping together and then coming apart, firing into life and then falling away again.

  Dr. Fishbein has pulled down the MRI scans and is stacking them in Olive’s file. He leans over and flips a light switch, and the three of them blink in the fluorescent wash, taking in the glaring white lacquer of the cabinets and the informational posters on the walls. Brain vivisections in acid-trip colors.

  “There’s a whole lot we don’t know about the brain. Even I’m baffled sometimes.” Dr. Fishbein seems amused by his fake self-deprecation. “But I’d guess your brain is accessing your memories, repurposing them as hallucinations. That’s where you keep your memories, you know: the temporal lobe. Memories and emotions. So, with this gliosis, this possible TLE, it’s like you’ve accidentally turned on a tap that you don’t know how to turn off.” He reaches for his prescription pad and begins to scribble. “But the good news is, I know how to turn it off for you.”

  He tears the prescription off the pad and hands it to Olive’s dad. Jonathan glances at it and folds it in half. Olive is annoyed: Do they think she is a child who can’t be trusted to hold her own prescription?

  “What if I don’t want to turn it off?” she demands.

  Dr. Fishbein turns with a look of mild surprise on his face. “I wouldn’t recommend that.” He absently clicks the top of the pen. “So, we’ll start you with a hundred and twenty-five milligrams of Depakote, three times a day, take it with food. Plus, you might want to consider lifestyle changes.” He turns to Jonathan again. “Is she sleep-deprived? Under a lot of stress?”

  Jonathan laughs. “She’s a junior in a private high school. What do you think?”

  Dr. Fishbein turns back to her. “Well, both of those are seizure triggers, so stop worrying so much, OK, kiddo? Get some sleep!
Try to have some fun!”

  He pats her on the shoulder and then abruptly leaves the room. Jonathan opens the prescription in his hand, reads it, and tucks it carefully in his wallet. Olive leans back against a cabinet and folds her arms across her chest.

  “I’m not going to take it,” she informs him.

  “Yes you are.” Her father closes his eyes wearily. “I’m sorry. But you heard the doctor.”

  “What happened to believing me?” she asks him, her eyes brimming with tears of disappointment. She thought they had an alliance. She thought he was on her side.

  Jonathan picks up a plastic 3-D model of the brain that is sitting on the bank of cabinets and pulls a lobe out. He turns it in his hand. “Try to see it from my perspective, Bean,” he says. “This is your brain we’re talking about. And I’m not going to take chances with my daughter’s brain. Yes, we both liked the idea of you being psychic, but doesn’t this make a lot more sense? Let’s be honest.”

  “So, what now? You’ve decided I’m just brain-damaged, so you’re going to stop looking for Mom?”

  Jonathan peers into the model of the brain as if he might find it full of jelly beans or lost keys or the answer to the question she’s asked. He gently fits the lobe back into place. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But why would you bother looking for her if you think that what I’m seeing is just a result of misfiring neurons?” Her father is blinking a suspicious amount, and she stares at him, suddenly understanding. “There’s stuff you know about Mom that I don’t. Isn’t there?” Her father gives a tiny ambivalent shake of his head. “ ‘I believe you because I love you.’ That wasn’t true, was it? You think Mom’s alive because you found out something that you’re not telling me.” She’s growing excited. “Dad, you have to tell me.”

  He shifts uncomfortably. “Well, there was the nurse at the home who saw her.”

  She shakes her head. “You already told me you thought she was an unreliable witness. There’s something else, right?”