The Year of Disappearances

“You should know. Because they’re pains in the neck!” His voice was jubilant, and that’s when I realized he was telling a joke, aiming it at Bernadette. With her hair dyed black and her pale skin, she looked more like a stereotypical vampire than I did.



“What’s a vampire’s—excuse me, what’s your favorite mode of transportation?”



“Shut up, Richard.”



“A blood vessel!”



Bernadette and I didn’t laugh once, but the girl sitting next to Richard giggled incessantly.



“Where do vampires keep their savings? In blood banks!”



“Shut up, Richard.”



I was delighted when a boy from my literature class came onto the stage and began pounding on a large African drum. Richard turned around, pleased that he’d managed to annoy us. He wanted attention, any way he could get it. Bernadette shot me a look of disdain and shook her head.



Walker took the stage, accompanied by a drum roll. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt—no cape or sequined suit. His hair and skin glowed in the stage lights. “Welcome,” he said, “to the art of misdirection.”



The first few tricks involved eggs and impressed me more than some of the later, more elaborate ones, because their magic was, in a sense, real. On a table in the center of the stage, a Bunsen burner was lit, and Walker, using tongs, passed an egg through its flame until the egg was black. Then he dropped the egg in a bowl of water, and it turned iridescent, almost silver.



I knew some kind of chemical reaction must be responsible for the color change. But what made the trick magical was the story Walker told while he did it.



“For thousands of years, magicians have studied the practice of scrying,” he said. “It’s another word for crystal-gazing—for seeing the future in a reflective surface. Crystals link our mundane world with the one lying beyond it. In the moment that we gaze into the crystal, time dissolves. Our inner self grows calm. Our spirit connects with the light of the universe, making us clear and pure.



“Poor magicians like me can’t afford to buy a crystal ball, so we make our own with eggs.”



After the transformation was complete, he invited a member of the audience to come onstage to look into the bowl of water. Richard volunteered.



“Anybody else?” Walker asked.



“I’ll do it.” Bernadette was on her feet in a second.



“That’s not fair,” Richard said, and she said, “Shut up,” as she passed him.



“Relax and breathe deeply,” Walker told Bernadette. “Look deep into the silver ball, and tell me what you see.”



“I see the reflection of the candle flame.”



The theater was so quiet that I heard the sounds of people breathing on either side of me.



“Try to unfocus your eyes,” Walker said. His voice was soft, with a twinge of North Carolina in its inflections. “Try to see the mist forming in the crystal.”



“It’s an egg,” Richard said, but people shushed him.



“I see it,” Bernadette said. “It’s like smoke on the surface.”



“Let the smoke grow until it’s all you can see.” Walker signaled the drummer, who began to play a slow, rhythmic beat.



“It’s all I can see.” In her black shirt and jeans, her long hair hanging on either side of the bowl as she bent over it, Bernadette looked like a creature from another time, another world.



“Now let your eyes focus.” Walker’s face, intent and serious, was almost too handsome to watch. “As the smoke clears, tell us what you see.”



“I see…” Bernadette paused. “It looks like—it’s a skull.”



“Of course it is,” Richard said. “She’s a vampire. All she sees is death.”



But no one was listening to him, except me.



“I really saw it,” Bernadette whispered. She’d resumed her seat, and the magic show went on.



Walker did several tricks using scarves and coins that multiplied, thanks to the sleeves of his shirt, talking all the while about ancient India and Tibet and the tradition of magic. He used thin black threads (was I the only one to see them?) to move earthenware bowls across the table; he called them Babylonian demon bowls, explaining that they were placed in the corners of ancient houses to catch demons. I later learned that his story was true, and that the bowls were also used to gather demons to visit upon one’s enemy.



I wondered what Walker would say if I told him I’d seen an actual demon. As if he heard my thought, he looked up from a trick and winked at me. Then he turned a lump of coal into a diamond. I stopped watching for the strings and sleights of hand and let myself be charmed. For a moment I fantasized about being the magician’s assistant, dressed in my metamaterial suit, turning invisible when the trick required it, letting the magician take the credit. But how would Walker react to knowing what I was capable of—no, knowing what I was? He’d probably be terrified.



His final trick required an oversized trunk and the assistance of Jacey, a student notable for being the shortest person on campus. Under five feet tall, she sprang nimbly into the trunk, her thick blond braids trailing her.



Walker tucked in her braids, then closed and locked the lid. “Jacey volunteered to be disappeared,” he said. “She’s fully aware of the potentially devastating physical risks.” He began to chant words that made no sense, and he tapped the trunk lid three times with a tree branch that he called a Druid wand.



Of course the trunk was empty when he opened it. I figured it had a false bottom, and that once it was closed and tapped again, Jacey would be inside.



But when Walker opened the lid, the trunk was empty. “Let’s try this again,” he said, sounding worried. Was he acting?



He closed the lid, muttered the nonsensical words, tapped the wand. He opened the trunk and it was empty.



“You screwed up, Walker.” Jacey’s voice came from the back of the room, and we all turned to watch her. Now it was clear to me that she and Walker were acting.



“So the stage has a trapdoor?” Bernadette whispered.



But I didn’t answer. Someone was standing in the aisle behind Jacey. Autumn had arrived.



“Since I quit smoking, I got fat.” Autumn sat on the floor of our dorm room, ripping plastic from a cupcake. She’d stopped at a gas station and bought a variety of junk food, which she’d spread on the floor like a picnic.



I didn’t like sugary stuff, but Bernadette took a brownie and a thing called a Twinkie. “You’re not fat,” she said.



Autumn was at most ten pounds heavier than the last time I’d seen her. Her face was fuller and her hips a little rounder. I felt a twinge of guilt, as if I were responsible for her weight. But wasn’t quitting smoking worth gaining a few pounds?



To be sociable, I reached for a bag of potato chips.



We’d left Walker surrounded by a crowd of admirers, and I wondered which of them he might be talking to at that moment.



“Dreamy eyes,” Bernadette said, looking at me. “Somebody has a crush.”



Was it that obvious? I said, “How can you tell?” There was no point in denying anything—Bernadette was too observant for that.



“Every time you look at Walker, your eyes go gooey.” Bernadette bit into the Twinkie and waved its creamy center at me. “Like that,” she said.



“Walker is the magician, right?” Autumn wiped frosting onto the knees of her jeans. “That means you don’t like my brother anymore?”



I didn’t care for this conversation at all. “How’s Chip?” I asked.



“We broke up.” Autumn reached for a plastic-wrapped brownie. “He was cheating on me.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “I can see why you’d like that boy Walker. He’s cute.” She made cute have two syllables.



Then she and Bernadette began laughing, and I had no idea why until Bernadette stopped long enough to say, “Ari, you should have seen your face when she said that!”



“I think she’s still a virgin, “Autumn said to Bernadette, who said, “No way.” Then Bernadette turned to me. “Are you really?”



I took a handful of chips. “None of your business.” But knowing that they weren’t made me feel young and naïve, once more excluded from their world.



Autumn and Bernadette chatted late into the night. I mostly listened, surprised at how quickly they found things to talk about. The room was dark except for the light from my lithophane lamp, which illumined the little birds on the shade but kept our faces in the shadows.



Bernadette talked about the field trip we’d be taking. “Too bad you can’t come with us,” she said to Autumn, who was sleeping on the floor. “We only have room in the canoes for ten. You can stay in the room while we’re gone.”



“Maybe I’ll take me a tour of the campus,” Autumn said. “I wouldn’t want to go to a swamp anyway.”



“But it’s going to be really cool.” Bernadette summarized a few of our Environmental Studies lectures, doing a better job than Professor Riley had.



“It’s the largest swamp in North America,” she said. “Once it was part of the ocean floor, but now it’s covered by peat deposits and rainwater. During the early nineteen-hundreds people lived in the swamp, and loggers took out thousands of trees. Then it was turned into a wildlife refuge.”



Autumn said, “Uh-huh.”



“The Indians named it. In their language Okefenokee means ‘land of the trembling earth,’ because the peat is so unstable, you can make the trees shake if you stomp on the ground.” Bernadette was clearly looking forward to making trees shake.



Autumn yawned.



“The biodiversity is amazing,” I said, trying to support Bernadette. “More than four hundred species of birds, and alligators, and five kinds of venomous snakes.”



“Snakes, huh?” Autumn sounded sleepy.



“There are no roads in the swamp, only trails and boardwalks,” Bernadette said. “We’re canoeing in, and we’ll spend one night in a cabin and one on a platform.”



“You ain’t afraid? With all the gators and snakes?”



I wasn’t afraid, but I didn’t want to answer for Bernadette.



“I’m more afraid of the other stuff,” she said. “We read some folk tales about strange lights and swamp things—”



“Swamp things?” For the first time Autumn sounded alert.



“Ape men, and giants, and ghosts.” Bernadette’s voice was worthy of a vampire, I thought. She knew how to make sentences into stories. “Creatures of the dark, who move silently from tree to tree. The cabin where we’re spending the night is supposed to be haunted.”



“It is?” I said.



“Jacey did an oral report on that the first week of class,” Bernadette said. “You missed it. She claims a woman was murdered there, and her ghost walks at night. Professor Riley said it was all legend, but I believe it. Then there are reports of UFO sightings and abductions by aliens.”