The Vanishers (24 page)

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.

I saw your film
, it said. And that was all. Maybe he’d hated it, but that he’d bothered to see the film in the first place was a loving overture I couldn’t disregard. I wanted to write him back but knew this was not allowed, and suddenly these rules I’d been (sort of) respecting seemed self-defeating and sickness-enhancing and plain idiotic.

I wrote to my father.

I told him that I was in Vienna. I told him not to worry. I told
him I planned to come home after I’d completed the job for which I’d been hired, because this vanishing business wasn’t for me. I told him that I was just now (as I was typing this note) coming to realize that the reason I wasn’t so crazy about vanishing was because I’d met people who seemed strangely in line with his ways of thinking about emotional management—also, for that matter, the Workshop’s. Sealing your psychic shell against intruders. Keeping your personal story to yourself for fear that somebody might use it to hurt you, or for fear that you might use it to hurt someone else, even a dead someone else. Is that why he’d never told me how he’d suffered after his wife had killed herself, why he’d never told me what it was like for him to raise an infant alone—a creature that grievously howled as a matter of plain communication—how I must have functioned as a balm against her loss as well as a ceaseless reminder that she was gone? Did he hate her for this? Did he hate me? Did he hate her for making him, on dark occasion, hate me? Did he, after he watched my vanishing film, experience the same guilty rush I had when I realized: I was happy she was dead, because if she were alive, it would mean that we were somehow to blame for her leaving? That her being dead was preferable to watching a film in which she claimed that we were bad medicine, that we were making her sick? And as for experiencing her death as a relief, why should we feel guilty? If we secretly rejoiced and even bonded over our gladness of her death,
so what
? She hadn’t left us any less vicious way to commemorate her.

Love, Julia
, I typed.

I moused over the “Send” icon. But I didn’t send. I veered toward the delete icon. I deleted.

I wrote to Madame Ackermann.

Dear Madame Ackermann
, I wrote.
Wondering if we can call a truce. Forever your student, Julia
.

This one I sent.

I checked my e-mail one final time before logging out. I’d received a message from The Workshop.

It read:

The faculty member you are trying to contact is on leave. If you’re looking for general information about the Workshop, please contact Dr. Karen Yuen at [email protected]. If you’re trying to contact this faculty member in particular, we don’t know what to say. Your e-mail will be forwarded to his or her personal account, but we cannot guarantee its receipt, nor, if received, that it will ever be read. Of course this is always the case with missives, virtual or otherwise; we’re just pointing this out, should you be under the impression that any form of communication is fail-safe. Regardless, if you do not hear from this faculty member, the Workshop is not to blame
.