The Vanishers (22 page)

“I’m being attacked,” I corrected him.

“Age is a warrior,” he said.

He aimed his camera toward the Goergen. A delivery truck had pulled up; a man unloaded crates of vegetables.

“Why do you care about turnips?” I asked.

The snapper reached into his vest pocket and removed a tin of chewing tobacco.

“I’m here to photograph a woman named Borka Erdos,” he said.

Ah
, I thought.
I’ve heard about you
.

“I am her conscience,” he said wistfully. “Or maybe she is mine.”

“She must have been very beautiful once,” I said, meaning prior to her car accident.

“Only my pictures can say,” the old snapper declaimed.

He offered to take me to his flat to show me these pictures. He bragged, as further incentive, that his flat contained “the underground snapper archives of Europe.”

“I own photographs of everyone who was everyone,” he said.

“Do you own photographs of Dominique Varga?” I asked.

He appeared miffed.

“Lady,” he said. “Of course I do.”

We drove a short distance to his flat—one vast room—that
indeed appeared to house the snapper archives of Europe. Side-by-side filing cabinets obscured every inch of available wall.

He withdrew a file folder and placed it on a table.

“Who is this?” I asked of a young woman in a shift patterned by saucer-sized dots.

“Borka,” he said.

If I strained I saw the resemblance—mostly in the nose, but the rest of the features belonged to a woman I’d never seen before. When Borka had said her face was not her own, she hadn’t been exaggerating.

The old snapper made coffee while I perused. The youthful photographs—Borka in her thirties—were followed by photos of a much older Borka, a Borka I could more easily square with the post-car-accident Borka I knew. The snapper owned no photos, however, of the intervening twenty-odd years.

He returned with two coil mugs handmade by a child, or at least their weighty lumpenness suggested this to be the case. To the touch mine was greasy, as though coated with a sorrowful residue like Helena’s ring. I set the mug down, determined not to touch it again. This snapper, I did not want to know about his life.

“I’m out of sugar,” he apologized.

I asked him about the gap in his file, the decades between the two Borkas.

“Tell me what I should have done,” he said, interpreting my question as a criticism. “The world thought she was dead.”

He told me that Borka, at the age of forty, had gone missing while on vacation in Ibiza.

“Ibiza?” I said. In my head I heard the words
heiress
and
masked women
and
prosthetic hands
. I was stunned, but I wasn’t. What a moron I’d been not to have put the pieces together already.

“People believed she was killed in a car accident,” the old snapper said. “That she drove her Mercedes into a cliff. But I promise
you, it was no accident. She did it for Dominique Varga. She did it for art.”

He sighed.

“The girls in those days,” he said. “What wouldn’t they sacrifice for Varga? I’m lucky my Rita never met her.”

“And Borka didn’t die,” I said, finishing his previous thought.

“Not in the usual sense,” he said.

Little surprise, then, that Borka would claim to have information about Varga’s current whereabouts. She not only knew the woman, she’d ruined her face for her. Also, I felt a tiny bit chastened by this irony, or this coincidence, or this perversity: my most fruitful Varga research source didn’t require me to regress anywhere. All I had to do was take the elevator upstairs to Borka’s room.

“No doubt the family was relieved she was gone,” the old snapper continued. “Borka was no picnic. Always needing to be the center of attention, and eventually she becomes a sort of movie star but she pays for the privilege with her face. So she disappears. The husband never remarries. And then, twenty years later the husband dies, and there is no one to take over the business, and Borka comes back from wherever she’s been, not dead at all.”

“How odd,” I said. But upon reflection it wasn’t so odd. Borka had vanished herself and unvanished herself. This was no longer an alien paradigm.

The old snapper shrugged. “Sometimes pretending to be dead is best for all involved.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. I asked him to show me his photos of Dominique Varga.

He scrutinized me, possibly trying to divine if I, too, were the sort of weak girl who might fall sway to her unhealthy influence.

He deemed me immune.

His Varga file proved lean. Inside were stills of Varga on the sets of her various films, such as
Simone Moreault
. Also, not that
I was expecting it, but I realized upon not finding it that I’d been hoping—maybe there would be a picture of my mother.

“That’s it?” I asked.

The old snapper bristled.

“I mean,” I said, “they’re wonderful.”

“But I haven’t shown you the best ones,” he said. “I keep them in a special place. Someday I will sell them and make an honest fortune.”

The snapper retrieved two photos from his bedroom. The first was of a woman’s face slashed to bits and surrounded by glass.

“A still,” he said. “Of Borka. No one ever found copies of the car accident film, but I have proof—it did exist.”

Borka, I had to admit, appeared pretty convincingly dead, her face a pulverized fruit. I better appreciated what a good job her initial plastic surgeon had done, given the original mess.

“But that is not the most valuable,” said the old snapper. “This one is the most valuable.”

He handed me a photo of a young Dominique Varga—she looked like a teenager—face shadowed beneath a straw visor, breastfeeding a baby.

“Which film is this from?” I asked.

“No film,” he said. “That is from life.”

“She had a baby?” I asked.

“A daughter,” he said.

Irenke. So she hadn’t been lying. Varga did have a daughter. But whether Irenke was that daughter remained unsubstantiated. Given the number of desperate acolytes Varga attracted, and Irenke’s doomy vibe, it seemed prudent to wonder.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She is dead like my Rita,” the old snapper said. “Pottery was Rita’s life. That’s her kiln in the corner.”

“Which one is dead?” I asked.

“Everybody is dead,” said the old snapper, extending his arms to indicate all the inhabitants of his loft, the 2-D people morgued in the file cabinets.

It struck me that he was a little bit senile, my old snapper.

“The child, too?” I asked.

“A face is like a rune stone,” he said. “A face says to me ‘long life’ or ‘happy marriage’ or ‘early death by wrong raising.’ But she was such a terrible potter, my wife,” he sighed. “That she was considered the artist in the family, it was a bad joke we could never, for the health of the marriage, laugh about.”

His eyes bobbled unsteadily, as if he were seeing his wife in the room before him, and maybe he was; the line between senile and psychic was fine, even nonexistent. My father’s father, when he entered his dementia endgame, had let me, then aged twelve, tag along on his sundowner fugues, the two of us traveling together to a World War II naval ship stationed in the Yellow Sea, to a two-story apartment building in Lowell, Mass., his birthplace.

“I guess that’s love,” I said.

“No,” he said, turning back to the photo of Varga and the baby. “
That’s
love.”

The snapper’s thumb landed on the infant’s head, blotting it out.

That sudden redaction (thumb over face) provoked me. I passed a hand over the photo. The veins on the underside of my wrist twanged, a taut pulling of melancholy threads. Then it happened. This regression wasn’t painless or dreamy, it was the physiological equivalent of being reduced to a mess of protons and accelerated through the Hadron collider, of being looped at light speed and crashed into other protons that had also, once, been part of me.

I coagulated into a crunchy mass in the Parisian hotel lobby, my body a casing for glass shards. I sat in my usual chair. I made grinding, particle noises whenever I moved.

Across from me, Irenke, drink in hand, wept.

I clutched my head.

Irenke threw her glass against the floor, shattering it.

Then the floor disappeared.

“That bitch,” Irenke raged. She tore at the neckline of her dress.

“Who?” I said. I’d never been scared in a regression before; this time, I was scared. I’d arrived at a forbidden place.

“I wanted to be her muse,” she said. “But instead I am her cameraman. She hides me behind the drapes and makes me watch.”

“But you are her muse. She gave you—or rather she will give you—a necklace and tell you exactly that.”

“She’ll give me nothing,” Irenke said. “Anything I own of hers, I had to steal.”

She sobbed into her elbow crook. Her other hand grabbed my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done horrible things.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. I patted her arm. A glass shard poked through my skin, then another and another. I touched one. They were numb as teeth. “Whatever it is you did, I forgive you.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “She deserved it. She used me to get what she wanted and then she dumped me, pretended I’d never existed. I had to make her suffer for what she did. She was a bad person, you see. You’re lucky you never met her.”

“Your mother?” I asked.

She raised her head. To stare into her pupils was to stare straight at the subatomic engine room of the universe’s collective human misery, its self-annihilating, Hadron-collider core.

“No,” she said. “Yours.”

The old snapper drove me back to the Goergen. I gripped my wrist—the one Irenke had held—but I couldn’t stem the vacuum suck that threatened to empty my veins. I worried that I might psychically bleed out onto the car seats.

The concierge greeted me with his usual indifference. I sat in his desk chair—an off-kilter walnut spin that boinged on its base like those playground horses I rode as a kid, the ones attached to a thick metal spring, the ones that tried to buck you, head first, onto the cement.

Irenke was fucking crazy. She was a deranged astral imprint and nobody’s daughter. Possibly she’d known my mother, but more likely she was a psychic stalker who’d, for whatever reason, chosen to pick on me. Maybe Irenke was a psychic henchman of Madame Ackermann’s, an infiltrator tasked to further sicken and confuse me. This would explain why Madame Ackermann had hurried past us in the Paris hotel lobby. She didn’t want to have to pretend to “meet” Irenke, and risk my cottoning on to their plan.

But regardless of who she was or wasn’t, I needed to break off all contact with her. I’d ask Marta for help.

This plan calmed me.

Then I checked my e-mail. I’d received a reply from Professor Hales.

Dear Julia
, he wrote.

Attached please find an essay I would like to submit to
Mundane Egg
for publication. I wrote it to accompany the monograph of a spirit photographer whose photographs, quite frankly, I despised. The photographer rejected the essay because it had nothing to do with her work. Instead I wrote an essay about Indre Shira’s “Brown Lady” photograph, because I had the good fortune, last summer when I was in England, to visit Raynham Hall. I paid the pound equivalent of US$300 to sit on the actual staircase where the Brown Lady photograph was taken, but as you will see from my essay, the expenditure was not a foolish one
,
especially if
Mundane Egg
sees fit to publish my findings. Please tell your boss that I’m a fanatical reader of her publication
.

I tried to open Professor Hales’s attachment, but the concierge’s computer didn’t recognize the software. Needless to say, I knew there’d be nothing in there relating to my initial question to him concerning overrides.

I did a quick “overrides” Google search and ended up on a Wikipedia page about computer programming that made me realize: anything can strike a person as menacingly apt.
(The implementation in the subclass overrides the implementation in the superclass by providing a method that has the same name, the same parameters or signature, and same return type as the method in the parent class. If an object of the parent class is used to invoke the method, then the version in the parent class will be executed, but if an object in the subclass is used to invoke the method, then the version in the child class will be executed.)

I copied the link and pasted it into an e-mail to Professor Wibley, whose advanced senility rendered him safe to correspond with, assuming he’d heard of e-mail. I dispensed with the pretense of soliciting fact-checking advice for
Mundane Egg
; I asked him about overrides, and left it at that.

Then I wrote to Colophon.

Varga had a child; possibly her name was Irenke. But we don’t need her. I’ve found a better source
.

He did not write back.

I did not reveal that I’d met the heiress who’d organized the first official festival of Varga’s films, the heiress who’d once been the suspected victim of a Varga-directed snuff but who’d crashed her car on purpose, and who’d mostly survived her mistake.