Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

To fill those wonderful pockets with all the German cigars in Brazil.

To smoke them all.

To work up the nerve slowly,

smoking,

to say it.

To tell your daughter about the blood that ran down your legs and stained your sandals in a restaurant bathroom just after you married her father.

To leave out for your daughter the brief interval of time between the bleeding in the restaurant you called a miscarriage and when you felt pregnant again, to tell her you wrote the sequence the way you did for the sake of story.

To speak of this bleeding to her and then retreat into adages about craft and beauty.

To make no mention of the truth about the interval, that it had been less than a day and the doctor said it was the same pregnancy, that it had been spotting, not a miscarriage, because you were certain he was wrong — it was another baby now and you had chosen the father.

To hold on to this certainty the way one holds on to a coat or a word.

To have made a coat of words and cloaked yourself in it.

To have lifted yourself into an almond tree.

To have climbed higher and higher as you had as a child and recall the same breeze carrying the same scent of almonds, and before you could fall there was your father below, waiting to catch you.

To endure the fact that you were on an island, doing nothing but smoking, while one of your children’s ears was delivered to a hotel in a box.

To know the self-loathing that is having brought harm to your son, to both of your children, to have nothing to hide in from this loathing but the dirty coat again.

To hear your daughter say it has the odor of a stranger.

To be this stranger she speaks of.

To find that being a stranger to her all day is like having a fever, your skin burning with it, and meanwhile your daughter seething, unable to bear you.

To watch her leave on a boat through glasses you sat on and which you can’t fix in this place where you’ve heard them call you Widow.

To glimpse now, as she goes, just enough splinters of your daughter through these broken glasses to know.

To wager that her boat has become a hyphen against the water, a comma, and then

By the time Rocha clicked to the right channel he’d missed the last of the flames. All the cameras were showing now was the ash, blowing in gusts like swarms of locusts, or like something more minuscule that couldn’t be captured on TV — clusters of atoms or electrons, the spectral bits of a mind too extraordinary to leave the world in the ordinary way of simply getting old and waiting for disease.

Then, at last, the camera zoomed out and he saw the hotel sign and the yellow umbrellas, how much of the back half of the building had been blackened into a cavity of ashes. A young man from the island who worked at the reception desk was speaking into a microphone, but Rocha put him on mute. He couldn’t stand to hear the analysis of some bellhop in flip-flops. He’d already heard the island people going on about her odd cigars, how the fire had surely been an accident. But Beatriz had told him and he’d missed it. She’d said the island was the right place to end and he’d read the sentence only as it pertained to him and the book of hers he’d published, as her gracious way of letting him know she was not appalled by what he had done with her pages. He’d read the note only for what it said about his skill, his worth to her as an editor.

Even now, watching the brigade of shirtless men from the island splashing buckets of water at the room in which she’d caught on fire, Rocha could not think of her actual body. Only of her sentences, of Luisa Flaks in the bathtub letting the suds and water flow over the edge and on and on, of how Beatriz had insisted that he misunderstood, that language was what had to be restrained, not the woman she’d invented, not the water pushing over the edge, onto the floor.

And now even the ash was unclear. A speck of soot or sand had gotten stuck on the camera lens, or a smear of water.

Goddamn it, fix it! Rocha shouted at the TV like an old man. But the smudge remained.

Eliminated. That was the word the service had used when they called to let him know that the loan shark was finally gone. They had found him. Rocha’s sister had insisted that he hire two services, as one was sure to be incompetent. To pay multiple criminals to find and kill someone on his behalf, to condone a murder, to write a check for one, had made Rocha feel morally loathsome. He’d always thought of himself as more principled than his siblings. He’d indulged himself as they had, but had thought he was different, that when it really mattered he would stick to his principles in a way that his complacent brothers and sisters never would. But it wasn’t true. When Marcus was kidnapped, Alessandro had suggested the possibility of hiring a hit man, but Rocha had chafed at the suggestion. Hire a murderer? Endorse such an industry? He’d told Alessandro that the country would never move forward if law-abiding citizens made a practice of hiring murderers to kill one another.

But he had done it. He’d hired a murderer. Several of them. He was a man who kept to his principles at the expense of other people’s lives but not his own. Not his lover’s. And now there was nothing to do but watch this worthless, sooty footage of a burning building on the TV along with everyone else.

As the boat rose, Raquel held on, clinging to the railing with everyone else. After each wave, the nose of the boat smacked down with such violence they all crashed against their seats. You know the moon is the reason, an older woman clenching the railing next to Raquel said. The woman began to describe her last boat to the mainland just before a full moon and Raquel nodded politely, only half listening, as she didn’t plan on taking another boat to Boipeba after this one. She wouldn’t be abandoning her exactly. She would just send Marcus instead. He would be able to stand seeing their mother carrying around that dirty coat like a homeless person. She’d send along a new pair of glasses and some fresh clothes and sandals. He would come and decide when it was safe to bring their mother home. It was his turn to make the call. Raquel didn’t want to do it again, not this time.

Look at that! The chatty woman beside her pointed to what looked like another jagged wave until Raquel saw it, a long gray line breaking the surface of the water — the tremendous back of a whale.

Then, just as suddenly as it had risen, it sank again.

João wasn’t hungry.

But his mother had made him coconut bread and insisted.

So he ate for her.

And his mother hovered, brushing the cinder from his hair.

Emma was extracting hair from her brush in the bathroom when she heard Miles on the other side of the door shouting something about Beatriz. She clicked on the bathroom fan to drown out the sound of his voice. Despite her efforts to be frank with him, he’d refused to leave Brazil or get another room. On long runs, she had admired Miles’s ability to continue at any cost. His determination was contagious, perhaps never more so than now, in Brazil. With Miles unwilling to budge, Emma had decided her only course was to leave herself. There was no shortage of hotels in Salvador. Once the hospital released Marcus this afternoon, they would simply head to another.