Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

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

Or no name at all just a web of lines that

resembled letters

Her mind filling them in as

Raquel smelled the bacalaão on his fingers

bit down

into his thick palm

until her teeth broke the skin

until she tasted what lay

beneath his skin

his blood

beginning to

and he began to

she’d never been stunning

never publicly revered

but never weak never hidden

never crazy

gone

the man behind her

yanked at her hair

jerked her head back

if there is a gun in a purse

its bullets traceable to no one

her finger bent

and the trigger went off

Emma felt the ricochet up through her body, the loudness of the blasts detonating in her head. Yet she was still standing, still pressed against the brick wall, still conscious enough to see Flamenguinho’s man pull open the same door and vanish.

Across the alley, a plume of smoke rose from a bag of garbage, releasing burnt specks of plastic and cardboard and a new scatter of roaches. A few meters beyond the burning bag, Marcus was writhing on his back and clutching his leg, and this time Emma did not consider Raquel. She rushed right toward him, but Raquel was already closer and reaching him faster, restrained Emma with her arm, Stay back! she shouted at Emma. I just shot my brother, for God’s sake.

But Emma crouched beside Marcus anyway, tried to undo the knot to get the burlap sack off his head but he kept thrashing and the knot was tight. One side of his shorts was blackening with blood and each time he shuddered the blood darkened faster. We need to make him a tourniquet, she said. We can use my tank top. She started to pull it off but Raquel told her to stop.

Just move back, Raquel insisted, pulling a cotton headband from her purse. As she knotted it around Marcus’s thigh, Emma felt something along her own leg, and thought she must be imagining it from staring so fearfully at the blood pooling around Marcus. But then the rat twitched its hairless tail against her hand and she screamed.

I said get back! Raquel yelled again and this time Emma obeyed. When the ambulance arrived and the EMTs poured out, she stayed where she was. Raquel did all the explaining. With so many people speaking at once, Emma could only grasp fragments of what was being said. Metal things kept snapping on the gurney. Someone finally cut off the burlap sack and she saw the swollen, horrible state of Marcus’s face before he turned away and Raquel ducked after the EMTs into the ambulance and there was nothing to do but mutely take a step back and watch. Emma knew the distance — how far to retreat to be respectful yet still present. To remain available yet silent. To quietly withdraw until she was flush up against the dirty bricks of the alley wall.

Once again, my friends, Beatriz Yagoda has kicked the bunda of Brazilian literature. We may not know where she is, but here at Radio Globo, we’ve just gotten word that she has a new book coming out, so somebody must know where she’s hiding.

The line for a copy is going to be as long as the anaconda and it’s going to sell out fast. So do yourselves a favor, my friends: put your shorts on and get to the Travessa bookstore now. Or you could skip the shorts and get there faster, but if you get arrested or assaulted while reading naked on the bus, you are on your own.

All the images had been there. The only thing Rocha had to do was give each one the space it required. Or so he explained to the interviewers from the magazines who had received the galleys of the new book and kept calling, pushing him to reveal where Beatriz was. He had no problem taking a little perverse pleasure in withholding information. There was an art to the elegant evasion of an answer. But when the questions were about the book itself, how much he’d worked on it with Beatriz, he got nervous. He couldn’t entirely recall what he’d done with the manuscript on his plane ride back from Salvador. In his mind, there was just the rapture of those hours, the thrill of them, all the way up in the sky with his pen, editing each passage down to its intrinsic perfection.

But even that thrill felt sickening now as he stood in the air-conditioned marble lobby of his building with the package someone had left for him earlier that morning. Inside the package, covered in Bubble Wrap, was the cheapest sort of knife, its blade crusted with blood, and the following note:

BOA TARDE, SUGAR DADDY,

YOU’RE ALMOST THERE.

$200,000 MORE AND I WILL LEAVE YOUR FAGGOT FRIEND