I heard the rasping sobs of Madame Ackermann as she, too, was stuffed into a straitjacket.
I continued to track the urine’s progress, now less than a foot away and closing in.
In my head I began a mantra that I hoped Madame Ackermann could hear. Stop, I begged. Please please please stop. Soon this simplified to Please.
I repeated it over and over until I didn’t recognize the word anymore.
Please please please please.
I thought the word so loudly I could hear it.
I peered up from the rivulet long enough to catch a glimpse of Madame Ackermann, hair curtaining her face in snotty ropes, the two of us a pair of ruined, straitjacketed twins.
Please please please continued the mantra, uttered by a voice so pathetic and stripped of dignity I was ashamed that it belonged to me.
And it didn’t.
“Please, stop,” Madame Ackermann begged as the orderlies dragged her past me. “Please,” she said beseechingly, as though I were a person capable of saving anyone.
We decided it would be in poor taste for me to rent Madame Ackermann’s vacant A-frame.
“We don’t want people to talk any more than they’re already going to,” said Professor Yuen.
Plus the A-frame was on the market, had been on the market for months. “You wouldn’t want them to sell it out from under you,” said Professor Yuen, though we both knew it was unlikely that the A-frame would sell, given what had happened to Madame Ackermann. Too many people in East Warwick were sensitive to bad psychic residue, especially in matters of real estate.
Instead I subleased a small apartment on East Warwick’s three-block-long stretch of student-oriented commerce. Located above a store that specialized in flannel nightgowns and henna kits, the apartment belonged to Professor Blake, now on semi-permanent sabbatical at a drying-out facility in Kansas. Sparsely furnished with a feeble kitchen but featuring a well-equipped bar conveyed, for no additional fee, to the subsequent tenant, the place proved great for parties, even though the bathroom was a literal closet, privatized by an accordioned rubber curtain that slid back and forth on stuttering runners.
I arrived in East Warwick with very few belongings. What clothes I had filled two of the five drawers in Professor Blake’s dresser. I online-shopped for basics in neutral shades like groat and topsoil. I purchased a lamb’s-wool coat at a vintage store. Winter in New Hampshire was always coming.
While it was never explained to me why I’d been offered a three-year lectureship at the Workshop, compared to the other mysteries of the world, this one didn’t haunt me much. The letter from Professor Yuen, by the time it reached me at my father’s house in New Hampshire, had been forwarded three times. “We have an opening for a three-year renewable lectureship,” her letter read. “I think you’d be perfect for the position.”
The letter confirmed that the rumor of my psychically attacking Madame Ackermann had not remained limited to the staff at the Cincinnati headquarters of TK Ltd.
“You’re the Julia,” my TK Ltd. counselor said when he accepted the paperwork I’d filled out to officially unvanish myself.
WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR VANISHING FILM TO REMAIN AVAILABLE FOR VIEWERS?
I checked the NO box.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE A COMPANION FILM EXPLAINING YOUR REASONS FOR UNVANISHING?
I checked the NO box.
“I’m a Julia,” I replied, accepting the safety deposit box. Inside was my driver’s license, a set of keys to my New York apartment, three silver sticks of gum that had dissolved, coating the drawer with a membranous goo.
“You messed that Madame Ackermann person up,” he said. “You should watch her vanishing film.”
En route to the bursar’s office, I was stopped by a man wearing a pair of elbow-length leather gloves. He introduced himself as Timothy Kincaid. He shook my hand overzealously.
I flinched.
“Bah,” Kincaid said. “You can stop with the delicate act. But you sure had me fooled. Any chance you’ll authorize me to screen your film for training purposes? We need to be able to spot sleepers like you.”
I denied him authorization.
“I’d like to take my original with me,” I said.
Kincaid shook his head.
“Not possible,” he said. “You signed a contract stating that the original belongs to TK Ltd. But you can stipulate when it can and cannot be seen, of course. We’re not total monsters.”
From Cincinnati I flew to Boston; my father met me at the airport to drive me back to Monmouth, where I planned to spend the spring and probably, too, the summer.
We didn’t talk about my vanishing or my unvanishing. Mostly we talked about quartzite, and I asked him what he knew about an electrobiologist named Dr. Kluge, because it was one of those moments, so rare in our relationship, when my paranormal life intersected with his scientific one. He lectured while I fiddled with the radio. This was a familiar configuration for us, one that had always worked—him driving, me in the passenger seat. We’d always had our best conversations in the car because it allowed us to be in close physical proximity without his ever needing to look at me.
After seeing the photo of Varga’s half-finished surgery, I better understood the daily haunting I enacted on my father with my face.
A few weeks after arriving in Monmouth, I received an e-mail from Maurice, my former Workshop colleague who’d not once, while I’d been sick, bothered to contact me. The breezy tone of his e-mail tipped me off. The font twanged on my screen with envy and curiosity.
Got the yen to reconnect, Maurice wrote. Wondering what you’ve been up to.
A day or so later I received an e-mail from Maurice’s Workshop confidante Rebecca, never a friend.
Glad to hear your health has improved, she wrote. Need your address so I can invite you to my wedding.
She was orchestrating a viewing for my old classmates, I thought. Their idolatry of Madame Ackermann didn’t trump their need to inspect the person who’d proven to be the most powerful psychic of all, if the rumors of my destroying our mentor were to be believed. How did she do it?
For all of these people, I constructed a fake auto-response message.
If you’re receiving this message, I wrote, it means that the person you’re trying to contact is no longer at this address. Of course there’s always the possibility that the person you’re trying to contact remains at this address, but does not wish to be in contact with you. Additionally, it’s possible that this address has been compromised, and in the amount of time required for you to read to this point, a virus has been downloaded to your computer. Among other forms of havoc, this virus will send all the flame mails you’ve saved in your “drafts” file, the ones you wisely thought better of sending but couldn’t bring yourself to delete, because the anger is still so real.
In August, the letter arrived from Professor Yuen offering me a job.
Over dinner that night (grilled andouille and grilled bread and grilled radicchio—my father and Blanche prided themselves on never once, during the summer months, turning on their stove), I told them I was returning to the Workshop.
“To take a job,” I said.
“A job,” said my father. The fact that the Workshop would hire me confirmed its unceasing commitment to charlatanism.
“It’s a three-year lectureship,” I said. “Renewable.”
“Why?” Blanche asked.
“Because if I do a good job, they’d like the option of keeping me.”
“No,” said Blanche.
“What she means is,” my father said, “why did they hire you?”
“Because you don’t even have a terminal degree,” Blanche added. Blanche was bothered by incomplete degrees and any other endeavor embarked upon and abandoned. She always finished the movies she checked out of the library, even if she hated them. Experiences needed to be sealed up by credit sequences, commencement speeches, death. Closure was her thing, though she viewed it less as a vehicle for acceptan
ce and recovery than as a matter of hygiene.
My father sawed at his radicchio.
“I would think that your health problems would make it difficult for you to commit to a three-year position,” Blanche said.
My father cut his radicchio into smaller and smaller pieces until he’d reduced it to a purpled mush.
He pushed his plate away.
Blanche hadn’t put scare quotes around “health problems,” nor did she need to.
“Sometimes one can resolve the unresolvable by accepting it as unresolvable,” I said.
“Hmmm,” Blanche said.
“Meaning it only registers to the brain as unresolvable if your brain is trying to resolve it,” I clarified.
“So you’re not looking to get better,” my father said.
“I am better,” I said.
Since leaving the Goergen, I told them, I’d been asymptomatic.
This was true.
Dinner wound up in the usual manner. My father smoked a pipe on the rattan chair with the giant circular back that rose behind his head like a woven-reed thought bubble. Blanche and I did the dishes and listened to a radio show, on which a curvy actress was interviewed about how it felt to be fat, at least compared to other actresses.
We said good night. We went to bed.
Before I drifted into sleep—sleeping was no longer a problem—I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable: that Madame Ackermann had never been attacking me. But this possibility I let seep into my mind for just a second or two. To release Madame from the blame I’d assigned to her only put me at the mercy of a greater and scarier unknown. What had made me sick?
Maybe Madame Ackermann was innocent, I thought, as sleep closed in. Maybe she was. But of one thing I was fairly certain: I had never intended to attack her.
“This will be your office,” Professor Yuen said. The walls stank of paint. Without Madame Ackermann’s posters—of the chairs from the Vitra Design Museum, of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (which featured a woman splayed on a fainting couch, a troll-like incubus hunched on her chest)—the room reminded me of an operating room, all brightness and anti-bacterial smells. “We’d prefer if you didn’t tack things to the walls,” Professor Yuen said. “Certain previous occupants were very disobedient when it came to this rule.”
Professor Yuen excused herself to a meeting; she’d be back in an hour, she said, to pick me up for lunch. She was itching to bring me to a new Japanese restaurant, located in a renovated mill that hung over the banks of a river.
“Rural sushi,” she said, without a flicker of humor, “is no longer an oxymoron.”
I closed my office door. The paint stink, bell-jarred, intensified. From my window I watched Professor Yuen exit the building and hurry down the walkway to her pumpkin-colored Saab. We’d become friends of a sort. Buddies who respected an implied boss–employee hierarchy (she took pains to remind me) as we did banal domestic errands together. She’d driven me to the nearby bigger town, the one with the strip mall, and helped me pick fabric for curtains I’d never sew, and new bedding for Professor Penry’s futon at an overstock store that sold discounted sheets, cashews, and pool noodles. She’d requested that I sit by her during the first faculty meeting—because, she implied, the faculty needed to see that she supported me as a new hire, despite my controversial situation. She was assuming the valiant role as my protector. For this, she made clear, I owed her. But soon this gambit revealed itself as a sham, a cover-up of her real motives, as well as a distortion of her actual understanding of the constellated relationship between me, her, the faculty. By befriending me she was taking a stance against Madame Ackermann, thereby challenging those who might seek to defend her, or argue that she should, upon her release from whatever secret asylum she’d been committed to, return. She was locating herself on the side, or so she believed, of true power. I was the muscle. I was the one not to be messed with.
Because look at what I had done.
I did try once to tell Professor Yuen that she might be mistaken. Over a meal of lame dim sum, I’d tried to hammer a dent in her certainty.
“Funny that I don’t have any memory or knowledge of attacking Madame Ackermann,” I’d said.
Professor Yuen’s eyes hardened like those of a person hearing that a loved one has died in a plane crash, then liquefied again when she remembered, But no, he changed his plans at the last minute, he took the train.
“The most virulent psychic attacks issue from the unconscious,” she said. “Whether ‘you’ intended it or not is immaterial. We are helpless before our lower power. And isn’t it kind of fun,” she said chummily, “to think you’re living a parallel life about which you’re unaware?”
She offered to bring some book by my apartment later that night; she needed me to be as convinced of my covert ruthlessness as she was.
I wasn’t. At least I was pretty sure that I wasn’t. However, the more I attempted to deny my involvement with Madame Ackermann’s misfortune, the more passionately Professor Yuen believed I’d masterminded it all.
So I stopped denying it. Living the lie seemed less aggressively mendacious than failing, by trying, to set the record straight.
Living the lie was not such a bad way to live—especially given the respect I was afforded by those who, in the past, had afforded me so little. When my hire was announced in a Workshop alumni newsletter, I received congratulatory e-mails from Maurice and from Rebecca (so sorry you missed the wedding). Professor Janklow invited me to headline a psychic attack conference in Berlin. Professor Hales forgave me for failing to accept his submission to Mundane Egg.
Their attentions made me feel good, but not easy. Each morning I awoke and conducted an examination. Head: no migraine. Torso: no rash. Anus: not fiery. Finally I’d get out of bed—cautiously, in case gravity should prove, as it did in the past, my undoing—and run through a checklist of possible failures.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Then I would get dressed.
At the same time, I was regressing like a champ. Gone were the days of patchy psychic activity, impossible to harness. Simply lying down on my new Florence Knoll bench was all it took to send me off to specific destinations, and for hours. Professor Yuen assigned me a stenographer, a young girl named Sheila, soon forced, due to my prolixity, to wear a brace on her writing wrist. She came to my office every morning smelling of men’s sporty deodorant, an annoying trait I vowed never to comment upon. Save for the basics, we never spoke.
Despite these successes, the key that Varga had given to me still proved psychically useless. It did, however, unlock the actual door to the actual room where Irenke had committed suicide in 1984; I knew because I’d visited 152 West 53rd Street over a long weekend to collect my few possessions from a storage unit. I’d been unsurprised to discover, at that address, the Regnor Hotel. An interview with a gossipy lifer janitor, a man who functioned for the Regnor as its memory morgue, revealed the grimmer specifics of what I’d known to be the facts—that Irenke had checked into the Regnor Hotel on October 24, 1984; that she’d swallowed a lethal combination of whiskey and diazepam; that her belongings, including a heavy pendant necklace, had been shipped, per the instructions detailed in the note she left behind, to her mother in Paris.
So I’d checked into Room 13, I’d taken a nap on the bed. Contrary to what many believe, rooms in which people have killed themselves are often the quietest rooms, unrattled by restless electrons. My mother’s bedroom was a neutral space, a psychic beigeness. I left Room 13 having experienced the same peaceful vacancy. Why Irenke had killed herself remained unknown to me, and just as well. Reasons were for the survivors. They did Irenke no good.
But after my trip to Room 13, Irenke began to let me visit her again in Paris, and pretty soon we’d developed a routine. Every morning we hung out for an hour, like friends meeting for coffee at a local East Warwick café, though Irenke preferred to drink whiskey sours, a bad habit she’d ear
ned the right to enjoy. We had one of those relationships that was organic and easy because we didn’t discuss the unpleasant things, and the refusal to do so was not viewed by either of us as an act of cowardice, nor did we view it as an indication that we were incapable of real intimacy.
Because I’d decided—this kind of hating, this kind of fault-finding, this kind of symbolic matricide, it had to stop. If I’d formed an allegiance with Irenke, it was because I’d decided that to befriend Irenke was to ensure that my mother’s death did not perpetuate more pointless, self-defeating rivalries among women who, in the end, were only killing themselves.
Besides, we had a lot in common, Irenke and I. We were sisters of a sort.
At the Workshop, meanwhile, my classes were a hit. I dated a variety of blue-collar, off-campus men. I even reconnected with my first boyfriend, James, which is to say that I started sleeping with him again, and we thought, for a week or two, that we were doomed to be a couple. But he was a bit of an emotional mess, his own mother having recently died of something prolonged and horrible, the length of which had enabled him to have too many wrenching conversations with her about how she missed both what hadn’t happened to her yet and what had happened to her already with equal vividness. Her dying, she said, made her miss James’s childhood and the childhood of his unborn children in the exact same moment, with the exact same nostalgic intensity, which had rendered her life both timeless and collapsed, an immortality in which she existed forever or a grave into which her past, present, and future disappeared. This sort of talking had undone James, and it also, even when related to me secondhand, for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, undid me. We decided to part ways before we overrode our old good memories of one another with new bad ones.
But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware. I visited a number of physicians in the area, all of whom pronounced me fit as a fiddle. If it had been difficult to convince my former doctors of the medical validity of an illness comprised of many contradictory symptoms, it was even harder to convince these doctors of an illness whose only symptom was a complete absence of symptoms.
The Vanishers: A Novel Page 23
