The Disappearing Act: A Mystery

[star studded]

Part One: Gabriel

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Can a man really disappear for good?

When I was in high school, a man known only as Nico was an internationally famous architect and project designer. His name was as good as a brand. A building by Nico. A district by Nico. A business center by Nico. They were good as gold for a time. Today, most modern artists and architects consider his work to be young and amateur, but perhaps that was the draw of him in his prime. He was a risk to be taken.

In the early-to-mid nieties, Sarajevo was under seige by the Yugoslav National Army. Several architects from all around the world were brought in for an impossible project: to rebuild portions of the city while the place was still practically a crater. It seemed like a futile effort. I read the papers in London, we discussed the concepts in my concepts of design class, and realized that there was no way for anything to cut against the grain. If the modus operandi of a specific area was destruction, we as young architects could not find any room for creation. These were the projects that I was taught to pass on.

And then he was gone. In the midst of it all, Nico seemed to slip off the radar. His crew was left in the dust and the project was abandoned. There were no signs of foul play, no evidence of violence or death. It was like he just up and walked away.

Perhaps it isn't his architecture that I admire so much. It's his ability to disappear. If he is alive, he wants no one to know. He could be living his life somewhere, content, left alone. There were no more cameras and no more interviews. No more criticism. No more struggle to cover up who he was in the past, or the present.

I envied that. I wanted to create my own disappearing act, but never managed to do it. I changed my last name. I moved to New York City to work. I cut off all communication with my family to cover up the disappointing things from the past. These are not what create the man, I convinced myself. I too could get up, like Nico, and disappear.

I haven't thought about the art of the disappearing act in quite some time. I haven't thought about the skeletons in anyone's closet until I was reminded. I've thought long and hard about who I am and who I want the new people in my life to believe I am. I've thought about who I want his family to think I am, and how they could possibly imagine me if they knew the lie and then they knew the truth. I've thought about the disparity. I wonder if that was Nico's problem. The man and the image. The difference between the papers and the man. Did he disappear because he chose to or because destiny had it written for him? And then, if that was the case, what was the role of destiny in Nico's life? What is the role of destiny in my own life?

There is a startling difference between myself and myself.

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ January 27, 2007 08:28 PM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>

[star studded]

Part Two: Lucy

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Can a man really not remember who he is?

Sometimes I worry about not remembering who my husband and children are and the terror of it takes over. It's like a panic attack mid-day at the grocery store. A finger prick on a spinning wheel and the whole thing could go to hell. I wonder if he had a wife before me. I wonder if that wife suffers from the same terrors. I wonder if she looks for him, like a woman staring out at the sea, waiting for a ship to come in, her hair piled high, his old love letters clutched in her hand, the wax and parchment crumbling from age and the heat of her hands. I feel for this make believe woman. I create images of her in my head. Give her names. Anna, Mary, Esther, Lydia...

I wonder if this makes me a kidnapper. I wonder if his entire story is made up. What if this is just the way he is? A man who grew tired of his life and then wandered off to make a new one with an extended bank account and a charming little grin when he gives me a present he picked up on his way home. A fistful of flowers, a glimmering necklace he saw in a storefront window, a new magazine he knows I'll read.

I ask myself questions like this all the time. Why me? Why my son? Why this life? Why Amsterdam? Why the tabloid fodder from years ago? Why is it now that we ask these questions? Do I believe him, or does love cure everything? He could lie and lie and lie and I would make up excuses to stay, and I don't think he's ever told me a lie, nor could he ever bring himself to. I don't think his mouth knows how to say the words.

I wonder if it's plausible that I could ever forget him. Head trauma, emotional shock, half a planet's distance between us and nothing could make me forget him. Surely there's a part of him wired to me, the cut of his hands against my skin, or the way my name sounds when he says it, all clumsy vowels like a child. I dream about him. I wash his watery, clotless blood out of my clothes. I trust him with the awkward tangle of my fall-prone son for eight hours a day. There is no room for forgetting anymore.

And yet.

I could live on the tip of his tongue for years, a word remembered but unspeakable, elusive. I cannot predict the future and I cannot rely on the past because it is as unreliable as the future. I struggle to live now, in the moments comprised of cotton worn thin and secrets I keep to myself, cells dividing, mornings locked behind doors, my face pressed to cool tile.

He is ephemera, but as concrete as steel. I miss him when he is here, in front of me, wiry limbs and olive skin, his promiment prince's nose, his unplaceable eye color, his smell of smoke and paper and color -- turpentine, glass.

Can a man really choose to forget who he was?

Could a woman be so lucky?

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ January 27, 2007 08:28 PM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>