And on another hill, there is a man. He is making something, a new kind of machine. He will put it on the roof, and it will spin light and energy down from the stars.
One day they will be together, and then my work will be complete.
Unsichtbarkeit
I HAD SOME MONEY PUT ASIDE by October, and went to Paris to continue my work without distraction.
My work. Your work. Our work.
It has to stop, you used to say. And I agreed with you. Agreed with you that it had to stop, and believed you when you said we were helping.
Helping what?
Helping to stop it.
I did not write to you after I arrived in Paris. By spring I had finished the coding but when I tried to get in touch so I could deliver, it was as if you had disappeared. Vanished from the net, and your various emails and phone numbers didn’t work either. Maybe that was a clue.
If you are going to do this work, you will have to know how to disappear.
We used to practise disappearing. I was better at it than you. Once high on a ridge in Hawai’i I leaned against an ancient temple wall and watched Japanese tourists walk past me so they could look out over the ocean. Hoping for whales, getting boats. The little group went back and forth a few times making bathroom forays and fetching forgotten binoculars and cameras. I guess the heiau itself had studied as we had, for it couldn’t be seen from the road unless one knew what to look for.
When the tourists were heading back to the parking lot for the final time, I made myself visible again and one of them cried out. “Were you there all along?” a man asked in heavily accented English. It was his wife, presumably, who had shrieked. Or maybe she was his sister. I don’t think it matters. What mattered was the invisibility spell had worked.
“Yes,” I told the man, “I’ve been here all along.”
Where is here?
All places and times exist at once.
That isn’t really useful information though, is it?
Following online trails I came across someone who said he had talked to you recently. The past tense made me anxious. A small grey fear began to grow inside me, from mouse to cat and eventually to dog, although there was no reason why it should. It just seemed strange that you should be careless, that if you were disappearing you had done so only partially. No one should have heard of you at all. It shouldn’t have been so easy to find your footprints. But maybe the person who said he had known you (in Athens, he said, over the winter) was lying. Maybe he posted on the internet to catch people like me, people who really had known you, and actually might know where you were.
Sometimes the same people who say they are helping you are actually trying to hurt you.
Sometimes you’re actually hurting the people you’re trying to help.
Did I inadvertently lead people to you?
But if that was true I would at some point have been captured and tortured so I would give it up. Your location. Your plans. And I wasn’t helping them, I was trying to find you, so that I could give you the work I’d done on invisibility.
And Karina? She told me the day they found you she was driving—not that that means anything.
In hindsight so much seems crazy dangerous, both of us making unwise choices—at least if we were interested in keeping not just body but soul together—we were like people in a le Carré only it was our lives.
Yes, it was ironic. I had been working on software to make you better at what you were already doing.
Disappearing. Verschwinden.
But there are different kinds.
How to erase one’s traces, achieve unsichtbarkeit. Invisibility, the program. Sure to be a giant seller if I’d gone commercial, but then they could have used it too. The people who were watching us could have become invisible, so that we wouldn’t know they were watching. You wanted it just to be for us. For people like us.
What are people like us like?
People who agree it has to stop. Invisibility Spell, the program. VPN was just the beginning.
Because of the cat-sized fear I wrote you a letter one friend writes another when they don’t want them to die. I copied it several times and sent the same letter to snail mail addresses in three countries and to your German cousins. All six identical letters were returned unopened. The three sent to Germany, the one to London, even the one sent to a new address, one I’d never seen before, in Athens, that the stranger I met online when I was staying in Montmartre had given me. But the return of the letters didn’t necessarily mean you’d really disappeared. It might have just meant you were practising. We used to practise all the time. It was the most important exercise we could do, you said.
How do you know when the other person has stopped practising disappearing and disappeared for real? How do you know when you yourself have stopped?
Somewhat rhetorically, I asked these and other things of the person who had known you over the winter in Athens. But was it one person, or three, or was it Karina?
They were kind, the person who said he was a man and had known you. Too kind, I thought, to be lying to me, but they also did not agree to meet me in the flesh. He said he had not seen you since early March, and that no one else he knew (that you knew too) had seen you since then either.
I tried to visualize these people in Greece, whom you had spent the winter amongst, while I laboured on Invisibility Spell, alone in Paris. You, in Athens, where it was warm, sitting in Exarchia cafés late at night, unmaking and remaking the world in conversation. You never tired of it.
I didn’t write you from Paris. It never occurred to me you might not have been able to find me. You were you, after all.
I moved back to Berlin. I waited for you to get in touch. For no particular reason, my fear grew to dog-size. If I wasn’t by your side I could not protect you, I could not change things. I was the wrong person to practise disappearing from.
When I heard something again (and it was a whole other year), it was that you had killed yourself before they found you. I suppose it seemed better than them getting hold of you. I was strangely comforted to hear you had used a gun. Fast and painless. One hopes.
It has to stop, you used to say.
What has to stop? In the end it was you who stopped, not it.
In the end it was they who stopped you.
Maybe you let them find you. Maybe you were tired. Maybe it wasn’t suicide at all. Maybe letting them find you was a form of suicide. Maybe hounding you till you killed yourself was a form of murder.
In Berlin, after I heard, I did not contact anyone, out of perversity. And knowing there was nothing anyone could say. More than once I “accidentally” walked by your building, where I had often stayed, overlooking the Admiralbrücke over the canal. It was strange to see your building in the spring sunlight. I had only known it in winter, known its courtyard full of bicycles, its steep narrow stairs leading to your top floor flat. I still had a key to the arched wooden street door but I didn’t take it out of my pocket to see if it still worked in the sticky lock.
It was only much later that I understood. Perhaps you were trying to protect me from what you saw as inevitable in yourself. You would slip through my fingers like a fish, back into the ocean. You had an appointment there with someone, and it wasn’t me. I lived in a different ocean altogether. I wanted to go with you, but you wouldn’t let me. You knew the appointment was for yourself alone.
Once I knew I would never try the key it was time to leave Berlin again. I went back to Paris, briefly. But I’d gone to Paris to finish the work, and with it done, and you gone, Paris was haunted. I went to New York. Home. It had been decades.