Eventually I started going by my ex-family’s house every day, between 3:30 and 5:15 p.m., after Charlotte got home from school and before Jennifer got home from work. I dressed up and parked down the street, watching carefully. Sometimes I barely saw anything but the glow from the TV. On Tuesdays Charlotte wore her mom’s clothes and makeup and strolled around the neighborhood, I didn’t know why. She never had other kids over. She never seemed to study. From time to time she made paper models of animals or buildings or monuments, and tore them up after she built them. This was a hobby I had never seen when we lived together.
One day the house filled up with boxes, and then they moved again, and soon Jennifer’s lawyer sent a letter with a new address for the child support checks. Then Jennifer emailed and apologized for using her lawyer and described her new job and Charlotte’s new school, where she seemed to be fitting in. After that one last email came, saying they were happy and to stop texting and emailing unless it was an emergency. I didn’t know what had changed. I went by their old house and pictured my daughter powdering on her mom’s pale foundation. Whose fault was it that I couldn’t imagine my little girl as a popular kid? I sold my fancy computer stuff for a simple laptop, and I wrote a novel about a hacker whose ability to disappear was his only strength.
The last time I saw Charlotte was just after the second move. The secretary at her new school called and said my daughter was acting out. I asked why he hadn’t called her mom, and he said he had, with no answer. The guy wouldn’t accept excuses over the phone. I got there in fifteen minutes. In the principal’s office a nice older white lady with nice round glasses and nice impersonal manners asked me about my family. I told her what I had told her secretary: that I had agreed not to see my family anymore, so couldn’t they cut Charlotte some slack, she was going through a lot? I said I had heard that Charlotte was fitting in.
“Usually kids who think acting out can make them popular,” the principal said, slowing her words as if I wouldn’t understand, “are kids who feel they are acting at home.”
It was a line you gave someone who didn’t know his whole life was an act. Maybe you could only recite it if you didn’t know this about yourself.
I told her I would give up everything, even my daughter, if it meant a better life for my daughter.
Afterward Charlotte was waiting in the hall. She knew about adults, what could hurt them and where they were going next, like a ghost or a shrink. “Do you not get it?” she said. “You’re making everything harder on me. Now everyone will know you’re my dad. How can I be normal?”
She guided me to an emergency exit. She had a ten-year-old’s brutal eye for what was an emergency and what was not.
THE CAVE
I needed to update Yumi on my situation, I would present the box as Disappearance Exhibit A. I had filled that box with objects of Charlotte’s unfulfilled desire—wasn’t that loving better? Now those objects were gone, and the unfulfilled desire was mine. How could I make myself not disappear, when disappearing and not disappearing were both acts of nothing? The one thing my parents and my adoptive parents would have agreed on was that you didn’t control your fate (your personality is an aspect of your blood type, God never gives you more than you etc.). What I wanted to hear from Yumi was that she still believed we held our lives in our own hands. She was everything pro-choice! Earlier that month she had shown me a line from one of her grad courses: To want is to realize what we don’t have . . . I was still thinking about that and about what it meant I lacked.
She had described the whole scene. She was taking notes on autopilot, the professor was bio-ing some French psychoanalyst, then suddenly class was over and she hadn’t moved in ten or fifteen minutes. When I asked about the last note she took, she got her pad out of her bag. It was the same pad she used for work.
To want is to realize what we don’t have.
To love is to give what we don’t have.
Then some letters that probably meant food orders.
Dude at table 2 is a groper.
Etc.
Several times she had called this course “White Men Obsessed with Their Penises.” The more I thought about her notes, the more I worried about who I was.
I parked on Mount Auburn Street and walked to clear my head. The short stretch of trees before the university could almost fool you into thinking you were in a small town. In the peace between traffic I could hear birdcalls. Then I got to the quaint shops made loud by students. Soon I regretted coming. Halfway to Harvard Square the footsteps behind me grew threatening—they kept a beat. My senses expanded in an invisible circle around me. I walked a little farther, and the footsteps kept coming. Finally I spun on my heels. Twenty feet back, at the edge of my sense-circle, two white dudebros pretended to chat. They wore hats that said something about this country we all lived in, that it wasn’t great anymore.
Sweat dripped from my palms. I had suffered some damage to my nervous system. I wondered how long the dudebros had been following me. The other day the news had reported a white man raping and strangling Asian women in New York’s Chinatown. Black males kept getting shot by police. This was the menace we lived with—I wasn’t lucky enough to disappear from menace. It was a menace you could sometimes barely see. I stopped to check whether the dudebros would pass, but they stopped too and honked their hands at a student in a headscarf. In other words they made convincing dudebros, and this didn’t comfort me.
I turned right on JFK Street. The dudebros turned right on JFK Street. They talked about bikes with zero gears, difficulty as a trend. The world wasn’t hard enough for them. I tried to walk like JFK, the president: chin level, good Catholic posture, as if going to greet God. I clasped my hands devoutly in front of me and turned into an alley. In my head I recited, Ask not what your country can do, etc. I dropped a ten in the bucket of a brown woman with no legs. When no one followed I portioned my breath into consistent measures. I listened over my noisy heart. Then I took a series of rights back toward The Cave, telling myself there was no reason dudebros would follow me, and two red hats came around the bend.
Unless they too had parked on Mount Auburn Street with the plan to walk from there to The Cave to get a little air because earlier the toys they had bought had disappeared, they were following me. What was the connection between disappearing and following? I swung my head left as if something fascinating had appeared, and one of them nudged the other.
We stood in front of The Cave. In the window my reflection had come an unknowable distance of time and space to meet me. I felt extremely tired, like my reflection’s effort had been mine. Before I could censor myself I asked why the dudebros had followed me.
One of them twisted his hat back and forth like who was I talking to. The other said, “What? You mean us?”
“Do you see me?” I asked.
“You think you’re invisible or something?”
I wondered whether that was it, I had mistaken disappearance for invisibility. “Then why are you following me?”
The first dudebro touched the second’s arm and nodded to go inside, but the second held back. “Wait. This dude is pissing me off.”
I pressed my fingers to either temple.
“Okay,” I said. “Never mind. Maybe it was just in my head. I get carried away sometimes. I’ve been told I’m not a good judge of people.”