The Art of Disappearing Read online

  “I do a one-woman Penelope-and-Odysseus routine,” I said. “I’m a textile consultant for the hotel and restaurant industries. So I do both the weaving and the voyaging. Without the Sirens and the suitors,” I added. “Or the sorcery.” I caught his eye.

  “Suitors and sorcery,” Toby echoed. I felt the silk slip of something between my fingers. I opened my hand and released a cascade of rose petals. “Perhaps that is about to change.” Toby looked down at the petals. “I was aiming for whole flowers,” he said, scattering the petals. “I’m distracted.”

  I laughed, crushing some of the petals into my palms, hoping to absorb their scent. “A bit closer this time.” I rubbed a petal between my fingers. “You certainly come prepared. What else have you got up your sleeve?”

  Toby laughed.

  He ordered a whiskey for himself and another wine for me. The sweetness of the wine and the bitter aftertaste of its synthetic container made the flashing slot machines swirl in and out of focus.

  In the beginning, Toby’s arrhythmic speech caught me off guard. His pauses sneaked up unexpectedly, and he swerved from subject to subject like a racecar driver. With no indication to mark the end of our talk, he announced, “I’m off. It’s not that I’m not enjoying myself. It’s just that I’m getting a little tired.” He cleared his throat. “Tired mind. Thoughtless hands. I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

  “It’s been an interesting impression.” I smiled, trying to draw him back but willing to let him go. “Maybe I’ll get to see your show sometime,” I added, even though I was planning to leave Nevada the next day.

  “That might be sooner than you think,” Toby said. “Circe held Odysseus for a whole year just with magic and wine.”

  By the time I’d thought up a response, Toby had vanished into the tangle of slot machines.

  People always say how minutely they remember the details of the moment that changed their lives—let’s say the waltz of light and shadow, the Greek key design on their coffee cup, the bitterness or sweetness of food, the dryness of skin, the specific pathway forged by adrenaline, the black and ocher hexagons on the carpet. What I remember most about that night, besides the stop-action motion of the Old Stand Saloon as Toby crossed the room to join me, is the restaurant’s synthetic gingham napkins.

  When I reached my room, I withdrew the napkin filled with quarters from my bag. I tucked the quarters away in a small pouch, then spread the napkin on the floor. From my sewing bag, I pulled out a needle and thread and a patchwork quilt—my traveling companion. When you move around as much as I do, you need your own map or trail—a time line to remind you of where you’ve been, how you got there, and if necessary, how to find your way back. Working quickly, I sewed some of the napkin into my quilt, hoping it would lead me back to the magician.

  As I’ve said, my name is Mel Snow. I was born in the lull between a blizzard and a flood. My parents told me that it was the falling temperature that forced me into the world. I’m not sure I believe this. I do think the blizzard—its rampant disruption of our suburb—has contributed to the way I design my textiles. I love the patterns, the seamless repetitions, which are both effortless and expected, as clear and orderly as a marching band. But as much as I desire an unbroken chain of diamonds, leaves, or snowflakes, I cannot let them sit perfected and undisturbed. I want to turn up the volume, introduce a synthesizer or a zither, something out of place in the arrangement of the orderly orchestra. So I shorten a trapezoid into a rhombus, skip a diamond in a string of fifty, darken a white snowflake to an ashy gray. And in my designs, with their minute corruptions, I try to create a pattern of patternlessness.

  When not disrupting my own textiles, I made a living comforting and reassuring the cheapskate owners of small hotel-casinos in forgotten Wild West towns. I had recently been working for Sew Low Fabrics, and I was struggling to get a handle on their clients who wanted to evoke a bogus respect for Native Americans. “How about something a little more Indian? One of those geometric prints in too many colors. The tourists love that stuff,” they’d say. “No one wants to forget how the West was won,” they’d add with a chuckle. The manager of the Old Stand Saloon was no exception.

  I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the magician before taking the bus out of Tonopah that afternoon. But the manager had kept me overtime with a string of gripes about his order for curtains, bedspreads, and napkins, all patterned with an interlocking horseshoe motif—a bit of which I had sewn into my quilt. He had spent so much time telling me about how proud he was to “buy American,” even though I’d noticed that he’d ordered his plates and flatware from Mexico, that I had only a few minutes to catch the bus. I dashed to the lobby, the clatter of the synthetic stain-resistant horseshoes drumming in my ears like a high-speed forge, and took a harried look around for Toby.

  The waiter with the jagged teeth peeked around the door of the restaurant, where he was arranging cutlery on the buffet. “He’s gone,” he said. I grabbed my bag and went to wait for the bus. The magician didn’t appear.

  Eighty miles outside of Tonopah, in a small town called Beatty, I had to transfer to another bus that would take me to Las Vegas in time for my midnight flight. As I got off, I asked the driver, “Am I going to make this connection?”

  “If he comes, he comes,” he replied, not looking my way. He closed the door, and with a hydraulic hitch, the bus was off.

  I waited. The yellow sun began to melt and spread, dyeing the sky rust, then crimson, and finally cornflower blue. I dragged my foot through the loose stones and watched as the traffic began to pick up—the late-night convertibles and caravans heading for a night out in Vegas.

  After two hours, I stood up, shouldering my bag, and prepared to walk to the gas station in the distance. I had gone only a few steps when a brown minivan came to a halt next to me. I picked up my pace, but my bag was heavy. I didn’t turn around until someone lifted it from my shoulder.

  “The desert is no place for someone named Mel Snow.”

  I faced the magician. “I missed the bus, I think.” I tried to hide a smile. The sun reflected off the jet buttons on Toby’s black cowboy shirt—the only visible manifestation of his time in the West. A tumbleweed rolled down the two-lane blacktop toward us. I stared beyond it, at the rusted desert disappearing toward distant mesas.

  “You shouldn’t mind missing things. Things go missing for me every day. Books, bags, even shoes, both of them. It’s an art.” Toby trapped the tumbleweed with the toe of his shoe.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Looking for you.” He bit his lip and looked away. I looked down at his angular shadow stretching across the highway.

  “Really?”

  “I’m not good with people, normally,” the magician said, the static of his voice almost swallowing his words.

  “I thought you said that I was the lonely one.”

  “Are you getting in?”

  I already had my hand on the door. I peered into the back of the van. “No assistant?”

  Toby bit his lip and shook his head. The bravado of the previous night was absent. He reached for the shift, brushing my thigh. My fingers extended toward his but coiled instead around my seat belt as he put the car in gear.

  “My last assistant vanished,” he said.

  “In a puff of smoke?”

  “Something like that.”

  I watched the desert stretch itself out alongside the road in swirls of sand and rough plants. When I shifted my gaze across the windshield, I often found that I was looking at the spot Toby’s eyes had just left.

  “You never told me where you’re going,” the magician said.

  “You never said where you’re taking me.”

  “To see my show.”

  I smiled as I watched the mesas pop up alongside us—tea tables for Titans.

  The town of Intersection, Nevada, lies one hundred miles east of the Old Stand Saloon, just off the Tonopah highway—a slow road that’s ha
rdly traveled, on account of its two-lane nonsense and lack of exit signs. Intersection was built around a gas station that expanded into a convenience store, which expanded into a diner when the old highway was first built. Tract houses sprouted around the diner, and then a visionary from Reno thought he smelled gold and tried his luck with a casino. Then came a whore house and then more tract houses. And soon the town was crawling with a first generation of Intersection natives.

  Greta Civalier, called Sunshine, who wove her story into mine and Toby’s, was half Quebecois and half Navajo, and Intersection born-and-bred. At sixteen, she was attractive, but not so romantically attractive as the role she had written for herself. Although she had the benefits of her mother’s sun-baked coloring and her father’s elegant profile, she hid both of these under the tattered black trimmings of teen-goth style. Her thick brown hair was interwoven with patchy black dye. Chipped black nail polish covered her chewed nails. Stripes of dark eyeliner masked her eyes, while white makeup did its best to obscure the glowing skin beneath.

  Along with her friends, Greta had experienced a period of eighth-grade rebellion, during which she haunted parking lots in ripped clothes and planned small acts of vandalism she never carried out. But when her friends moved on to the next fad—boys and glitter and faded denim—Greta’s personal style grew darker. Her multicolored punk fashion gave way to a mall-goth look of platform boots and oversized black T-shirts advertising bands like Obituary and Cradle of Filth. Soon Greta, no longer wanting to be a billboard for music she really didn’t enjoy, began to take an interest in the occult, finally fixating on death, dying, and the dead. At least death, unlike the rotating fads embraced by her friends, would never go out of style. Death was real. Immortality was even better.

  The nickname Sunshine, taken from her mother’s favorite clairvoyant on the Psychic Friends Network, was an attempt by the Civalier family to rescue their daughter. Greta’s mother, who had abandoned her native religion, scorning its sweat lodges and canyon lore, tried everything to weed out what she called “that child’s morbid fixination.” She sent Greta to a summer camp run by a splinter group of fundamentalist Christians and enrolled her in several after-school Bible studies. But the Bible summer had served only to reinforce Greta’s fixination, and she came home with stories about how her counselors were looking forward to the day of Revelation, the day when, according to Greta, “Everyone would be, like, totally happy to die.”

  We met Greta in the Route 66 Diamond Diner, which lies nowhere near the classic highway. After school, for $3.75 an hour, she tied back her half-dyed hair and traded her black uniform for a white apron and a sea green dress while she sloshed coffee, blended milk shakes, and cried “Order up!” Toby and I were seated at the far end of the counter, hoping to grab a quick burger before his show.

  “Take your order?” Greta issued her questions without interrogatory words. It was just easier that way. She tapped her black nails on the counter and fiddled with the strands of ball-chain necklaces looped around her neck. Noticing that Toby was removing a creamer from underneath my chin, she said, “Cool.” And then she looked at me with the teenage horror of having ascribed coolness to something that might not be so. “That all you can do?” she asked.

  “All?”

  “Like, can you do real stuff?”

  “Depends on what you mean by real. But I can do more than this,” he said, producing a saltshaker from the air with a pop.

  “I was kinda into that when I was younger. But now it’s pretty dumb, you know.” She gave him a strange smile, one that seemed to mock the magician.

  “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Oh, not that you are dumb. Personally. It’s just that I think card tricks are sorta boring.”

  “I don’t do card tricks. I promise,” Toby assured her.

  Greta wandered off to the far end of the counter without taking our order. A moment later, she was back carrying a flyer. “You’re not that magician? The one performing tonight?”

  “I might be,” Toby replied.

  Greta tapped her nails on the counter. “Well, are you or not?”

  Toby nodded.

  “I saw your show.”

  Toby didn’t reply.

  “A couple of years ago. State fair.”

  The magician’s jaw tightened.

  “You made that woman disappear. Your assistant.”

  “Not quite,” Toby muttered.

  “So, then what?”

  “Is our little punk girl bothering you?” a sandy-haired kid sitting farther down the counter asked.

  “Shut up, Jimmy. I’m not a punk.” Greta narrowed her heavily lined eyes. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said under her breath.

  “Yeah?” Jimmy said with a laugh, “So, what are you?”

  “I’m a nihilist.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It means I think there’s no point to anything, especially if you’re stuck in a dumb town like this.”

  “Whatever, Sunshine,” Jimmy said.

  “Don’t call me that.” Greta turned back to Toby. “I was wondering when you’d pass through.”

  “Here I am.”

  “And with a new assistant,” Greta said, looking at me.

  I shook my head.

  “No? So, you looking for one?”

  “One what?” Toby asked.

  “An assistant.”

  “No. I stopped doing magic with people.”

  “You think I’m going to work in this diner my whole life.”

  “I don’t know what you are going to do,” Toby said. “But I’m hoping that, at least for now, you are going to take our order.”

  “Yeah?” Greta fumbled for her pad. “I know what kind of magic you can do.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” the magician replied, then consulted the menu.

  “You ever do Vegas?”

  “Soon.”

  “Like you’re ever going to Vegas,” Jimmy called.

  “What do you know?” Greta snapped. Then she turned to Toby. “If you do Vegas, you’ll need an assistant.”

  Toby shook his head.

  “I’ll come.”

  “Why don’t you start by coming tonight?” Toby asked.

  “You gonna do anything dangerous?”

  “I might.”

  “Maybe. So maybe.”

  When I joined the thin line of spectators trickling into the Intersection High auditorium, I wasn’t surprised to see Jimmy, Greta, and her two best friends already sitting in the second row, right down from the seat Toby had reserved for me. They looked around nervously, doing a poor job of smothering their excitement with teenage skepticism. There was an uncertain electricity running through the auditorium as people prepared to abandon their common sense.

  Toby’s show smelled of sideshow and vaudeville. Crushed velvet capes shiny with wear, three-note music box crackle, and black top hats green with age formed the backdrop that allowed him to be distrusted and believed. He had all the lines from magicians past. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight you are going to see things behave in a way you never thought possible,” he began, using the worn pomp and circumstance opener of any magic show. It was as if he was trying to conjure the image of a traditional magic show to distract the audience from his brand of magic—the kind that didn’t involve tricks.

  His hands—which seemed so much smoother onstage than they had on the Tonopah table—cut through the air with disarming grace as he opened with a series of shadow projections that showed the road from Beatty to Tonopah with its parade of passing mesas. As he bent and curled his fingers, the mesas ran together until they exploded on the screen as a rushing river.

  Once Toby had folded away the screen, he took off his top-coat and turned it inside out. As he reversed the sleeves, the coat vanished and was replaced by a canopy of black silk on which local Native American cave paintings appeared. Then he wrapped the black fabric around his shoulders, and it transformed into a red robe embroidered with C
hinese dragons.

  Toby reached into the pockets of the robe, pulling out handfuls of sand that I’d seen him collect outside the auditorium. He flung these into the air, transforming the sand into snow. Then he reached up, capturing some of the swirling snowflakes in his fingers. He cupped his hand and put his lips to his palm, blowing the snow in a perfect helix that spun from the stage into my lap. As the snow descended over me, Greta looked in my direction and rolled her eyes. “Lame,” I heard her whisper to her friends.

  I don’t think the Intersectioners noticed or appreciated how Toby conjured with objects he’d collected from their town that day—street signs, coffee cups from the Route 66 diner, a wreath from the war memorial. They had been expecting rabbits and hats and enchanted bottles. They didn’t know what to think when Toby caused a seasonal shift onstage or when he made a bed of verdant flowers grow from the dry desert earth. They looked confused as he transformed one of the school’s banners into a cactus shaped like a famous Vegas casino. I’m certain the audience didn’t appreciate the greasy gingham napkin that produced a windfall of quarters. They simply slid to the edges of their seats, hoping that the traveling magician could offer them a low-impact release from the binding laws of crop cycles, ten-cent slot machines, droughts, and the rest of the everyday. They were hoping not for magic but for a church revival on the grandest scale—salvation instead of levitation.

  I’d already had a foretaste of Toby’s singular mastery of magic, his impressive tricks. Now, with all the awkwardness I’d seen in the car banished, his hands carved the air, finding pockets of space visible to him alone. He pulled statues and busts and paintings from nowhere onto his stage. He made them change shape. He made the figures in the paintings move, the eyes on the busts wink. And while he conjured, when he looked at me, his lips curved into a subtle smile.