The Hypothetical Girl (21 page)

This is why they have nannycams
, Emily thought.

For a time she wrote about her vanishing on her blog, “Emily’s World”: “I am disappearing. It doesn’t hurt. It actually has no sensation at all.”

Her therapist was quite delusional. She insisted Emily was still totally visible, that this was some sort of psychotic episode she was having. “Why do you keep referring to yourself as the disappeared girl? This is very unhelpful to our progress here.”

“I am a realist,” Emily said. “I call ’em as I see ’em. Or as I don’t see ’em, apropros of the present scenario.”

“Could this be a reaction to the divorce proceedings?” June asked. “To the way Evan took all the money, your nicest things, wedding presents and such, sold them on eBay?”

“I could have stopped him.”

“But perhaps the way he treated you, so shabbily.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Emily said.

“Well, maybe it’s a reaction to that man you met online,” June suggested.

“Which one?”

“The one who said you were …”

“Hypothetical?”

“Yes, that one. What was his name?”

“Nick.”

“Well, that upset you, didn’t it?”

She had been mostly confused by Nick. She had met him on Matchmaker.com and they had chatted about six times so sweetly, so intently, before the phone call. “I think I miss you,” she had dared to say, when they finally spoke with actual voices. “Can one miss someone one has never met?”

“You can, but it is ridiculous,” Nick had replied. The next time she heard from him—and the last time—was when he texted her that sentence, the one to which her therapist June referred: “You are not an actual girl,” he wrote. “You are hypothetical.”

Yes, June may have hit the nail on the head. It was like a curse; he must have brought it on.

At the Bronx Zoo, Emily liked to go to the enclosure of the nocturnal animals, the “House of Darkness.” She liked to see how the lemurs could blend so artfully into the leaves of trees; the bats could fold themselves up like unneeded umbrellas hung deep in the bowels of a closet. Certain toads could slink down into the stones beside pools of water and become stones. It was interesting to see the way these creatures vanished. They made it very artful. They made it quite lovely.

Her own vanishing continued to be a stop-and-start thing. It did not involve folding up or blending into trees or dark. She was more like a drawing that was being erased.

“I shall miss you,” she said to the little bit of herself she could still see in the mirror in the morning. “You were nice to be. I especially enjoyed the way you looked in that red turtleneck from Saks.”

Since she had lost her job some months before, she wasn’t missed at work. She wasn’t missed by a child, as she had no child. Her mother, in the beginning of her eighth relationship, which would soon morph into
her eighth marriage (she was certain), seemed to be on some sort of extended pre-marriage, pre-honeymoon vacation.

Her ex was completely incommunicado. He did not answer texts, e-mails, or phone calls. His inbox was always full. She had the sense they had communicated for the last time when he told her about his new girlfriend. She had forbidden him from seeing Emily, texting or speaking with her. Her sister, Sofia, was mad at her for some long-forgotten incident having something to do with an Albuquerque City Bond they jointly inherited from their father. True, Emily had misplaced it. But she was sure it would turn up someday. Of course, if she vanished before it did that could be a problem. For this reason she dared not contact Sofia. Calling her would be like purposefully dialing up an argument.

Then she had somehow lost her cell phone. Everyone’s numbers had been inside it. She could have tried to find them all, sent out some sort of frenetic e-mail to everyone she knew—
Send numbers! Quick!
—but it hardly seemed necessary if she was vanishing.

All of this had happened in winter, and by spring, when the first flowers tested the air with their bright fingertips, purple and clementine and ruby red, she was just a slip of a thing. Like cellophane.

She went out on her porch and sat on a small stool left there by the previous tenant. She looked all around at the ways things were coming into themselves. Then she felt
something on her ankle. When she looked down she saw an ant crawling up to her calf. “Little ant, you are lost,” she said. She flicked it back to the known world.

For a time after that she became water. She was a pond, a stream, the gathered drops in the tub after a shower. It felt nice to be so cool and shiny. Then she became shadow. That had been nice also, to feel sewn to a heel, connected. But then she disconnected and came loose and dried up.

She had known the day would come. She walked by a store window and there it was, the absence of her presence. In the place where she should be were other people’s reflections: cars, women with strollers, couples holding hands, couples arguing, a mother and her daughter, two women who had to be sisters, admiring a lovely handbag. People not so different from the person she had been.

A man with a dog on a leash passed right through her and she reached out to pet it, right along its golden retriever–ish spine. For the longest time the dogs had sensed her, but this dog did not sniff or turn or register her at all.

She walked home quickly, feverishly, trying hard not to panic. She walked her invisible self up the stairs to her apartment and let her invisible self inside. The phone was ringing, but how can a vanished person answer a telephone? The only thing to do, the only responsible, sane, and viable option she could think of was to
go to bed. Get into her bed and try to dream, dream of
being
and of things that are, of cotton candy and large spiral seashells, of brown spicy mustard and sketching her initials in cement when they poured the new patio at her parents’ house; dream of the time she broke her arm falling off the jungle gym.

Dream dream dream of pain, of objects, of cold, of heat, of Jell-O, of potato latkes, of really really nice shoes. Dream herself back to the world.

She swiftly brushed her invisible teeth. She tucked her invisible self into her bed. She shut her invisible eyes and tried hard to smell the soft and slightly lemony smell that had been the smell of herself. She tried to feel her toes against the clean sheets. She tried not to be recently departed. She shut her invisible eyes and looked into the invisible dark.

Somewhere in the distance she caught a glimpse of the girl she had been before she vanished and she thought she would like to send that girl a note, letter, an e-mail, or better, a telegraph:

P
olar bear and deer were chatting. They had met on thosestupidhumans.com, which was not meant to be a dating site, per se, but then there were lots of stories cropping up about matches made there. Odd couplings, unconventional matches. Like eagle and sea bass. Now there was an original love story.

It had begun in a chat room about climate change, a concern all around these days, but then everyone else had left, one by one, shrimp, black squirrel, and finally millipede, and the two found themselves chatting solo. Suddenly it felt quite intimate, and deer had confided.

“Forest seems smaller all the time. They are felling trees like nobody’s business.”

“Tell me about it,” polar bear replied, “you can’t find an iceberg these days worth its salt.”

“Oh, are they salty? I always imagined them saltless, chipping off as they do, from glaciers.”

“Figure of speech, my dear,” polar bear replied.

“Say, you ever get any terns anymore?” asked deer. “I hear they are in short supply.”

“Oh, yes, we get terns aplenty, but they are just so annoying. Yap yapping, dipping into the krill and fish population. The whales are all so upset about it. They are turning into major competitors.”

“Sounds like the woodpeckers. They are all over the place, eating all the bark.”

“There you go, everyone is eating everything now, not enough to go around for anyone. Stupid humans.”

“Stupid humans,” deer typed.

Suddenly, there was an awkward lull in the conversation, broken when deer wrote, quite out of the blue:

“What is it like, the mating season? Any different these days?”

Another lull, then:

“No, there are females around, just can’t seem to find anyone I connect with lately.”

“I hear you,” wrote deer.

“Now you, on the other hand, you I can really connect with,” polar bear typed.

A lull. What to write?

“I feel the very same way,” wrote deer, finally.

That was how it started. This conversation was followed by an exchange of e-mail addresses, texting, a bit of Twitter, and then a rather long ooVoo session when deer found herself quite attracted to polar bear, her heart all fluttery. Polar bear was also feeling quite
out of the ordinary, all sweaty-pawed and a little, well, turned on, to be frank. Deer had such a soft tawny coat. Deer had such big, shiny eyes, rather like icy pools of water. And she batted those lashes so seductively, like pine branches in the wind.

They chatted all hours, ooVooed and Skyped, and the texting had gotten quite out of hand. Polar bear preferred to write at night, by the light of the moon. The days were so bright it was hard to see the screen. And with the northern lights flickering all around, well, it was just so romantic.

The problem with texting, as anyone will tell you, is the absence of tone. You just can’t tell so much of the time whether someone is joking or serious, coy or aloof, sardonic or straight. On several occasions, deer assumed polar bear was rushing, trying to get the texting session over with. Polar bear had been doing nothing of the sort. But there it is: tone.

One day, very early, just after she roused herself from sleep, shaking all the loose chips of dream off her coat, deer shot a courageous text.

“Thinking ’bout you,” she wrote. Indeed, she had just had a very sultry, sexy dream about polar bear.

Polar bear, at that moment, was already well on his way to sleep. He was so sleepy, just on the edge of a major sexy dream himself, and could barely rouse himself to respond. Polar bears sleep hard, hard, hard, and they love their dreams. He left the text unanswered.

“Are you mad at me?” deer texted the next day.

“What? Of course not. That is silly,” wrote polar bear. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” deer texted back. She was embarrassed to write that she was hurt when he had not answered such a personal and confessional text.

There was a lot of interspecies miscommunication, as well, having to do with feeding habits and migration patterns and such. Plus, obviously, the time zone disconnect. When it was midnight in the Arctic it was late afternoon for deer in her forest, so you can imagine how cumbersome that could get. Polar bear suggested they do away with texts entirely and stick with Skyping.

“I like it so much better when I can actually see you,” polar bear wrote.

Deer felt her heart do a back flip. She blushed. When a deer blushes it is as if her whole body is trembling and trilling; it is very pleasurable.

“Awww,” she wrote. “I like to see you, too. You are so handsome.”

“Now it is my turn,” polar bear wrote, “to say awww.” Polar bear was blushing. When polar bears blush, a deep and warm flush of blood ripples through them, starting at their toes and moving up to the tips of their noses. Of course, neither one could detect the other blushing, as this was a text communication, but they just felt they somehow
knew
. They were becoming quite good at detecting mood in each other, reading between the lines.

Then came the silence. It was a rather long silence, caused when polar bear was forced to move to an entirely new feeding zone, quite a significant distance away. The fish were very sparse and there had been no sea ice to sun on at all in the area where he had been residing. But deer took the silence quite personally. What had she done, she wondered, to alienate him so?

“Hello, hello?” she wrote in an e-mail. They had not used e-mail much, and she thought it might get his attention. But polar bear used his e-mail only for very important business matters and communicating with a certain distant cousin in Alaska, so he hadn’t opened it for weeks. He was having quite a hard time just existing, to be honest, and didn’t want to trouble deer with all his woes; it felt like it would be whiny and very unmanly.

Deer, for her part, was feeling quite uneasy all day long. She walked through the forest despondently, barely stopping to graze or nap. Polar bear, polar bear, what happened here? she thought. Then, having lost so much sleep, she found herself falling behind her herd, and by the time she caught up all the good grass and twigs and such were already gone. She became rather spindly, and this was furthering the sense of a malaise besetting her. She tried to talk about it with a few friends and relatives.

“I am in love, hopelessly, I am afraid, and the object of my affection has just checked out. I haven’t heard from him in almost a week.”

“Oh males,” said her cousin. “They do that. They will use silence quite strategically, when it suits them.”

A strategic use of silence was something that had never occurred to deer. She assumed polar bear was straight with her, no game playing. They had even discussed it. Their mutual distaste for games.

Then deer did something she didn’t like doing. She went on a popular dating site and looked for polar bear. To see if he had joined up and what his profile was. She found him. There he was: polar bear! He wrote all about himself and what he was seeking in a mate.

“I seek a partner who has similar interests, who loves the sun and warm days but finds solace in the snow as well. And … no games!”

Deer immediately compared her own qualities with polar bear’s needs in a mate. She loved sun and warm days. She also thought she found solace in the snow. The forest filled with drifts and embankments, with sharp, taut edges. The world so thoroughly transformed. But then, was that admiration or solace? What exactly is solace? And how many girls had responded to polar bear’s posting? She could see he had been on the dating site within the last twenty-four hours. He had gone onto the site but was not responding to her texts! This could mean only one thing, she thought. He was still “looking around”; she was not the solitary object of his affection.