The next time I heard from my mother, her voice was a whisper on the other end of the line. Dean and I had been broken up for a week. He kept calling, first my office and then my apartment, and approached me in our last class, after I’d administered the final exam. He accused me of humiliating him; he said that if he hadn’t dug through my office closet and found a commencement gown — which he wore home and didn’t plan on returning — he didn’t know what he would have done. He made a scene. The other students stared. When my mother called, it was the first time I’d answered the phone in days.
“Diane,” my mother said. “I think your father is going to kill me.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“He’s been banging around in the basement all morning, making his plans,” she said. “Last night, he kept shouting at me about the lawnmower. I really have no idea what’s going on.”
“That makes two of us.” I walked down the hall and wedged myself into the cool dark space of the closet.
“I keep telling him that he should disappear,” she said. “But he doesn’t listen.”
“You don’t want to say that.” I found my husband’s baseball cap on the floor beside me and rubbed the brim, wondering how it had ended up in the closet, how I had ended up in the closet. “Mom,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stay in Chicago.”
“You could come here,” she said. “You could help me with your father and the lawnmower and the doorbell.”
“What’s wrong with the doorbell?”
“It’s broken.”
“So where are you now?” I pushed the cap into the corner, underneath a stack of clean sheets. “If you’re not in Nebraska.”
“Da nessuna parte,” she said.
The phrase she’d used this time translated into get nowhere. When I started to ask my mother what she meant exactly — as in, who was she getting nowhere with — she hung up. I stayed in the closet, holding the phone in my hands, feeling on the cusp of some kind of shattering.
Later that evening, I took a shot of scotch in the kitchen. My husband had started keeping his diving equipment in the guest bedroom and, even with the door closed, an earthy, raw smell had overtaken the apartment. I had another shot, then went to look at plane tickets online. I wondered what, when I got to Nebraska, I would say to my mother, if I would learn to comprehend the language she was now speaking, if I would know how to answer her back. I ended up studying the websites mentioned in the newspaper article on people who had changed identities: Metamorphosis, The New Life Institute, Disappearing Acts. They all looked like scams, all asked for money up front, and yet I couldn’t help imagining myself as Betty or Raquel or Lucinda, couldn’t help dreaming up a new life: I would go to some remote part of the West, near the Mojave Desert, say, and let my hair grow long. I would live in a trailer, so I could always pick up and go. I would write a futuristic account of a misunderstanding that led to a war that raged on for a thousand years, a war that could have been avoided entirely if someone had just said one thing differently. Finally I turned off the computer and stared at the dark screen. I wondered about the one thing I should have said differently, the one thing that set me on this irrevocable course.
That night I dreamed there was a heat wave so intense, the mayor ordered all the city’s residents to take refuge in Lake Michigan. Soon the lake was packed with bodies. The water was hot. We bobbed there for weeks, all of us, even after our skin wrinkled and peeled. Then one day I looked across the lake, and everyone was gone except for some single, distant person — so far the face was a grey smudge. I felt something like relief, like recognition, and started to swim. Each time I thought I’d reached him, it was only a dark spot on the water.
I came home one evening to find the balcony door open and a strange noise coming from outside. Dean was still calling and my husband had been politely ignoring the phone calls I insisted go unanswered late at night. The department head had phoned earlier that day to schedule a private meeting with me. Her tone had been somber and clipped and after we set a time, she hung up without saying goodbye. I was in all kinds of trouble, and I knew it.
My husband was standing on the balcony, a tape recorder clenched in his hand. He’d turned on the Christmas lights; I noticed one of the bulbs had gone dead. I went outside and stood beside him. He clicked off the recorder.
“School’s out,” he said. “Any exceptional students this time around?”
I looked at him, startled, but he was already staring at his hands, not expecting an answer. I wondered if Dean or someone from the university had contacted him, or if he’d somehow known all along. I pressed myself against the railing, weak with terror and relief.
“I can apologize to you in fifteen different languages,” I said. “Where should I start?”
“I’m not interested in the languages you speak anymore.”
“Fair enough.” I looked at my husband. The bones in his face seemed to be weighing down his skin. I asked what he had been listening to.
“An audio of the mishegenabeg,” he said. “I got it at diving practice. A cryptozoologist in Wisconsin recorded it.”
“Play it for me,” I said.
A low, hollow noise surrounded us, like an echo bouncing around a cave. Or like whales conversing. Or a primordial groan. He played it again and again. Of course, the recording couldn’t have been real, was something anyone with a little imagination could have made, but I didn’t tell him that. I gazed at the lit windows staring back at us like eyes, at the glowing orbs of the streetlamps. This was the language he was trading in now, and I would have to adapt or not.
“What’s going on with your mother?” he asked when the noise finally died.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to have to do something soon.”
“And what is it you’ll do?”
“I don’t know that, either.” I had so many ideas of what to do, ideas that felt at once intensely possible and as intangible as fog moving across Lake Michigan at sunrise. I could go to Nebraska and care for my mother. I could stay in Chicago and try to figure out how I had gotten to this point, surrounded by people I couldn’t understand. I could finish my paper. I could write something new. I could help my husband search for the mishegenabeg. Or I could just disappear.
I looked out into the city, at the shadows between buildings, the peaks of skyscrapers. A row of people bicycling on the sidewalk below. A sombrero on a dumpster. The smog that sank against the tops of buildings like hair on a woman’s shoulders.
“Look at that,” my husband said, using the tape recorder to point out a distant building and the pair of lighted elevators rising and falling, so bright against the black of the structure.
“I want to be buried in a city,” I said. “There’s no such thing as night here.”
“Lake Michigan’s deepest point is nearly a thousand feet.” He rested his arms on top of the railing and leaned against the iron bars. “It’s so dark down there, nothing grows. It’s called the hypolimnion layer.”