Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

Emma felt her heart lurch. Would you leave now? she asked, but Marcus shrugged.

There’s no point, he said. They already ravaged me. I’m a man without an ear.

At the mention of the ear, he retracted his hand from under Emma’s and closed his eyes. Every consolation she could think of felt inadequate, so she said nothing. She wasn’t even sure where to look. Certainly not at his bandaged ear, and not at his neck, which was collared in awful, raw-looking blisters where the rope had held the bag tight around his skin.

And the book, Marcus said with his eyes still closed. Did you bring it with you?

I did. She reached for her bag. I didn’t know if you’d want to hear your mother’s—

I meant yours. What you’ve been writing.

Emma leaned into him as if they were on the ferry again with a damp wind against her back. When Marcus leaned to meet her mouth, something beeped on the machines. Must be the libido reader, Marcus said, but the beeping didn’t stop. It got faster and shriller. Marcus kissed her harder, and Emma shifted her weight to her wrists, bracing for whoever would enter to attend to the machines and find her there, leaning too far over the bed to pull away.

Another poor rapaz from Minas, my friends, is locked up for good. In record time, the police say they have the man who kidnapped Yagoda’s son. But the poor rapaz they picked up can’t write his own name. Here at Radio Globo, we’re wondering how he wrote the ransom notes. Would a loan shark with serious cash have a record of stealing gasoline?

And so, my friends, the great circus of Brazilian justice goes on.

The arrest played on the morning news while Raquel sat on her hotel bed. She was finishing off the soggy remains of a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria while she texted Thiago. If she did at least three tasks at once, she felt less conscious about eating so many meals this way, alone.

Do you think that man, she texted Thiago, could kidnap the rice and beans off his own plate?

She swallowed a bit more of her soggy sandwich and reread the message, regretting having sent it. Since the gun, Thiago had offered so little. He took hours to respond, and when he did, the only jokes he made were about giving her job to Enrico if she stayed away much longer — Enrico, who was so cocky and inept they’d spent entire meals making fun of him.

The police believe this arrest may lead to the return of beloved writer Beatriz Yagoda, the newscaster announced, brushing her bleached bangs out of her face, and Raquel clicked off the TV. She also kicked the remote to the floor, then her phone, which made for several desperate seconds of searching when it began to ring.

It was only Rocha, however. In his standard aloof voice, he reported that he’d received a letter from her mother postmarked from the remote island Boipeba. Her request, he said, is for you to go to her.

Raquel looked down at her filthy clothes on the floor, her tank tops wilted with sweat, her yellowed bras. The one well-cut linen dress she’d brought was now stained in two places, though she’d continued to wear it anyhow. She’d even begun reusing her underwear.

Rocha explained that the letter had been very brief, and Raquel nodded, not aware that she’d begun to cry until she wiped her face. And my mother thinks, she said, that she can just send a note through you and I’ll jump on the next ferry to Boipeba?

My dear, you are free to do with this information as you please.

Am I? I don’t feel particularly free. Raquel yanked open the desk drawer to get the notepad she’d seen there. What’s the name of her hotel?

Well, I had my assistant look into the matter and I think you might find her at Pousada do Sol. Your mother’s only remark was that she was lodging at the one with yellow umbrellas.

All she gave was the color of the umbrellas? Puta que o pariu! Raquel sank onto the bed. She knew this was just the sort of outburst that a man like Rocha would recoil from and she should calm down. He was their only savior.

And what am I supposed to do about my brother? she yelled anyway. Leave my mother’s translator in charge? Emma doesn’t understand anything about Brazilian hospitals.

The translator will be adequate, Rocha said. I really have to go, dear. Um beijo.

Alone again with the little that remained of her soggy hospital sandwich, Raquel turned to her phone to cope in the way of her generation. She tapped the screen and began to search for things.

There was a catamaran to Morro de São Paulo. Then she’d have to take a speedboat. There didn’t seem to be a direct route, but with her mother there never had been.

She scrolled down for the boat schedule but found only a single time: one chance a day at 10 a.m.

She had fifty-three minutes.

Chance:From the Latin cadentia, that which falls out. 1.A force assumed to cause events that can neither be foreseen nor controlled, as in: She could find her mother only by chance and a yellow umbrella. 2.A fleeting, favorable set of circumstances. See also:gamble, hazard.

The boat’s horn was sounding when she arrived, the motor already chopping at the water. Raquel called down the dock for the ticket man to wait, the wheels of her suitcase stuttering over the planks. He gestured for her to take her time, that she was fine, but once she started to run she couldn’t stop. She was still panting as he lifted her luggage onto the boat and told her to relax. She wasn’t the last one. A man had gotten out of a taxi just behind hers.

Pulled up right after you, the ticket man said.

And he’s coming down the dock now? Raquel felt her throat closing. He’s followed me, she said. I’ll give you forty reais if you lift the plank now. Please. She reached for his thin, veiny arm. He was an old man, his eyebrows white and bushy, the skin folding in around his mouth. My ex-boyfriend is terribly violent, she said, scraping around in her wallet for cash.

She held out sixty reais and he said, Está bom, menina, already lifting the ramp.

As they pulled away, she didn’t let herself look. With a face, he would only haunt her longer. She thought of her mother’s pages and wondered if her mother had been able to keep her eyes shut. Alongside the catamaran, the blunt edge of the dock was behind them.

They were onto the water now and on their way.

Although he lived in front of the ocean, Rocha did not stop to watch it. To do so had come to feel like a cliché. Yet this morning, he could not resist. And so ten steps behind him the temporary bodyguard he’d hired for himself and Alessandro stopped as well. To be followed all day in this manner was exasperating, but until the services he’d paid for were completed, he had no choice. He had taken his free movement for granted.

He had also forgotten this splendid breeze, how one couldn’t feel it without coming to a stop completely, although it was not really the ocean that he was considering now so much as Raquel moving across it, how long it would take her to reach Boipeba. He found her a rather tiresome young woman, but imagining her alone on some boat full of tourists, he felt an ache for her.

Even if she did find her mother, the conversation, or lack of it, would be excruciating. Beatriz would fix her gaze on some gloomy incongruity on the beach — a plastic spoon jutting out of the sand, the hand of a broken doll, some dying bird. Raquel would see her mother looking away and would want more, much more, and who could blame her? Didn’t he want more from Beatriz? Didn’t everyone?