“Many people have fissures or holes in their eggshells,” Marta said, “that allow the foreign entities to invade.”
She instructed me to lie on her sofa and visualize my eggshell.
“Now imagine it’s thicker,” she said.
Marta asked me to inspect my shell for cracks or holes. I imagined running my hands over the bony smoothness until I found an irregularity—a tiny checkmark-shaped fissure.
Marta instructed me to patch it.
“We’ll do this exercise every session,” Marta said. She warned that I’d find new holes to patch as my abilities for espying imperfections in my shell grew sharper.
“In order to get better I must become more skilled at detecting how I’m sicker?” I said.
“If that’s how you need to see it,” Marta said. “Regardless, you cannot take these exercises lightly. I don’t want you to make poor choices.”
“Choices,” I said.
“I want you to channel your energy inward, not outward,” she said. “I stress to my psychic attack patients—revenge is not a compelling therapeutic goal.”
“Revenge is a very compelling therapeutic goal,” I said. “It’s just not a very noble one.”
“For a woman of your exceptional abilities, these exercises are far more dangerous,” she cautioned. “What you do when you leave here is your business. But while you are in my care, I cannot assist you with your … unconscious warfare.”
I promised Marta to engage in no unconscious warfare. In good faith, I promised her this. I was innocent, at the time, of the lengths to which my unconscious would go to mock my inability to know my own warfare intentions.
On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn.
“Hey,” I said.
Alwyn didn’t recognize me at first, her eyes glancing off me with chilling indifference.
“Oh,” she said, catching herself. “Hi.”
Her smile unnerved me. I knew, now, what casually stony person hid beneath.
I followed her to the concierge’s desk. En route she caught me up on what she’d learned about Madame Ackermann’s movements. She’d been to a spa in New Mexico.
She also told me, displaying a recent New York Times article, that Madame Ackermann had been in the news in conjunction with the surgical impersonators case I’d first heard about at the Regnor panel. There’d been a sharp rise in reports of surgical impersonator sightings (i.e., people refashioning their faces to look like people who had died) in and around New York City, prompting a Manhattan criminologist to speculate that these impersonators were part of a terrorist group engaging in civilian psychological warfare. A number of notable American psychics, including Madame Ackermann, had become interested in the case—they assumed these impersonators to be astral imprints whose sudden abundance suggested there’d been a meaningful “rupture” in the astral membrane.
Hilariously, Alwyn said, the psychics had positioned themselves on the side of reason; Madame Ackermann was even quoted in the Times article as saying that a band of surgical impersonators acting at the behest of (and funded by) a terrorist leader was, comparatively speaking, “an unlikely scenario.”
I noticed Borka across the lobby, reading a butcher-papered book. She waved to me. I waved back.
“Who is that woman?” Alwyn asked.
“She’s skin-care royalty,” I said.
“Really,” Alwyn said.
“Her name means bedbug,” I said. Then I started to correct myself—her name didn’t mean bedbug—but I’d already forgotten what it was that it meant.
“She more resembles a praying mantis, don’t you think?” Alwyn said.
“I guess,” I said.
“She’s astonishingly ugly,” Alwyn said. “I hope she finds a better face soon. Don’t you?”
“I like her,” I said.
I was, I’d noticed, one of the few. Borka did not socialize with the other plastic surgery patients—the baronessas and the wives of import moguls, the members of the varied Austro-Hungarian aristocracies with whom she, in the outside world, presumably mingled. Whenever she passed the card-playing quartets in the lobby, mean whispers fizzed in her wake.
For some reason, however, Borka made me feel at home. Also she taxonomized humans using inscrutable animal metaphors that never failed to amuse me. People she didn’t like were half-dachshunds, people she did like—for example, me—were beetles.
Alwyn suggested I join her for tea in the dining hall. I agreed, even though I was made nauseous by the tea they served between meals, called liver tea because it detoxified the liver, the organ most weakened by psychic attacks.
“So,” Alwyn asked, “how’s the work?”
I assumed she meant my first session with Marta. The airiness of her tone renewed my paranoia that she’d shared with Marta inaccurate information about me.
“It’s fine,” I said. “But I’m a little curious … I’m concerned … what I mean is, I’m wondering what it is that you tell Marta.”
Alwyn regarded me, bemused.
“How can I say this,” Alwyn said, “so that you don’t take this the wrong way.”
“By wondering if I’ll take something the wrong way,” I said, “you’re guaranteeing that I won’t.”
“You’re the last person to be trusted to portray an accurate version of yourself,” she said.
“You, meanwhile, are the first person Marta should trust,” I said.
Alwyn stopped mid-stride.
“I’ve never told her anything you wouldn’t eventually have told her,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
“OK,” she said, as though the matter were settled.
“But,” I said, “I’m a little concerned that you might tell her something that I would never tell her because I don’t believe it to be true.”
“Such as?” she said.
“Such as the ridiculous theory that Madame Ackermann wanted me to use her as a mother substitute.”
“Only you would find that theory ridiculous,” Alwyn said. “Madame Ackermann is a medium. A person through whom dead people speak.”
“Believe me,” I muttered. “When I was with her, no one was speaking through that woman.”
I circled back to my original worry.
“But you didn’t tell Marta I had sex with Colophon.”
Alwyn pulled at her little bangs as if they were a furled shade she might draw down over her face.
“What?” she said.
I repeated my question.
“Did you?” she asked.
“Have sex with Colophon? Or tell Marta that I did?”
“Please,” she said. “I know you’re way smarter than to do that.”
Alwyn returned to walking, briskly this time. I marveled at how she was able to project a blanket of certainty over a conversation that was pure jumble, stunning her listeners into shamed muteness. I didn’t dare press her to elaborate on what I’d failed to understand, even though a few crucial logic steps were missing from our exchange, steps wherein actually useful information might reside.
The dining hall was empty. We tapped the hot urns, filled our cups with liver tea.
“I know I keep saying this,” Alwyn said, “but we really do have a lot in common.”
She proceeded to recount in dull detail the gist of a paper published by the Journal of Mental Science in the mid-seventies, one that established a telepathic link between mothers and babies, and proved that babies in orphanages—separated from their mothers and deprived of their first, and most intense, human bond—were forced to search further and further afield for this connection.
“Those babies were twice as likely, by the age of three, to exhibit psychic predilections,” she said. “Would you say that’s when your abilities first appeared?”
“I can’t remember,” I said.
“What I don’t get is why I didn’t develop any psychic abilities,” she said. “My mother might as well have been dead for all I saw of her when I was little. Part o
f me suspects she must have read that article; she’s so competitive, she probably spent just enough time with me to make sure I wouldn’t develop powers that she hadn’t developed herself.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. It sounded totally insane.
“My stepfather told me she tried to abort me.”
“Recently?”
“She denied it when I confronted her. I’d deny it if I were her. It’s curious, though, right? I mean obviously I’m curious. Why did she want to abort me? Maybe she did have some kind of … power. Maybe she knew I’d grow up to disappoint her more than she disappointed herself.”
“I thought she was an internationally famous shampoo model,” I said.
“You say that so dismissively. She had iconic hair.”
“I’m marveling at the inadequacy of the phrase,” I said.
“Because it was a hair campaign her face was barely visible, thus people assumed she was an unattractive woman whose unattractiveness a skilled photographer was forced to obscure. Passersby on the street would say, ‘You’re the Breck Girl!’ And then, ‘But you’re so pretty.’ She was a famous model, and yet she spent her life convincing others she had a face that didn’t need hiding.”
“That is kind of tragic,” I conceded.
Alwyn pulled a tabloid magazine from her bookbag.
“Odd that you should be asking so much about my mother today,” she said.
She showed me a photo of a woman in an ivory ski ensemble standing in front of a gondola at Gstaad, her hair a blue-ish auburn that winged to the sides as though attached to wires.
“That’s her?” I said. “You’re prettier. Not that it’s a competition or anything,” I hastened to add. But it was true. Alwyn’s beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she’d had, or how much water she’d drunk, or how many people she’d annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.
“She doesn’t look like a woman whose daughter has vanished,” Alwyn said. “Though what that would look like, I can’t say. I only know it’s not that.”
She finger-jabbed the page, creasing her mother backward at the knees.
“She still hasn’t flown to Cincinnati to see my film,” Alwyn said. “Has she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Has she?”
Alwyn scrutinized me.
“Just testing,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were obeying the rules. No psychic activity.”
That wasn’t the only reason she’d asked. She was deeply bothered by her mother’s and stepfather’s failure to see her vanishing film. (I wanted to assure her: on this front we did have something in common.) I recalled the crying woman at the Regnor panel and her comment about library books that remained unread for decades. Alwyn and I, by committing our absences to film, had become objects whose neglect could be quantified.
“You’re lucky you’re being attacked,” Alwyn sulked. “Someone cares a lot about you.”
“Your mother cares about you,” I said. “She hired a detective.”
“Mmmm.”
“She probably wants to make sure that you’re not in any trouble or danger,” I said.
Alwyn laughed.
“If you’d had a mother,” she said, “you’d understand what a forgiving interpretation of motive that is.”
“I had a mother,” I said. “But I was spared the rite of passage of hating her.”
“Which is exactly your problem,” Alwyn said.
“Maybe more of a matter of inexperience than a problem,” I said.
“Hate is a form of emotional attachment,” she said. “You’re denying yourself the only maternal bond available to you. This is your weakness, in my opinion. This is why you’re being attacked.”
“Because I don’t hate my mother?” I said.
“Like it’s so outlandish,” Alwyn said. “What kind of woman would kill herself when she had a month-old baby? I’m sorry, but that’s monstrous.”
I picked up my liver tea. I drank what, for me, counted as a lethal dose.
“It’s not monstrous,” I said. “It’s fucking tragic.”
“I suppose you’re one of those people who feel worse for Sylvia Plath than for her two children,” she said.
This was true.
“I don’t understand how a woman could do such a thing,” Alwyn said. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“Maybe that’s your problem,” I said coldly. “Thinking it can be understood.”
Two weeks after my arrival at the Goergen, I received irrefutable proof that I was getting better. Or maybe it was proof that the pills I’d been taking in New York had been cleansed from my system thanks to the liver tea and the colonics to which I’d been subjected, and the bookbinding hobby I’d picked up, maybe too the Mundane Egg visualizations I did every day with Marta, even though I always left her office feeling dirty and ashamed.
Regardless of the cause, after more than a year of psychic blindness, I was able again to see.
On my fourteenth night at the Goergen, Helena, a plastic surgery patient from Budapest, blustered into the dining hall.
“My engagement ring is gone!” she announced. Her left hand spasmed above her head, lacking the ballast of the very large diamond she’d made certain we noticed, rattling the gem against table surfaces when she ate, her hand otherwise seemingly paralyzed by its amazing shackle, the fingers slack, the palm upturned, as though awaiting something—a kiss, a nail.
Perhaps I was reading too much into her. Borka had told me: Helena was not a lucky girl (“girl” employed by Borka as an emotional category—Helena was in her fifties). This engagement would be Helena’s fourth marriage; her previous husbands had left her, two of them had beaten her. But on the plus side, said Borka, she’d started out as a secretary, and very poor, so at least she’d married her way to money.
“It’s not all ditch water,” Borka said.
An orderly hurried Helena into a chair and urged cold compresses upon her. Helena’s three-day-old face-lift was in the delicate stage; intense emotions were contraindicated. A man in a white suit took notes while the rest of us hovered. Her ring, Helena told us, had been stolen from her locker while she soaked in the thermal baths.
“I’ll post a reward,” Helena said to us, the silently gathered. “To whomever finds the thief, I shall express my gratitude in a manner known as handsome.”
I heard her tell another plastic surgery patient that she’d lost the engagement ring her first husband had given her, too. “Though it was impossible not to lose that ring,” Helena confided. “The diamond was the size of a lentil!”
Back at our table, Borka and I gossiped.
“It probably fell down a drain,” I said of the ring. The Goergen featured an unnerving number of drains, not only in the showers or puncturing the walkways between the thermal baths but in rooms usually immune to deluges—mine, for example. I’d found a drain underneath my bed, implying that the room would be hosed out once I left, my various residues cleansed. Maybe the drain was regulation. Who knew. I tried not to think about it. Whenever I lay on my bed, I repeated in my head this sentence: I am contaminating the scene. I am contaminating the scene.
“It is for the best that she not marry this man,” Borka said.
“She’s still going to marry him, I’d imagine,” I said.
Borka appeared traumatized by this suggestion.
“She cannot,” she said. “A lost engagement ring means the marriage cannot happen.”
Borka drew a finger across her throat.
“If she marries him she’ll die?” I said.
“Maybe only the living kind of dying,” Borka said. In the Hungarian countryside, she informed me, people believed in the existence of beneficent meddlers who broke up bad marriages before they happened. In ancient times this was accomplished by the destruction of the dowry, for example the disappearance of a herd of livestock.
“But of course it is just a fol
ktale to allow for the theft of jewelry and sheep,” she said.
“My mother lost her engagement ring,” I said.
Borka was unimpressed, much as she’d been when I’d told her that my mother was dead. I’d come to expect such reactions: she was slightly autistic, Borka was, but aware enough to know that she should respond differently. As a result, these confessions of mine made her tense; she seemed to register them as a rebuke.
“And she persisted in marrying my father,” I said, trying to apply a happy spin, also to assure her—I expected her to be nobody other than who she was.
“Indeed,” Borka said. “And look what happened to her.”
“Well …” I said.
“When a woman is enchanted by unhappiness, there’s little that anyone, even a beneficent meddler, can do to dissuade her,” she said.
“I thought you said the beneficent meddlers didn’t exist,” I said.
“I said they were probably thieves,” she replied, her tone embittered for reasons I couldn’t connect to the loss of rings.
That night I had a vivid dream.
The locker room could have been any locker room in any former Eastern bloc country—tiled, steam-noisy, the locker doors painted noxious shades of citrus, the vibe vaguely gas-chamberish. A little girl stood naked while a naked woman—her mother, I guessed—dried her back, her breasts and haunches bobbling with the effort.
The mother disappeared to the lavatories; the girl pulled on her sweater, her too-short pants. Beside her, a young woman disrobed with professional efficiency, quick and fluid. At first I did not recognize her—Helena was a blonde now, and thirty-odd years older. She removed her engagement ring, its diamond minuscule, more of a chip than a stone, and placed it in her locker. Without padlocking the door, she, too, disappeared to the lavatories.
Sneaky as a shadow, the young girl slipped her hand into the locker. She posed in front of a long mirror, hand against her cheek, stolen quarry glinting on her finger.
“I” stood behind her.
As in my previous regressions, I did not appear in reflective surfaces. My consciousness was not embodied, though I inflicted on this world my ghostly void. When I stood before the locker room mirror, a white spot in the shape of a person appeared where I should have been, as though someone had taken an eraser to a charcoal drawing, rubbed me out.
The Vanishers: A Novel Page 12
