I tried to return the cricket cage.
“No,” Borka said. “You keep it. A gift.”
“A bribe,” I clarified.
Borka hugged me, smearing my hair with the softening ointment she rubbed on her face. She pressed her mouth against my skull so forcefully that I could feel her teeth.
“Silly Beetle,” she said into my head. “As if there is a difference.”
When Borka and I returned to the Goergen, nobody appeared to have noticed that we’d left.
I found this interesting.
The next morning I decided to go outside again. I spun through the revolving front doors, hunched against the sprung alarm, the bark of security dogs—but nothing.
Ha, I thought, as though I had gotten away with something sneaky. Then I realized I’d proved that we were cows, balking at a few white lines painted across a road. The discouragements were bullshit; maybe they existed as some form of thought experiment. Or thoughtless experiment, proving we’d failed to think for ourselves. How thoughtless can people be?
People can be remarkably thoughtless.
The park was empty at this hour, no nodders, no snappers. I sat on a bench to eat a roll and to better inspect, in the daylight, Borka’s cage and key.
A sunglassed man entered the square. He wore coveralls and carried a canvas bag full of what sounded, when he set them on the octagonal paving stones, like tools. I decided that there was something suspicious about him, as though he’d determined which precise shade of brown promised to fade into most city backgrounds and render its wearer unmemorable, failing to register with witnesses save as a beigy blur.
Perhaps this man was Alwyn’s detective. She’d barely left her room in the past three days, convinced that the detective was posing as a snapper in the square, one with a very powerful telephoto lens that might catch her, through the giant windows, in a first-floor common room.
It seemed, for once, that Alwyn was not being dramatic or paranoid.
The probable detective asked me a question in German.
I smiled.
“I said,” the man said in English, “got a problem?”
“Thanks for noticing,” I said.
The man finished his cigarette, checked his watch, opened his bag, and removed three telescoped metal tubes, which he lengthened and attached to one another via a flat, rotating platform.
“So you’re a detective,” I said.
“Huh?” the man said. He pulled a camera from his bag and affixed it to the top of the tripod he’d assembled. He loaded it with a Polaroid cartridge and photographed the pigeons at his feet. He yanked the Polaroid from the camera, shook it, peeled away the black skin. He stared at it. He showed it to me.
It was a Polaroid of pigeons.
“Do you mind?” he asked, pointing the camera at me. “I need a human being.”
No question it was a bad idea to have my photo snapped by a probable detective in Gutenberg Square.
He dialed the focus. “Think about someone,” he instructed.
“What kind of someone?”
“I tell people before I take their picture to think of a person they love. Then the picture will not only be a picture of their face. Because who cares about a face? A face is a hole in the landscape. How ugly,” he said, pointing to the cricket cage. “Please, will you hold it?”
I held the cricket cage in my lap. I tried to think of a person I loved, but no one person stuck. Faces spun in blurry sequence. A sped-up odometer of faces.
“Another?” he asked. “Over there.”
I shifted to a different bench. For some reason he used a flash, even though it was bright and getting brighter, the sun threatening to clear the roof of the easternmost building on Gutenberg Square.
I closed my eyes.
I opened them to total darkness. I couldn’t see the buildings or the bench or the man or the pigeons.
Beside me was an animal; its hairs prickled against my forearm. It swung as though attached to a meat hook, then collapsed in a heap by my legs.
A coat.
I felt to the other side of me. A second coat.
My feet, when I moved them, encountered a battalion of shoes.
I was in a closet.
Then I heard voices.
“You’re so proud to be a bastard,” said a woman.
“A boy shouldn’t ignore his talents,” said a man.
Bed springs depressed.
“Tell me,” the woman struggled to say as the man kissed her. “Tell me why you don’t love me.”
The man didn’t respond.
“Tell me why or this stops now,” the woman said.
The noises ceased. The man laughed.
“Because you’re soulless,” the man said. “And pathetic.”
The noises resumed. There was wetness and gasping.
“I should be blamed for permitting you to fuck me,” the woman said.
“No, for that you should be pitied,” the man said.
“Pity me,” the woman moaned. “Please.”
The act was quick. Afterward there was silence, followed by crying.
I slid my hands along the door molding, feeling for the knob. I turned it.
Through an arched doorway I could see bodies on a bed, clothing askew.
I recognized this room.
The man still wore his shoes.
“Stay,” the woman said. She clung to the man. “I love you.”
The man unpeeled her hands from his torso.
“You’re such a parasite,” the woman said, voice rising. “A nothing.”
Now I was certain: I had been in this room before, during one of my Barcelona chair regressions. I recognized the drapes, behind which, I knew, hid a young girl with a video camera. I recognized the intimidated and repulsed young man; I recognized the woman’s hands, the ones that appeared to have squeezed many necks. Her face, however, remained a blur, as though she were a pedestrian caught in the periphery of a reality TV show, her head digitally smudged to avoid a lawsuit.
“The question we should be asking ourselves,” the young man said, “is why I agreed to this.”
“Because I’m the only contact you’ll ever have with fame,” the woman retorted. “I am the one successful work of art you’ll ever make.”
She reached toward him as he sat on the edge of the bed, cinched a shoelace.
“Pity me again,” she said. “Please.”
The man stood. He straightened his belt. He stepped on the woman’s discarded clothing: a pair of jeans, a striped sailor shirt.
He yanked his jacket off a chair and left.
The woman curled herself around the absence on the bed, dredging from her body hideous scraping noises.
This went on for quite a while.
Then the woman was overcome by a case of hiccups, or what I initially mistook for hiccups.
In fact, the woman was laughing.
Clutching the bedsheet around her like a towel, she yanked the drapes open to reveal the young woman and a video camera on a tripod. The young woman appeared as a silhouette to me. She shivered; her dark boundaries blurred. Even so, I couldn’t fail to recognize her. This was why, when I’d met Irenke at the Regnor, she’d struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before.
The woman kissed Irenke on the cheek, played with her hair.
“Let me get you a sweater,” the woman said.
She walked toward my closet, sheet dragging over the floorboards and toppling a spire of books. She flung wide the closet door and her face snapped into focus, her features sharp, unsheathed.
Up close, there was no mistaking who she was.
Dominique Varga reached toward me with a hand. I closed my eyes, I waited for her fingers to close around my throat and begin to squeeze.
“Stop squinting,” the man said. “Smile a little.”
He kneeled on the pavers, his camera against his face.
I reclined on the bench, overcome by wooziness. I felt as though I’d leapt from a sp
eeding motorcycle. The sensation of sideways falling was impossible to shake.
I asked the concierge if he had a camera I could borrow.
He told me that cameras were not allowed at the Goergen for reasons that were likely very obvious to me.
“How about a flashlight?” I asked.
Back in my room, I shut myself into my wardrobe and beamed myself in the face with his flashlight, hoping to prompt another regression.
No regressions occurred.
I returned the flashlight and wrote an e-mail to Colophon. Intriguing progress to report.
I described to him my “encounter” with Dominique Varga and a woman named Irenke, while stressing to him that my regression had been accidental (I’d been, as Alwyn had surely reported to him, mostly pretty respectful of the discouragements). Then I watched the latest attachment from Madame Ackermann. She’d sent me a new version, one less obscured by fog. I could see the woman on the bed more plainly, she had long black hair and resembled, as she was meant to resemble, my mother—though “she” was no doubt Madame Ackermann.
I could imagine the dramatic arc of these attachments (and frankly I was impressed by the amount of time, money, and creative energy she was willing to dedicate to my attack). Madame Ackermann would become more and more visible, until the figure on the bed was unmistakably her, at which point she would address the camera with fake concern and say, you poor thing, you look like you’ve seen a wolf.
Then she’d laugh until she passed out. Or she’d tempt the video artist from behind his camera and have sex with him on the bed.
She was capable of any degree of blasphemy.
I dragged her e-mail into the trash.
Colophon, meanwhile, had e-mailed me back.
sounds like you witnessed the filming of “up-and-comers, coming, going” and who is this irenke
She was an actress, I wrote back. She claims to be Varga’s daughter.
Colophon responded instantly.
varga had no daughter but if you talk to her again maybe she could help us however be careful she is probably unstable many women were obsessed with varga she had that effect
I told him I’d do my best. I waited for his next parry, a “congratulations” or some expression of enthusiasm or gratitude for what was a pretty significant breakthrough. Nothing.
Then I met Borka in the baths.
As we retrieved towels from the attendant, Borka badgered me about the key.
“Did you do it yet?” she asked.
I told her I had not done it yet. I needed more context. The key was not leading me anywhere.
“But this is the beauty of you, Beetle,” she said. “You get your own context.”
“Can’t you tell me to whom this key belonged?” I asked.
“It’s a hotel room key,” she said. “It belonged to no one. And if I tell you what I’m looking for, you’ll tell me what I’m looking for.”
“That’s the point of all this, I thought,” I said.
She told me a little bit about her past, one that had nothing to do with the key, and truthfully seemed to have nothing to do with her. She told me about her dead husband, a gambling shut-in whom she’d cheated on. He’d given her the cricket cage as a present.
“He was a weak man,” she said. “He wasn’t up to the task.”
“Of being your husband?”
“Of living,” she said.
“And the key?”
“It was once in the possession of someone I might have loved,” she said.
“Not your husband,” I clarified.
She appeared pained. “Correct,” she said.
I asked if she and her husband had had children. Borka adjusted the knot on her headscarf, hauling up on her jaw as though she had a toothache.
“No child,” she said, “would have us.”
Her expression suggested: this was not the truth.
In the locker room, as we undressed, I investigated the sags and droops of her body for signs of motherhood. Even if the heart says no, the body keeps a record of these biological capitulations to others. Or this is how I thought it should be. Those who can’t make scars in time, they make scars in people.
But Borka’s body was unreadable. She was distressingly thin; what flesh remained on her body had slung forward and looked like the pathetic rucksacks in which a person who owned practically nothing had consolidated her possessions. What could have been the stress of a long-ago pregnancy was indistinguishable from the hard wear of years.
“You find me disgusting?” Borka asked, catching me.
“Of course not,” I lied. These regressions took their toll. I wanted to hide in my room with the shades drawn, blot my head beneath a pillow.
“It is not always a tragedy to be unrecognizable as your former self,” she said.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because,” she said. “You might be mistaken for someone better.”
She wrapped a towel around her body, forgetting that her face was the scariest thing about her.
My sixth week at the Goergen, I regained yet another talent I thought I’d forever lost.
I awoke one morning to find my pulse quickened, my peripheral vision tinseled. I’d come to understand these symptoms differently since I’d become sick, as dreaded harbingers of a migraine. Prior to my illness I’d welcomed these symptoms; prior to my illness they’d predicted the onset of one of my coincidences. I would learn something. Now, however, they promised an unenlightening journey, one that mimicked the movement of an oil drill, a claustrophobic spiraling into a hole.
I hurried to the lobby where I tried and failed to convince the concierge to slip me my bottle of vicodin.
“You are inhuman,” I whispered.
“You are inhuman,” he replied, and handed me a paperclip.
I spun around; I walked straight into Alwyn.
“Breaking the rules again?” she said. Her face was pale and her hair was a mess, her bangs thrusting upward like the fine tines of a comb.
“I needed an aspirin,” I said. “You also look like you need an aspirin.”
“That’s not what I was referring to,” she said.
I guessed she’d heard from Colophon about my encounter with Dominique Varga. I hadn’t kept this from Alwyn on purpose; I’d figured that Colophon would tell her if he wanted her to know.
“Colophon is fine with me regressing,” I offered in my defense.
“I’m not talking about Colophon. Though he already told me about your visit to the Up-and-Comers set. Very nice, by the way. I’m talking about Marta.”
“What does Marta have to do with this?”
“Marta told me,” she said, “what you’ve been telling her.”
“I don’t tell Marta anything,” I said. “All we do is Mundane Egg.”
“Interesting,” Alwyn said. “That’s not what I hear from Marta.”
“And what do you hear from Marta?”
“Nothing you haven’t presumably heard yourself,” Alwyn said, “given it came out of your own mouth.”
She switched the topic to Madame Ackermann, who’d visited three luxury spas.
“Does she always take so many vacations?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Actually,” I backtracked, recalling what I’d learned of her habits in the crawlspace, “she doesn’t.”
“I’m beginning to worry,” Alwyn said, “that she’s got a lead on Varga.”
“That she works as a masseuse at Canyon Ranch?” I said.
“Could be,” Alwyn said, missing the jibe.
I went to my 10 a.m. Marta meeting, during which we did the usual boring stuff while I waited for my migraine to thunk into gear. Toward the end, I asked her if I could read the notes she’d kept of our sessions.
“That would be against policy,” she said.
“Just what I’ve said to you. I wouldn’t expect access to your notations.”
“No,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”
&nbs
p; “But what I’ve told you belongs to me,” I said.
“That is an interesting interpretation,” Marta said.
I shot a look at her clipboard. Marta tipped it closer to her chest.
“Who is Irenke?” she asked.
“Irenke?” I said.
“You wanted to know what you talk about during your sessions. Often you talk about her.”
“I do?”
Marta’s brows cinched.
“Now’s not the ideal time to become involved with people like Irenke.”
“Why?” I asked. I wanted to know what she thought about Irenke. Who was she? Why was she pretending to be Dominique Varga’s daughter?
“You are a medium,” Marta said. “Although so is everybody a medium, an involuntary host to free-floating misery. But you’re a more available one.”
“Available,” I said.
“You are more easily used,” she said.
After our session, I hid in a darkened hallway. I waited until I heard Marta’s door open and shut, her gum soles suctioning over the tiles.
But her door was locked. I glared through the nubbled glass at the inert shapes of furniture, desperate to get inside. What had I told her? Again, I proved a victim of my own inexpertise. I was a clearinghouse for other people’s misery, but lacked the requisite gravity to assert, over these doomy voices, any mastery or control. Mediums, or so Madame Ackermann liked to say, were not merely containers, they were decoders. They imparted meaning and shape to the meaningless and the shapeless. They pulled sense from the sorrowed air.
Me, I was an unreflective repository for people’s sorrow. A trash can of sorrow.
I tried and I tried to get inside Marta’s office.
No surprise. I failed.
I took the elevator to the lobby. Empty. Even the concierge was gone. I went outside again and waited for my migraine in Gutenberg Square. Maybe I’d tempt another snapper to take my photograph.
Two nodders, a man and a woman, kneeled in a flowerbed, slow-motion weeding, or maybe they were holding on to the weeds to steady themselves. Closer by, an old man slept, a Leica over his crotch. His beard was so white it had begun to yellow, like a peeled apple exposed to air.
The Vanishers: A Novel Page 15
