A Longing to Disappear

Ever since he was a child, Mortimer McConnell had dreamed of
disappearing. No, it wasn't that he'd carved that visible a niche for
himself in this world. Just the opposite. Surprisingly, for a tall,
hulking, big-boned young man like Mortimer, anonymity was a state that
he didn't have to work toward. He moved with the painfully awkward
uncertainty of an uncoordinated giant. Even in high school he had been
that "big, tall...you know...oh, what's his name," or worse yet,"Lurch"
a nickname given him because of his supposed resemblence to the Addams
Family's Frankenstein of a butler

Yes, Mortimer had longed to disappear even then, to vanish in a cloud
of mystery that would banish the laughter, replacing it instead with an
aura of baffled astonishment. Like unrequited love, Mortimer's longing
to disappear gradually festered into an obsession. Every person that he
encountered was masking a sneer of contempt for him, and every set of
eyes that didn't avert their gaze from his burning glare of combative
anger was probing his mind for dark and guilty secrets.

Eve his job had become distasteful for to him. He had nothing in common
with the beer swilling, sex-obsessed losers that he worked with, and
the job itself was maddeningly repetitive. Finally he quit. He just
walked away from the receiving dock at the discount store one
afternoon, pleading illness. It wasn't a lie, he was sick to death of
humanity. Two days later he called his supervisor to let him know that
he wasn't ever coming back. A phone call was good enough. That way he
didn't have to see anyone or go through the phony amenities of goodbyes
and best wishes. You know, all that crap that you say but don't really
mean to someone whom you've worked with but don't really care
about.

He had enough money saved to last a few months, at least. Maybe longer
if he scrimped on his meals a bit, turned down the heat and only burned
one light at night. Television wasn't a temptation any longer. He'd
kicked in the picture tube in a fit of anger. It had been one of those
happy huggy people commercials that had pissed him off. You know, one
of those commercials that they crank up the sound on. This one was so
sickeningly upbeat that it had even including singing. He didn't have
to put up with that crap. Now that he'd drawn the drapes on that
annoying electric window to the world, he was truly alone. But he was
still dissatisfied.

He knew that there had to be a way to disappear. He couldn't want
anything like he wanted to disappear so badly, he reasoned, without it
being possible somehow. It just wouldn't be fair otherwise. In a world
that had cheated him of so much, he desperately hoped for fair play in
this one urgent desire.

For years Mortimer had pored through tomes of occult lore, tales of the
supernatural and old, discredited volumes of metaphysical quackery. Now
that he'd forsaken his job, he had even more time to devote to his
research. Maybe their was a nugget of truth to be extracted from those
veins of delusion. Maybe he could discover a passage that would
suddenly make things clear to him. Maybe he'd find the key that would
allow him to slip into another plane of existance and leave this
contemptable world behind.

Charles Fort, in his "Lo," and "The Book of the Damned," those wierd
compilations of bizarre and inexplicable events, had written of
individuals fortunate enough to have managed to unaccountably
vanish.

Mortimer read the mystifying account of David Lang, a farmer in
Tennessee, who stepped into a window in time, a vortex, or who knows
what. He just vanished. He disappeared in plain sight of his wife and
children while waliking from their house to the barn.

Stranger yet, where he disappeared there appeared later a circle of
dead grass about fifteen feet in circumference. Several months later
his children came running frantically into the house. They said that
they heard their father's voice faintly, plaintively, calling for help.
His family listened with impotent anguish as the voice faded gradually
away into the oblivion of the lost.

Mortimer was obsessed with the case of Dorothy Arnold as well, the
debutante who disappeared in New York's Central Park in 1910. Could her
case somehow be connected with the sudden, inexpicable appearance of a
magnificent white swan in Central Park Lake? She'd written a poem
shortly before she vanished, comparing herself to one.

Living within eight blocks of Central Park, Mortimer seized upon this
area as his best hope to find a way to enter that unknown land that
lies beyond our ken. He'd always avoided the park in the past. Too many
noisy people, loving couples ad obnoxious kids. Now he wandered the
park resolutely in the twilight hours before the night, after most
people have left with the daylight. He started packing a .38 too. No
muggers, punk kids or other trash of humanity were going to stand
between him and his search.

Evidently, Mortimer decided, there are occasional rifts in the fabric
of our existance that a person can step into if he is fortunate enough
to find one. No doubt that's what had happened to Lang and Arnold, he
reasoned, althogh it must be harder to come back out of one of those
strange portals than it is to enter one. May an individual couldn't
return once he'd stepped through the rift. No problem. He didn't figure
he'd have any desire to step back into the world he knew and longed to
escape from.

After wandering the park for a couple of months, Mortimer was becoming
acutely sensitive to his surroundings. He could feel an eerie,
indecipherable presence in the area surrounding Central Park Lake. It
was something unearthly. It was a sinister force that he felt he could
almost reach out and touch. Almost. He's found a couple of circles of
brown grass too. He was getting close. He could feel it. It would only
be a matter of time now before he could step out of this world into
that glorious unknown beyond.

"There's that crazy son of a bitch that I've been telling you about,"
whispered one of the three young thugs who were watching Mortimer from
behind some bushes, like predatory animals stalking their prey.

"He lookin for somethin?" the youngest of the three wondered
nerviously. ""Ya think he's alone? He keeps stickin his hand in his
pocket. Ya think he's packin some power?"

"He ain't lookin at nothin but the ground," the third male growled, his
voice honed to a hardened edge by inner city rage. "Let's go for
it."

The huddled behind the bushes to plot their assault. here were loud
whispers, a couple of nervous questions, then three almost simultaneous
grunts of assent. One of the figures rose from behind the bushes and
slipped away to the right.

Mortimer was oblivious to their noise and movement though. He'd seen a
shimmering flash of light off to his left, then darkness. Then
anunaccountable flash of light again. No, it wasn't fireflies. He'd
been fooled by them before. There was something strange, something
eerily different. Maybe he'd just gotten a glimpse of an enterance to a
portal.

Moving toward it, he tripped on a tree root and fell to the ground. He
cursed softly, but was more embarrassed at this confirmation of his
clumsiness than he was hurt. He had stayed in the park too long
tonight. He could hardly see the footpath, much less obstacles such as
tree roots now that he'd deviated from the sidewalk.

There it was though. There was that inexplicable flash again. It looked
like one of those lamps that you turned on with the rest of the lights
in the room off. You know, the kind of lamp that flashes multi-colored
bursts of light in a room, then goes dark so that the next display of
light will be yet more dazzling.
A lava lamp. That's what it was called.

Rapt in wonder and in hope Mortimer began to grope toward that coaxing,
shimmering beacon.

The young nervous member of the trio deliberately cracked a branch off
to Mortimer's left, then coughed loudly as he approached Mortimer,
holding his hands out to assure the stranger that no harm was
meant.

"Excuse me, Mistah. I've lost the path. Can ya point me to it,
maybe?"

"Leave me alone," Mortimer muttered bitterly, still vainly hoping for
the shimmering puzzle to return. Yes, there it was. It was only a few
yards away. Then it disappeared again.

The intruder moved between Mortimer and where the light had been.
Mortimer panicked. "Get out of my way!" he screamed at the young man as
he tried to push his way past him to head toward the light.

Suddenly an arm locked itself around Mortimer's neck from behind. He
tried to get at his gun, but now another pair on hands had grabbed his
arms and were pulling them behind him. Mortimer kicked, he wriggled; he
broke free for an instant but was pulled to the ground from behind. He
rolled away and kicked up at one of his attackers and knew that he'd
done damage. The guy had grunted in pain.

Mortimer turned to look for the lights. They were gone. By that time
two of the men had come back at him. One of them hit him a numbing blow
on the side of the head and the other tackled him from behind.

They guy that he's hurt with his kick had gotten up now. "I'll show
you, you son of a bitch." he shouted angrily.

Mortimer saw it as though it were a slow motion film; first the flash
of silver, then the lunging movement that thrust it forward at him, and
finally the impact. He felt a searing, frightening moment of intense
and overwhelming pain as his stomach took the knife to its hilt. Then
he felt it withdraw, and then re-enter his body with more murderous
fury.

As he sensed his life departing his body, Mortimer McConnell was
wishing for the last time in his life that he could disappear.