There’s nothing to build, I said. The world is going.
I know that, you replied. But there isn’t anything we can do about it.
That’s what I’m saying, I said.
I looked at you looking at me. I heard that we were saying the same thing, though I didn’t understand how it was possible for us to mean it so differently. Later that night I asked you to quit your job too, stay home with me during the days. We could get survival-ready, rent a garden-level apartment with barricadable windows. We could walk around all day getting to know the things that wouldn’t be there for much longer. But you wouldn’t. You liked being an architect. You said it would make you happy to have added even one thing to a world now headed for total subtraction.
The walking path next to the highway passed under a bridge. In the cool dark beneath was a bench facing onto some empty lot full of broken glass from bottles that people had thrown just because. When sunlight hit the broken pieces, the ground lit up like a reverse chandelier, a glittering patch of green and white. Now there was less each time I walked by. Also, no bench. I stood there facing the glass, eating my last apple.
There had been times when I thought I might be with you indefinitely, something approaching an entire life. But then when there was only a finite amount of time, a thing we could see the limit of, I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know how to use a unit of time like this, too long for a game of chess or a movie but so much shorter than we had imagined. It felt like one of those days when we woke up too late for breakfast and lay in bed until it was too late for lunch. Those days made me nervous. On those days we fought about how to use our time. You didn’t want to live your life under pressure, as though we’d run out, as though it were the last days. I’m not ill, you said. We aren’t dying, we don’t have cancer, you said. So I don’t want to live like we do, you said. There are two kinds of people, and one of them will give up first.
When we fought, you got over it first. I’d watch you from the kitchen, through a rectangular space cut into the wall, and I could see you studying the newspaper, ducking your head down to read small details in the photographs. I saw how gracefully you fell back into whatever article you had been reading before. Even then I knew: whatever hollow I made in you if I left would heal up like a hole sunk into water, quick as water rushing to fill some passing wound.
This far from the pier I could still hear the seagulls fighting over scraps, crying out with their harsh voices. Sounds carried farther these days, tearing through the thin air like a stone thrown as hard as you can toward the sea. The bitten-down apple core wet my right-hand glove, while with the other hand I pressed on the bridge of my nose. There are two kinds of people: one will only weep when the possibility exists, however remote, that someone will hear them. I put the core of the apple down on the ground and looked at it. Poof, I said. I waited for something to happen. Then I went and walked back up the path toward the high-rise.
When I got home, I collected all of Cookie’s toys, her food bowl and water bowl, the little purple ball with a bell in it, the stuffed squeaking duck that was almost her size. I lined them all up on the mantel in the living room so that I could watch them disappear, one after the other.
Was the disappearing growing faster every day? No. Was it moving geographically from west to east, or east to west? Was it vanishing the world alphabetically, taxonomically, or in chronological order? It wasn’t. As hard as we tried to understand it, there didn’t seem to be much order to the disappearing at all. A week would go by with everything pretty much in its proper place, and then all of a sudden there was no such thing as magazines, not in your home or anyone else’s, and nobody to bother making new ones. Did it work its way down from the biggest things to the smallest? Was there a plan? When you were in the right mood, when you were too tired to care much, it was beautiful — like watching the house across the street as someone walked through it turning each of the lights off in order, one by one, for the night.
I sat on the floor of my brother’s empty living room and ate four chocolate chip granola bars in a row. I had already called you once today, but I was working on a reason to call you again. Experts suggested that the things disappearing most quickly now might be intangible, metaphysicaclass="underline" concepts, memories, and modes of thought were just as vulnerable to erasure, they said, though they couldn’t give any concrete examples. I thought I’d better call you to see if you still remembered that Cookie had gone.
I pushed the buttons in order. It rang twice, and then I heard you.
Hello? you said.
It’s me, I said.
It’s you, you said back to me.
I just wanted to call to see if you still remembered Cookie, I said.
Of course I still remember Cookie, you said.
There was silence on both our ends, a blur of static on the line between us.
What do you remember? I asked.
I remember that you picked her because she bit you, you said, and you decided it was important that you win this one animal over. I remember you didn’t know how to hold a cat at the beginning, so you grabbed her just anywhere. You grabbed her in the middle and tried to pick her up that way. You got bit a lot, you added.
I have your number memorized, I said.
That’s good, you said.
And I said I should let you go, and you said good night and we hung up on each other.
I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less. I used to play a game I called “Are We Going to Make It?” You were playing too, whether you knew it or not. It worked like this: you’d forget that we were going to see the movie together and you’d go by yourself instead or with a friend, while I waited at home. Or you’d stay at work until four in the morning and forget to charge your phone, and you’d wake me up on the couch where I had fallen asleep trying to stay up for you. Then I would ask myself: Are We Going to Make It? And the next thing, whatever thing you did next, would become the answer, a murky thing that I’d study until I was too tired to think about it anymore.
An “independent physicist” living in Arizona had become famous for his theories on how the Disappearing might be a sort of existential illusion, analogous to an optical illusion. He said the fact that we still remember what’s been taken and can picture it in our minds is proof that it still exists. It’s like how you only see the duck or the bunny at a given moment, never both, he said. Only imagine that instead of knowing the bunny exists alongside your experience of the duck, you believe that it’s been irrevocably lost. It’s all about vantage point, he said, temporal vantage point: the way you might lose sight of your house when you drive away from it, but find it again when you look for it from the top of a hill. To think your house was lost, he said, would be loony. Disappeared things were like this, he said, coexistent but obscured in time. This was his theory of spatiotemporal obstruction. Those who believed in it believed that there was one special place that offered temporal “higher ground.” They made pilgrimages to a particular beach in Normandy where the cliffs were chalky white, the color of doves, and where it was rumored that recently disappeared things sometimes reappeared, soft-edged and worn and looking thirty or forty years older. In 1759 a twelve-year-old girl was said to have drowned herself there to avoid marriage to a much older man.