“The love of clandestine perversions, of exploiting opposing sides of the political propaganda machine, is a familiar Vargian trope,” Colophon retorted.
“Only if you think she was exploiting anything other than her own ability to be exploited and to exploit,” Alwyn said.
“And what do you believe?” I asked Alwyn.
“Me?” she said.
“Is she alive or is she dead?” I said.
“I have no idea,” Alwyn said.
I don’t know why but I did think: she’s lying.
“What I mean is,” she clarified, “something happened to her.”
“Clearly,” Colophon said.
“She was emotionally derailed,” Alwyn said. “Watch Not an Exit if you doubt me.”
“Probably she had her heart crushed,” Colophon said. “Don’t let the porn hobby mislead you. Alwyn’s a closet romantic.”
“This from the person who refuses to consider the woman who directed films about pretend-dead girls being fucked by strangers to be a pornographer,” Alwyn sniped. “She wasn’t exploiting people, she was exploiting an ideology.”
Alwyn excused herself to the ladies’ room at the precise moment that the waiter delivered our meals. Colophon and I waited five minutes for her to return, then gave up and started eating.
“I don’t suppose you have an opinion,” he said.
“About whether or not she was exploiting an ideology?” I asked.
“About whether or not she’s alive,” he said. “You were Madame Ackermann’s protégée. I’m assuming you exhibited some sort of … facility.”
“I don’t have an opinion about that, no,” I said.
“Of course not,” Colophon said. “Madame Ackermann mentioned you’d become sick. That you were taking ‘time off.’ ”
Colophon, chewing, inspected me. Then he reached beneath the table and produced, from his briefcase, a familiar sheaf of ghost-grid paper describing Madame Ackermann’s “trip” to the Tour Zamansky.
“I asked around to find out whose handwriting this was,” he said.
“It’s mine,” I said. “I was her stenographer.”
“Madame Ackermann’s account of how she found the film safe number always struck me as suspicious,” he said. “Among other things, she described the Tour Zamansky as Neo-Gothic, when really it was designed by a disciple of Le Corbusier.”
“To her credit,” I said, “Madame Ackermann’s not a googler.”
“I consulted an automatic handwriting expert,” Colophon continued. “He said that there’s a difference between writing produced from external aural prompts and internal aural prompts, which can be seen in the length of the ligatures. Ligatures refer to letters joined by links.”
“I know what a ligature is,” I said. I had no clue about ligatures.
“When a person is taking dictation, you see ligatures of three to four letters. But when they’re taking what is known as ‘auto-dictation,’ i.e., transcribing an internal voice, the ligatures tend to be five to seven letters in length.”
Using the clicker end of his ballpoint, he counted for me—five, six, five, seven, seven.
“According to the ligatures, you were not taking dictation from Madame Ackermann.”
“Huh,” I said, as though this were news to me.
Then he asked me how familiar I was with the phenomenon known as psychic attack.
I told him that I knew a little bit about psychic attacks, though I knew more than a little bit.
“I don’t want to seem as though I’m diagnosing you,” Colophon said. “But I believe that you’re being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann.”
I thought he was joking. He was not.
“Why would she waste her energy on me?” I asked. “I’m a nothing.”
“Well,” Colophon said, wiping his mouth. “You are now.”
Alwyn returned from wherever she’d been. With a spoon back, she methodically flattened her gnocchi one by one. It was like watching a child kill bugs, and did very little to warm me toward my own meal, a colorless dish scarred with prosciutto.
I was not a fan of gnocchi.
“So,” Alwyn said. “Did you tell her?”
“I was in the midst,” Colophon said.
“Just tell her already,” she said.
“I’m getting to it,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “I may die first.”
She turned to me.
“Madame Ackermann hates you because you were able to do what she failed to do, namely find the film safe number, and this humiliated her and made her feel old, obsolete, sexually diminished, etcetera, and so she’s psychically attacking you, which means you’re screwed because even though her career is on the wane, she’s still more powerful than most people in your field, but Colophon, contrary to how he might have presented himself to you while I was out smoking, does not feel ‘responsible’ for what happened to you, and thus if he’s offered to help you it’s not because he’s an altruistic guy, trust me, he’s an academic, i.e., an egotistical bastard who’s willing to pay for you to go to a pricey psychic attack recovery facility only if you agree, in exchange, once you’re better and once you’ve regained whatever powers you possessed to the extent that you possessed any at all, to help him resuscitate his failing career by finding Dominique Varga, whom he believes to be alive, and if he can prove it his career will be pulled from the scholarly junk heap and maybe he’ll get tenure somewhere decent and will no longer be forced to take visiting lectureships at agrarian schools in the Urals, but regardless he’s hoping, given what he presumes to be your shared personal interest in ruining Madame Ackermann’s reputation, that you’ll accept his offer to help you avenge your bodily misfortune.”
Alwyn forked a pair of gnocchi into her mouth.
“I might have phrased it a bit differently,” Colophon said.
“Of course you would have,” Alwyn said, chewing. “And yet here we are, meaning the same thing.”
Colophon withdrew a brochure written in German, Hungarian, and English (denoted, in case the language alone failed to signify, by nation-appropriate flags) from his briefcase. On the cover was a photograph of an art nouveau building located, according to the English copy, in a wooded district of Vienna, abutting a place called Gutenberg Square.
“The Goergen specializes in curing victims of psychic attacks,” Colophon said.
I noticed, on the brochure’s bottom right corner, the TK Ltd. logo.
“Currently the Goergen services two types of guests,” he continued, “those wishing to recover in secret from plastic surgeries, and victims of psychic attack who’ve been forced, in order to evade their attackers and recover their health, to vanish.”
“Point being,” Alwyn said, “you could also get a nose job while you’re there.”
Colophon examined my face for possibly the first time since he’d met me.
“I like her nose,” he said.
“Maybe truer to say that her nose is the least of her problems,” Alwyn said. “Sometimes it’s nice to fix what you can.”
“Psychic attack victims vanish?” I said, ignoring Alwyn.
Colophon nodded. “Psychic attacking vanishings account for a decent percentage of TK Ltd.’s business, one that increases by the year. You are far from alone.” Psychic attacks, he explained, both the conscious and the unconscious varieties, had become rampant among the non-psychic population—among members of book groups, for example. People were attacking each other via shared texts. Many more attacks were launched through social media sites. The possibilities for connectedness, and for privacy invasion, had unleashed what Colophon called “an epidemic of opportunity.”
“I still don’t understand why you want to ruin Madame Ackermann’s reputation,” I said. “She lied to you, OK. But so what?”
“Oh,” Colophon said. Then to Alwyn, “See? You overlooked a major detail.”
“So stab me,” she said.
After he’d received the l
igature assessment from the automatic handwriting expert, Colophon explained, he’d accused Madame Ackermann of lying to him about her role in the recovery of the film safe serial number. She’d denied it. A week later, she’d informed him, via e-mail, that she wouldn’t be able to further discuss her research methods with him due to the fact that she’d decided to write about Varga. She, too, was convinced that Varga was alive; she, too, had decided it would constitute a bold career move to find her.
“I understand Madame Ackermann has a habit of nicking other people’s ideas,” Colophon said. “Which is why, if you managed to do what it seems you somehow managed to do—find the correct serial number—then it would appear you have a talent that could help me, and we could be of mutual use to one another.”
“Ah,” I said. It was less a sound of revelation than of defeat. Ah.
Had it come to this? I thought. Was I this sick, this desperate that I’d embroil myself in a relative stranger’s revenge fantasies against my former idol in order to punish her for misfortunes that were, best I could tell, nobody’s fault but mine? And regarding Madame Ackermann’s psychically attacking me, well … I couldn’t see how I was worth the personal cost such an act would incur. Psychic attacks risked destroying the health of the victimizer as well as the victim.
I picked the prosciutto strips out of my meal. The stink of air-cured meat turned my stomach and reminded me of my first late August in the Workshop dorm, the air redolent with what amounted, in hindsight, to the ridiculous ambition to alter the molecular state of dead animal flesh with one’s spastic, twenty-three-year-old attention span. I remembered thinking, as a first-year initiate, this is the smell of my future. I would be a giddy, sweating failure, but then I would, without question, succeed. When I matriculated at the Workshop I was under the impression, as was probably every untried and untested initiate, that I was fated to be famous. Every streetlamp I walked beneath and darkened was proof of this. The Workshop, thus, had always been, in my mind, a temporary resting point on my life’s journey to greatness. But it hadn’t happened that way. Nothing about my time at the Workshop was restful. And while greatness no longer seemed a destination within my reach, I no longer knew, even in the average scheme of things, where the hell I was going.
I couldn’t sleep that night, even though I’d swallowed one Nembutal, two over-the-counter sleep aids, a glass of valerian-browned water. Finally I decided to kill the hours that remained until day watching the DVD Colophon had given me. As he’d chased a runny tiramisu around a plate, he’d emphasized: in order to cure myself of this psychic attack—in order to become well enough to humiliate and discredit Madame Ackermann by finding Dominique Varga before she did—I would first have to vanish.
There was no other way.
“And if you’re going to make a vanishing film,” he’d said, “you might as well be inspired by the master.”
I slipped Not an Exit into my computer. I clicked “Play.”
Varga’s film was about five minutes long, and I watched it fifteen times in succession. I couldn’t help but giggle at the title, until, by about the sixth watching, it no longer seemed funny, Varga and her mean love affair with an anonymous hand. Nor did the single line of dialogue, delivered by voiceover, possibly Varga as well, while a child cried in the background: It’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it.
Then I became depressed.
I removed the DVD, I drew a bath. As the tub filled I hunched on the toilet lid and considered the possibility that I was being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann. Professor Blake had explained psychic attacks with one simple and incontestably true statement: People make other people sick. Blake tweaked that statement to suggest that sickness was purposefully, malevolently, caused by other people. After an hour of witnessing Blake at his twenty-foot-long slate board, layering chalk scribbles over fist-erased chalk scribbles, his hands by the end of class as dusty and swollen as a wrestler’s, his ideas seemed the furthest thing from radical. They seemed obvious. They seemed like the only viable ideas.
I closed my eyes. I tried to sense Madame Ackermann inside of me, like the chatter of enemy bacteria I could sometimes hear when I had an ear infection. Surely there would be a trace of her; more than a confusion of symptoms, Madame Ackermann would want to leave her personal mark.
And she had. My pulse gonged in my ear canal as, eyes closed, I stared at it. And stared at it. And then marveled how, for all the hours I’d spent looking at the backs of my own eyelids, I had never until this moment realized what should have been apparent to me from the start—the annoying constellation of light pricks outlined the shape of a very familiar wolf.
I tested this suspicion. I opened and shut my lids rapidly. I tried to dislodge her design on me. But the pricks remained.
It was she.
I should have been alarmed. No, I should have panicked. I was being psychically attacked by the most powerful person in the field of parapsychological scholarship. But instead I was so relieved that I could almost hear the endorphin floodgates sliding open.
My sickness had a cause. What had been, for over a year, my free-floating, possibly fabricated (according to some doctors) state of misery had been validated and identified. I knew where it lived, what it ate for breakfast, what kind of parking tickets it amassed on vacation, the type of sheets it desired.
It even had a name.
I ran to my computer to e-mail Colophon. He’d been right. I had proof. But when I opened my inbox, I’d received another e-mail from aconcernedfriend—my third that day—with the same attachment of the woman on the bed. And then I nearly slapped myself in the head, it was so obvious: aconcernedfriend was Madame Ackermann. These e-mails constituted a form of psychic warfare, proving she’d hacked into my immune system and also my past. She’d been invited places that I’d never been invited to go. She’d been to my mother’s death bed, and she’d filmed this dramatized artifact to taunt me.
I watched the attachment so many times that it started to collapse, in my mind, with Varga’s vanishing film, the woman lying on the floor and the woman lying on the bed becoming one, and I could hear Varga’s voice saying, it’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it.
I closed my eyes again. I savored the wolf.
This is your fault, I thought, thrillingly. Your fault.
I drew a bath. As the tub filled, I stared at my face in the mirror and dared it to care. It did not care. With a gummy razor I cross-hatched, for the sake of experimentation, the topmost layer of skin on my wrists. I held my hand over the toilet and watched the blood drip into the bowl, a sight that made me remember my last menstrual cycle, now more than a year ago, with detached fondness. I would not say I was suicidal. I would never say that.
Besides, there was no point in punishing myself. Madame Ackermann was to blame for my misery. And I was going to make her sorry that she’d ever met me.
My favorite guest at the Goergen was a plastic surgery patient who identified herself, when I met her, as “Hungarian skin-care royalty.” A widow named Borka, she showed zero respect for the anonymity rules by which we were instructed to abide.
At the Goergen, the first thing we’d learned was the peril of being known.
“It means ‘foreigner,’ ” Borka told me of her name. “Always I have been a bedbug in my own family.”
Reedy, turbaned, with a spooky Isak Dinesen expression paralyzing her features, Borka appeared to be in her late sixties, though this remained an uncorroborated guess. Her rheumatoid hands—swollen, hooked, beige—resembled ginger roots, suggesting she might be nearer to two hundred. We sat together at meals, including Silent Breakfast, during which she scribbled instructions on a pad. A typical jotting would read LOOK 11 O’CLOCK, and I would do so, only to witness something I did not need to see: a psychic attack victim flaking her psoriatic scabs with a fork tine, for example.
Before bed, Borka
and I played backgammon in the lobby, where marble columns severed the vast square footage into many wall-less cubicles of space. We sat in scarred leather club chairs, our knees touching. Borka tried to psych me out whenever it was my move by intensely owling my face.
“You are a big déjà vu to me,” she’d say, her smoker’s rasp so throaty and mechanical it sounded as though it had been routed through a voice changer.
There were many discouragements at the Goergen, the strictest of which involved leaving it; we were threatened with not being allowed back in if we disregarded this particular admonishment. Given the skittish, high-profile clientele, paparazzi lurked across the street in Gutenberg Square with hopes of catching, as one famously did, the wife of an Austrian diplomat, her postoperative face coated with a salve that reflected the camera’s flash and inspired a number of gossip columnists to speculate that she’d had a diamond surgically implanted in her cheek.
The Goergen thus resembled a more extreme version of my existence in New York, my travels circumscribed now to the interior of a single building, the positions I assumed in chairs—the club chairs in the lobby, the chaises in the thermal baths, the lyre-backed chair in my room—acts of sitting with no pressure attending my inertia, no tourists for whom to speak theatrical Arabic.
I found it, at least until Alwyn arrived five days after I did, relaxing.
Alwyn was not a guest at the Goergen but a quasi-employee; given Colophon’s professional and financial entanglements with Timothy Kincaid (Kincaid’s foundation had awarded Colophon his research grant), and given that TK Ltd. owned the Goergen, Kincaid made an exception to the Goergen’s guest-only rule, allowing Alwyn to liaise with my psychic attack counselor, to make sure I abided by the many discouragements, and to guarantee, in the interests of everyone receiving a decent return on their investment, that I took my healing seriously.
In her spare time, Alwyn’s job was to track Madame Ackermann’s movements and keep abreast of any Varga progress she made that threatened to supersede ours.
The Vanishers: A Novel Page 10
