Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me. She smoothed the wrinkles on her black silk pants.
“There’s a popular saying among non-occultists,” said Madame Ackermann, dry palms hissing over the silk. “Anything is possible.”
At our next meeting, we did not talk about the film safe incident. Madame Ackermann claimed to be too bothered by allergies to regress; she suggested my time might be better spent replacing the bungees in her built-ins. The following week, she handed me a three-ring binder and a glue stick, and directed me to a drawer of her review clippings. We settled into a “strictly professional work relationship,” rife with all the tensions and incrementally building resentments that phrase implies. Madame Ackermann, without officially demoting me, employed me like any old intern, sending me to town to xerox recipes from a cookbook on loan from Professor Penry, or to deliver receipts to a tax accountant at her offices located on a literal mountaintop.
One day she tasked me to clean her family photos with an herbal disinfectant that she sprayed obsessively on light switches and doorknobs. Madame Ackermann stood behind me as I was wiping a photograph of her mother holding a baby, presumably her.
“Whatever could have possessed her,” she said, staring at her own swaddled image, “to do such a thing?”
“Her?” I said. “What did she do?”
I scrutinized Madame Ackermann’s mother (a sweet Viennese woman—I’d met her once) whose young face resembled a blurrier version of Madame Ackermann’s. Even then she was no match for her own daughter, an ominous, night-haired squib equipped, at that negligible age, with an untamed laser glare seemingly capable of setting her own blankets ablaze.
“My mother used to say,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that she’d rather die than miss a single day of my life.”
I waited for her to laugh. She did not laugh. Perhaps, I thought, this was a famous Austrian saying that, translated word-for-word, became a cannabalistic koan.
Madame Ackermann flapped her starfish eyes at me. They gleamed with a liquid substance I would never mistake for tears.
I understood, then, what she was referring to. We’d never spoken about my mother’s suicide, but she’d had access to the medical interviews I’d undergone prior to matriculation at the Workshop, the results of which claimed I suffered from a physiological and psychological syndrome called febrile disconnection or “pure motherlessness”—and described how, from nearly birth, I had compensated for this lack by developing alternate ways of linking my internal world with my outside one.
Madame Ackermann grasped my wrist. We were about to have the exchange I’d had with so many teachers and mothers of friends, the squirmy upshot of which was this: you poor dear.
Except, of course, we weren’t.
“Poor Julia, you must believe that you’re innately unlovable,” Madame Ackermann said. “No wonder you need so much from me.”
I pulled my wrist away.
“Also, you’re handicapped by guilt,” she said.
“Me?”
“You shouldn’t be so ashamed,” she persisted. “No one blames you for hating her because she abandoned you.”
“I don’t hate her,” I said.
Madame Ackermann kinked a dubious brow.
“You can’t hate a person you never knew,” I said.
“Plenty of people hate complete strangers,” she said.
“I guess I lack imagination,” I said.
“And whose fault is that?” she retorted, possibly implying that my mother, by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills when I was a month old, and dying alone in the middle of the day in her bedroom, had also lacked imagination. Suicide by pills was such a cliché, or so the whispering wives of my father’s friends would claim, women whom I’d eavesdropped upon (really eavesdropped upon) at the barbecues and the picnics to which we were invited throughout my childhood. I’d wanted to ask them: What, to their minds, counted as a less clichéd way to kill oneself? Was hanging oneself also clichéd? Was it a cliché to fill one’s pocket with stones and walk into a river? Was it a cliché to shoot oneself through the mouth, or hurl oneself into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, or take an overdose of hemlock, or douse oneself in gasoline and strike a match? Or was the act of suicide itself a cliché? Regardless, I had to wonder how much, when deciding to kill oneself, matters of originality came to bear.
“It can’t help the situation,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that I look so much like her.”
Then Madame Ackermann drifted off to her study, as if we’d been discussing nothing more fraught than her upcoming dermatologist appointment (the eczema on her rib cage had begun its march north).
I sprayed and wiped and sprayed and wiped. I emptied an entire bottle onto that picture frame, trying to disinfect it. To my knowledge, Madame Ackermann had never seen a photograph of my mother, thus how could she have known how much she resembled her? Which suggested that, perhaps while considering my stenographer application last spring, Madame Ackermann had done a psychic background check on me. Perhaps she’d been places I had never been. Perhaps she’d visited my mother. This made me feel betrayed, violated, spied upon, the expected reactions. But it also made me feel humiliated, as though I’d been beaten at a game at which I should have been uniquely positioned to excel. Because, despite my supposed gifts, I had never visited my own mother. She had never allowed it.
The first time I’d tried and failed I was nine; I’d taken a photograph of her to a carnival psychic, who ignored the photo and insisted instead on reading my tarot cards. Outside the psychic’s tent a barometric vise squeezed the air, the pressure creating a tear in the atmosphere above us, from which issued a chilly black exhalation. The carnival psychic, her hand atop the tarot deck, began to perspire; though a fake, she was not numb to dark warnings. I think we both knew, before she flipped the card, that it would be the Fool, cautioning me not to take the imprudent path.
For a year or so, I had not taken the imprudent path. I decided that I would not force myself upon my mother. She would have to visit me first.
But she hadn’t visited me. Not on my birthday, not on her birthday, not on her death day, not on Halloween or Easter or Christmas, not even on those plain old Tuesdays or Mondays when the hectopascals, which I measured religiously with a meteorologist’s digital barometer, indicated an atmospheric pressure so low, so hospitable to astral invasions, that even we heavy cow humans, with a minimum of struggle, might hope to pierce the membrane that separated alive from dead and turn like clouds above the world. On the days when the pressure was unfriendly to her kind and maniacally high, I’d still been attuned, I’d still been open, I’d still been willing to see her—as I’ve heard even the least psychically inclined mourners can sometimes see their dead—in the wind or in the polygraph chittering of tree branches. I’d searched for her in the bottoms of teacups and under the bed in which she’d died, the only grave she’d been afforded because her body had been burned, her ashes scattered on a mountain that was always cold when we visited. I had looked into the backyard brush fires my father fed with things a husband should not burn. But I had never found her. She had not wanted to be found. And if I had gone to the Workshop to sharpen my finding abilities so that I could track this most reluctant woman—so what? Sillier reasons drive people to read the air.
That night I confided the Madame Ackermann situation to a Mortgage Payment named Stan. Stan had never understood why I had been chosen to rise from the bottom of the initiate heap; he was relieved to see order restored. I allowed him his moment of delight. Then I asked him what I should do.
“Break up with her,” Stan said.
“I’m not dating her,” I said.
“Quit,” he said. “Whatever.”
I told him I couldn’t quit. No one had ever “quit” Madame Ackermann.
“Exactly,” Stan said.
Thus I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house the next morning, my letter of resignation in my pocket, my t
high muscles shaky after a night of fucking Stan.
She greeted me with her old quasi-conspiratorial warmth. She’d intuited my intentions, I later came to think, hours before I arrived.
“Good morning, Julia,” she said. “Something exquisite has come up.”
We sat in her kitchen alcove. We drank septic tea.
Certain odd-yeared Octobers, she explained, wanding honey over my mug without asking if I took honey, were famously poor months to attempt regressions (something, she offered, having to do with di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations; I later googled the phrase “di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations” and got zero results), which explained why she’d had me doing such drab tasks; but now, she said, I could assist her with an exciting archiving project. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University had purchased her private papers; the curator of the university’s museum needed an archival installment for an upcoming exhibition of the university’s holdings called ParaPhernalia.
Madame Ackermann escorted me to her crawlspace, reached by pulling a metal ladder out of the ceiling of her guest room; I felt, each time I climbed it, as if I were stepping aboard a small commuter plane. The crawlspace was windowless and lit by a thin fluorescent fixture with a seizure-inducing flicker. The walls—some sheetrocked and others not, revealing between the studs a cottony insulation the color of peed-on snow—were lined with cardboard boxes, badly stacked, heavy boxes riding atop lighter boxes that had become accordion-squashed over the years.
The air, overheated and dense with micro-particulates, had, when I inhaled, a felted quality.
In these boxes, Madame Ackermann announced, on that first odd-yeared poorly planetarily configured October day, in no particular order, is my life.
I allowed myself, for about five minutes, to misinterpret this announcement as a promotion. Madame Ackermann was allowing me—me!—to read her private correspondence, in which there might be a letter from the famed lover who’d inspired the Fenrir appearance, or maybe early drafts of her many parapsychology game-changing books such as E-mails from the Dead, in which she detailed the recent rise in technological paranormal occurrences (ephemeral, frequency-based forms of communication being much easier for astral imprints to hijack than manual forms). Perhaps, too, there’d be old journals or a notebook that refuted (or confirmed) the rumors surrounding the source of Professor Yuen’s dislike of Madame Ackermann, a scuffle dating back to their student days when Professor Yuen accused Madame Ackermann of stealing her dissertation idea.
Madame Ackermann, or so I optimistically concluded, kept these incendiary materials in her crawlspace, and I had, after passing an inscrutable series of tests, proved worthy of her confidence. Which furthermore meant she was no longer bent on punishing me for the transgression I’d committed regarding the film safe incident. She was communicating her forgiveness and respect by promoting me to an airless, mausoleum-like space, meant to aggravate my mild claustrophobia and promote future fiberglass-particle-inspired respiratory ailments.
Exactly.
It took me less time than I needed to finish my first capful of septic tea (Madame Ackermann supplied me with a full thermos) to realize that I had been really and truly demoted.
For starters, the boxes in her crawlspace did not contain letters, or photos, or journals, or anything of overt interest to anyone driven by nobly archival rather than creepily prurient aims. In these boxes were bills. Bank statements. Dry-cleaning tickets. Bottles of expired malaria pills and Benadryl blister packs. Unpaid parking tickets (twenty in one box, all from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all issued within a period of five days). Jury duty notices. Dog-eared linen catalogs. Grocery lists. Unfilled prescriptions. A note written on the back of a pristine scratch-off lottery ticket that said, apologies I hit your car but I don’t have insurance so instead I am giving you this lottery ticket good luck!
She instructed me to organize the box contents into a kind of chronological life portrait collaged from this paper detritus. I was to match the credit card statement to the parking tickets received during that time period, the prescriptions written, and so forth (this per the request of the curator of ParaPhernalia).
“But what about undated items?” I asked. Meaning, for example, her grocery lists.
“One doesn’t shop for leg of lamb in the summer months,” Madame Ackermann replied.
She left me to my sorting. Did I learn anything unusual about Madame Ackermann during those hours I spent dry-sweating in her crawlspace? I learned that she had, according to her statements, an intense Norma Kamali bathing suit habit; that she rarely bought organic meat and was more familiar than I wished her to be with diet TV dinners; that she desired, but apparently never purchased, an Austrian featherbed; that she visited a general practitioner who prescribed her enemas and dandruff shampoo; that her preferred stationary vehicular violation was the double park; that she tended to drop thirty items simultaneously at the Bon French dry cleaner, located in a mini-mall on the outskirts of East Warwick, and was never required to produce a ticket in order to pick up her clothing.
For seven long afternoons, I puzzled these paper scraps into a chronologically accurate approximation of Madame Ackermann’s existence. These scraps failed to suggest that Madame Ackermann was a woman of unusual psychic talents. They failed to suggest she was unusual in any way at all.
This experience made me question, as I sorted receipts into piles while drinking capful after venomous capful of septic tea, whether Madame Ackermann was anything more than the averagely constipated, irresponsible, dry-scalped, high-thread-count-sheet-desiring person. There was nothing special about this woman I’d idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired; it was even possible that practically anybody—maybe even I—was more gifted than she.
Which is to explain why, at her forty-third birthday party, I called out “Barcelona chair.” Because I was more eager than ever to prove to the attendees of Madame Ackermann’s party that they had underestimated me.
I was, in a word, stupider.
In the end, nobody in that A-frame save Madame Ackermann understood the import of my calling out “Barcelona chair,” because no one else had caught her torque. When I called out “Barcelona chair” I received, from my professors (who’d all, save Wibley, seen a spider), disapproving glares. By calling out “Barcelona chair” I exposed myself to Madame Ackermann alone.
No, that’s not true.
I also exposed myself to me.
When I called out “Barcelona chair,” the personal toll exacted by my deception, like the image of the chair itself, spun into focus. I was psychically exhausted by the charade of the past months; I wanted Madame Ackermann to know that I had not, from the ten-to-the-seventh-power-multiplied-by-thirty-six-twice options, accidentally doodled my way to the correct film safe serial number. As she snored on the Biedermeier sofa beneath her silk eye pillow, she was not enabling me. If anything, I had succeeded despite her.
Even so, I wasn’t prescient enough to avoid stepping into what we later came to understand as Madame Ackermann’s trap. She’d stashed me in her crawlspace like a pound of meat—hidden from view, awaiting petrification. She’d invited me, her demoted, deceitful stenographer, to her forty-third birthday party, and I’d been foolish enough to interpret the overture as a peace offering, when in fact she was bringing me into the killing arena. This was blood sport for her. But first she wanted to be certain that I was the person she suspected me of being.
I was only too happy to oblige.
After catching Madame Ackermann’s yard sale junk for nearly thirty minutes, the professors began to get bored. Professor Blake, unable to secure a martini refill, defaulted to sipping abandoned drinks. “Is it cake time?” whined Professor Hales. Professor Yuen, a recreational harpist, strummed a bookshelf bungee.
“One last throw,” Madame Ackermann begged. “A torque for the road.”
The professors, Yuen included, agreed to humor Madame Ackerman
n.
I stood on the landing of Madame Ackermann’s staircase, hands gripping the banister, peering over the heads of my professors, ego inflamed by my superior conviction that I was, in so many literal ways, above them all.
Again Madame Ackermann hair-curtained her eyes, locked her chin. She leaned so far forward, shins hovering at a ninety-degree angle, it was as though she’d nail-gunned her Dr. Scholl’s to the floorboards. For the last time that evening, she threw.
This was the throw for which she’d been reserving her energies, and explained why she’d spent the past half hour lobbing meaningless trash; she’d been building to what was known as a psychic cascade, when a person’s superior abilities have been utilized for silly tasks, thereby causing a surplus of energy to accumulate.
I did not intend to “catch” what Madame Ackermann threw, but to avoid doing so was like trying not to watch a car burn. What tumulted through the air was a wheel of horror (dismembered limbs, splatters of gray matter) that repeated its sequence as it rolled toward me. I clutched the banister. Dizzy did not begin to describe how I felt.
The wheel slowed as it came within inches of my face, the images condensing into a compact gory redness. She threw a bloody egg, I thought. But no. Spidery fault lines appeared in the egg’s surface as Madame Ackermann’s hairy-eared torque emerged from its chrysalis.
Fenrir.
His oversized wolf jaws parted and I saw, bobbing in the glottal gloom, my own disembodied head.
More distressing still: nobody else saw what I was seeing.
“Sorry, love,” I heard Professor Penry say to Madame Ackermann. “Botched that one.”
“The risk of throwing torques when you’re forty,” said Professor Yuen. “The blank rate is one in three.”
“Cake time,” said Professor Wibley.
In my sensitized state, I could practically hear the gloating. My professors thought Madame Ackermann had thrown a blank (i.e., a torque that fails, from the outset, to coalescence into anything more precise than a blob of spinning fog). And she had thrown a blank. An intentional blank. But that wasn’t all. Whereas her first throw of the night had been a straightforward torque—a single throw that appears to most as one thing, but to the skilled few as its evolved, “second-phase” form—her final throw was a double torque, wherein two unique throws occur in parallel, in this case a blank and a spiral (alone a highly advanced maneuver).
The Vanishers: A Novel Page 4
