The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

“And so … you’re here to tell her?” I asked.

  Irenke laughed.

  “That would be a mistake, don’t you think?”

  Probably, I thought.

  “You’re here to spy on her, then,” I said.

  “I’m here to audition,” Irenke said. “I want to see if she knows who I am. Don’t you think a mother should recognize her own daughter? Even if she abandoned her at birth?”

  “I didn’t know that Dominique Varga had a daughter,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Irenke said. “She erased me. She overrode me. A woman like her couldn’t be a mother.”

  The waiter appeared with our whiskey sours.

  “I didn’t order this,” Irenke said.

  “I did,” I said.

  “What is it?” she said.

  She took a sip.

  “It’s good,” she said. “I like it.”

  We clinked glasses. Irenke withdrew a camera from her purse and asked me to take her picture.

  “I want to remember this day,” she said. She wheedled a compact from her coat pocket and reapplied her lipstick.

  She tried, with mixed results, to smile.

  I took her picture anyway.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “So,” Irenke said. “Have you decided yet?”

  “Decided what?” I said.

  “Do you want me to help you punish her or not?” she asked.

  “Punish who?” I said.

  “I’m an expert at ruining people’s lives,” she continued. “It’s the one talent I possess.”

  She flashed her drink, already half gone.

  The elevator dinged. Two red-eyed women exited, followed by a woman obscured by long, black hair. Her step, unlike that of her dejected elevator mates, was springy, elated. She noticed Irenke, absorbed again in her makeup compact, picking at her lashes. The woman’s shoulders flicked together. She sped her gait and cut to the left, skimming so near to my armchair that her hand glanced off my cheek as she passed.

  She hurried past the doorman, who followed her with his eyes.

  Madame Ackermann. For certain, it was she, her hair shivering thickly across her back as she strode into the street without checking for traffic, hailed a cab, was gone.

  My cheek burned where she’d touched it.

  She’d been upstairs, I thought. She’d possibly met Varga. Apparently, too, she knew Irenke, or at least of her, and had chosen, for whatever reason, to avoid her. What did she know that I didn’t? Quite a lot. We’d funneled our way back through the same regression wormhole, Madame Ackermann and I, but she was leagues ahead of me.

  I considered chasing after her, confronting her, threatening her, even (I’m onto you), but decided against it. Psychics died doing this sort of thing. We were data collectors, not participants. Madame Ackermann’s mentor, for example, had drowned as an astral stowaway on a doomed Great Lakes cruise ship in search of a grandfather she’d hoped to save. Madame Ackermann, as her stenographer, had recorded her final, shrieking words before the water sucked her down.

  “You know,” I said to Irenke. “I could use your help with a different matter.”

  I told her that I wanted to accompany her on her audition. I wanted to meet her mother.

  “That’s impossible,” Irenke said. This request spooked her. “I’m sorry, no. She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Your mother?” I said. “But she doesn’t even know me.”

  Irenke fell silent.

  “Why do you want to ruin people’s lives?” I asked her.

  “This isn’t about what I want,” Irenke said. “It’s about what you want.”

  “But I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life.”

  Agitated, she drained her sour.

  “Look,” Irenke said, calming herself. “I’m trying to make it up to you in the only way I can. Please. For my sake. Accept my help.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but she wasn’t going to help me in the way I wanted to be helped until I relented. What was the harm in saying yes? I could pretend to accept her offer, I’d let her think that she was doing me this favor. Because then maybe she’d be more amenable to doing me an actual favor, and introduce me to her mother.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’d love your help.”

  After dinner, I stopped by the concierge’s office to check my e-mail. I had one message, from aconcernedfriend; though it was against the discouragements I clicked on Madame Ackermann’s video. What hurts you makes you stronger, I rationalized. And I needed to be stronger. I’d seen Madame Ackermann in a hotel lobby in Paris, circa 1980-something. We were fated to collide in the astral ether; I wanted to be up to our future encounters.

  The fog registered as green-toned, though perhaps this was due to the concierge’s crappy monitor. I watched the entire attachment. It centered me.

  Then I wrote Colophon a quick note. Did Dominique Varga have a daughter?

  Then—though it violated the vanishing contract I’d signed—I wrote an e-mail to Professor Hales. Professor Hales, I reminded myself, was so freakishly self-involved that he couldn’t be bothered to care that I’d vanished. He likely hadn’t noticed I’d left the Workshop.

  Dear Professor Hales, I wrote. Wondering if you could tell me a bit more about regressions via memory byways, and if you’ve ever heard of a phenomenon called “override.” I ask because I’m interning as a fact-checker at a new parapsychology journal based in the former Yugoslavia called Mundane Egg.

  I reread what I’d written. This notion of override was interesting. Though not the word used by my father, override might well have been the reason cited for his refusal to hypothesize about my mother, a request I made frequently as a girl. For example: we are on a beach, he and I. We watch a boy build a sandcastle alone while his mother sunbathes on a towel with a book, we watch a pair of sisters digging holes while their mother hauls buckets of water from the shore. Which mother would she have been, I ask him, the tuned-out sunbather or the hauler of buckets?

  This would elicit from him an evasive response, the gist of which was this: Of course it would make sense for me to claim that she would have been the hauler of buckets, because what’s the harm in conjuring a mother of exquisite selflessness? My response would not be a truthful attempt to answer your question, it would be an attempt to compensate for your loss by creating an ideal person whose absence you can mourn unreservedly. However, this puts me in the position of making her into someone she was possibly not; it forces me to falsely represent her to you, and in doing so I become, not the keeper of her memory, but the re-creator of her past, and that role makes me uncomfortable; also I believe it is, in the long run, a disservice to her, because you will grow up missing a mother that you would never have experienced, had she not died. And this strikes me as a second kind of death, a more complete and horrible death, to be annihilated and replaced by a hypothetical person who is not remotely you, thus I think it is better that she remain a quasi-mystery, a pleasant unknown, than an absence filled with compensatory narratives supplied by your guilty father.

  Of course he never said this, but he did, in his way, say this. How, as a child of five, of seven, I came to understand what he meant without his ever articulating it was less a measure of my psychic abilities than of my skill for interpolation, a skill that motherless children, raised in a preverbal communication void, come to master. Because he was telling me too, without telling me: She would not have been a hauler of buckets. She was not selfless. She would have been an absence even if she’d been there. And while it was true that he didn’t want to do a disservice to her memory, his reasons were maybe less noble than he was comfortable admitting to himself. He didn’t want her turned into a saint because she didn’t deserve sainthood. He was not so generous that he could allow her a posthumous glory she had not earned.

  I respected his caution. Some things, once done, can never be completely undone. Only a trace remains of the original, a scar in time.

&
nbsp; Before sending the e-mail to Professor Hales, I added a sentence about my boss at Mundane Egg, an attractive brunette who was a huge fan of his last book.

  I checked my account one last time; Colophon had responded.

  no daughter.

  The halls were empty. Dinner had ended long ago. Alwyn, thankfully, hadn’t shown—she’d had a meeting with the head of the Goergen’s privacy division, because her detective had tracked her to Vienna and was sending her menacing postcards—so I was spared having to lie to her about what I’d done all day. Lately Alwyn emitted a carcinogenic unhappiness that rendered me so anxious that I’d found myself, at one point, making an odd grunting noise with my back teeth like my father sometimes did when he was around me.

  From behind the guest room doors came sitcom laughter. The Goergen, at this hour, resembled the interior of an insane person’s medicated brain, the halls like vacant neural pathways lit by the occasional lunatic spark of activity.

  I didn’t want to go to my room. I’d started to find discomforting the height of the ceilings. To recline on my bed was not unlike lying at the bottom of a well.

  Instead I took the elevator to the fifth floor and stopped by Borka’s suite, for which she’d paid extra, but she didn’t answer when I knocked, and no wonder—when I unlocked my door I found her sitting on my bed wearing her coat and a headscarf.

  “I have a treat for you,” she said.

  Borka unhangered my parka; she zipped me into it like I was her child.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “We are going not-here,” she said.

  “But that’s discouraged,” I said.

  Borka rolled her eyes.

  “Distinguishing us from the other guests,” she said, “is that we are not cows.”

  From the street, Gutenberg Square appeared shabbier than it did from my window; the apartment building entrances were graffitied, the square itself populated by drug addicts and paparazzi. Borka called them nodders and snappers.

  “There’s one snapper in particular,” she said. “He’s followed me for decades. Now I find I miss him when he isn’t there. You know how these hateful people can become a daily part of normal.”

  Borka pulled me through the shadows of the buildings and along the cooler perimeter of the nearby woods. As I swayed down the sidewalk, Borka sped along at a hasty clip ahead of me. She wouldn’t take a taxi because, she said, the taxi drivers were spies, and besides, the metro led to the house her husband had purchased right before he died.

  I asked why he’d wanted to leave their hometown of Budapest.

  “Because Budapest is the City of Egrets,” she said.

  She means the City of Regrets, I thought, then reminded myself—this was Borka.

  City of egrets, city of tall, thin, spooky, watchful people.

  We emerged from the metro in a neighborhood where apartment buildings yielded to stand-alone houses. The air was dirtier, the heated smog hovering at the height of the rain gutters in a tobacco-colored band.

  Borka rang the doorbell of a stone house. A silhouette scurried back and forth in front of the parlor windows.

  “My maid,” Borka said. “She loves to sit in my chair when I’m out and read her smutty papers.”

  Finally a woman in a robe unlocked the door.

  “This,” Borka said to me, “is Sun. It means hedgehog in Magyar.”

  “That’s her given name?” I asked.

  “Of course it is given,” Borka said. “I gave it to her.”

  Sun led us to a living room with walls painted the black-blue of an aquarium for nocturnal fish. Borka prowled around a wing chair—testing the spring of the cushions, brushing her palms over the armrests, inspecting it for illegal use.

  Sun asked Borka a question to which Borka testily responded.

  “I told her we don’t want dinner,” Borka said. “Only some tea.”

  “I’d like some dinner,” I said.

  “It will have to be cold,” Borka said. “I cannot tolerate food smells in the evening.”

  “Cold is fine,” I said.

  Borka sat in the wing chair and busied herself by reading one of Sun’s newspapers.

  I ate the cold dinner Sun delivered while Borka flipped through her paper with the rage of old people in charge of television remotes. Finally she settled on a page, her blinkless Strigiforme eyes seeming to literally absorb its contents. Folding the paper, she showed me an article accompanied by two photos, one of a man caught on a short-circuit video camera, one of a second man, or maybe it was the same man, wearing a tie and smiling.

  “He is pretending to be this young fellow,” she pointed to the tie guy, “who jumped in front of a train.”

  “Why would he do that?” I said.

  “Because he was sad,” she said. “Though I can’t say why. He had a beautiful wife and three boys. He managed a hedge fund and had recently bought a house in New Jersey.”

  “The sad man’s pretending to be the happier man?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “The man who jumped in front of the train was sad. And this one had his face fixed to look like the sad man’s face.”

  “Oh,” I said, more interested now. “He’s a surgical impersonator.”

  I examined the photographs. The two men looked alike but also not.

  “So these impersonators exist,” I said.

  “Of course they exist. It’s only people like you who believe ghosts are the more sensible explanation.”

  She continued reading, her lips moving.

  “But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the dead man’s wife is upset. Her husband killed himself. And she remarried to forget about him. And now she doesn’t have to forget about him. What is so terrible about this?”

  “Well,” I began. As usual, Borka proved immune to standard emotional logic; it seemed injurious to her person to correct her understanding.

  “If someone asked you to change your face to look like someone they loved, would you do it?” she said.

  “Would you?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “I am heartless that way.”

  “You mean selfless,” I said.

  “Maybe it is because I do not have any special attachment to my face,” she said. She poked her cheek. “This one is not even mine.”

  Borka folded the newspaper; she lay it atop the other papers stacked beside the room’s tiny fireplace, over which loomed a massive marble mantle, as though any heat the fire might provide was an afterthought, really what she needed was a surface on which to place knickknacks. And knickknacks she had, a hamlet’s worth of little china people holding shepherd crooks and parasols, trailing detritus in the porcelain aura that encased their feet—a family of ducks, a dog, a dropped bonnet.

  Borka did not seem like the sort of woman to collect these sugary inanities, but perhaps she was compensating for the fact that mantles beg for photographs, and she had none. Not anywhere. I did not find this absence peculiar, however, because I knew from experience how unsettling it could be not to resemble the person once known as you. Whatever new face the car accident and the shitty surgeon had given her, it had required, for sanity’s sake, the total eradication of the old one, even in pictures.

  “Come,” Borka said.

  She led me to an upstairs study. From a desk drawer, she removed a perforated metal box.

  “I wanted to show you this,” she said.

  “It’s pretty,” I said. It wasn’t. “What is it?”

  “A Japanese cricket cage,” she said brusquely, as though, given my supposed gifts, this were a question I should be able to answer myself.

  She withdrew from the interior a key attached to an elongated diamond of green Bakelite, embossed with the number thirteen.

  Sitting at the desk, Borka wrote on a piece of blank card stock, her marks filling the entire white space, her penmanship buoyed by irregular aerial loops.

  New York City. 152 West 53rd Street. Room 13. October 24, 1984. 4
p.m.–9 p.m.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “You are invited,” she said.

  She closed my hand around the key. The chilly metal heated to skin temperature, then grew rapidly hotter until I was palming the equivalent of a live ash.

  I dropped the key back into its cage.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”

  “But it is no big deal for you,” Borka said.

  “I’m not allowed,” I said. “I’m working for other people at the moment.”

  Borka appeared not to hear me.

  “We can help each other,” she said desperately. “I can give you what you most want to find. I can help you see her.”

  “Who?” I said. “Dominique Varga?”

  Her eyes slid toward the floor.

  “She’s alive?” I said.

  Borka nodded.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “You don’t trust me?” she said. “You should. I have your heart in mind.”

  She searched my face for something that she appeared both relieved and saddened not to find.

  “Why do you care so much about her?” she said.

  “Varga knew my mother,” I said. “So maybe she could tell me about her. Since my mother will not let herself be known to me.”

  “You might learn things you’d prefer you hadn’t,” she said.

  “I’m willing to chance it,” I said.

  “Also Varga’s unreliable,” said Borka. “She’s an international liar.”

  “A lie is more valuable than nothing,” I said.

  Borka’s eyes were the strangest color, brown with a ring of pale blue encroaching upon her pupils like a milk fungus.

  She pressed my hand between hers.

  “That’s very true,” she said. “In some cases, a lie can be more valuable than the truth.”

  “In some cases,” I agreed.

  She smoothed my hair with her hand.

  “I will help you,” she vowed.

  “You will?” I said.

  She handed me the cricket cage.

  “We will help each other,” she said, blinking.

  Inwardly, I smiled. Classic Borka. She never gave something for nothing, not even a lie.

  I removed the key from the cricket cage. Again the metal rocketed from cold to branding-iron hot. I dropped it into the pocket of my sweater.