Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

In Brazilian Portuguese: Flamenguinho, after the Rio de Janeiro soccer team Flamengo, its colors red and black.

Toxic alkaloid/poison level:Highly variable, often fatal.

The esteemed literary publisher Roberto Rocha liked to test his steaks to see if the meat was worth what he had paid for it. The test had to do with the density of the smoke once the steaks began to sizzle. With the works of fiction he selected for his press, he tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.

He had not come across such a manuscript in years. Everything that appeared in the stack on his desk bored him within the first forty pages. Even the works he agreed to publish struck him as cheap, dry cuts now, something synthetic in their flavor. He wished someone had warned him that devoting his life and inheritance to a literary press would leave him this overweight and cynical. Of course, if they had, he would have written off that person as an imbecile and a philistine.

Senhor Roberto? His assistant, Flavia, knocked on the door and ducked her head in. The mail came. There’s a letter from your cousin Luisa.

That’s nice, he said, since I don’t have a cousin named Luisa.

Maybe it says Laura Flaks. Or Lourdes? The handwriting is a little odd. Flavia pushed up the thick dark-rimmed glasses all the literary girls wore now and handed him the envelope.

The surname Flaks did ring a bell, though not for anyone in his family. Rocha was fairly certain it was Jewish.

Caro Roberto, the letter began, I hate to ask this, but I hope that given the circumstances, you would be kind enough to help a cousin in a hard spot hide out for a week at the hotel below.

How perfectly bizarre, Rocha said.

And then it came to him: the bubble bath scene in the opening pages of the novel that had put his press on the map. Luisa Flaks with her head back, her long wet hair spread out like a spider web against the porcelain of the tub. Sensual, ordinary Luisa reclining in the bath, or not quite ordinary, as she’d had the nerve to resist turning off the faucets, had let the water spill steadily over the edge of the tub and across the tiles and seep into the apartment below, had let the spill go on until her skin had shriveled at the center of her fingertips and her toes and she could no longer feel her backbone against the porcelain. Rocha had been concerned that the scene was too extreme, that the descriptions dragged on too long, but Beatriz had insisted that was the point: to push everything — the amount of water, the details. To take all of it too far.

The novel had been the only book Rocha had ever published that went into a second printing within a month. After her next book won every major award in Brazil, he’d encouraged Beatriz to leave his press for a larger, international house. He hadn’t wanted to hold her back. He’d hoped she might continue to share her drafts with him, and she had. Every one.

In the other desk, he said to Flavia, is my checkbook. Would you bring it here?

A light rain began to slant across the deck as Emma boarded the ferry. Despite the drizzle, two boys by the prow were taking out a pair of battered-looking guitars. Others, including Marcus, had taken advantage of the benches under the roof to stretch out and nap through the ride.

Emma was too exhilarated to rest. She sat down at the end of the long bench where Marcus was sleeping so she could keep watch over his bag. Pittsburgh, Miles, her job — all of it felt like a skin she’d shed on the plane. Even English and who she was in it felt discardable, or at least until the long-haired boys at the prow began strumming the chords to “Redemption Song.” A girl with a necklace made of brightly painted beans started to sing the lyrics. Before long, a whole group was crooning “No Woman, No Cry” at a decibel and tenor that were impossible to tune out.

Emma turned to share her dismay with Marcus, but his eyes were closed. All across the open deck, people were making pillows out of each other’s laps. The rain was blowing more sharply now, and Marcus had stretched out along the bench in such a way that his head was nearly touching her bare knee.

She tried to slide down to a more appropriate distance but Marcus just stretched out longer, moving toward her in his sleep, or perhaps it was more intentional.

What she did know was that no 10K run with Miles would ever lead to a ferry ride in a mist like this. The thought arrived just as Marcus tipped his face back, his full, soft mouth so close she could feel his breath against her thigh. When something flashed brightly off to her left, she thought, Lightning.

Bom dia, Brazil!

Here at Radio Globo we like to get the morning rolling with some news about love, and Rio’s new heartthrob, Marcus Yagoda, has found it, my friends, in the arms of his mother’s translator. The still-missing author was a sizzler once herself and we’ve got the photos to prove it at globo.com.

Why her son was seen on a ferry off to holiday on Ilha Grande instead of looking for his mother in the trees of her fair city, we don’t know. But let’s wish him well, my friends. He is a son in strange waters, which seems as good a reason as any to fall in love.

Raquel opened the newspaper to the gossip page to look at it again. She’d gone out earlier for some fresh pão de queijo but had no desire to eat now. In the photograph, the rain and low gray sky over the ferry made her brother and Emma look like refugees fleeing a civil war, surviving a storm on passion alone.

Raquel had texted Marcus ten times, though she knew he wasn’t likely to be awake yet. With all the press their mother was getting, he should’ve considered that there might be a journalist on the ferry, and to fall asleep on Emma’s lap that way was bound to result in a headline like South African Author Still Missing, Son Rests on Her Translator.

She’d seen enough women gaze at her brother’s face to know what would happen next. By tomorrow morning, the two of them would be searching for Emma’s underwear in the hotel sheets instead of searching the island. They weren’t going to find her mother there, but regardless, it was the reason they’d left Raquel here to sit panicking alone over the bounced checks and overdraft fees multiplying with each mail delivery. The debt was far beyond anything they’d ever asked the aunts in São Paulo to cover, and Raquel couldn’t bear to call and hear what they would say.

This morning, before the paper arrived, she’d broken into her mother’s online poker accounts. It hadn’t taken long to figure out the password. Their mother used the same combination of birth dates for everything. The amount of money her mother had bet and lost was staggering. It had gone on for over two years, and most of the loss was under the name O Sapateiro, the Shoemaker — what her mother’s father had become when the money he’d brought from Johannesburg ran out. Raquel could remember sitting in his shop, watching him stare mystified at his own tools. In South Africa, he’d been a lawyer, but his limited Portuguese had made that impossible in Brazil.

Now his daughter had created an even more impossible situation. Reading through the mounting losses in her mother’s accounts, Raquel felt a shrinking inside her. She should’ve gone ahead and called Thiago yesterday. Now it was Saturday and she couldn’t. He would be with his wife and their sons. She’d followed him to PetroXM, thinking that they’d have an affair eventually, but Thiago seemed too decent for that, or feared she would be the type of woman who would push him to leave his family, and he would be right. She would.