Sarah had been in love with him for seven years when he disappeared. Vanished, without a trace; the only possessions missing were his 
laptop and his car, an escape pod which no one could trace as he fled the city.

The police were called, of course, but there were no signs of criminal activity and, after all, there was nothing illegal about simply 
picking up and leaving. As Sarah and the two policemen stood surveying the apartment, which looked for all the world like something 
someone was about to come home to, the younger one tried to comfort her, but the words fell on deaf ears. Sarah stared blankly at the 
walls, which were covered in posters and paintings, a bewildering mixture of sanity and insanity.

A few days later, she had dinner with some of his other friends, a tense wake of a dinner, with an empty chair reserved in the vague 
hope that he would come back. They tried to talk of anything but him, but the atmosphere was charged; each of them claimed to know 
nothing about his disappearance, claimed to have no warning, and then looked suspiciously at the others, one by one, trying to figure 
out which one of them was lying. After all, all of his (known, anyway) close friends were at the table, and it seemed improbable that he 
would not keep one tendril to his past life.

The mock Mafia game went on for some time, until the clenched shoulders gave way, and the people slowly left, one at a time. Sarah was 
the last one to leave, and as the second-to-last shuffled off, she glanced around the room hopefully, as if now that she had won the 
endurance contest he would materialize to give her the prize. But the only prize she would get would be the check from the fat Mexican 
waitress, a mishmash of chicken scratch vaguely translatable to the combinatorial language of Mexican food, tamales or enchiladas or 
tacos, with beef or chicken or nothing, with maybe some rice or a tortilla, lettuce, guacamole, the usual eight ingredients arranged in 
one of the myriad ways.

Sarah stared at the ceiling and tried to remember if he had acted strangely the last time she had seen him, two days before his 
disappearance. She went over their brunch in detail, trying to conjure up an image of his face, trying to find a telltale smile or frown 
or sigh. She strained her brain trying to figure it out, but there were no clues; same as always, she thought. 

Suicide was the obvious diagnosis, and something that everyone but the close friends came to believe. As the months went by, this became 
accepted as fact; he had driven off in his car and killed himself. Sarah knew this wasn't true; it would be quite unlike him, after all, 
to go out in a whisper, and with his laptop in hand to boot.

The problem with someone vanishing completely with no leads is that there was nowhere for her to start. For the first few weeks, Sarah 
would come home and sit around sipping wine idly and watching television, her mind thinking up an endless list of possible locations, 
each as unlikely as the last on purely statistical grounds. He could, after all, be anywhere; the car was a reliable Toyota that had 
made it across the country several times, and the laptop could faithfully guide him to any destination he chose. She stared at the map 
of the United States on her wall, the constellations of small towns lying along rivers beckoning, but mostly she just ended up 
overwhelmed by the possibilities.

He never did come back. Over the years, he slowly faded from Sarah's mind, the aftertaste fading away, and slowly, she stopped wondering 
what might have been. She got married, had children, and was eventually put out to pasture and died, and with her died the last trace of 
his existence, the last piece of his legend, and thus, decades later, the last puff of smoke from his disappearing act was extinguished.