The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  “My mother didn’t leave a note,” I said.

  “We’re aware,” Alwyn said.

  “Of course I see a difference,” I mumbled.

  Kincaid, she continued, hired video artists to shoot footage of the vanishers. The subsequent collection of vanishing films was stored at the TK Ltd. warehouse in Cincinnati so that family members, friends, acquaintances could view the testimonies of their vanished beloveds. Kincaid described his warehouse as a living mortuary, a hopeful grief museum.

  “Colophon decided that the films could serve a wider population—that the viewing of these films by people who’d lost a loved one to actual death or to suicide, could be therapeutic. Which is how he came up with the idea for the Lost Film Conference.”

  “That’s kind of a misnomer,” I said. “The films aren’t lost. And neither are the people.”

  “The attendees are metaphorically lost, by and large. It’s not a complete misnomer. You saw the weepers in the lobby. Most of them had loved ones who were killed on 9/11. The weepers hold out some hope that their husband or daughter made it out of the buildings, realized they could disappear without a trace, caught a bus west or north or south, and started a new life.”

  I still struggled to understand how this qualified as a preferable scenario.

  Alwyn mentioned, in an offhanded way, that she herself had recently vanished. She complained about her mother and stepfather, neither of whom had gone to see her vanishing film and who were wasting thousands of dollars each month on a private detective.

  “You were suicidal?” I said. I tried to spot the talent in her—because it was a talent, self-killing. I didn’t possess it. I’d tried to find evidence of my mother’s talent in photographs, but anything can appear meaningful at a backward glance: Hands clamped beneath opposing armpits on a warm spring day. Lips pinched shut against (it can appear, in retrospect) the release of a nuclear misery. The innocence of every gesture read as a clue to a future murder no one foresaw.

  But Alwyn—I couldn’t see the killer in her. She was haphazard, missing buttons, one shoulder always half out of her cardigan and roots that grew pale, not dark.

  Even then: Alwyn’s story did not add up.

  “If they’d bother to see my film,” Alwyn said, “they’d respect my reasons for not wanting to be found, they’d stop trying to find me.”

  “But what if a person changes her mind after she vanishes?” I said.

  “A very small percentage of people unvanish themselves after a few years. But not the majority. Though quite a lot of people choose to revanish. That’s common. Because disambiguation recurs, after a time. Your life becomes your life, and you need to leave it again.”

  This seemed less a comforting solution than a stressful warding off of the inevitable. I imagined the dread and hopelessness suffered by the person who’d vanished so many times that there was no place else to go. She was known to everyone. It was a fear not unlike the one suffered by Blanche, who took medication to combat her mood swings. After a year or two the drug stopped working, as though her body had figured out the trick being played upon it, and formulated a runaround. She’d visit her doctor, who’d prescribe a new drug, and she’d return home to await its failure. Her body registered cures as invaders, as an enemy to defeat. At some point there would be no more cures. Her body would be too familiar, or would know too much.

  “Too bad,” Alwyn said, “there was an unvanishing panel this morning you might have enjoyed.”

  She flapped a hand toward the conference program. Most of the events were unmoderated screenings, for example “Selected Vanishing Films January 1, 2007–August 31, 2008,” interspersed by panel screenings with titles such as “The Therapeutic Value of Witnessing” and “The Trauma Survivor as Cultural Hero.”

  “I’d like to see one of these other panels,” I said.

  “Now?” Alwyn asked. “I was going to shower.”

  I recalled that a person with a maybe-concussion shouldn’t shower alone. Then I recalled that it wasn’t people with concussions but people prone to seizures. I hadn’t been allowed to shower alone for the month following my seizure at Madame Ackermann’s birthday party. Pam had sat on my toilet reading her course pack whenever I showered, so close to my naked body that I could smell her highlighter.

  My phone alarm beeped, reminding me it was time to take my 6 p.m. pills. Also it reminded me: I had dinner plans with my father and Blanche.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said.

  “But you need to meet Colophon,” Alwyn said. She sounded quite desperate. “He needs to tell you about the job.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have plans tonight.”

  “How about tomorrow night?” she countered. “We’ll rendezvous in the hotel bar. They serve excellent whiskey sours.”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  I pulled on my coat, shouldered my bag. I shook Alwyn’s hand and promised not to forget our meeting.

  “Looking forward to it,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said, my eyelid pulsing its silent alarm. What my mind no longer foresaw, my body did.

  Back on the street, the temperature had dropped with the sun, but there was no wind, and walking down Eighth Avenue felt akin to being cryo-frozen, a gradual halting of bodily time. When I reached the Japanese restaurant Blanche had chosen I was pleasantly all-over numbed, a sensation I reinforced by knocking back, at the velveteen-tarped entryway, a pair of Vicodins.

  “Julia!” said Blanche. Her yellow hair had grayed at the temples, lending her a punkishly off-kilter vibe that interacted really excellently, I thought, with her Icelandic sweater and her clogs.

  Blanche stood and hugged me. And hugged me and hugged me. In contrast to my father’s duck-and-cover personality, Blanche was an energetic wrangler of other people’s messes, capable of dusting and watering the elephants that inhabited the many rooms of our farmhouse in Monmouth, the one in which my mother had killed herself, the one my father, for reasons both evident and bewildering, refused to sell. Once he married Blanche, my father, with relief, ceded to her female expertise the duty of my physical and emotional upbringing, and thus she’d guided me, from the age of twelve, through a syllabus that focused on Trixie Belden mysteries, the New England arts of wood stacking, linoleum block printing, and chowder assembly, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She insisted that she and I memorize Plath’s Ariel; the poems, she said, might help me understand why my mother had done what she’d done. They hadn’t, but I’d liked them very much, and they’d provided for Blanche and me a form of jokey intimate patter, a coded way to bitch, in his presence, about my father’s occasional fits of chauvinistic pique, for example when he came home to find Blanche and I wielding Exacto knives over a pile of concrete-colored lino tiles, arguing over the most appropriately nondenominational holiday card image, the dinner chicken unroasted, the house a booked and scarved and sweatered mess.

  It can sew, it can cook, it can talk talk talk, Blanche would say after he’d stomped off to his study, to which I would rejoin, Will you marry it, marry it marry it.

  She had married it. And thank God. When Blanche arrived, our years preceding her arrival appeared, by contrast, a weary slog, a tiptoe, a blueness. And yet, with Blanche, there were boundaries. Blanche had never had children because she’d never wanted children. As much as she loved me, she did not desire to be my mother, in deference to my real one, yes, but also in deference to her own inclination to provide, for the needy, the occasional break from their lonely routine. She was the hired help, a hospice worker by trade, beloved by her patients and their families. She existed for me, too, as a temporary caretaker whose generosity was limitless because the job was not.

  Blanche’s hug concluded and my father stood to take his turn. My father expressed physical affection like a bad mime. He threw himself at me and administered the Heimlich maneuver of hugs, then, after stripping my coat from my arms and forcing it on a passing busboy, situated me on a chair and pushed me
so far into the table that my lower ribs rubbed against the edge when I exhaled.

  He seated himself across from me and made a low, silence-filling grunt that I’d mistaken for years as the sound of him clearing his throat, and had only recently come to identify as the grinding of his back molars. This was no harmless de-gumming of vocal cords. This was damage I was hearing.

  We stared at our menus and readjusted, in those minute physical and emotional ways, to being in close proximity to one another.

  As we waited for our drinks, Blanche chatted about the ceramics exhibit they’d seen that afternoon, and showed me the autobiography of the artist, a book called I Shock Myself.

  “That,” I said, “is an amazing title.”

  The waiter delivered a pitcher of sake and three small wooden boxes. Alcohol was contraindicated for twenty-three of my twenty-three medications. I filled my box with water.

  “Did we mention that we saw James the other day?” Blanche asked.

  “How is James?” I said. James had been my boyfriend from our chaste note-writing romance in the third grade through college and up to the summer before I’d left for the Workshop, at which point I’d been with him for a longer period of time than my father had been married to my mother, and we both thought we should try out other people. Unbeknownst to James, during the intervening two years, I had done nothing but hold tryouts.

  “He’s seeing a Kathy,” Blanche reported. “He had no idea you’d left school.”

  “We haven’t been in touch,” I said. “Not for any mad reasons.”

  “I told him you hadn’t dated anyone since him,” she said.

  “I hope you also told him that I’ve had sex with about fifty people since him,” I said.

  My father origamied his paper chopstick sheath into a little staircase.

  “Even if you did sleep with fifty people,” Blanche said, “it’s not in your nature to do so. There are thrilling harlots and there are steady old dogs. I’m sorry to report that you’re the latter.”

  “You’d be surprised, Blanche,” I said. “I shock myself.”

  Blanche and I knocked sake boxes.

  We ordered, we endured the intensification of the restaurant sound track, one volume bump every five minutes, until we were pretty much screaming at one another, and my father rolled the cardboard cocktail flyer into an ear trumpet that he used in full view of the hostess, who was not the least bit guilted into turning down the music.

  “I love this place,” he said, after our various makis and dons had, an hour after ordering them, still failed to arrive, and we were all gassy on fried peas.

  Finally our meals appeared. Because we’d worked our way through all of the noncontroversial topics, my father asked about my health.

  “You got my candida article,” Blanche said.

  “I did,” I lied.

  “Maybe what you have is sexually transmitted,” my father said into his rice bowl.

  “That’s chlamydia,” Blanche corrected.

  “Believe me, I’ve been tested for everything,” I said.

  “And how is your job?” my father asked.

  “A soul-crushing bore,” I said. “Otherwise great.”

  “That’s life for most people,” he said. “That’s why you need to find something about which you are passionate.”

  “I had something I was passionate about,” I said. “But I can’t do it anymore.”

  “Maybe the Workshop wasn’t your true calling,” Blanche said. Blanche persisted in hoping I’d retrain my psychic abilities toward the pursuit of a more practical career; she thought I’d make an excellent member of a political advance team, danger-proofing foreign sites for upcoming diplomatic visits, preventing future harm instead of prying into the pasts of random strangers, for whom the damage was already done.

  “But today something unusual happened,” I said.

  I told them about the girl who tripped on the rug, her maybe-concussion, my visit to the Regnor, the vanishing films.

  “I’ve never heard of anything so cruel,” Blanche said of the vanishing films, and of vanishing generally.

  “Do you really think it’s cruel?” I said. “Would you rather, Dad, that mom be dead than alive and living elsewhere?”

  “That’s not a question anyone should ever be asked,” Blanche said.

  “I was asked that question earlier today,” I said.

  “And how did you respond?” Blanche challenged. She was a steady old dog herself.

  “She is dead,” my father interjected. “Thus making this a futile conversation.”

  “Maybe a film is a bit much,” I said. “But a note might have been nice, don’t you think?” Once I’d asked my father why my mother hadn’t left a suicide note, to which he’d replied, We are not that sort of people. To his mind, this oversight of hers was less a mark of insensitivity than of the tensile strength of her character.

  “Most meaningful sentiments are cheapened by articulation,” my father said.

  “In America today …” Blanche began.

  “In America today,” I said. “How could you possibly finish that sentence?”

  “… people overestimate the value of expression,” Blanche said.

  “Don’t be bitchy to Blanche,” my father said.

  “Blanche can handle it,” I said.

  “It’s your father who can’t handle it,” Blanche said. “Be nice to me for his sake.”

  “Maybe that was her problem,” I said of my mother. “She never found something about which she was passionate.” My mother, or so my father liked to tell me, was “always a bit drifty.” The implication being that she might not have killed herself if she were less drifty, never mind that I considered suicide the least drifty act a person could commit.

  “She had a passion,” my father said defensively.

  “What?” I said.

  “She was a metalsmith,” he said. “She won a fellowship to apprentice in Paris after we became engaged. She sold her jewelry on the street to make extra money. Then a gallery picked her up. She had some very rich clients. Famous clients. But you knew that.”

  I stared at him incredulously.

  “How would I know that if you’ve never told me?”

  “Don’t be disingenuous,” Blanche said. “We know what you got up to at that school.”

  “I don’t go there,” I said. “I mean that in the literal sense of the phrase.”

  I could tell: They didn’t believe me.

  “She lost her engagement ring while she was in Paris,” my father said, apropos of God knows what.

  “Which I wouldn’t have minded so much,” he added, “except that it cost me the bulk of my tiny savings at the time.”

  Then, changing his mind, he said, “I minded a lot. I was very angry with her. She wasn’t one to talk about things, ever. I couldn’t help but suspect that she lost the ring because she didn’t want to marry me.”

  “But she did marry you,” I reminded him.

  “I suppose,” he said, as if this remained debatable. “But only because she viewed me as good for her health. Our marriage was the medicine she forced herself to take daily.”

  I could see Blanche wondering whether or not she should attempt to reassure him about the probably honestly loving intentions of a person she’d never met.

  “Well,” Blanche said, opting instead to revert the conversation to me and my problems, “I think you’re lucky, given your lack of qualifications, that you’ve found a job at all. The next step is finding a job you like.”

  “I might have a new job soon,” I said. “A man I sort of know through the Workshop wants to hire me.”

  As I confessed this I realized: I had no intention of meeting Alwyn and Colophon tomorrow night at the Regnor’s bar. Aside from the fact that any doings with Colophon, and more crucially doings with Dominique Varga, represented a serious health risk, two restaurant outings on two consecutive evenings was a form of exertion for which I’d end up paying.

 
; “He’s a … psychic?” my father asked.

  “He’s an academic,” I said.

  “Is he,” said my father, more interested.

  “He writes about film,” I said.

  “Ah,” said my father, less interested.

  “What sort of films?” Blanche inquired.

  “Art films,” I said. “Made by an artist named Dominique Varga.”

  My father’s interest re-upped, but cautiously.

  “Dominique Varga?” he said. “The French woman?”

  “By birth she’s half French and half Hungarian,” I said. “But yes, I believe she lived most of her life in France.”

  “That’s curious,” said my father, who sounded totally incurious, even half scared.

  “You’ve heard of her?” I said. I found this hard to believe. My father’s area of professional interest—sinkholes and underground streams produced by the chemical erosion of carbonite rocks such as dolomite—singularly obsessed him. He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.

  “Your mother knew her,” he said. “When she lived in Paris, I mean.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “When was this?”

  “Eighties,” my father said. “That Varga woman bought a lot of her work. Practically supported her.”

  “What kind of stuff did she make?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what they’re called,” he said. “Necklaces?”

  “Wow,” I said, still too stunned to know what to make of this. “Do you own any of these necklaces?”

  “No,” he said, as though it would be unthinkable that he would hide such a thing from me. “She sold it all before she came back to the States. She was somebody else by then.”