The first time I disappeared it was an accident. We were in the department store. One minute we were walking in the aisle, there were bodies around, racks full of coats, shirts, slacks, pegged pants hanging stiff and straight as flayed meat. I can’t remember if I wandered off the path to touch one of them, or my mother did, or both of us stopped to look at something and just lost each other.
I was embarrassed, first. When I knew. Understanding that you’ve disappeared is a gradual process. It’s a negative information. You have to realize that nobody sees you, and that takes a while.
Later I began to do it a bit more intentionally, though still it was a half-conscious thing, at best. There was a series of funerals. They were all at the same place. Both my grandfathers died within, I don’t know, six months or a year of each other. Then one grandmother. I barely knew the grandfathers—I mean it was sad, in both cases there were late-night phone calls and suddenly being up with the kitchen lights on and mom and dad pacing and talking in the proverbial “hushed tones” I guess you could say.
But then the funeral home: it was actually a pretty cool place. Down in the basement there was a room with a ship in a giant bottle and lots of neat nautical stuff. There was another room with a great big table and deep, comfortable leather chairs. And the key thing: an actual Coca Cola fountain. There were tall glasses and straws and you could drink as much as you wanted to, and the Coke tasted sweeter and more sophisticated somehow coming out of that fountain.
There I guess were my first formal experiments in disappearing. I would do it while the visitors filed through. Being the child of the son of the deceased, we had to be there all day. I didn’t mind; I had books, and the basement, and the Coke fountain. What I minded were the people filing through, with their sad looks and condolences. And the faint mothball smell of their funeral clothes as they bent down and gaped at me, saying things like reading off titles: “Your Grandfather Was a Very Good Man,” and “At Least He Didn’t Suffer.”
So I disappeared.
It took time. Concentration. I was frustrated at first. Uncle Ned and Aunt Sally came downstairs and sat with me for a very long time, not saying much of anything—God, it was awkward! Sitting between them on this couch, just seeing their big fat legs sticking out, with Uncle Ned sort of resting his hand near my thigh, both of them breathing… I couldn’t read and I couldn’t disappear.
But gradually it happened. I remember how excited I was when some random relative came bouncing down the stairs to look for me, only she couldn’t find me. And I was sitting right there! With a Coke in my hand and a book in my lap. I had to sit very still, of course. She walked right up to me, looked right through me, shouting over her shoulder the whole time to my mom that I wasn’t down here.
For a minute, I thought my mom would raise a general alarm and they’d turn the whole place over trying to find me. But there were more people coming all the time. This woman stood there in the center of the room for a minute. Jesus, who was she? I’ll never forget the way she got quiet, looking around, slowly. And then this sort of creepy look came over her face. That’s the weirdest part about disappearing. You finally see what people look like when there’s no one else around. It isn’t pretty. I think the whole history of the world could change if everyone could see that. And I can’t even describe it. Something dropped away, and something else came onto her face that I didn’t recognize even as human.
Let me put it this way: I was very glad at that moment she couldn’t see me.
I’ve been able to disappear whenever I want to, pretty much ever since.
