Disappearing Acts

[Sol]

Have you ever wanted to become someone else? Have you ever actually tried it? Follow Luke Soloman, “the ultimate iconoclast” (Apex Reviews), on the Experience Trail in a suspense- and laughter-filled interlude that starts in Paris and ends in Rio as he transforms yet again--this time into perhaps the unlikeliest character of all: the author. “A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND, where anything can come alive when you start with a blank page … [Luckman] shows the reader that as individuals, we, too, have choices and potentials. There are no boundaries or rules to limit us.” --Reader Views

(from Book V, The Accidental Gringo)

“One ticket to ... Rio de Janeiro,” I stammered, self-consciously, given the rate at which I was visibly (or invisibly) dematerializing, to the Varig representative waiting behind the counter. Was it just my imagination, or did she actually shudder at the sight of my missing appendage? Was I already that grotesque?

Luckily, being November and the off-season for travel between Europe and South America, there were still last-minute seats. “Will you be traveling first, business or economy class, Monsieur?” the representative asked, in French with a slight Portuguese accent.

“First.”

“Bien sûr.”

After months of rotting away like a banana long forgotten in a drawer, months of decomposing—after a wasted spring, a squandered summer and a fall I frittered away in the most anaesthetized creative paralysis—suddenly I was alive and moving at light speed again, running (literally) for my imaginary life. What had transpired since my melodramatic epiphany in the Métro, my rediscovery of my true identity and theatrical release by Malcolm in the rain, was, in a nutshell:

Nothing.

That’s not entirely accurate. In a sense a great deal had happened. For starters, the roles had reversed. My return to Amanda, followed by our emotional reconciliation, had effected an astonishing change in her. She became a totally different person. Overnight our dynamic switched polarity, swung magnetically into an opposite scenario, one in which Amanda suddenly loved more than she hated me—loved me, in fact, more than she loved herself.

This time, it was she not I who offered to compromise, put her Art on the back burner, sell her soul by going to work as an underpaid computer graphics lackey in the real world so I could stay home in our cozy penthouse apartment on rue Phoque and write my little heart out, so I might have time and space to finish the series of novels that would make me famous and us independently wealthy—the series, enfin, that would set us both free.

But contrary to plan, I didn’t perk right up at the opportunity to create again, didn’t forge boldly ahead into Book IV, Luke in Exile, didn’t stay true to my vision of myself as a man of letters in a brave new world of literature ... Instead, I spent my days in a bathrobe and slippers getting fatter and dumber while eating TV dinners and watching French soap operas, a lifetime pleasantly removed from my odious job at the Lobotomist, yes, but as yet uncommitted to a new course of action, a fresh direction.

I became a lounge lizard, a couch potato, less than worthless from a narrative perspective, sometimes with the evanescent thought of sitting down to write but never sufficient motivation (even with Amanda cheering me on) to do so.

Thus I wasted her sacrifice, pissed away her enormous gift as I discovered (to our mutual disappointment) no one can ever do it for you. After everything, after Malcolm, after the Métro, after all the teas, cakes, ices and a platter full of crises, I still wasn’t back to living my own imaginary life—I was still, in essence, living someone else’s—and now had neither motion nor language to sustain my textual existence ... until, at last, I started to disappear.

“Window or aisle?”

“Sorry?”

“Would you like a window or aisle seat, Monsieur?”

“Window.”

“Checked baggage?”

“Non merci.”

“Do you have any checked baggage?”

“No.”

“Carry-ons?”

“Just my trusty old buffalo leather duffel bag here.”

“Could I please see your passport?”

“Certainly.”

Then one day, the day I unexpectedly ended up at Orly International Airport, my thumb just vanished. It happened completely out of the blue when, having finished watching the French version of The Young and the Restless, having cried my little tear or two, I’d miraculously summoned the energy to drag my lazy tub of lard up off the couch and wash the leaning towers of dishes that had accumulated during my pampered desuetude.

Significantly, it was my right thumb. But strangely, there was no pain. There wasn’t even any blood. I couldn’t find my thumb anywhere in the sudsy water—not even after draining the sink. Nor had, I verified in a growing panic, the disposal chewed it off. I searched for it everywhere, my thumb, combing every nook and cranny at a fever pitch. But the simple, unavoidable fact of the matter was: my poor thumb was gone.

In hindsight it’s patently obvious this was a most natural consequence for a picaresque character such as I, a creature, as I’ve elsewhere explained, born of the road and of words. And the thumb, it must be admitted, was a nice touch—being a symbol of the road I’d abandoned as well as the thumb on my writing hand.

So it didn’t take me long, after I calmed down enough to get my bearings, after I sat down at the kitchen table and poured myself a double scotch then another and drank enough to stop shaking, to figure out what was happening, to understand I was disappearing because the conditions of my existence, the very terms of my survival, had been neglected. Not that this offered much consolation when the rest of my right-hand fingers began to dissolve one by one and the invisible ink covered my wrist and began to creep up, ever so weirdly, toward my elbow ...

“Monsieur Soloman, I must ask you a few routine questions.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Did you pack your own bag?”

“Oui.”

“Are you carrying any objects that do not personally belong to you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Are you carrying any weapon or object that might in any way be used or construed as a weapon?”

“No.”

I was lying through my teeth. I still had my Swiss army knife somewhere in my bag. I prayed it would be overlooked.

“One moment, s’il vous plaît.”

But you know, I’d had intimations something like this was coming. Following weeks of sleeping peacefully at night, from my regular profound repose in which, if I dreamed of anything, I dreamed of profound repose—I say, at some point in my extended vacation from life’s pages, I’d started to hear the Voice of the Road in my dreams, first whispering then calling then shouting my name.

“What do you want?” I finally demanded, annoyed.

“EVERYTHING.”

Then one day in the midst of my bourgeois househusband “bliss,” there it suddenly was again—this thing that at first felt like an itch, then a rash, then a pustular inflammation. The old wanderlust erupting. The burning desire to go everywhere, meet everyone and do everything—then write it all down—cracking me back open after all this time. Trying to ignore it was like trying to ignore a case of herpes. Not that I would know. I scratched until I bled, but the wanderlust just kept itching.

“FOLLOW ME,” the road insisted.

“Where?”

“ANYWHERE.”

I was indecisive, though. I couldn’t seem to make up my mind about anything—where I wanted to go, how I wanted to go, even (reflecting on my personal comfort, how coddled and cloyed I was) if I wanted to go. I kept processing possible scenarios for the future the way a high-speed computer flies through different combinations trying to crack a code. But I still had no idea whether I was going or staying. The only thing I could say with relative assurance was either one day I’d leave, or I wouldn’t.

Eventually, between soaps, I got around to making lists of possible destinations, detailed lists of theoretical itineraries that crisscrossed the globe like rubber bands—yet in the end I remained unable, of my own volition, without something dramatic like starting to disappear by degrees happening to me, to set myself adrift again on the old High Seas where anything, anything at all, could happen. Which, despite being precisely the point of sailing, the point of navigating the uncharted waters of Chance and Possibility rather than growing down predictable roots in the Backyard of Mediocrity, was also precisely what scared the devil out of me.

But after being a castaway so long, shore-locked on my tiny one-man island, the surrounding sea frozen in a real-world winter, at least I was finally listing again—listing, listing, listing in my little life’s ship, preparing (if only speculatively) to resume my destiny as a wayward mariner. Though I found myself waffling between embracing the uncertainty of a mapless existence and being totally, thoroughly terrified by it, at least I was waffling, going through the motions, undergoing a slow but steady sea change. I knew I had to regain some sense of plugging back into the Adventure even if it meant throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Again.

“The total price of your ticket, Monsieur, including airport tax, comes to 7,777 francs.”

“Curious.”

“How would you like to pay?”

“Cash.”

I was on the verge of a radical move, no doubt about it. I’d intuited as much the night before I started to vanish, when Amanda came home from work to a disaster of dirty dishes spilling Dr. Seuss-like out of the sink, saucers used as ashtrays, cigarette burns on the couch, the floor covered with so many food fragments we could have cooked the whole thing and eaten it like a giant pizza—when she returned exhausted and empty to find not dinner piping-hot on the table but me seated comfortably, having not written a word, having not so much as lifted a pencil, amid it all like a retarded baby content in its messy playpen—when I watched the tears well up in her eyes at the sight of this mirrorball of contradictions, this talented do-nothing, this uninspired genius she couldn’t (for all her martyrdom) change—when, my pity for her aroused, I stood and took her in my arms and made love to her there on the scummy floor, our bare asses steamrolling pasta shells and dried bits of steak hâché—when, afterward, I tried to explain what was happening to me even though I didn’t understand it myself, tried to explain why I couldn’t possibly accept so large a gift as her whole person—when in the middle of my blabbering I gazed into her still-red eyes scalloped beneath with dark rings and suddenly felt hot tears spilling down my own cheeks—

“Nobody forced you to stay with me, Luke.”

“I know. I’ve been your prisoner entirely by choice.”

Sincere tears, crocodile tears, rummy tears, tears of recognition? Recognition of what? that all-or-nothing meant nothing? or that it meant all?

I lifted her geisha face and stared into her almond eyes. Sadness infused her with a special beauty, bittersweet in quality, like a late-blooming flower spreading its delicate petals on the eve of a killing frost. Desirous to protect such a frail flower, I pulled her to me and held her warmly in my arms.

In making love to her, I realized the next day as I watched my elbow fade like an ember, I’d been saying goodbye. I was saying goodbye to her even as I said goodbye to myself, my old self, threw dirt on my coffin and placed a wreath on my tombstone. For no sooner had I finished my third double scotch than I knew exactly what I had to do to avoid annihilation: I had to leave. Immediately.

There was no time to call Amanda, no time to scribble a note, no time to pack my bag. Who wanted a bunch of stuff anyway? For all its unsettling abruptness, this might be the greatest opportunity of my imaginary existence to follow my nose down unexpectedly fulfilling paths, travel the Experience Trail unencumbered, carrying only the essential baggage.

Without further ado I quickly changed into street clothes (covering my invisibility as best I could under my leather jacket), pocketed Amanda’s stash of cash in the atelier (telling myself I’d pay her back later), then grabbed my duffel containing (I made sure to check) my to-be-continued series manuscript, Swiss army knife and passport, as I headed out the door with only one arm.

•

By the time my taxi pulled up at Orly, I was missing my right shoulder entirely. But it seemed I was disappearing less rapidly thanks to the taxi’s movement. With difficulty, feeling unbalanced, I shouldered my bag and paid the driver, tipping him handsomely, then entered the main terminal and scanned the Départs screen. For a few seconds I waffled between hemispheres, but when I finally settled on the Western, it didn’t take long to select my destination: Rio de Janeiro.

Or maybe I should say it didn’t take Rio (“Last call for passengers to Rio de Janeiro,” a voice announced over the airport speakers) long to select me. In any case the name was like sugarcane alcohol on my tongue.

Rio. Just whispering it filled me with sweetly intoxicating images of graceful palm trees lining white crescent beaches, turquoise water and lapis lazuli skies, wavelike sidewalks and sunlight dancing with shadows in sweltering Latin streets, sultry mulattas shaking honey-colored flesh to mouthwatering samba rhythms. Images, in short, wherein a future me was already in progress ...

“Your ticket and boarding pass, Monsieur. Have a pleasant flight.”

“Merci. I will.”

Or would I? It occurred to me then I’d never flown before, not that I could recall (which, as always, wasn’t saying much)—and that, in fact, I had a bona fide phobia of flying. Flashes of footage of incendiary death gripped me at the mere thought of takeoff. “I’m afraid we’re experiencing minor technical problems,” I could hear the panicking captain announce as one of the wings broke off in a deafening explosion.

Then there was the very real possibility I’d acted too late and, despite my efforts, was about to disappear completely. Discretely feeling inside my jacket with my left hand as I passed through security, I was relieved to discover that, though my shoulder remained missing, my collarbone was still holding.

And then I was walking to my terminal, then approaching my gate, then handing another representative my boarding pass, then walking down the carpeted tunnel, then watching a bent crone in a wheelchair being wheeled past only to spring up out of the chair like a gazelle and briskly board the plane, then timidly boarding myself and stashing my bag in the overhead and sitting down in my comfortable first-class window seat with lots of gizmos beside an Asian man in a tailored suit engrossed in an illegible newspaper.

No sooner had I settled in than a stewardess stopped and politely inquired whether I’d like something to drink. I politely asked for champagne. When she politely brought a glass, I politely drank it and politely asked for another. We repeated this, politely, twice more before takeoff.

I stared out the window into the early darkness as the plane taxied down the runway, the little white lights on the ground blipping by like fireflies on a timer. Engines roaring, the g-force sucked me back as the plane shuddered up into the air and everything started jumping around like epileptic videotape.

Briefly, I experienced the urge in the pit of my clenching bowels to spew scotch and champagne all over the forward cabin. I was staring down the barrel at twelve hours of pungent socks, tasteless movies and babies crying, and had every excuse to be jetting along with every care in the world ... But it suddenly seemed my destiny, the sky. To soar on eagle’s wings. Skywalker—that was one of Blue’s nicknames for me.

I mustered the courage to peer out the window again as the earth spilled away. The plane ascended sharply and, dizzyingly, seemed to fold back into itself as it oriented its trajectory. For about ten seconds, Paris revealed itself below one last time, a vast illuminated starfish, the Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, Orsay, Beaubourg ... my old city from the days of my old self. Even as I was borne away into another incarnation, I wanted the scene, like a lover’s face, to imprint itself permanently in my fluid brain.

•

An hour later, pale cloud carpet below, stars all around, I found myself slicing through international airspace at the start of yet another installment of the Adventure. Even God didn’t know where I was. Somewhere over the Atlantic. Where Europe becomes the Americas. And vice versa.

What realizations and revelations would result from this voyage I didn’t presume to guess. I could arrive only to turn around in my tracks and head back. Or I could never head back, could disappear into the Amazon like a wayward Horatio Alger.

I could go AWOL from society, slide off civilization’s map, compose my masterpiece under tent eaves in the rainforest. I could violate common sense in most unseemly fashion, throw it to the winds for the umpteenth time. I could spontaneously transform, wake up famous, turn amnesiac again, become the Wandering Jew, be abducted by aliens ... Burning the bridge when you get there. Or better yet: burning the bridge while you’re still on it. Learning to fly of necessity, while in the act of falling.

Inebriated and making perfectly lucid nonsense, I was again sailing the old High Seas bound for a destination that might never have existed, that might never exist except in the turning pages of my mind. Discovering the plane’s motion had restored me, that my arm had returned and I was good as new, that Luke was back and more justified than ever in pushing boldly ahead into the singular fictitious existence I kept creating for myself, I acknowledged (before sinking into a drooling stupor for the duration of the flight) how reappearing was only a metaphor for the totality of my imaginary life—that, as with everything else, if I would only believe in it sincerely enough, I could succeed in making my destination, if not strictly factual, at least undeniably true.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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