The Vanishers (25 page)

That Madame Ackermann was unreachable was not news to me, but nonetheless this auto-reply ignited a tiny pilot light of panic in my sternum. I was not safe here.

I’m so fucking happy to be leaving
, I thought. The Goergen’s loose windowpanes, the gaps between the floors and the walls, the hundreds of drains, the women with the holes in their heads, everywhere I looked I saw opportunities for infiltration and loss.

After packing, I went to Borka’s room to tell her I was transferring to a spa for old people and schizophrenics. Also I wanted to return the key and cricket cage. I’d failed to regress to 152 West 53rd Street, Room 13, on October 24, 1984, between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., and now I was headed to a maximum-security building where it would be pointless to even try. Whatever information Borka possessed about Varga, she would have to give it to me without the promise of anything in return.

I found her in the rare giddy state; Marta had approved her surgical objectives. It appeared she’d already had a procedure or two—her eyelids were swollen, her upper lip distended.

“I can’t wait until you see me again,” she said.

I didn’t bother telling her: I was never going to see her again.

Though I tried to discourage her, she insisted that I take her money.

“For sad mood days,” she said, pressing a hamster-sized roll of bills into my hand.

When I returned the cricket cage and key, however, her mood hairpinned.

“You’re giving up?” she said. “After all I’ve done for you?”

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I can’t.”

She grabbed my hand.

“Tell me what you need to know,” she said. “I’m ready to help you now.”

“I don’t know if that would make a difference …”

“Someone died in that room,” she blurted.

I blinked at her.

“Who?” I said.

“A stranger,” she said. “But her conceits were sent to me.”

“Conceits?” I said.

“Clothing,” she said. “Belongings.”

“Why would a stranger send you her belongings?” I asked.

“There was a note,” she said, “instructing the concierge. Should anything happen to her, I was to receive her conceits.”

“What else did the note say?”

“Nothing,” she said bitterly. “It said nothing.”

“So you want to know why this stranger sent you her things?” I said.

She nodded.

“I want to know if I am somehow to blame,” she said.

“Why would you be to blame?” I asked.

She pushed her fingers into her eyeballs. Literally, her fingers disappeared to the first knuckle, her old face like a snakeskin beginning to molt.

“These people,” she said. “These people who die and you never knew them. What are you supposed to feel?”

She really wanted me to tell her. She really thought that I would know.

“Nothing,” I said, tossing the key on her bed. “You’re not supposed to feel anything.”

She removed her fingers from her eyes, and it was, I swear, as though she’d pulled her fingers from holes in a dyke that had previously held back a flood. It struck me with the force of a riot hose.

“Oh
really
,” she hissed. “Hasn’t your blighted, miserable life taught you anything? You’re just like her. Doomed to fail because you’re too scared to try.”

“Who?” I said. “Who am I like?”

My mother, I thought. Since she’d been in cahoots with Varga, maybe Borka had known my mother, too.

It was possible.

“My mother?” I said. “Did you know her?”

Borka laughed meanly.

“No,” she said. “I did not.”

I didn’t push her to explain; to do so would be pointless. She wasn’t giving me anything I didn’t earn first. But I wanted her to understand: I had information, too.

“I discovered your Varga secret,” I said. “I know about your ‘death.’ ”

I didn’t say: I know you disfigured yourself on purpose, that you drove your car into a cliff because you were an attention-hungry rich girl who wanted to be a celebrity, or maybe because you despised, with an intensity that drove you to violence, your face.

She scrutinized me as though I were a math problem, an x-value that remained momentarily, and terrifyingly, beyond her comprehension.

But whatever she divined reassured her. The wrathful floodwaters withdrew; she tamped her real self back to invisibility. Again, she was only ugly on the outside.

She smiled and held out her arms to me. I allowed her, one last time, to smooth my hair.

“Silly Beetle,” she said. “You know so much nothing.”

She forced the key into my robe pocket.

“But we still have our deal, right?” she said.

I didn’t tell her that I had no intention of touching this key ever again. Whatever she wanted me to discover in that hotel room, it was a fool’s errand. No matter what I found out, no matter whose face she had, it would not stop her from hating herself.

“We have our deal,” I lied.

Back in my room, I opened my French doors and stepped onto my room’s small patio. I took a mental snapshot of the view—the distant lights of the various bridges stretching over the Danube, and the blackened void of the Vienna Woods; the immediate quiet of Gutenberg Square, and the lighted flat windows across the square, revealing the collapsed cushions of easy chairs and dirty plates on tables but never people.

Soon, my presence was detected; below me, the camera flashes popped. I canted my face downward so the snappers could get a clear shot of my face. I waved. I smiled. I hoped that Madame Ackermann would see these photos and be lured to the Goergen in search of me. Let her come, I thought, because I will be long gone.

The flashes weakened, flickered, extinguished. Now there was only night down there. What I’d taken for flashes were the flames
of many individual lighters as the nodders fired up their pipes. In the newly keen silence I listened to the wind that, when I closed my eyes, became the sound of the nodders’ gaseous brains leaking from their bodies, whirling around Gutenberg Square, filling whatever lonely vacancies.

From
Vienna I took a train through the Carpathians. The scenery was stunning but I barely registered it, instead spending most of the trip recovering from a fright I’d had at the station when a woman wearing a familiar Pucci scarf cut in front of me in the ticket queue. Her black ponytail hair lashed my cheek as she pushed behind a businessman, knocking his briefcase from his hand.

It was her
. I willed myself not to move, to cease breathing. Perhaps she’d fail to detect me, purchase her ticket, swan off toward her gate. But then I had to sneeze, and I tried not to, and the pressure built and built until what emerged from my body sounded less like a sneeze than a rock striking another rock.

She turned.

She was not Madame Ackermann.

Still, I took this mistake as a warning. I “saw” people before I saw them, their arrival preannounced by a doppelgänger stranger.

Thank God for the bunker. I’d started to think of my new venue not just as a health necessity but as an architectural narcotic, even a potential vacation.

Before boarding the train, I checked my e-mail at a “free” Internet café, one that required me to purchase a pastry, and demonstrably enjoy it, before I was allowed to touch a keyboard.

I’d received my daily attachment from Madame Ackermann and a very long response to my override query from senile Professor Wibley.

“Concerning overrides,” he began, and thank goodness he did, because the e-mail did not seem to be about overrides at all, but about the dangers of method acting, and how actors, in using their own pasts to animate the emotions of a nonexistent character, replaced their memories with the memories of a performance in which they’d employed these memories, the result being, after a number of “usages,” that these memories became the province of myriad fictional others, and the actor could only access them by worming his way backward through the various roles he’d played, but that his past, once he reached it, was no longer, in theory, only his.

Wibley then veered into a riff involving T. S. Eliot’s artistic quest for a degree of depersonalization “that approaches the condition of science,” and how Eliot and other modernist writers at the turn of the last century viewed it as their ultimate goal to achieve the continual extinction of their personality, resulting in an idealized state that was adopted by the psychics of the time and renamed, in psychic circles at least, “clairvoidancy.”

“Though these days I am suffering,” wrote Professor Wibley, “more from voidancy than clairvoidancy. See me as a cautionary tale. I was colonized by the Mind of Europe even though I superannuated Shakespeare, Homer, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen. Regardless, it is not my intention to depress the youth. I simply hope that I have been of some small consolation to you, whoever you are.”

He’d included, at the bottom of his e-mail, the following boilerplate:

“Some can absorb knowledge, the luckier must sweat for it.”

A few hours past lunchtime, my train pulled into the tollbooth-sized station at Breganz-Belken.

A man in a pale sage uniform greeted everyone who disembarked—myself and two older couples—he took our luggage, he led us to a golf cart. Soon we arrived at a honed monolith that protruded from the ground at a slight angle as though it had been haphazardly dropped from outer space.

Whereas the Goergen was fluted and cartouched and polished to a high gleam, the Breganz-Belken was a Brutalist cave, the surfaces so matte they looked powdered.

I told the woman at the front desk that I had a reservation.

“Julia Severn,” I said.

She had such good skin, this woman. She was so flushed with health that she appeared feverish.

“I’m afraid there’s no guest here by that name,” the woman said, as though we were discussing a third and presently absent person. I showed her the postcard on which Alwyn had written my confirmation number, as if this constituted convincing proof that her database was incorrect.

She inputted the number and her face flickered. Evidently I did have a reservation, but she refused to outright admit this.

“Additional postcards can be found in the night table,” she said, initiating some rapid key commands. “Should you choose to use them, they will appear on your week’s-end bill as ‘additional room charge.’ May I have your credit card?”

I handed her Alwyn’s credit card.

“Also, I’m scheduled to see Kluge,” I said.

“Kluge,” she said. “I believe he’s in Tehran, skiing. But I’m happy to know that women of your generation are taking the aging process so seriously. It’s never too early to start the fight.”

“No,” I said, “actually—”

“However, I can’t enroll you in the Kluge therapy until you’ve been approved by one of our diagnosticians,” she said.

She told me she’d slotted me in for “a ten o’clock Mike.”

Her computer beeped.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Alwyn’s card. “Declined. Do you have another?”

I told her I did not.

“We are not above accepting cash,” she sniffed.

I sloughed a wad of bills from Borka’s Sad Mood stash.

A sage-uniformed porter unlocked my room with a key card made of wood. After he left, I lay in the bed and, nose against the window, peered down the rubbly slope on which the backside of the spa was perched, the vertiginous view a freeze-frame of falling. From somewhere in the nearby woods, I heard wolves. Then I realized it was a recording of wolves, piped through tiny speakers scattered like spores throughout the room.

When I called the Goergen to tell Alwyn I’d arrived, I was told that she was unavailable. I left a message saying that she might want to pay her credit card bill.

She did not call me back.

That evening I ate in the spa’s restaurant. My fellow diners were male-female couples in their fifties or sixties, seated across from one another at broad two-tops. Nobody spoke. Their faces remained slack, incommunicative blanks. Perhaps given my recent experiences—with silence-mandated meals, with postsurgical dining partners discouraged from facial displays of emotion—this did not strike me as unusual.