In “The Disappearing,” Joyce Carol Oates examines the way time can unravel both our relationships and our selves. The story chronicles the fading of a marriage from the wife’s perspective, but we are left uncertain as to whether it is her husband or she herself who is gradually disappearing. We asked poet and artist Anis Mojgani to illustrate the story for us. Here, alongside some excerpts from “The Disappearing,” is his beautiful and moving response.
“Alone with her husband in the violated house, Julia felt shaky, uncertain. She knew that he would try to embrace her—he was repentant, ashamed—and when he came to her, and touched her, she pushed from him with a little cry.
She could not bear for him to touch her at that moment. The heat that lifted from his body, as of an obscure but defiant humiliation.
‘A gun! You had a gun in the house, and I didn’t know.'”
“Like other things in their close, intimate life. Things they would
give up, or had given up; things they’d abandoned of which they would not speak nor perhaps even think, as days, weeks, months, and years washed over them, warm water lapping over their mouths.
The husband, the wife.
Disappearing, and gone.
———————
He was becoming mysterious to her. He was making her uneasy.”
“Each understood that the other had been deeply shocked. The wife had seen that the husband did not love her, and she was lost, as if she’d kicked free of gravity, for without the husband to love her, how was it possible for the wife to love him?”
“Often now, she felt panic. A sensation as of great beating wings descending upon her, sucking up oxygen, leaving her cringing, faint.
Embarrassing to love another person more than the other person loves you. Like wrong-sized persons on a teeter-totter.
Impulsively she resumed the old antagonism: ‘Ryan, tell me: we don’t have a gun in the house now, do we?’”
“The hurt was a bruise you longed to press, to establish that it is a bruise, and that its hurt is natural.
She was waiting for him to love her again. To discover her, as he’d discovered her forty-five years before. A lifetime!”
Poet and artist Anis Mojgani is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion and a multiple TEDx Speaker. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in the pages of such literary journals as Rattle and Forklift Ohio. He has three poetry collections, all published by Write Bloody Publishing: Over the Anvil We Stretch, The Feather Room, and Songs From Under The River. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and their dog Trudy.
You can find more of his work on his website.