The Vanishers (14 page)

“I understand Madame Ackermann has a habit of nicking other people’s ideas,” Colophon said. “Which is why, if you managed to do what it seems you somehow managed to do—find the correct serial number—then it would appear you have a talent that could help me, and we could be of mutual use to one another.”

“Ah,” I said. It was less a sound of revelation than of defeat.
Ah
.

Had it come to this? I thought. Was I this sick, this desperate that I’d embroil myself in a relative stranger’s revenge fantasies against my former idol in order to punish her for misfortunes that were, best I could tell, nobody’s fault but mine? And regarding Madame Ackermann’s psychically attacking me, well … I couldn’t see how I was worth the personal cost such an act would incur. Psychic attacks risked destroying the health of the victimizer as well as the victim.

I picked the prosciutto strips out of my meal. The stink of air-cured meat turned my stomach and reminded me of my first late August in the Workshop dorm, the air redolent with what amounted,
in hindsight, to the ridiculous ambition to alter the molecular state of dead animal flesh with one’s spastic, twenty-three-year-old attention span. I remembered thinking, as a first-year initiate,
this is the smell of my future
. I would be a giddy, sweating failure, but then I would, without question, succeed. When I matriculated at the Workshop I was under the impression, as was probably every untried and untested initiate, that I was fated to be famous. Every streetlamp I walked beneath and darkened was proof of this. The Workshop, thus, had always been, in my mind, a temporary resting point on my life’s journey to greatness. But it hadn’t happened that way. Nothing about my time at the Workshop was restful. And while greatness no longer seemed a destination within my reach, I no longer knew, even in the average scheme of things, where the hell I was going.

I couldn’t sleep that night, even though I’d swallowed one Nembutal, two over-the-counter sleep aids, a glass of valerian-browned water. Finally I decided to kill the hours that remained until day watching the DVD Colophon had given me. As he’d chased a runny tiramisu around a plate, he’d emphasized: in order to cure myself of this psychic attack—in order to become well enough to humiliate and discredit Madame Ackermann by finding Dominique Varga before she did—I would first have to vanish.

There was no other way.

“And if you’re going to make a vanishing film,” he’d said, “you might as well be inspired by the master.”

I slipped
Not an Exit
into my computer. I clicked “Play.”

Varga’s film was about five minutes long, and I watched it fifteen times in succession. I couldn’t help but giggle at the title, until,
by about the sixth watching, it no longer seemed funny, Varga and her mean love affair with an anonymous hand. Nor did the single line of dialogue, delivered by voiceover, possibly Varga as well, while a child cried in the background:
It’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it
.

Then I became depressed.

I removed the DVD, I drew a bath. As the tub filled I hunched on the toilet lid and considered the possibility that I was being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann. Professor Blake had explained psychic attacks with one simple and incontestably true statement: People make other people sick. Blake tweaked that statement to suggest that sickness was purposefully, malevolently, caused by other people. After an hour of witnessing Blake at his twenty-foot-long slate board, layering chalk scribbles over fist-erased chalk scribbles, his hands by the end of class as dusty and swollen as a wrestler’s, his ideas seemed the furthest thing from radical. They seemed obvious. They seemed like the only viable ideas.

I closed my eyes. I tried to sense Madame Ackermann inside of me, like the chatter of enemy bacteria I could sometimes hear when I had an ear infection. Surely there would be a trace of her; more than a confusion of symptoms, Madame Ackermann would want to leave her personal mark.

And she had. My pulse gonged in my ear canal as, eyes closed, I stared at it. And stared at it. And then marveled how, for all the hours I’d spent looking at the backs of my own eyelids, I had never until this moment realized what should have been apparent to me from the start—the annoying constellation of light pricks outlined the shape of a very familiar wolf.

I tested this suspicion. I opened and shut my lids rapidly. I tried to dislodge her design on me. But the pricks remained.

It was she.

I should have been alarmed. No, I should have panicked. I was being psychically attacked by the most powerful person in the field of parapsychological scholarship. But instead I was so relieved that I could almost hear the endorphin floodgates sliding open.

My sickness had a cause. What had been, for over a year, my free-floating, possibly fabricated (according to some doctors) state of misery had been validated and identified. I knew where it lived, what it ate for breakfast, what kind of parking tickets it amassed on vacation, the type of sheets it desired.

It even had a name.

I ran to my computer to e-mail Colophon. He’d been right. I had proof. But when I opened my inbox, I’d received another e-mail from aconcernedfriend—my third that day—with the same attachment of the woman on the bed. And then I nearly slapped myself in the head, it was so obvious: aconcernedfriend was Madame Ackermann. These e-mails constituted a form of psychic warfare, proving she’d hacked into my immune system and also my past. She’d been invited places that I’d never been invited to go. She’d been to my mother’s death bed, and she’d filmed this dramatized artifact to taunt me.

I watched the attachment so many times that it started to collapse, in my mind, with Varga’s vanishing film, the woman lying on the floor and the woman lying on the bed becoming one, and I could hear Varga’s voice saying,
it’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it
.

I closed my eyes again. I savored the wolf.

This is your fault
, I thought, thrillingly.
Your fault
.

I drew a bath. As the tub filled, I stared at my face in the mirror and dared it to care. It did not care. With a gummy razor I cross-hatched, for the sake of experimentation, the topmost layer of skin on my wrists. I held my hand over the toilet and watched the blood
drip into the bowl, a sight that made me remember my last menstrual cycle, now more than a year ago, with detached fondness. I would not say I was suicidal. I would never say that.

Besides, there was no point in punishing myself. Madame Ackermann was to blame for my misery. And I was going to make her sorry that she’d ever met me.

My
favorite guest at the Goergen was a plastic surgery patient who identified herself, when I met her, as “Hungarian skin-care royalty.” A widow named Borka, she showed zero respect for the anonymity rules by which we were instructed to abide.

At the Goergen, the first thing we’d learned was the peril of being known.

“It means ‘foreigner,’ ” Borka told me of her name. “Always I have been a bedbug in my own family.”

Reedy, turbaned, with a spooky Isak Dinesen expression paralyzing her features, Borka appeared to be in her late sixties, though this remained an uncorroborated guess. Her rheumatoid hands—swollen, hooked, beige—resembled ginger roots, suggesting she might be nearer to two hundred. We sat together at meals, including Silent Breakfast, during which she scribbled instructions on a pad. A typical jotting would read LOOK 11 O’CLOCK, and I would do so, only to witness something I did not need to see: a psychic attack victim flaking her psoriatic scabs with a fork tine, for example.

Before bed, Borka and I played backgammon in the lobby, where marble columns severed the vast square footage into many wall-less cubicles of space. We sat in scarred leather club chairs, our knees
touching. Borka tried to psych me out whenever it was my move by intensely owling my face.

“You are a big déjà vu to me,” she’d say, her smoker’s rasp so throaty and mechanical it sounded as though it had been routed through a voice changer.

There were many discouragements at the Goergen, the strictest of which involved leaving it; we were threatened with not being allowed back in if we disregarded this particular admonishment. Given the skittish, high-profile clientele, paparazzi lurked across the street in Gutenberg Square with hopes of catching, as one famously did, the wife of an Austrian diplomat, her postoperative face coated with a salve that reflected the camera’s flash and inspired a number of gossip columnists to speculate that she’d had a diamond surgically implanted in her cheek.

The Goergen thus resembled a more extreme version of my existence in New York, my travels circumscribed now to the interior of a single building, the positions I assumed in chairs—the club chairs in the lobby, the chaises in the thermal baths, the lyre-backed chair in my room—acts of sitting with no pressure attending my inertia, no tourists for whom to speak theatrical Arabic.

I found it, at least until Alwyn arrived five days after I did, relaxing.

Alwyn was not a guest at the Goergen but a quasi-employee; given Colophon’s professional and financial entanglements with Timothy Kincaid (Kincaid’s foundation had awarded Colophon his research grant), and given that TK Ltd. owned the Goergen, Kincaid made an exception to the Goergen’s guest-only rule, allowing Alwyn to liaise with my psychic attack counselor, to make sure I abided by the many discouragements, and to guarantee, in the interests of everyone receiving a decent return on their investment, that I took my healing seriously.

In her spare time, Alwyn’s job was to track Madame Ackermann’s movements and keep abreast of any Varga progress she made that threatened to supersede ours.

Not that we, or I, had made any progress.

I met Alwyn in the lobby where, a mere five minutes after walking through the front door, she was already in a fight.

“Cell phones are discouraged,” the concierge said. “If you do not give me your phone, I cannot give you your room key.”

“Just to be clear,” she said. “You’re not discouraging me. You’re forbidding me.”

“I forbid nothing,” he said. “You are free to sleep in the square with your precious phone.”

“But I’m not one of them,” she said, gesturing toward the club chairs occupied by surgical patients in bandages, psychic attack victims overcome by tics and rashes. “Tell him,” she appealed to me.

“She’s not one of us,” I said.

“How can I say this as a compliment,” said the concierge. “You will not always be a young or unloved girl.”

Alwyn grudgingly relinquished her phone.

“What a puffin-stuff,” she said, after procuring her key. “Walk me to the elevator.”

She handed me her heaviest bag. She’d changed her hair while on her brief vacation in Paris, coloring it burgundy and snipping tiny bangs. She’d traded her sloppy cardigans for a collarless tweed jacket with expensively frayed cuffs and hems; around her neck she’d pinned a scarf patterned by miniature equestrian hardware, stirrups and bits.

Alwyn noticed me noticing her, and in return took my quick measure—my wool robe, my boiled-wool slippers, both presents from Blanche one Christmas when she’d themed all her gifts around the support of a local sheep cooperative.

“You look so convalescent après-ski,” she said critically. “I got here just in time.”

“I’ve been taking my healing very seriously,” I assured her.

“No,” she said. “I mean
I
got here just in time.”

We slalomed her bags between lobby columns, past a quadrant of club chairs occupied by postsurgical patients in headscarves, cards fanned before their bruised faces, legs slung to the side as though riding horses through a copse of spectral trees.

Alwyn babbled, at an indiscreet decibel level that triggered the lobby’s rat-a-tat acoustics, about the detective her mother and stepfather had hired, and how this detective had tracked her to Paris.

“My old prep school roommate, who lives in the Marais, started receiving phone calls from a man inquiring about me. Where was I staying in Paris? What were my travel plans? Fortunately, I told her I was headed to Sofia. Once a deceitful gossip, always a deceitful gossip. How are things with you?”