Vapor Trail

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Angel stepped carefully over a crack in the sidewalk. Like in the kid’s game, she chanted under her breath, but changed the words, Step on a crack, you get your body back. Then, reminded of her serious work this evening, she picked up the pace and simplified the chant to an occasional refrain, I’m not here. Not here. Not here. .

She had learned to make herself invisible when she was eleven. To leave her body entirely.

She knew it was a mind trick. She knew that here and now, physically, her body was walking, down the main street, in Stillwater, Minnesota, under a sweltering 104-degree July sky. The 84 percent humidity draped her face like a dishrag. Sweat trickled down her back and her stomach and collected in the crotch of the tights she wore underneath her sweatpants. She knew she was sweating because she was way overdressed for the weather.

She wasn’t dumb. She knew she had a problem.

The people out there looking in, with all the big words in their mouths, had names for it. When she heard the term dissociative fugue, she imagined a cannonade of piano keys. She thought of Bach. She had read that other cultures understood the necessity to occasionally escape your life. Eskimos called it pibloktoq. To the Miskito Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua, it was gris siknis. The Navaho had their “frenzy” witchcraft, and the one she really liked the sound of-amok-came from Western Pacific cultures.

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