My mother called these trips his retreats from reality, to which my father would say, when he returned, reality is a construct, consciousness an illusion, and my mother would either laugh or turn away, depending on how long he’d been gone that time. After a while, she stopped calling his trips anything, and a while after that, he moved to a small house one town to the east of ours. The direction seemed significant at the time; I see now that it was not. It was from this small house that he would eventually vanish entirely, without a word, without saying goodbye.

Of course: a vanishing preceded by a goodbye is no vanishing at all, though it can be just as incomprehensible.

The beginning I know for sure. Once upon a time, my father went to the Levitation Center. I also know the next part: and he never came back. He missed his weekend with me, and then the next. I remember my mother’s silence filling the car as we waited outside the darkened windows of that new eastern house, engine running, pretending the pile of plastic-wrapped newspapers breeding steadily on his porch meant nothing, nothing at all.

disappear (v.) from dis- “do the opposite of” + appear “come into view,” from the Old French aparoir, aperer “come to light, come forth”; see also: vanish, die out, abandon; see also: no letter, no call; see also: a year and more without a single message to your daughter, who is wondering what could have happened, who is alone with her furious mother, and who misses you.

“You’ve missed the welcome talk,” said Magda. Her bare feet were thin and coated in white dust from the driveway. They looked dead. “Are you hungry?”

My stomach recoiled. The cab, the mole. The slap slap slap of the body on the dash. I shook my head.

“All right.” She shrugged with one shoulder and I wondered how old she was. “Let’s drop off your bag.” She led me inside the building and down a short hallway. Most of the program participants slept in four small dormitories, she explained, though a handful would spend the summer in tents a half mile or so up the mountain. The tents were private, and more comfortable in the heat, but they also cost more, and, as I would soon find, few parents sending their daughters here wanted to grant them any extra comforts. Most of us were here to be punished.