The Disappearing Act

In the summer of 2023, the hottest on record, a novelist known only as M travels by train across Europe to a literary event. M is a Russian writer, around 50 years old, who left her homeland after it launched a war against a neighboring country. She now lives in a foreign city by a lake but has been unable to write and feels profoundly dislocated. She describes her country's regime through a recurring metaphor: "the beast," an entity so vast she did not realize she had been living inside it until she was expelled. People in her adopted city interrogate her about the beast with anxious compassion, some suggesting she should have fought it sooner. M agrees but cannot explain how one fights a creature that surrounds you entirely.

M is now a novelist in name only. Whenever she searches for words, she has the sensation of a live mouse trapped in her mouth. Her thoughts have become rapid and shallow, and she spends her days reading terrible news dispatches: rising casualty counts, children in bomb shelters, burnt-out buildings. All she wants is to sit motionless, pretending to be dead. Her one consolation on this trip is the promise of six uninterrupted hours on a connecting train, during which she plans to sort through the contents of her head, a process she compares to ironing out internal wrinkles.

When the train reaches the town of G, M discovers her connecting train has been canceled due to a rail strike. At the station she notices a strikingly handsome man with fair hair in a ponytail held by discreet hair clips. She wanders to a Turkish café, orders tea and a börek, a savory filled pastry, and sits inside, exhausted. On her phone she sees images of catastrophic flooding in occupied territory: A hydroelectric dam has been blown up, drowning chained farm dogs and killing every animal in a zoo. An elderly man sits uninvited at her table and asks where she is from. M objects, saying the question signals to a foreigner that they do not belong. Their conversation is cut short by her phone: the festival organizers suggest she take a slow train to the border town of F, where a taxi will meet her.

On the train to F, M cannot sleep, experiencing a constant sensation of falling. She reflects that she is no longer certain she belongs to a single species. Having lived inside the beast for as long as she can remember, she sometimes checks the mirror for red fur growing on her forearms. She recalls a story in which a traveler enters a provincial museum that becomes an endless trap, its rooms multiplying until the traveler falls through into his forbidden home country. M takes this as a warning against trying to return.

Arriving in F, M spots the ponytailed man again; he glances at her and quickly looks away. No taxi waits for her. She finds a car she believes was sent by the festival, but neither she nor the driver knows the destination, and the driver eventually gives up. M's phone dies completely. She walks up the main street feeling herself becoming cut off from all duties and promises, her inner self gradually quieting into something soft and childlike. She checks into a chain hotel, lies on the blue bedspread, and feels she has at last arrived. She reflects on dolphins, creatures that once crawled onto land but changed their minds and returned to the sea, finding the idea of double transformation almost consoling. She goes out and wanders to the Grand Hotel Petukh, whose name in her native language refers to the lowest caste in the Russian prison camp system: prisoners rendered permanently unclean through ritualized degradation, with whom any contact made you suspect as well. She orders wine on the terrace, finding it salty and metallic.

Sitting outside smoking, M forgets for the first time in months where she is from. A gnawing memory surfaces: the story of a linguist who travels to the edge of the desert, where nomads cut out his tongue and force him to become an entertainer, grunting and dancing for his captors, until he refuses to perform and wanders into the desert, disappearing. M connects this to her own condition: language has stopped obeying her. The beast has expanded to encompass everyone who spoke her language. She feels she must be the beast herself, noticing spasms in the faces of those she speaks with, as if they see the beast before they see her.

Feeling strangely light, M spots the ponytailed man and follows him through increasingly empty streets to dusty tents and a banner reading PETER COHN'S CIRCUS. He turns and demands to know why she is following him. M claims she is heading to the circus. He accepts curtly and walks away.

Forced to enter, M sits on a bench outside the tent. Two women smoke nearby, speaking her native language. M listens as they discuss their predicament: their colleague "Lion," a human magician, died two weeks ago, and without him they have no act. The tattooed woman argues they could manage the illusion's mechanism if they found someone to take a place inside the sarcophagus, a coffin-like box central to their act. M offers to help. They test her in the velvet-lined box; she curls into it willingly. They agree she will return to rehearse and perform in the final show. When asked where she is from and how she knows Russian, M answers vaguely: "I'm from the South," the least truthful but most acceptable reply.

That evening M watches the circus in transported wonder, regressing to childhood as lions, acrobats, and a girl on a blue globe fill the ring. She falls asleep without plugging in her dead phone, deliberately maintaining her severance from yesterday's world. The next morning, Saturday, she wanders through town and finds herself again at the Grand Hotel Petukh. The ponytailed man sits down beside her and says he was just thinking he would meet her. He suggests they visit an escape room. Inside, while searching the cluttered space, he mentions his grandmother, 102 years old, in a care home in F, who wakes every morning saying she does not want to be alive. M blurts out advice on how one might succeed at dying, then stops, horrified. They fail to solve the puzzle. Over lunch, the man reveals he recognized M from a literary festival and has read her recent book. M's sense of anonymity collapses: It was never about her as an unknown woman but about a traveling novelist from a far-off country who kindled respectful interest.

Back at the hotel, M feels rage. The man mistakes her for "the novelist M" when she has begun to feel like a new being, perhaps just A, fresh and instinctive. She makes her way to the circus for the performance. She is given a long red dress, oversized goatskin boots, and a metallic feathered headdress. In the mirror, the being reflected has nothing in common with the former M. Under spotlights, she climbs into the sarcophagus. The illusionist pulls on white gloves. A chainsaw shrieks. The sarcophagus shakes violently. When the halves are pulled apart, one is wheeled away with red boots dangling from its end. The audience roars. A child screams: "Again! Do it again, please!"

Afterward, the circus owner Peter Cohn, a small man in dark glasses with a carved tiger's-head walking stick, offers M a job traveling Europe with the circus, no passport needed. Then, without turning his head, he adds: "No, you aren't Romanian." He is the first person on her journey to ask not where she comes from but what she is called. M answers without deliberation: her name is A. Cohn sniffs the air. "You're ex nostris," he says, a Latin phrase meaning "one of ours." "You're a Jew, aren't you?" M, who has spent months identifying herself only as Russian, replies almost with astonishment: yes. As she rises, Cohn points his stick at a spot beside the door, and M realizes her new employer is blind.

On Sunday morning, A wakes early and abandons her suitcase, sorting her possessions on the bedcover. She leaves behind her dead phone, her own book in her own language, her passport, the keys to both her former and current apartments, and her name. She packs only bare essentials in a canvas tote: trousers, underwear, a shirt, and two turquoise sweets. She walks at a jaunty pace toward the waste ground where the circus stood, but there is nothing there. The trailers, tents, and banner are gone. Only an overturned bench and a tin of cigarette butts remain. A rights the bench, sits down, and digs for a smokable butt. Her lighter is still in her pocket. The yellow stray dog from the circus approaches and flops onto its side nearby, gazing tactfully past her.

The novel's final section, numbered "0," consists of a single ambiguous line: "Perhaps the caravan was waiting for them around the corner." Whether A and the dog will find the circus remains unknown.