Vanishing Act

by Seonah Kim

The day Crow met Robert in London, he produced from his wool cap a rabbit as white as midnight snow. She packed her bags that afternoon, left with him by morning. The trick was not part of his normal routine. In fact, Crow has not seen the white rabbit since.

She has been on tour with him for three months. This weekend, they’re in Vegas and Robert says, Baby, every other street clown is a “magician”. From now on, I’m a prestidigitator.

act 1.

The attendant on their flight from Las Vegas to Denver is just one guy. At first, she thinks he is the pilot, because of the loose authority he exhibits as they board. He welcomes them as though they’re entering his own plane, flashes his braces at them, and she thinks he must be fresh out of flight school. And even his clothes, lacking in certain trademarks, (striped shoulder pads? a particular shiny pin?) don’t register as wrong. Perhaps it’s the gummy she took at the gate, THC dosage unspecified, prescribed to her by Robert, who has flight anxiety. Crow does not have flight anxiety. She has flight anticipation, which bubbles in her stomach, muddling like a gassy thrill until she is settled in her narrow pleather seat. They fly coach, a condition which Robert assures her is temporary. As soon as he signs a Netflix special, he swears, soon.

The guy with the braces gets on the loudspeaker and says Welcome aboard folks. I hail from the beeaa-utiful Caribbean Island of Pu-erto Rico, and it is my pleasure to be joining you on this short flight from Las Vegas to. There is a pause, a scattered chuckle from the cabin and then he says Denver, and Crow observes his ignorance and the reaction of the passengers and her own impenetrable ambivalence.  

He enters the cabin and offers a tray containing tinfoil-wrapped fruit bars and chocolate-covered rice crisps. One of each or two of the same, he says. One of each or two of the same. The way he repeats it is so monotonous and bored it is almost playful. This is the smallest plane Crow has ever been on, two seats on one side of each row, one on the other. There is no business class on a flight like this, a fact which Robert no doubt relishes.

Will we fly private from Vegas to Denver once you get your Netflix special? she asks him.

Robert smiles at her with a sleepy sort of dismissal and says that private jet emissions are terrible for the environment, and he has many thoughts on the subject, which he will expound on when he is not so drugged up.

Crow selects two chocolate rice crisps when their pilot passes them the tray. Robert’s eyes are closed so Crow takes two more chocolate rice crisps on his behalf, smiling at the pilot and then glancing to Robert, as if to say, we’re together, he’ll want these later. The pilot in braces looks at Robert too, seems to contemplate making a joke, and then the woman in the seat behind Crow announces to her seatmate, to the whole plane really, that she is on a connecting flight from Venice. The seatmate asks if it was warm in California. The woman laughs tightly and corrects her: Italy is actually quite cold this time of year.

Puerto Rico, my home country, is so warm right now, the pilot says, rolling the Rs in Puerto and Rico as he had on the loudspeaker. I was there last week, but now I am flying to. Denver, the woman smiles. Denver, he says.

It’s only once the plane begins to rumble down the runway and the guy is still standing at the top of the aisle, demonstrating safety procedures, that Crow realizes he is not their pilot after all.

It’s not snowing on the Las Vegas tarmac, but once they begin to graze the clouds, streaks of wet white light race past the windows and she thinks of the way intergalactic travel is depicted in movies. Robert drops her hand, which he had gripped when the rumbling began. Crow wonders why snow doesn’t always reach the ground, if it’s not heavy enough or not fast enough, for the plane is doing the moving, at least in the perpendicular direction; the snow could be still, floating in space like dust, though it appears to her, through the glass, supernatural and screaming.

Crow turns away from the window but Robert is already asleep, having probably taken something stronger than just an edible. He would not have appreciated her observation of the violent, wintery altitude, but she would have told him anyway, had he been awake. The first time she flew with him, she found his panic endearing, was baffled but amused by his need to be unconscious for an hour-long flight. Even now, she feels a pang behind her breast as she examines his slack features, undone and half-bathed in the dark and glow of the overhead compartment. She wonders if her own face looks as empty when she is asleep, wonders if it is often snowing in the clouds on dry, sunny days.

act 2.

In London, I am almost always awake. I tend bar at a pub late into the evenings but rarely go home after my shift because I am usually still wired and restless. Instead of walking to my empty flat in Battersea, I walk from Clapham where I work into the upscale Kensington neighborhood of Chelsea. It takes me an hour and a half to get there by foot but I stay on the busy roads and listen to The Strokes and am in no rush.

It started one night when I was trying to lose a few drunk guys who had been at the pub and whom I had suspected might be following me. The streets that led home were quiet, a little seedy, and the whole evening was giving me the creeps. Imagine if I lived in one of these mansions, I thought as I entered Kensington. Imagine if I was going home to a two-story walk-up with a fireplace and a clawfoot tub. I found myself peering into the few windows lit up all orange and imagining myself inside that life, safe and dim, scented with expensive candlewax, a husband who loved me and a baby on the way.

After walking for a while, it becomes easier to believe that I am moving towards a destination, that I am heading truly home. Instead of turning back, I continue to weave deeper into the paved streets, wide and shadowed in marble.

I am beginning to shiver, exhaustion and the September chill tangling in my calves. I’ve been standing all night at the pub and have just now walked about three miles. I sit on a fire hydrant by the curb. I’ll rest for a few minutes and then go home. My music flutters into ambient silence and I follow the headphone wire into my purse with numb fingers. Locate my phone and pull it out. Dead. Sitting on the hydrant is such relief for my aching legs. If it weren’t so cold, I might have been able to fall asleep.

A navy Honda sedan pulls up to the curb, right into the empty space in front of me, and its hazards begin to blink. The driver switches on the overhead light and his features flicker half-bright. He looks through the glass and meets me with the eye that isn’t in shadow. 

The windshield bears two stickers, neatly aligned: Lyft, Uber. The street is empty besides us two and I approach the car, drawn to its warm exhaust more than anything. I open the right rear door. I climb in, holding down the hem of my skirt as I fold pale legs into the icy leather seat, pull the seatbelt across my chest.

Casey? The driver says into the rearview mirror. I can see both eyes now, brown and sunken beneath a furry brow. His gaze is blank and cloudy.

Yeah, my phone died, sorry. The location might be wrong on your app, I say. He turns off the overhead light and puts the car into reverse. My stomach lurches with the edge I feel before a flight. I shift forward in my seat, trying to see the screen of his Android, which is mounted on the dash and plugged into the stereo. We’re thirty minutes from our destination, Highgate, and then we will be a three hour walk from my flat.

I lean into the headrest, allow the city lights to stream through my lashes like something melted. I wake to the slamming of brakes and blaring of a horn. My driver is spitting what could be Arabic and flipping off a passing car which careens drunkenly through the intersection where we have stopped. He continues mumbling to himself, or actually it seems he is speaking to someone on the phone, a responding voice just audible over the stereo music.

I take account of the streets, which have blurred from ink to charcoal in anticipation of morning. You can just let me out here, actually, I say. This is fine. He stops speaking and looks into the mirror again, almost suspicious now. You sure? I glance at the map on his phone. We are still several blocks from Casey’s destination. I wonder if it’s their apartment or their parents’ house or a place where they work an early morning shift. Yeah, I put the address in wrong. He pulls to a slow stop and I throw open the door before he has a chance to park. Thanks. I hop out, hope Casey’s card doesn’t decline, how strange it is that the ride never cancelled, and enter the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried.

A small park surrounds the enclosed graveyard, which opens only during the day, but I scale the metal posts easily as the Honda’s grumble fades into side streets. When it’s gone, only breathing is left: breathing by invisible animals, by the scattered plants and trees. It can’t be later than five in the morning.

Inside, the silence which settles around stone is cold. My footsteps on the dirt path seem to echo, as though against concrete. Leaves rustle. An owl hoots. I unlace my combat boots and strip my socks and leave them in the grass under a tree.

I used to smoke weed in a cemetery across from my high school, with friends, and then later with a boyfriend. After class, during free periods, turning back up with red eyes, doused in drugstore perfume. We would make crude jokes about the names on the graves, invent stories to try and spook each other. Rebellion felt distinctly safe in high school, intentional and expected like dusty black Converse with my floral-print sundress. I see rebellion now as it is: one of many failed attempts to control the opaque inevitabilities of destiny and chance.

These days, I enjoy walking through cemeteries, surrounded by death and earth, winding trails and willows. They are a cool, perfect escape from the hot London summers. I have never walked through one so early in the morning.

When my phone is not dead, I take pictures of the statues, a stone angel dripping with moss, a Virgin Mary flanked by dried bouquets. My camera roll is full of photos of these things. I occasionally veer off-path to get a closer look at the generational plots, the ones whose little headstones sprawl outwards from some small pillar or block of marble engraved with the surname. Sometimes, the headstones themselves don’t list names, only familial titles: MOTHER, FATHER, DAUGHTER, SON, SON, SISTER, BROTHER, SISTER, BABY. These are often flat, flush with the earth, while the ones that stick straight up contain more detail:

MARY E.,
LOVING MOTHER AND WIFE
1887-1956

or

JANICE K.,
BELOVED ANGEL
MAY 12 1918 – SEPTEMBER 1 1918

+

I feel movement before I see them. A force and its adherent. First, a lanky and regal and wild-looking black dog. Then, a man with shoulder-length brown hair and violent blue eyes. He is wearing a white t-shirt under a black sweatsuit, which makes him look a bit like a priest. He smiles apologetically because his dog, off-leash, has approached and is sniffing my cold legs.

I’m so sorry, the man says, we never see anyone out here this early. He reaches for the dog’s collar. I don’t mind, I say, I love dogs. I bend down to scratch behind its silky ears. I notice as I do so that the backs of the man’s hands are spiked with intricate and dense ink patterns.

Her name is Belle, he says.

Like the princess or the instrument? I ask. My voice sounds shrill next to his measured, melodic one, my words even more out of place. I am suddenly aware of my bare white feet on the hard earth. But the man smiles and finishes attaching a leash to Belle’s collar, coils the strap around his wrist.

That depends, he says. Do you want to see her do a trick?

+

The memory returns only in dreams. I had been eighteen and dating the boyfriend I used to smoke in the cemetery with, Jamie. It’s no big deal, he had said that summer, when we found out. It’s only been a few weeks. You can still take the pill. Or maybe he had said, you can just take the pill. Just take the pill.

I had gone to my mother, trembling, and Mother, who had been young herself when she’d had me, ushered me into the car and drove us to Planned Parenthood, held my hand through the exam, no questions asked. Though occasionally, of course, I wonder what things might have been different had certain questions been asked.

It was still early enough for me to just take the pill. Luckily, said my mother. Lucky you found it so soon, the nurse said. Like cancer, I thought. We’re talking about him like he’s a lump. Which, technically, he still was. And the nurse, who was a woman, warned me fairly of the pain, and the blood, and the emotions, though not about the way bathroom tiles would never again feel normal beneath my hands. Nothing could have prepared me for the texture of his exit, nor for the emptiness after. The nurse had tried, of course, as she adjusted the white paper gown between my braced and elevated legs, as I angled my body on the cushioned gray table so as to view a constellation of white pixels blinking on a black screen of which somehow my son was comprised, but perhaps I hadn’t been listening closely enough.

The dreams are always of Jamie, bare-chested and wearing a frayed Cardinals hat, which had never been fully red in the time I’d known him, but by the end of that summer, had faded into a papery beige. In the dreams, he is holding our child, who is small and bloody and wrapped in cloth, to his chest, even as the cloth blooms red, even as his skin grows sticky and slick. I reach for them, for my son, for Jamie, whom I love, in these dreams, though I have not seen him in so many years, and sometimes these days he looks like Robert, with hair that is jet black, not blond as Jamie’s is in my waking memory. He pulls away, laughing. Laughing not at me, but at something just beyond my line of sight, something constantly in my peripheral, which seems to disappear whenever I turn to face it.

+

Of course I want to see the dog do a trick. I love to be surprised more than anything in the world. Like meeting Robert in London for the first time. He had stopped me for my hair. Red like strawberries, he’d called it. Do you want to see some magic? he had said.

Close your eyes, the man says, just for a moment. And when I clap, open them. I obey. Belle barks. A moment later, he claps. When I open my eyes, I briefly forget what I am looking for. Then I remember. But where’d she go? I ask, turning in a full circle, examining the damp grass for paw prints.

The man is smiling. He seems pleased. He says: Where did who go?

act 3.

They have a few shows in Denver, where Robert is going to try out some new tricks. In one of them, Crow will make her debut as his assistant. The new trick he’s working on is actually old, the oldest in the book, aside from the rabbit one, which she still has not seen since that first day. This trick is the one where she scrunches herself into a box and he saws the box in half, an act which to Crow feels comfortable and intimately satisfying, like she’s been rehearsing for it her whole life.

Robert will expect her to practice with him for hours in their suite, though all she wants to do is eat a room service grilled cheese in the hotel bed and watch House Hunters International on the cable TV. He will make her perfect her expression, as though her face is going to be enlarged on a stadium screen. Really, they’ll be in some mid-tier “historical” playhouse which endures cover bands and provides terrible acoustics. The drinks will be overpriced, the guests will grumble but still buy them, and the bar will make more money on the show than the box office.

Despite the false bravado and constant rebranding and embarrassed disappointment and uncomfortable travel, Crow stays. Because no matter where she is during Robert’s show, if she can see his face while he performs his act, see his hands, whether she is looking up at him from her position on the table, or sideways from a chair angled just so offstage, she gets to feel that thing all over again, soft fur as white as snow, a warm expectant window beaming through white marble, a black and barking dog slipping through the silent air without a trace.

Can I show you a magic trick? he’d asked. And she’d looked into his honey-brown eyes and seen the most radiant and terrifying possibilities, all the hope and disappointment she’d ever felt. Her mind returned to very early birthdays, when she’d been too young to name this feeling, seeing the cake float towards her, all aglow with heat and sugar. Mortified by the singing, squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to cry, puffed up her cheeks to blow out a wish.

act 4.

It’s sort of like a feeling you get in your bowels. Like a lurch at the top of a roller coaster, at the mouth of a tunnel. In the past, she has described it as an edge, though even then that word felt flat and wrong. It’s like holding the key to a lifelong enemy’s demise in your hand, knowing that your next move could destroy them forever. And you feel ashamed, because you have been granted such an easy victory with this key, but also know that your success is inevitable once they are gone, that nothing foreseeable could stand in your way ever again. You know that you must use this key or regret it forever, yet you also know that in doing so you are eliminating the only real obstacle you have ever had. It’s not a choice and it’s also your final choice.

You close your eyes. You wait for the sound of clapping hands.

BIO

Seonah Kim (she/her/hers) was born and raised in the Hudson Valley of New York. Currently, she writes and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is in the process of obtaining her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia. She is also a waitress and a teacher.