The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (top non fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

my eyes to see a long shadow stretched on top of the ice. Max’s face had peered into the crack. His long white arms had reached into the water and pulled me out.

Fourteen

As Max and I got older, his nighttime departures became more frequent. He would slip down the drainpipe three or four times a week. My parents, heavy sleepers, never noticed his nocturnal disappearances. But I could detect the slightest movement in my brother’s bedroom. Driven by his swim team discipline, Max went to bed every weeknight at ten. Just after eleven, the rattle of the chain on his bedside lamp told me that he had gone to sleep. I’d wait a few minutes, until I could hear the first bass notes of his deepening breath, and creep into his room, slide into the empty chair at his bedside, adjust the chair’s angle toward the window, and make sure that Max was safe inside his dreams. On the nights when the rain was riling the sleeping river, I shut the window next to his bed to protect him from the water’s call. Just after midnight, my vigil ended. I’d readjust the chair and walk out of the room, keeping my eyes on my brother until the last possible moment, memorizing the shape of his sleep. But I was always an imperfect guardian, for I knew that after I left, he would wake up and vanish into the night.

When I learned about the whale and the purpose of Max’s night outings, my own sleep started to come quicker and snatch me away faster. Soon my vigil grew shorter and less diligent. The beep of my brother’s alarm at 1 A.M., the opening of his window, his descent along the vines and drainpipes, the soft thump of his feet on the grass, and his eventual return a couple of hours later were camouflaged by my dreams.

By the time Max entered his final year in high school, he had metamorphosed into a strange sea creature. His skin was not the healthy tanned hue of a beach bum, but pale and translucent, an odd bluish white that came from spending too much time underwater. He passed through our rooms carried on his own current. His appearances at the dinner table or at picnics in the backyard were fleeting. He often disappeared from family outings, lured by a nearby river or lake. Max slipped away gradually. Until the day after I fell under the ice—then he vanished altogether.

After that, the house seemed to shrink inside its foundations. We circled around his room, his chair, his pile of flippers and bathing suits. During the first days of his absence, I blamed myself for his escape. He had vanished on my watch. After many false starts, the moment that I had trained for had come and I had let my brother slip away. I waited for him to call or write, but grew bored with my vigil. It was hard, I learned, to create an engaging routine out of absence—out of the phone that didn’t ring, the mail that didn’t come, the empty bedroom that never creaked. And when the quiet of Max’s room began to lull me to sleep rather than keep me awake, I stopped listening for my brother’s return. I knew not to make the same mistake twice, not to sink into a myopic observation of Max, or of his absence. So I began to look elsewhere, at the interlacing branches on the trees, at the new tiles our mother ordered for the kitchen, at the school windows streak-stained with steam from hissing radiators. And one day I noticed that I wasn’t waiting for Max at all. This might sound heartless, absorbing Max’s disappearance into the everyday. But it became clear to me that, in the absence of a coherent or pleasant pattern to his disappearance, I had jumped the gun once again. Max’s leaving was not the vanishing I had been dreading since the night he jumped into the river. He would wash ashore somewhere.

Two months after Max left, his correspondence started. At the beginning, his letters were stubborn and jerky. His first postcard came from Florida, where he was working with a group of marine biologists in the Everglades, studying plant life. Two weeks later, we got a letter saying that he would be sailing up the coast, creeping under piers and crawling along the bottoms of ships to examine the effects of pollution on barnacles. As Max slipped further underwater, shrugging off dry land for the deep sea, his letters began to arrive in waves. After barnacles he dived deeper to study the sleep patterns of flounder and halibut. Max began to live upside down, his feet pointing toward the sky and his eyes combing the cool darkness of the lightless sea. He was a mountaineer whose thrill came from reaching the lowest point. Max described his undersea world with cartographer’s clarity, painting maps of sea caves and the interlacing networks of tidal beds.

Max described the different sounds of the deep ocean—the heavy murmur a hundred feet down, the light buzz that hovers around large reefs, the delicate whistle that skims along the surface. He believed that he could hear a storm in the distance as it drummed back and forth between the waves. He told us how mollusks and seaweed tasted fresher when eaten in the sea and that eating an oyster underwater was like kissing a mermaid.

Every so often, Max promised to come home. But we knew he wouldn’t. Somehow he was always buffeted by the tides before he reached our shores. We grew accustomed to his excuses and deferrals. Then Max called to say he was in Costa Rica and would arrive in Bermuda for an open-sea swimming competition the following morning. The next day, a plane ticket was waiting for me in our mailbox.

Max’s letters had described several of these extreme swims, these Tidal Roars, as they were