The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  I collapsed into her chair. I wondered, too, what a woman had to do.

  At 2:50, I initiated the long wend to Marta’s office.

  Marta ushered me inside without a greeting. She eyed me skeptically.

  “I’m afraid I cannot be an accessory to your rage any longer,” she said.

  “My what?”

  “You and this Irenke,” she said. “You are both so angry.”

  “She’s the angry one,” I said. “Believe me, I don’t want anything to do with her.”

  “You’ve both lashed out at the people you think are to blame for your misfortunes,” Marta continued. “But the blame, you must accept, begins with you.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said.

  “You aren’t aware,” she said. “You blame Madame Ackermann. You think it’s her fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said.

  “Even if it is,” she said. “It doesn’t justify what you’re doing. You cannot do to others what they have done to you.”

  “It’s do to others what you would have them do to you,” I corrected.

  “So you think it is fair to attack a person because she has attacked you.”

  “I’m not attacking anyone,” I said.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Regardless, we’re going to stop these sessions for the time being.”

  “But I need your help,” I said. “I don’t want to visit Irenke anymore.”

  “Then,” Marta said coolly, “don’t.”

  There were ten of us at Dr. Papp’s talk.

  Borka did not attend. She had not been at dinner. It was as though she somehow knew that I knew about her past with Varga. She did not want to be asked why she’d hidden this from me.

  As Dr. Papp spoke, he bounced a ball of kitchen twine in one hand.

  “Have you ever heard of the expression ‘bubbling over with happiness’?” asked Dr. Papp, winding the twine around the neck of each guest, connecting us chain-gang style. “Your emotions are like water; they pour onto the people around you.”

  Dr. Papp explained, as he distributed pairs of nail scissors, how throwing bad energy caused rips in a person’s psychic carapace, thereby leaving the attacker vulnerable to retaliation.

  “This affects all of you,” Dr. Papp said. “You,” he said, pointing at a countess who’d had a face-lift, braiding the fringe of her head scarf. “You’ve sliced open your carapace. Do you think it’s only germs that can find their way into the wound?”

  A crucial part of daily hygiene, Dr. Papp said, was to survey our emotional attachments and cut the unhealthy ties.

  He instructed us to identify an unhealthy attachment growing from our carapace. Then, using the scissors, we were to cut the string that bound us to the neighbor on our right.

  I identified Irenke as my attachment.

  Before we cut our string, however, Dr. Papp recommended we imagine our attachment in the basket of a hot-air balloon.

  “Revenge is a counterproductive therapeutic goal,” Dr. Papp said, echoing Marta. “Pretend you are sending your attachment on a nice vacation.”

  I wedged my fingers into the scissors’ tiny metal loops; the edges were dull, the blades chewed at the string one fiber at a time. The action made me sleepy. Finally the string snapped and I watched my balloon rise. The basket, however, appeared empty. Where was Irenke? I’d launched an empty balloon.

  Then I saw her.

  She called my name.

  Julia, she said. I tried to say I was sorry.

  What happened next happened, I later concluded, because my brain was overtaxed by the many exercises and regressions I’d subjected it to. The carpet morphed underfoot to a bed of nails that gouged my legs, and made them bleed and bleed and bleed, until I had to hold my chin up so that I didn’t drown in it, my own rising red death.

  Then a storm started. The wind scooted along the surface of the blood, carving it into sharp ridges until the blood was no longer blood, it was an ocean of fire that the wind fanned higher and higher, the waves flicking the balloon’s fabric, saturating it red, then orange, then black.

  From the basket I heard screaming.

  “Stop now!” Dr. Papp yelled in order to be heard above Irenke’s screaming (which, in theory, only I could hear). Then I understood: I was screaming.

  “Bring it in for a landing!” Dr. Papp commanded.

  It was too late. The flaming balloon refused to land, powered by its own manic gusts of heat. It made a swipe at me, zooming so close that I could feel its furnace exhale against my cheek. I looked into the eyes of the passenger’s terrified face.

  Her face, however, did not belong to Irenke.

  I couldn’t watch what happened next, but this seemed worse than cowardly. I forced myself to stare at that burning ball, I forced myself to watch as my mother climbed to the edge of the basket, stared down at my red ocean, and jumped.

  Here is what I learned in bed.

  The Danube flows through, and partially forms the borders of, ten countries.

  After a serious illness, Goya spent five years recuperating and reading French revolutionary philosophers, in particular Rousseau, who taught him that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters.

  There are such things as irregular flowers.

  I also learned that there’d been a spate of surgical impersonator sightings in European cities such as Paris and Düsseldorf, and that plastic surgeons had been asked to report to the authorities patients who approached them with “unrealistic” plastic surgery goals.

  Things I did not learn in bed. I did not learn how I was moved to the top floor of the Goergen where, it turned out, the keypass-only medical facilities were located, and which included a hallway of private recovery rooms and a vast surgical theater. I did not learn the name of the specialist who attended me, a formal man whose hospital jacket had been tailored to fit his wide shoulders and narrow waist (in those first hazy days, I thought my pulse was being monitored by a waiter in a white tuxedo), and who did not speak English. I did not learn the name of the pills given to me, sapphire blue capsules that, when left for too long on the white napkin that covered my bed tray, stained the fabric red. I did not learn how I’d acquired a hand-shaped burn on my face, one that spanned the precise spot I’d been touched, during my trip to the Paris hotel lobby, by Madame Ackermann.

  When Marta came to visit, she encouraged me not to think about the incident with the balloon basket.

  “We have a saying,” she said. “The wound heals better without the fork.”

  When Alwyn came to visit, I told her that Marta believed I was attacking Madame Ackermann.

  “I’m aware,” Alwyn said.

  “But I’m not,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” she hedged.

  “And I told Marta that I don’t want to visit Irenke anymore,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you can’t help yourself.”

  Regardless, Alwyn insisted, the counterproductive result of my regressing was this: I’d become sicker than ever.

  I couldn’t disagree with her. Since the night of Dr. Papp’s presentation the wolf had returned with a high-wattage vengeance. Every time I closed my eyes. There it was.

  “You are your own worst enemy,” Alwyn observed, as a nurse changed my face dressing. “Have you heard of Dr. Kluge? He’s a very famous electrobiologist. He was also once engaged to my mother.”

  Dr. Kluge, she informed me, discovered that a stone called quartzite, due to its density and a property called laser-woven particle distribution, prevented the transmission of certain energy frequencies. He’d helped develop a spa facility made of quartzite slabs to block these frequencies; this building was the perfect place to stall the aging process.

  “It also works as a treatment for schizophrenics,” she said. “They hear fewer voices when they’re in ‘the bunker.’ ”

  I didn’t object to being classified as schizophrenic. In the metaphoric sense of the word, or maybe
the literal sense, no one could dispute that I’d become an unwitting ventriloquist for various hostile others.

  But for my “wellness purposes,” Alwyn clarified, I’d be unable to psychically reach out to or be reached by Irenke, or Madame Ackermann, or anyone else for that matter. This spa, to which she and Marta proposed I be moved, was, best I could tell, a building-sized version of the Faraday cage that Madame Ackermann kept in her basement.

  “Usually there’s a yearlong waiting list,” Alwyn said, “but I’ve arranged with Kluge, because we’ve remained on friendly terms, for you to hop the queue. He guarantees you’ll show measurable improvements within a week.”

  Alwyn fiddled with the cord to my blinds, raising and lowering them until the sunlight stopped at my neck, my head decapitated by shadow.

  She admitted, then, that she’d taken it upon herself to do a little extra research “for the sake of our work.”

  She handed me a glossy fax that persisted, in the annoying manner of faxes, to curl up on itself rather than lay flat, as though protecting its contents from dissemination. I pinned it open on my bed tray. Written in French, it was a bill of sale from a gallery in Paris called Les Einsteins, dated May 1980, and included a photo of the necklace Irenke had been wearing at the Regnor. According to this bill of sale, the purchaser was Dominique Varga.

  Which struck me as curious, but not overly. It confirmed what I already knew to be true. The necklace had once belonged to Varga.

  But it grew more curious.

  The bill of sale split the necklace’s proceeds into various commissions—the finances of Les Einsteins were modeled more on those of a socialist consignment shop than an art gallery—the figures diminishing into smaller and smaller amounts until everyone who’d had any contact with the necklace, it seemed, received a cut, including, almost as an afterthought, the artist herself, whose name was Elizabeth Severn.

  This fact did not strike me with the force it might have; the minute dose of morphine my doctor had prescribed protected me from astonishment. Maybe, too, I had already made this connection in some soupy backwater of my brain, but had failed to fish it to the conscious surface.

  I saw threads, wet dark threads, swirling and knotting and leading definitively nowhere. My mother had made Irenke’s necklace. This fact did not strike me with the force it might have; the minute dose of morphine my doctor prescribed protected me from astonishment. Maybe, too, I had already made this connection in the swampy backwater of my brain, but had failed to fish it to the conscious surface. Did this mean Irenke had known my mother? Did this prove Irenke was Dominique Varga’s daughter? Perhaps the only thing it proved was that, yes, Irenke had acquired, and possibly stolen, this necklace from Varga, which Varga had bought from my mother.

  But whether or not Varga was Irenke’s mother, and whether or not my mother was, in Irenke’s words, “a truly bad person,” well, this necklace illuminated little more on these fronts, save the stark reality that nothing in my life, no object, no person, spun beyond the orbit of gravely, perversely mattering.

  Perhaps I should have wondered how Alwyn, while doing “a little research,” had tracked down the one bit of information I’d thus far kept from her—that Varga and my mother had been friends.

  I did not wonder.

  “Les Einsteins was Varga’s gallery,” Alwyn said. “Maybe Varga was simply a fan of her work. Regardless, I think it’s safe to presume they met each other.”

  Beneath her allotted pittance, my mother had signed her name. I traced her handwriting’s erratic and inscrutable leaps. Not to use these letters as a portal, not to go anywhere. I wanted a thing, not a doorway.

  “Also,” she said, “I spoke with the gallery owner. I said that he must have found your mother’s work impressive, given he’d agreed to represent her. To which he said, ah.”

  I didn’t know what ah meant. I did not want to know.

  “Do you think Dominique Varga would have allowed any old person to regress into her past? She knew your mother. Maybe she respected her for being … similarly cutthroat. Whatever the reason, Varga’s partial to you. This is a big advantage we need to exploit. You need to let her use you.”

  Alwyn, I noticed, had worried the pimple on her chin into a scab. She floated her fingertips over this scab, savoring the time when she could return to her room, pry it off, continue her excavation in private.

  “OK,” I said. “How?”

  “She’s partial to you,” Alwyn said again. She seemed sort of pissed about this. “Just … do what she asks.”

  “That depends on what she wants,” I said.

  “She probably wants what everyone wants from you,” Alwyn said meanly. “Information.”

  I tossed the fax at her. I was in no mood for Alwyn’s jibes.

  Alwyn retrieved the fax from the floor. She set it on my bedside table.

  “Don’t you find it interesting,” she said, “how you’re allowed to regress or whatever it is you do into my life, but I’m not allowed to pry into yours?”

  “I’ve never pried into your life,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said, as though she’d been aiming to trick me into this very answer. “And why not?”

  “Because I’m taking my healing seriously,” I said.

  “Right,” she said, disgusted. “You’re … how do I say this. You’re undiscerning. You’re a psychic slut. Any stranger who’s in proximity, you ‘can’t help yourself.’ So why could you help yourself with me? Why weren’t you interested in me?”

  “Because we are work colleagues,” I said, not knowing what else to say—why was it I hadn’t pried into Alwyn’s life? “I figured it was better to respect your privacy.”

  “How thoughtful,” she said. She pulled on her bangs so roughly I worried she’d tear them from her scalp.

  I put a hand on her forearm. She tensed under me, unwilling to submit to my lame overture.

  “Maybe it’s related to the surgeries,” she said dully.

  “What is?” I said.

  “You’re drawn to infiltrate a weak spot. All of these surgery patients, they’ve made holes in themselves. How could you resist invading?”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking that this category of person did not exclude Alwyn.

  “And anyway,” she said, “I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to care about me the same way I care about you. I shouldn’t expect you to do for me what I do every day for you.”

  She stared at me defiantly. Suddenly we were having a coded conversation and I was meant to provide my own key.

  I could not.

  Just as quickly as she’d turned abrasive, Alwyn recalcified into business mode. She’d already arranged, she said, for my train ticket and admission to the Breganz-Belken spa; she, meanwhile, would be staying at the Goergen.

  We’d both meet up with Colophon in Paris in one week’s time.

  “I’m not coming back here?” I asked.

  She told me I was not.

  “I think you’ll find your stay at the Breganz-Belken enlightening,” she said.

  “Enlightening?” I said. A sealed-off stone bunker, I thought, should promote the opposite of enlightenment: Endarkenment.

  “Who knows,” Alwyn said, “you might be forced to learn something you were never curious to learn.”

  “About myself?” I said. Given I’d be in a psychic safe house, more or less, mine would be the sole consciousness I’d have access to.

  “Well,” she said dryly, “if there’s one person you’re less interested in than me, it’s you.”

  Borka arrived as Alwyn was departing. They practically collided in the small aperture to my room.

  “Excuse you,” Borka said.

  Alwyn did not cede her position. Borka pushed her scarf back. She brandished her face like a gun.

  Alwyn caved, permitting Borka to enter. Borka did not thank her or acknowledge her for giving way, causing Alwyn to simmer, not that Borka noticed, or would have understood the implicit meaning if she had.
Had they become better friends, or rather better enemies, since I’d been in the medical wing? Something was up. That something appeared to involve me. But I was too sapped to care what or how.

  Alwyn tried again to leave, and was blocked by an orderly, a polite man who allowed her to huff through. The orderly bound my arm in a Velcro cuff and took a ridiculously long time to measure my blood pressure. I asked him if I had a pulse, and he answered, I’m not sure.

  He stopped trying. He checked the progress of my burn, now mostly healed, he wrote something on my chart, he pronounced me well enough to return to my regular room.

  “Fantastic,” I said.

  As Borka helped me pack my stuff, she noticed the fax on my bedside table.

  “What is this?” she asked, pointing.

  “Oh,” I said. It was too difficult to explain. Also, I still hadn’t confessed to Borka what I’d learned of her connection to Varga; this would inevitably arise if I showed her the bill of sale with Varga’s name on it. A part of me enjoyed knowing something about Borka that she didn’t know I knew. She’d made it clear—we were friends, but we were members of an information economy, too. A part of me intuited that I’d be wise to preserve this bargaining chit until I needed it.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Alwyn gave it to me.”

  Borka stared at it disapprovingly.

  “That girl is a half-dachshund,” Borka said. “She will make you sick.”

  “Someone beat her to it,” I said.

  “She’s your friend?” Borka asked.

  I scrutinized the empty doorway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Alwyn as a friend; I simply thought, given how little interest I’d shown in her, that I couldn’t rightly claim her as one.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re right,” Borka confirmed, as though she’d been testing me. “She’s not.”

  The night before my train was set to leave, I stopped by the concierge’s desk to check my e-mail for the first time since Dr. Papp’s presentation. I’d received no word from Colophon and ten video attachments from aconcernedfriend, none of which, due to the Goergen’s gluggier than usual connection, I could open, and an e-mail from my father, forwarded from TK Ltd.