The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  “Are you here for the film conference?” the woman asked. She had an Eastern European accent. With her doll eyes blinking from her scavenged face, she resembled a person buried inside another person.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m an actress,” the woman offered. “Visiting from out of town.”

  I smiled a force field. I was in no mood for talking.

  She played with her necklace, balancing it on her pointer finger.

  “My mother gave this to me,” she said. “She’s a movie director. She told me I was her muse.”

  I squinted at her anew. This, perhaps, explained why she’d seemed familiar to me. No doubt she’d appeared in one of the many foreign films I’d watched since arriving in New York, my apartment located a block from a revival house that insisted on screening films without English subtitles or dubbing. I’d become gifted at extrapolating story lines without the aid of a single comprehensible line of dialogue. These movies also made me miss my psychic forays less, these oblique glimpses into the lives of cinema strangers functioning as a plausible substitute.

  “Your necklace reminds me of one Sylvia Plath wore in a photo,” I said.

  “The one where she was also wearing the flowered dress and the sweater?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Sometimes her eyes look blue and sometimes black,” she said. “And what was she thinking with the over-the-head braids? She might as well have tattooed the word hausfrau on her forehead, or what little you could see of it under those dustpan bangs.”

  “ ‘He tells me how badly I photograph,’ ” I said, quoting from the poem “Death & Co.” Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself—she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me—no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face.

  “Irenke,” the woman said, failing to extend a hand.

  “Julia,” I said.

  Finally the bartender appeared.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked.

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

  “I’ll have what I’m having,” Irenke said.

  “Make it two,” I said to the bartender.

  “Two what?” he said.

  “Whiskey sours,” Irenke said.

  The bartender grew very irritated.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Two whiskey sours?” I said. “Please?”

  “All you got to do is ask,” he said gruffly.

  Irenke put on her coat.

  “It’s so cold in here,” she complained.

  “It’s really cold,” I agreed.

  “Tell it to the management,” the bartender said.

  He throttled up a pair of whiskey sours and placed them both in front of me, as though Irenke weren’t even there.

  I slid a sour to her.

  We sat without speaking. She snapped beer nuts between her front teeth and shot me sidelong glances when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

  “I think we are suffering in the same way,” Irenke said finally.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “We have both been jilted by people who might have loved us,” she clarified.

  “I practice a no-attachment policy with men,” I said. “I’m all business.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re a call girl?”

  “I used to call on people,” I said. “But I was never paid.”

  “It’s no big deal to be used by strangers,” Irenke said. “It’s when you’re used by people you know that life becomes unfathomable.”

  She announced she had to visit the ladies’ room.

  “Need anything?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “Maybe a toilet.”

  She examined me at unabashed length.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your life is about to get better.”

  “It is?” I touched my cheek, always an alienating sensation. The anti-seizure meds numbed my skin; to touch my face was to enter a failed romance between body parts.

  “You must have been such a pretty girl,” she said. “We should get her back.”

  “Get who back?” I said.

  She touched my droopy eyelid with a fingertip.

  “The woman who did this to you,” she said.

  Her lids flung wider. Suddenly her madness, like the flecks of lead sifting to the surface of her blue irises, was all that I could see of her.

  I shied away.

  “Nobody did anything to me,” I said.

  “You did this to yourself?” she asked.

  “I’ve contracted a virus,” I said.

  “Fascinating,” Irenke said. “And how’s that going?”

  “How’s what going?”

  “Believing that.”

  As she dismounted her stool, she knocked my bag to the floor. She shoved the pill bottles back inside. She handed it to me.

  “When you’re ready to fight,” she said, consonants blurring, “give me a call.”

  I amended my diagnosis. Irenke wasn’t crazy, she was drunk.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You know I’d do anything to help you,” she said, flipping up the collar of her coat. “I owe you that much.”

  “You owe me a lot more than that,” I said, humoring her.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I owe you much, much more than that.”

  There was no point in correcting her drunk’s outsized commitment to our insta-barroom intimacy—we didn’t know each other. She owed me nothing.

  “I mean it,” she said. “When you decide you need my help, call on me, call girl.”

  “I will,” I said. “And same here. If you ever need my help. Don’t hesitate to call.”

  She steadied herself on the edge of the bar.

  “Not to worry, Julia,” she said. “There’s no helping me.”

  Irenke disappeared through the door, over which an exit sign buzzed. I swear I heard the sound of dirt raining onto a coffin lid. I experienced, or thought I experienced, what might be described as a muscle memory, if the brain could be considered, as psychics considered it, a muscle—my gray matter straining to interact, for the first time in over a year, with those ulcerations in the astral plane. But then I realized that there was nothing psychic going on here, this was plain old human intuition kicking in—an arguably more useful talent for me to manifest. Because it didn’t require any special talent to know: Irenke was doomed.

  My phone alarm beeped. It was time to take my 6 p.m. pills. I swore to myself as I struggled with the tops. My pharmacist refused to give me non-childproof bottles even though I promised her I knew no children.

  On the bar I lined up one Dramamine, three ibuprofens, two vitamin Cs, four folic acids, a Voltaren, and two psylliums. Handling pills, even after a year of copious pill taking, still gave me an illicit charge. I did not touch, but often visited, the prescription bottle I’d found in my father’s bedside table when I was seven, a bottle with my mother’s name on it containing a single, half-nibbled pill.

  Weirdly, I couldn’t find my bottle of diazepam. I emptied the contents of my bag onto the bar. I checked under the stools, searching the shadows where an errant bottle might have rolled when Irenke spilled my bag.

  Then I understood: Irenke had stolen my diazepam. She didn’t strike me as a drug addict, but as something worse—a creepy collector of souvenirs.

  Her odd violation tiptoed me to the brink of dissolve again—really, what was wrong with me? If there was one victory I could claim to have achieved over the past thirteen and a half months of illness, it was my refusal—or inability—to wallow. Perhaps, I thought, my unsteadiness could be blamed on the w
hiskey warming my chest, and its bittersweet reminder of my carefree early Workshop days, when the only schedule I respected, after basking, hungover, on the campus green, was one that landed me each afternoon in the windowless reading corridor because I liked the packaged butter cookies the librarians served with the four o’clock tea, the silly daintiness of this ritual leavened by the violent death images on the reading corridor walls, painted by a forerunner of the Mexican mural movement.

  Such nostalgia left me vulnerable, however, to the understanding that this person didn’t exist, and not only because I’d left the Workshop. I didn’t count my life in days anymore, I counted it in hours. I counted it in pills. That carefree person no longer functioned as the norm from which I’d deviated. As the months elapsed, my old self would be vanished by this new self. It was a mean variety of suicide that permitted you to keep living, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Your life is about to get better.

  I clinked Irenke’s empty glass.

  As I finished the last of my sour, the bar door opened—Irenke, I assumed, returning from the ladies’ room. But no.

  Alwyn entered, followed by a balding man in a charcoal muffler.

  “There you are,” said Alwyn, as though we hadn’t agreed yesterday to meet exactly here.

  “This is Colophon,” she said, presenting a drawn man who most resembled, of the famous people I could think of, Virginia Woolf. He wore a gray suit beneath a gray overcoat, and could have passed for an overworked diplomat were it not for the felt beanie on his head.

  Colophon announced that he was hungry and needed to eat. He did not appear interested in me, save to discover whether or not I was a fan of gnocchi.

  Fine, I thought. We could be mutually indifferent to each other.

  Alwyn insisted on charging my bar tab to her room. I left Irenke a napkin note that said, “You vanished. I’m off to eat Italian. I’ll call on you.” Of course Irenke hadn’t given me her phone number, but I hoped she’d figure that I was drunk and forgot I had no way to contact her. Because the truth was this, I told myself: I was never going to call.

  At the restaurant, Alwyn filled and refilled her tiny wineglass with Chianti, and occupied herself by holding the corners of her polyester napkin in the candle flame, watching the fabric wither to a nub. After we ordered our food, she engineered a tiff with Colophon.

  “Did you mail the grant application?” she asked.

  Colophon confirmed that he had mailed the grant application.

  “Because it had to be postmarked by today,” Alwyn said.

  Colophon repeated that he had mailed the application.

  “You always insist that postmarks don’t matter,” Alwyn said, “but I assure you that the committee is dying for a reason to throw your application in the trash.”

  “We’ve applied to Timothy Kincaid’s foundation for a research grant,” Colophon explained. His voice was subterranean and minor-keyed, mellow but not altogether relaxed.

  Not that I wanted to sleep with him, but—I could sort of understand why Alwyn did.

  “We are not trying to get a grant,” Alwyn said.

  “I am trying to get a grant and Alwyn, though she does not agree with my Varga theory—that her acts of political and professional immorality were performance pieces meant to critique such political and professional immoralities—will nonetheless benefit from the funding as my research assistant,” Colophon explained.

  “Porn is porn,” Alwyn said. “Authorial intent does not make it less porny. That was her point.”

  “And what was your authorial intent?” Colophon asked. Then to me: “Alwyn had quite a porn career once upon a time.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it a career,” she said. “More of an inspired hobby.”

  “Not so inspired,” Colophon said. “How familiar are you with Dominique Varga?” he said to me, cutting to the chase. Colophon, I’d already registered, was not one for small talk unless it, too, was of the cutting variety.

  “Not very,” I said.

  As Alwyn continued to drain glass after tiny glass of Chianti, Colophon told me all that I already knew, and much that I did not, about Dominique Varga. Born in 1942 to a Hungarian mother and a French father, Varga began her career as a morgue photographer in Paris, where she’d moved from Budapest in the late sixties at the age of twenty-six. One day Varga took a razor blade to the photographs she’d snapped of the female cadavers, excising them from their morgue surroundings. She pasted these into the editorial spreads of fashion magazines on the metro newsstands, situating them alongside the models like dead alter egos. When Varga was arrested and charged with vandalism, her career was born.

  “From the very outset, however,” Colophon said, “she positioned herself as an artist with a contradictory, even hostile belief system.”

  When Varga’s work was championed by French feminist critics Simone Moreault and Lisette Bloch, for example, Varga responded by wearing funeral attire to the trial of Jules Fanon (a then-infamous dismemberer of prostitutes) and weeping on the courthouse steps for seventy-two straight hours following Fanon’s sentencing to life in prison. Later she published a series of domestic photographs titled “Interior ReDecorator” wherein she simulated a self-administered abortion with a curtain rod; obscuring her head is a large photograph of “Let Them Live,” the French 1970s anti-abortion group.

  But according to Varga—a claim her oft-mocked critics, Colophon said, met with forgivable dubiousness—her cruelly whimsical attitude changed overnight when, in 1977, her mother died. After selling all of her belongings, including her prints and her negatives, and donating the proceeds to a political collective intent on installing the death penalty in France, she withdrew from the art scene for two years. By the time she reappeared, in 1979, she’d become one of the most prominent directors of underground pornographic films in Europe.

  Yet the word pornographic, Colophon explained, didn’t accurately capture the tenor of these films, which were less erotic than meditative, even serene. The films gained a fringe cachet among louche, aristocratic Europeans, in particular a wayward heiress who organized, at her Ibiza beach house, the first official festival dedicated to Varga’s films, in June 1980. The second night of the festival, the heiress disappeared.

  “Like vanished?” I asked.

  “Like dead,” Alwyn interjected.

  “Or possibly not,” Colophon said.

  “Dead,” Alwyn repeated, bored.

  A month later, a gossip columnist in Paris received an anonymous phone call informing him of the existence of a film directed by Varga, one that starred the heiress lying on an Ibiza roadside. Her car, crunched against a cliff, smoked in the background as her body, thrown (or dragged) free of the wreckage, was lovingly fondled by masked women wielding prosthetic hands.

  While many in the heiress’s circle claimed to have seen this film, Colophon said, no hard copies were ever recovered. Soon, however, a series of six snuff films bearing Varga’s signature dark aquarium lighting began circulating, again via underground channels, throughout Europe. Though no bodies were found, Varga was charged with the murder of the heiress and six other women. But at her sentencing, a female spectator removed her coat and lay, naked, in the aisles of the courtroom. Once in custody, the woman identified herself as the “snuffed” star of Varga’s six films.

  “Nobody died during the making of these films,” Alwyn said, quoting Varga. “Nobody but me.”

  Following her acquittal, Colophon said, Varga again found herself both embraced and reviled by the French feminist establishment. Those who reviled her were invited by Varga to her film premieres and asked to speak to the audience about Varga’s moral flaws while Varga wept audibly backstage. Those who persisted in supporting her, such as Simone Moreault, found themselves mercilessly parodied.

  “She made a film called Simone Moreault,” Colophon said, “in which a badly dressed academic uses a naked woman as a typewriter stand.”

  In 1982, criti
cism erupted over a series of films showing Varga having sex with young male artists who, afterward, professed to have slept with her only to gain a career foothold. None of these men knew they were being filmed. The results were exhibited in a show Varga curated at Blue Days, her then-gallery in Paris, called “Up-and-Comers, Coming, Going.”

  “Varga claimed, ‘My grieving body is the most powerful sculpture any of them will ever create,’ ” Colophon said. “And here is where my scholarly interest in Varga begins.”

  According to photographs of this opening, an anti-fascist artist named Cortez was among the guests. Two weeks later, Varga announced she’d accepted an endowed chair at the Institut Physique du Globe de Paris; additionally, she’d been hired to shoot a propaganda film for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National party that would, Varga said, “make Triumph of the Will look like a Looney Tunes animation,” a claim that earned her the nickname, “the Leni Riefenstahl of France.”

  When Varga disappeared again in 1984, this time for good, no one, Colophon said, was surprised. Some people believed she’d been kidnapped and killed by either the leftist radicals who’d been sending her death threats or by a member of Le Pen’s own security team, many of whom boasted backgrounds in organized crime; others believed that she committed suicide, a claim buttressed by Varga’s last known film, Not an Exit, interpreted by some as a suicide note, in which Varga stars as a woman who’s violated by an anonymous hand.

  Colophon drank two glasses of wine in quick succession. Alwyn, entranced again by her napkin-burning project, seemed unaware that her lips were pursed and twitching, like a person unpleasantly dreaming.

  “And what do you believe?” I said to him.

  “He believes she ran off with Cortez,” Alwyn said. “He believes the fact that the film reel was found in Cortez’s safe proves that they were collaborating, and that Varga wasn’t a fascist, or a pornographer, but a bold crusader against ideology. Her ‘fascist’ project was a performance art piece, aimed to undermine all ideologies.”