The day Dick disappeared, I woke up fuming.
We’d had a row—the word we’d agreed to use when it wasn’t quite a fight. We overpronounced it for effect, yawning the vowel like we were English, like cow, like ow. We hadn’t gotten to bed ‘til north of midnight, or rather, we’d gotten in bed, then proceeded to argue about some semantic stupid thing for two more hours.
In the morning, Dick did his usual routine and I listened, my back to his side of the bed—thumbs tapping against Reddit, sputtering start of the shower, wood drawers on metal casters, rough denim pulled over dry hips, coffee beans throttled against steel burrs. I tried to let these familiar drones lull me back to sleep, but no more meaningful REM came. When I heard the front door latch behind him, I swung my feet to the side of the bed and started my day.
Dick worked in the city and I worked at home. For a few good years, we’d both worked at home, listening to each other’s calls, adopting each other’s mannerisms, becoming sensitive to each other’s subtlest partialities. We’d swallowed each other up and grown strong, one single self laid on top of the other like a taco held by two tortillas, like a stack of Pringles, like an eclipse. But the sun is still there, even if you can’t see it.
The day Dick disappeared was productive for me. I was between assignments, in the liminal space that surrounds gig work like a goo, so I ran errands to feel useful—went to the corner store for cilantro, drove myself to the post office, swam laps. I texted Dick at 5 to say I’d be going into quiet mode, that if he got home before 6, not come into the office. He didn’t respond, but I didn’t notice.
Dick and I were what any clinician would call co-dependent. Had been for 13 years, ever since we’d fallen asleep watching a movie on a dirty couch, woke up sweat-glued to each other, went for pancakes, and started our life together. The nights we’d spent apart since then had been few and necessary, mandated by work or other obligations. We did everything and processed everything as a unit. Some families complained about the forced togetherness of the plague years; we barely registered a change.
The bodega had been playing a Joni Mitchell song when I walked in, the one where she’s warbling about drinking her lover like communion wine then pouring him out of her in her songs. She wrote it about Leonard Cohen, Dick once told me, and I’d been singing it to myself all day—at the post office, in the pool, at my desk.
The row had been about Dick’s discomfort with me using him in my writing. I had an idea for a new story and I thought he’d be excited—I’d been stuck—but he had questions. You’re going to talk about that? Fictionalize it how?
As a kid I’d wanted two things for my life: to be a writer, and to fall in love. Over the years, writing teachers told me you had to be willing to mine, deploy, obliterate your self in your work. I took this lesson and applied it to the wrong thing.
One of those teachers put an Annie Dillard book about writing into my hands and what I remember most about it is a line she excerpts from the sculptor Anne Truitt. This minimalist modernist wrote three memoirs of her life straddling the spheres of art and domesticity, and in one she said something that stuck with Dillard—something I’ve since learned by heart: The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s most intimate sensitivity.
My life was no longer just mine to obliterate, was part of the problem.
*
Dick and June fought a lot. Not about anything serious, but because they were both stubborn, defensive, given to linguistic analysis. It was gymnastic, the way these conversations went. Athletic. You couldn’t half-ass it; it drained them both. There was never make-up anything at the end. It was more like the conclusion of a very long wrestling match, each retiring to their corners, someone feeling more beat than the other but neither with enough of their wits intact to feel triumphant. The overwhelming emotion was exhaustion, not victory. Not love.
But they did love each other. It’s important you understand that.
*
The day Dick disappeared, I put a period drama he hated on the TV and chopped carrots and onions and preheated the oven before I even thought to check his location. When I did, it said he (or, at least, his phone) was still at work. The small cursor of his young face, an old picture in which he still had the mustache that had drawn me in, hovered over the address it always did when I checked on him throughout the day.
He was still there at 7:15, and this was unusual, though not unheard of. Sometimes they kept him late. Sometimes his boss didn’t want to drink alone. He’d gotten a reputation, his first years at the company, as a wife guy—one of the ones who always went home. But he was getting more comfortable there lately, more bought into the culture. They’d given him more power, which meant the things we rolled our eyes at when he started he had excuses for now, excuses he believed in. They made him feel important, which is maybe something I used to do. The Dick I’d first met who got drunk on two beers had become a guy whose beers you didn’t count. He’d sprouted a new branch, an offshoot: Dick at work. Eclipse, obliteration by another name.
The tiny cubes of vegetables hissed when they hit the oil, then curled up at their edges, filling the apartment with its modal weeknight scent. I poured a wave of orange lentils on top, placed frozen slices of bread on the toaster rack but didn’t toast them. I did the dishes, started a book. At 9, feeling more shame than fear, I sent Are you guys still at the office to Dick’s closest work friend, Alex. It was 9:30 by the time he sent back:
Sorry, already at home!
Then, Nah, we were done hours ago.
Then, Left around 5:30.
*
Dick and June were married in the last year things were normal. After their wedding, friends told them it was the last time they’d gathered in a group before the world went weird, contracted, folded over on itself. All couples experience post-wedding nesting, but most do not experience it as an outfitting of the only space they’re allowed to inhabit. The surfaces of Dick and June’s apartment were efficient to the point of silliness—they thought of everything, and plenty of other stuff they didn’t need to think of. Living room color schemes were optimized, kitchen shelving revamped, conversation-starting antiques procured. They built new desks so their every limb could bend at a perfect 90-degree angle. And when they were finally released back into the world, they hosted, and hosted, and hosted.
They were proud of what they’d built together—more proud, maybe, than of anything else they’d done with their lives. They busied themselves buffing their shared world’s many facets, not pausing to wonder if they were making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. They weren’t yet thinking of the road they traveled together as a path that foreclosed others, were not yet seeing the ways that being in this couple meant not being a great many other things.
*
The day Dick disappeared, it was 10 p.m. before I went looking for him. I had a great parking spot, is why I waited. When I pulled on my coat, I didn’t know where I was going; the cat looked confused. The toast was still in the toaster, crystals of freezer burn melting it damp.
Behind the wheel, I put the car in gear and started driving—first to his train station, then to the local bar, then just up and down random thoroughfares. It being night made the task seem harder, as if daylight would have meant I could drive down the streets of one of the largest cities in the world and easily spot him among the throngs.
*
Dick and June first met in an overgrown backyard in the scrappy Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain, where a mutual friend was showing her senior art school project—a taxidermied bear on its hind legs with lasers shooting out of its eyes.
IN THIS COURSE, YOU WILL LEARN TO SKIN, FLESH, AND MOUNT A CHIPMUNK—these words were being projected from somewhere inside the bear’s face onto a white sheet strung across the back porch of a big filthy group house. The words ran across the sheet in a line so you had to stand there for a while to read them. A classmate had composed music to go alongside it, which was undulating and pulsing in an aggressive overlap of interrupting time signatures that made June feel like she was presently dying.
She looked down at the flyer she’d been handed at the door, now flimsy with humidity. The piece was called VERSCHRANKUNG, a German word that meant overlapped, tangled, entwined—the inability to tell where one thing ends and another begins. It seemed to be about how, when something dies, a part of it doesn’t. The description stitched together so many meaningless nouns—forced reanimation, taphonomy, thanatology—that June found herself unfocusing her eyes to see if some greater picture would emerge.
The bear was saying something different now: AN ACTIVE NERVOUS SYSTEM IS NOT NECESSARY TO EXPRESS IDENTITY. June was clutching a Narragansett can, her legs twitching with mosquitoes, when Dick appeared next to her.
I’m not sure I understand what college is for, were the first words he’d said. She looked over and up, as he was tall, with milky skin and clear eyes like a healthy fish.
I’m not sure I understand what taxidermy is for, she’d said back.
They stood in silence.
My grandma taxidermied her cat, Dick said. You know, when it died.
ATOMS POSSESS MATERIAL AGENCY WHETHER ALIVE OR DEAD, the bear was saying now.
I always thought, Dick went on, it seemed like an unwillingness to let something go. Like she’d gotten used to it always being around.
As if responding to some unspoken cue, they both turned to face the bear.
What do you think is going to happen to it, Dick asked. Will it just live in this yard?
I guess it’s probably not that different from where it lived before, June replied.
Where was that?
She looked down at her flyer.
New Hampshire.
*
I woke to the sound of four thuds in quick succession.
“Miss”—four more thuds—“miss, you can’t park here.”
The officer looked at me with kind eyes, like he knew. I considered telling him—it felt weird I hadn’t told anyone—but he was already walking away. I rubbed my face, got my bearings. I’d parked outside Dick’s office, at an intersection downtown ordinarily jammed with people. It looked post-apocalyptic this time of day.
I’d arranged the car so that I could see the elevator bay in the lobby of his office. You had to sign an NDA to go up there, had to have a keycard to even talk to the front desk. They made a doorman sit there all night and I’d already beckoned him through the glass, to see if he could tell me who had signed in or out lately. I knew the answer before I asked.
I started the engine to appease the cop, drove around the block, pulled over again, and looked at my phone. I’d fallen asleep with it in my hand, watching Dick’s dot pulse at his office. I unlocked it with my password, face too puffy for biometric recognition, and navigated back to the map screen. Dick’s dot, last pinged at the office, had stopped live-updating 85 minutes ago.
*
When Dick and June started dating, most of their friends told them not to. June had just gotten out of something messy, and Dick had just broken up with a mutual friend named Mel. “Just” was relative—it had been almost a year—but Mel couldn’t let Dick go. She would show up at his parties, drink too much, and cry on a bed full of coats until their friends went in to comfort her.
After a few fraught weeks, June’s friends had given her a reluctant ultimatum—him, or us. No one wanted to deal with the fallout, with Mel. June asked Dick to meet her, and they’d climbed a thick and scraggly magnolia branch to have the conversation. When June said, unfortunately, no, Dick took her hand and said, respectfully, yes.
It was the first choice they’d made together, or perhaps the last choice she’d made alone.
The friends got over it, some in weeks, others years. Many were at their eventual wedding. But June never quite forgave them the watershed they’d thrust upon her. The razor’s edge of that moment, the drama of the choice, had opened a portal, a choose-your-own-adventure. June could never escape the feeling that somewhere, in another dimension, she’d crawled down from that tree and led a completely different life.
*
The sun was just beginning to crest over the Hudson River when I wove my car through that weird road that vivisects Central Park. We liked to drive it during lockdown, to feel the city breathing with no people in it. Dick loved the way it spat you out right at the steps of the Natural History Museum, which was where I was going to check next. Dick went to the Planetarium there every year on his birthday. It didn’t open for hours, but what did that matter? I found a parking spot, took a seat on the stone steps, leaned my head on a massive column, and waited.
*
A week before Dick disappeared, June met him at a bar after work.
Lately when we drink, June said, all I want to do is go home and write.
I think that’s how a lot of alcoholic writers feel.
Ok, but I’m not.
Not yet, Dick said.
You don’t think I’m in any danger of that, do you? (She resisted the urge to say “you of all people.”)
Dick thought for a moment.
No…no, you like being present too much. You don’t have enough of a drive to disappear.
Drinking doesn’t make people disappear.
You know what I mean.
When it’s just one drink, she said, I’m actually more present. Like it unlocks a trapdoor and I spill out. It makes me feel…uncontainable.
You say that like it’s a good thing.
Isn’t it?
Booze quiets the me, in me, Dick said. Like I can stop thinking about what I am and just be it.
Are those different things?
For me, yes.
That the pull for both of them came from wanting to be good at their jobs was a commonality that went unnoticed. The more alike Dick and June became, the more they noticed their differences—two Pringles that, stacked, reveal a ripple in one’s edge. They had an easier time seeing the ripple now, seeing how they kept each other from things, than seeing how they both just wanted to feel good at something, understand the world, experience astonishment.
After they’d sat picking at a plate of cold fries for a minute or five, Dick spoke again.
Why don’t you just have a drink at home, before you sit down to write?
June thought for a second.
But if I also drink socially, she said, pausing to chew, isn’t that a lot of drinking?
Dick shrugged. You do what you have to do.
He paused.
To write, I mean.
*
Maybe he was hurt. Maybe he’d asked Alex to lie. Maybe he got the attention of the right people and the CIA took him—he was always very good at things, random things, everything. He won any game you played with him. Would they tell the wife, if they did that?
Maybe he’d wandered into the East River in a trance, like those men in Boston who got picked up on CCTV answering an untraceable call before drowning themselves in the Charles.
The guttural clunk of locks jerked me from my maybes. Behind me, doors were swinging open, releasing the museum’s overnight air in one big sigh out onto the parkway. I blinked my eyes like a doll to find the comforting mystery of dawn had vanished, and immediately I missed it. The light of day was now here with all its arrogance, its foreboding warmth, its smothering din of starlings and car horns and school children.
The security guard looked down at me, registering surprise for just a moment, then checked my bag like I was any other patron.
*
In another life, Dick said, he would have liked to be a physicist. He’d studied philosophy in college, read about Einstein’s and Schrӧdinger’s experiments in quantum mechanics, then become an engineer instead of a thinker. June could barely explain what he did at parties—something with machine-learning, imaginary numbers, math.
June did not deal well in abstractions. That she had failed to progress beyond Algebra 1 was a point of pride for her. Math did not, in her view, carry the potentiality of bringing her in more intimate contact with the stuff of humanity, with the inherent beauty of reality.
Dick saw it different. What, he’d once asked June, could be more real than numbers? Yes, he’d allowed, numbers are invented, but they describe the world. They enumerate reality.
Over a recent breakfast Dick handed June a magazine folded open to an article about an arts festival in Germany. A Nobel-winning physicist had exhibited an experiment there and now someone had built an installation responding to it—a structure comprising a suitcase, an oscilloscope, a Bela board, and a laser beam shot through a crystal that could “manifest the indeterminate beauty underlying our reality in the stochastic cadences of synthesizer tones.”
He basically built something, Dick had tried to explain, that translates the quantum realm into music.
Why, June asked, I’m sorry but why is that special? What even is the quantum realm?
Dick took a deep breath. It’s how particles we can’t see behave, influence each other.
Why is that more interesting to you than how actual living humans behave?
Dick’s eyes disappeared into the back of his head. It is how they behave, those are not separate things! But these particles can do things we are only just beginning to witness.
Like what.
Like they can exist in multiple states simultaneously.
I can do that.
Dick looked annoyed.
Seriously, what practical application does that have?
We don’t know yet, is kind of the point. It could lead us places. Maybe places beyond the quantum realm. To alternate dimensions, time travel—
Time travel! They should lead with that.
He inhaled deep.
I think there’s a certain scientific integrity they want to lead with.
*
I went first to the taxidermied bears, staring into their glassy black eyes. Then I went to the gemstones, because we’d had a religious experience in front of a giant malachite at the Smithsonian the day after our wedding. Nothing but a sea of school groups, of adolescent girls pointing their charm-laden phones at mounds of rose quartz.
I’d saved the most likely for last, as if the more time passed the more afraid I was to find him. I was the only one in the Hall of Planets save for an old man with a white mustache, meandering up the spiral staircase, hands folded behind his back. He paused over one placard for what felt like a lifetime before moving on, at which point I made my approach.
TELEPORTATION A REALITY? These words were printed on a temporary sign, not embossed on metal like the rest of the facts of the known universe.
Anton Zeilinger researches QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT, it read. While transferring quantum information isn’t the same as teleportation, Zeilinger’s experiments made enormous steps toward the instantaneous transference of matter. Einstein famously called them “spooky.”
My arm hairs caught the wind. I kept reading.
In 1997, Zeilinger’s research team conducted the first teleportation of quantum information using entanglement. Such entangled particles collapse the structure of spacetime as we understand it, because there is no differentiating between them—they are neither one nor two, but in a primary reality of their own making.
I had all but stopped breathing.
Despite the distance that separates them, these particles share the same fate.
I took out my phone and typed “quantum entanglement” into the browser. “When two subatomic particles become entangled,” the search summary read, “one instantaneously ‘feels’ what is happening to the other.” I walked over to a bench, not lifting my head from my phone.
I read about how photons tangled in a state of “quantum coherence” will decay into “decoherence” every time; about the existence of a disentangled, “post-coherent” realm. About the quantum eraser experiment, in which two entangled particles were measured, rearranged, and re-measured, only to reveal that the rearrangement had altered the initial measurements—in other words, they had found a way to change the past.
After a while, I got the sense I was being observed, looked up, and saw the mustache man further up the ramp, staring back at me. He squinted one eye in an almost wink, then turned and kept walking.
*
Couples therapy was Dick’s idea—the rows were getting rowdier. They met with Glynnis on a linen couch, glass vases holding single calla lilies at either end. She wanted to know what they fought about. The usual stuff, June said. What’s usual, Glynnis asked.
June spoke in general terms, as if describing tragedies that befell all mankind: There’s the fight you have because you aren’t feeling close, and you think a fight might bring you closer. The fight you have because you haven’t had a bunch of smaller fights. The fight you have because they love you so much, sometimes you have to test the bounds of it. The fight you have because you aren’t on your best behavior. The fight you have because you said something to your partner you’d probably never say to a friend.
Let me stop you for a minute, Glynnis said. What are these things you wouldn’t say to a friend?
Just, bratty things, June said. Rude things. You want your friends to spend time with you, and everyone has so much going on, nothing is tying them to you but the pleasure of your company.
Dick held out a flat hand at his side—like a platter, presenting June. Whether I enjoy her company, he said, is apparently irrelevant.
Glynnis said these sounded more like the fights you have because your partner is always there, and sometimes you don’t feel good, and you have to figure out how to talk to someone you live with whether you feel good or not.
The work was strenuous. Dick and June would commit to something, adhere to it studiously for a few days, then relapse in a moment of weakness. The problem was they’d let the bad habits gather strength for so long, they were what came naturally now. The urge to blame, deny, defend emerged first, like instinct. It seemed to get easier, not harder, to be petty. To say cruel, loaded things. Shouldn’t it work the other way around, they asked Glynnis on the couch. Shouldn’t love accumulate, gain strength, spill out in kindnesses?
She told them they just needed to choose to be kinder until that became the habit again. The problem was even then you couldn’t relax, not really. Alcoholics know this—it’s one day at a time. This is supposed to make the work feel surmountable, like a plate you could finish if you just followed each bite with another bite, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.
To Dick and June, this just sounded like a lot of steps, a lot of bites. It was a weak state to be in—one that made you wonder if you wanted to eat what was on your plate at all.
*
Eventually it seemed reasonable to check the apartment again, where I sank into the couch in an exhaustion that held the cold museum steps, the stiff car, the years.
I’d never dialed “911” on a cell phone before, and for a moment I wondered if maybe there was some new way to do it, like an app. After just two rings, a woman’s voice picked up. She sounded like a teenager. “911, what’s your emergency?”
“I’d like to report a missing person.”
“Adult?”
“Yes.”
“Relation?”
“Spouse.”
“How long has it been—”
“Since?”
“Since they were where you thought they’d be.” This construction felt unusual, off script.
“I guess about 15 hours.”
“Have you made any attempt to contact them?”
I told her I had texted, called, checked location, phoned a friend.
“We can’t file a report until 24. Give us a call back if you still haven’t heard from them tonight.” It was over before I could protest. The clock on the oven read 11:58.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, waited for the glass door to fog up, set my phone on the counter. I went through the motions on autopilot, completing every shower step down to the green clay scrub I always ended with. I’d never been able to make sense of exfoliation, and yet here I was doing it, in these of all times. Weren’t you supposed to limit the rough elements that touched your skin? Weren’t our feet calloused because of exposure to particles similar to those found in this product? Wasn’t it the eventual callusing of the face we were all trying to avoid? It seemed like you could only slough the top layer off, scrub raw, start again so many times before something hard, something different grew back.
Out of the steam and into the hallway, the noiseless air felt clean, cold, overwhelming. My lungs ached, like they were bringing in too much oxygen. What, I wondered, should I be doing right now? There was nothing stopping me from blasting an opera, getting a stack of pancakes, hopping on a plane, doing anything at all. My life, our life, had so many limits built into it—limits that, absent one person, disappeared into thin air. Our partnership, our marriage had become more meaningful than either of us could have been alone. And we were loyal to it. Everything we did was filtered through that loyalty. I didn’t know what I answered to without it.
I pulled a T-shirt over my head, put on a pair of bike shorts, and wound my hair’s wet ropes into a secure pile at my crown. I wanted everything off my face. I needed to feel the vacant air on my hot neck, my burning ears.
I walked into the kitchen, bare feet on cold tiles, and stared out the window into the back alley. A giant tree with thick, scraggly branches held two starlings, bouncing on a twig whose silver leaves seemed to dance in the wind. If one so much as lifted its foot, the whole branch shook.
I took a glass down from the cabinet and a frosted bottle from the freezer. The gin flowed thick like an ointment, like a balm. I brought it into my office, sat down at my computer, and opened a blank page.
The day Dick disappeared—
