One night when Silvio was in college, he went out and never came back. Her parents thought perhaps he had a secret love. The next day Vivi went to school and dance class as usual. When the second night passed, the anxiety overwhelmed her parents. They called Silvio’s friends. The next morning they visited the university and then the hospitals. They reluctantly got the police involved. She overheard her folks murmuring about car accidents, comas, predators, drowning in a well. They made Vivi keep going to school, though she cried to stay. When she returned the apartment was filled with the whole herd, every vicuña in Zana, and every member of the Zanistos, too, no matter the species, crowding, smoking, and fretting. Each time the door would open all heads would turn in concert, a flight of stares. The phone kept ringing, but the caller never had news of Silvio.

Like all vicuñas, Vivi and her family were skinny, large-eyed, and high-strung. Her father sometimes wore three shirts to make himself more formidable on the street, but the real effect was slightly absurdist. The family shared the same fine white-and-cinnamon coat. Ever after Silvio’s disappearance, her parents agonized over the possibility that he could have been killed for his wool. Shambling along a dark Zana alley, humming a chamber piece to himself, Silvio would have been an ideal target for those who looked at vicuñas and saw only profit.

The police never found anything, though no one expected that corrupt den of wolves to help. The university was plastered with posters of Silvio’s face for weeks.

Some months later, a friend of her parents’, one of the most prominent Zanistos, an artist-theorist bear in spectacles who had gotten a plum professorship in Upstate New York, wangled a fellowship for Vivi’s father.

Her parents never wanted to move to America. They would have stayed in Zana forever, waiting for their son to return. Their friends had to drag them to the bus station.

After a fourteen-hour bus ride during which her mother only cried and slept, they boarded a ship bound for New York through the Panama Canal. Vivi never again saw Peru. Silvio became a phantom from her lost world.