How to Disappear

One day, Roger Williams just got up and left. He left everything. His home, his job, his friends, his bank accounts, his things, his bills, his fears, his hopes, his goals, everything that defined a life in his world. He simply stood up and walked away. Later, when the police were halfheartedly investigating his disappearance, they found his shirt and pants and underwear and wallet and phone, wet and weatherbeaten, in a ditch alongside a rural highway several miles from where he used to work.

Roger kept one thing, for a while, which were his shoes. Eventually the slip-soled oxfords wore out somewhere in Virginia and he left those behind as well. They were found by a local dog and chewed into unrecognizability in a fit of destructive joy. While he was unaware of that occurrence, he would have been glad to know they had brought happiness to someone.

He continued onwards, naked, hungry, sunburned, and thorn-scratched, but deliciously unburdened, towards the sun as it rose each morning. He found food here and there as he went, foraging as his nameless ancestors had done. The soles of his feet grew hard and thorny and dark and his hair grew wild and unkempt, strewn with leaves and twigs and crawling with whatever opportunistic hitchhikers saw fit to catch a ride. He itched and smelled but it no longer bothered him – he’d left concerns of societal propriety along with the other trappings of his old life.

Reports spread along his trail of a vagrant, a wild man, a sasquatch passing through the landscape and burbled along the gossipy streams of the social fabric. He heard none of them. He’d left language and reading and thought on the bookshelves of his old home. His mind, focused solely on what was of immediate concern, had no more need of those burdens. He passed through days and nights, over highways and lawns and parking lots and verges and walls, following the warm beacon of the sun, until he came to the ocean.

He spoke its language now, shifting and crashing tongue welcoming him to join it. After a few moments tasting the salt washing the stinging sores on his legs and feet, he entered its chilling embrace, willing to let the ancient currents carry him instead of his tired legs. Weightlessly, he floated out beyond the sight of land. Land was where weight lived, where concerns and zoning laws and the endless burdens of living stayed. They had no grasp on him out here where the landscape shifted endlessly without meaning.

Happy to float without destination, he spread himself out like a raft of his seaweed brothers and drifted and slept. He awoke to hunger pangs and impact with a large and improbable object. A huge white pillar rising from the waves, surmounted by a spinning object that cast fast moving shadows across the skin of the world. At first, he felt irritated at the intrusion of some semblance of order on the otherwise peaceful, meaningless chaos of the ocean, but listening to the lap of the waves against the column, the ocean’s slow grinding voice told him it had brought him here. Despite their friendship, Robert was born as a creature of land and the ocean wished him to live in order to continue their conversation.

His muscles protested as he pulled himself out of the water and his skin creaked as it bent in almost-forgotten shapes. The ladder reaching into the water rose up a short way to a landing, made more of rust and peeling paint than of much else. Dripping, he stood and surveyed the scene around him – chattering ocean spread out to the edge of his hazy vision, studded in all directions by similar pillars. Some distant part of his mind dusted itself off to say “windmills” before settling back down into its shadowy niche.

A door was set into the tower, and though it protested loudly as he worked the latch, opened to let him enter. Another ladder rose up into darkness, climbing the inside and interrupted at intervals by grated landings. Without judgement or curiosity, he began climbing the ladder, dripping water down onto the metal floor at the bottom of the shaft. He rose up the ladders, taking breaks at the landing to enjoy the strange sounds carried up the metal tube. The only light available was coming from the open door at the bottom and eventually he was ascending in darkness. The rungs and landings continued to come at regular intervals, though, so he continued to rise without concern.

A strange moment came when the rungs stopped and he found himself in a dark space. Wondering what the now-distant ocean had meant by bringing him here, he fumbled about in the dark for a few minutes, banging his shins and elbows on the metal protrusions inside, until he brushed a panel on the wall and the room flashed into illumination. He was in a strange, industrial volume of space, gleaming white paint and stainless steel everywhere. Black and yellow trimmed signs adorned the wall and a slow grinding throb permeated the space.

After letting his eyes adjust to the fluorescent glare, he wandered around the nacelle of the windmill aimlessly. Behind another door copiously covered in signs, he found a spinning shaft that seemed to be the source of the droning sound. Its language was different than the ocean, despite a similar shuffling syntax. It communicated little, other than the fact that it was. Another door opened to reveal a number of pallets of bottled water, several of which he tore open and drank thirstily. Of the burdens he’d left, his body and its needs were inextricable. An orange bag contained boxes of individually wrapped bars of food. His past self might have called them bland and inedible, but he ate several hungrily before continuing his exploration.

Another ladder led to a hatch in the ceiling, which upon opening let in a ceaseless cooling wind rich with the salt of the sea far below. He pulled himself up and surveyed the dark ocean around him, blanketed in night. He could no longer see the distant forest of pillars he’d seen before, but instead a field of pulsing red lights spreading out to infinity. Massive blades cut the air behind him, their ceaseless whooshing adding to the droning hum of the song inside. He sat for a while, no thought beyond that of enjoying the view. The horizon began to lighten but Robert didn’t notice as sleep had overcome him. He lay, exposed and free, on his platform far above the joyously singing ocean below, wind pulling at the wild tangles of his hair and beard.

He was awoken with a start by a group of curious seagulls pecking at him. The birds initially hopped away as he stirred but were curious enough to return a moment later. One, bolder than its peers, was unlucky at it approached his outstretched arm as Robert quickly grasped it and, in a move born of deep forgotten reflex, wrung its neck. The rest leapt into the air, shrieking alarm and mourning their friend, but quickly disappeared on the invisible currents of the wind. Robert thanked the sea wordlessly for this gift and began stripping the feathers from the carcass, scattering them on those same currents. He tore into the bird’s flesh over the quiet protestations of his civilized mind. When he’d stripped the edible parts from the bird, he stood, mouth dripping gore, and threw the rest to the ocean below before. He urinated freely over the side of the platform, urine blowing in the wind and spattering on himself and the top of the nacelle. Again the old voice complained but was quickly silenced by his enjoyment of the warmth it brought to his legs and toes.

He descended into the structure and closed the hatch, glad for now to be free of the chilling wind. He continued his exploration of the space, finding more orange bags filled with equipment useless to him. A rack on the wall held a number of life vests, which he spread in an open corner of the nacelle and laid down on, the weight of his earlier meal leaving him feeling sleepy. He napped, happily, unconcerned with the passage of time outside, lulled to sleep by the constant thrum of the windmill.

He woke and, missing the wind, opened the hatch in the ceiling again. The sun was directly overhead and shone down into the space in a hard shaft of warm light. He warmed himself in it for a moment before retrieving another of the bottles of water, which he drank gratefully. There were other bags in this closet, one of which contained an emergency fishing kit. The scant meat the bird had provided had been digested and he was hungry again. Taking the kit and a ration bar, he descended the ladder and upon reaching the grate at bottom, asked the ocean for a boon. He baited the hook and threw it to the waves, trusting his friend to provide. He tied off the line to a railing and laid down on the hard grating of the platform, letting the susurrations of the sea sing him to sleep in the slanting sunshine.

When he awoke, the line was taut and thrumming with a gift. He hauled the line in to reveal a shining fish. He bashed it against the platform until it stopped moving, then opened it with the knife included in the fishing kit. The flesh was cold and salty but clean and satiating, and he ate until he was full, supplementing it with bites of the ration bar. He left the head and spine in the bottom of the shaft as future bait before diving into the ocean and relieving himself there, feeding the fish that might be his future meals. He fully felt his place in the wheel of life and was satisfied. He stayed bobbing for a while, telling the ocean of his gratitude for the life it had given him, before climbing back out and ascending the long series of ladders to the top of the windmill. By the time he pulled himself onto the floor of the nacelle, gasping, the sun had set and the hatch in the ceiling was dark. He closed it against reprisals from the seagulls he’d scared off earlier and slept, deeply, on the pile of life vests, his stomach full and mind empty except for the warm glow of happiness.

For months, Robert lived like this, eating fish and the occasional gull, collecting rainwater when the bottles ran out, pissing in the wind, and learning the slow creaking language of his surroundings. He was untroubled and distant from the concerns of the life he’d walked and swam away from. He was startled when a new note rang out one day, human voices and clanging footsteps rising up the ladder. Panicked, he quickly climbed the ladder to the roof and shut the hatch behind him. The long mats of his hair blew in the ceaseless wind and he hugged his knees to his chest tightly as he cowered against the railing. He could hear the strange voices exclaim in a language he’d nearly forgotten inside, expressing confusion and disgust as they violated his home. Too soon, the hatch was flung open and he found himself looking at a man, face expressing anger and fear and concern in equal measure. As he clambered out in his orange vest and reflective pants and hard hat, gesturing forcefully at Robert, ice cold panic filled Robert’s veins and he did the only thing he could think to do to escape – he dove over the side, wind tearing at his face, plunging to the cold embrace of his only friend. All went black for awhile, and Robert felt true freedom – the lifting of his last burden, the release of physical existence.

The void was endless and quiet and peaceful, but lonely. He existed as a mind only for an unmarked period of time, weightless, massless, free, unaware of its own awareness. It was a shock when he awoke, swaddled in blankets on a cot in a rocking room. There was water and food of the sort he used to eat. The flavors were strong and unpleasant after his time at sea, but he choked them down as demanded by his hungry body. He found that he’d been dressed in clothes like theirs, pants made of a rough fabric and a shirt that smelled like they did. The men came in and talked to him, in words and sounds he struggled to connect to any meaning. After a few attempts they stopped trying, and Robert hoped that this was the end of it, that they would let him go back to his strange island in the sky.

Soon, however, outside the window of the boat, he saw land again, and he was taken forcefully, but not roughly, to another group of people waiting at the docks, who again spoke to him and asked him questions in that language he thought he’d abandoned. They bundled him into a car with whirling lights on top and took him to a large blocky building. Against his will, he understood the word Hospital written on a sign outside.

Inside, he was washed and his thicket of hair and beard cut off. He was probed and prodded by people he was now recalling were called doctors and nurses. He ate more of the old world’s food and watched as the stark lines of his body filled back in. One of the doctors came and talked to him daily, asking him questions he wasn’t ready to recall the answers to. After several weeks of this, he surprised himself by answering, his own voice an unfamiliar croak, the feeling of speaking a strange convulsion in his throat.

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Robert.”

The doctor was startled by the noise he’d made, and so was Robert. With time, the doctor was able to coax more sounds out of him. After a few days of talking, the doctor showed him a picture he recognized. His old self, the one he’d shed, that he’d unburdened himself from. Robert had seen himself in the mirror and knew his face had changed, but he still felt a deep emotional tug upon seeing his old self.

“That’s me. Was me.”

The doctor was visibly excited and began to ask more questions. Robert thought he had left those memories, that identity, with his clothes in that highway ditch, but the information started to come back to his mind, unbidden. His name, his old job, the things he had used to clothe himself in an identity. Things he no longer wanted but had found their way back to him.

The weeks passed and more of Robert’s old things were pressed into his hands, literally and metaphorically. He had been a missing persons case that had taken the nation’s mild interest for a few weeks before it turned to other stories in the absence of a conclusion. His old friends and colleagues called to speak to him on the phone, some came to visit, and he said contrite words he didn’t really feel about making them worry. It turned out he had spent several months missing between his trek to the sea and time spent haunting the windmill, and most thought he was dead. His friends were tearful and angry and relieved and he tried to share their feelings, but the pressures of being human – clothes, meals, toilets, clocks, language - all weighed on him and pressed out his ability to feel anything other than trapped.

He lay in his hospital bed one night, sleeplessly reliving his stint in the windmill. He missed the feeling of the boundless ocean lapping at his body, the caress of the wind high up on the nacelle, even the mindless grinding rhythm of the windmill motor. He knew he wouldn’t be able to revisit that life, that a hatch had closed on him, shutting out the sunlight. He thought of his last moments of panic and fear up there on top of the world, of the half-remembered plunge and the ensuing darkness.

Without thought, he rose from the bed and shed the loose pants and shirt the doctors had dressed him in. Naked, he silently slipped into the darkened hall and made his way to the stairwell at the end. The stairs rose above him for several floors in the murky industrial light and he thought warmly of the shaft of the windmill, how he’d learned to enjoy ascending and descending it, the rhythm of the climb meditative despite its required exertion. He padded up the stairs to the roof access and walked across the graveled surface.

The wind caressed his body like a reunited lover and he smiled. This time there was no panic or fear as he stepped over the edge.