The Vanishers (34 page)

My request, I understood, was complicated; what you want a person to know is often the last thing you want a person to know. For example, I wanted him to know about the terrible war waging in my brain. For months I’d lived in terror of seeing Varga’s face again, because even that single glance, via a grainy photograph, had initiated a scary variety of override. I could no longer conjure my mother’s face without seeing Varga’s half-baked rendition, as though the two had been combined by a lenticular lens, resulting in a stereoscopic 3-D effect in which, depending on the angle from which I viewed them, my mother became Varga and Varga became my mother, a rapid alternation that risked a dangerous blurring, even an extinction.

If I’d spoken to anyone about it, I would have spoken about it to him. But I never did. I’d made certain he never knew a thing about Dominique Varga. Given his general incuriosity about the aboveground world, and the fact that most of the press about Varga was in Europe anyway, it hadn’t been difficult to shield him from her.

“I’ve always assumed that you could know whatever you wanted to know about your mother,” my father said. “Thus I never had to make the decision about what
I
wanted you to know. Or what she would have wanted you to know. I’m embarrassed to say—that you didn’t require me to do this for you, I found it to be a great relief.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I understand.”

“There’s so much I can’t tell you,” he said. “No matter how much I might want to do so.”

Then he did what he could bring himself to do so rarely—he looked me in the face. I saw there, surging to the surface of his pupils, an oily flash of shame so repugnant I had to force myself
not to look away, to receive this confession he’d chosen, maybe involuntarily, to unloose. He was relieved she was gone. Maybe not immediately, but very soon after she’d died he’d realized—he’d been spared. In their marriage the bad had long outweighed the good, but she would never leave him, at least not by half measures. By dying she’d released him from a life of vicarious, and then increasingly not, misery. She’d been toxic, a chore. Then she died, and he’d never forgiven himself for getting so lucky. He’d been spared her worst, but allowed to keep her best in the form of me.

I understood why he couldn’t share this with anyone. I doubt he’d ever shared it with himself.

“In America today,” I said, smiling, because I knew when I smiled that I chased her resemblance away, “people overestimate the value of expression.”

I meant it. If he was incapable of telling me that we’d been better off on our own, I was just as incapable of telling him that there was a woman living (last I heard) in Paris with my mother’s face.

I stored the necklace in its box in the top drawer of Professor Blake’s wet bar, alongside his monogrammed muddler. For the obvious reasons, I never touched it. I came to view it as an unusual pet I had to keep in a cage, a small snake or lizard. One night I decided to wear it out.

The party was being thrown by and for Professor Hales, whose manuscript had won a prestigious English prize, the occult equivalent of the Man Booker.

I’d planned to drive with Professor Yuen, who came up to my apartment for a pre-party old-fashioned. She critiqued my outfit as
I muddled the maraschino and the sugar in the bottom of her high ball.

“A little meh,” she said. “Do you have a colorful scarf?”

I didn’t do scarves. Scarves were risky for psychics to wear unless you were Madame Ackermann, the equivalent of accessorizing with a crystal ball and a shoulder crow.

“How about a statement necklace?” Professor Yuen asked.

Since I was, at that moment, replacing the muddler in the drawer beside my mother’s necklace, to claim I didn’t own such an item would be too much of a bald-faced lie.

“Perfect,” Professor Yuen said, eyeing the pendant. “Is that some kind of a dog?”

“Dog?” I said.

She pointed to the pendant.

“It’s abstract,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s the eye,” Professor Yuen said, pointing to the red stone. “And the snout. A wolf, maybe.”

I squinted. It had only ever resembled a mean alphabet to me.

“I’m not seeing it,” I said.

The night was clear and cold. I smelled woodsmoke as I walked to Professor Yuen’s Saab, parked in a handicapped space in front of the vegan pizza parlor. The full moon shone with arctic intensity over East Warwick, reflecting off the tin roofs of Main Street, glaciating the landscape. We drove past the Workshop buildings, glowing in the woods, and took the scenic route along the river, sinuous as mercury between its banks. The night assumed a déjà vu creepiness that intensified when Professor Yuen turned off the river road and started to climb up the hill that led to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame.

“Where does Professor Hales live?” I asked.

“Top of this ridge,” Professor Yuen replied.

We passed Madame Ackermann’s driveway with its hinged For Sale sign. Through the woods it appeared as though the house was brightly inhabited, but really it was just the moon’s reflection in the windows.

The party was like every other Workshop party. Martinis and oven-warmed hors d’oeuvres, high-pitched congratulatory chitter-chatter ballasted by sotto voce bitching. Professor Hales gave a toast to himself—“there’s no one better qualified to tout my many virtues”—and a cake the size of a dollhouse was served. I’d drunk too much Prosecco and decided to take a breather in Professor Hales’s study, one wall of which was glass, affording a helicopter’s-eye view over the White Mountains. I pulled a chair close to the window and stared out at the mostly wilderness. Here and there signs of civilization blinked—windows, a cell tower, the sweep of car headlights on an unlit road—but primarily the scene promoted emptiness and loneliness, an ocean void of lifeboats.

I massaged my neck and between my shoulder blades, which had begun to ache. I lifted the pendant in my other hand, relieving myself of its weight. I was buzzed and trying to relax. Maybe I honestly did fall asleep, and maybe I only dreamed that I stood at the threshold of my parents’ old bedroom, the door in front of me a square outlined in light like an e-mail attachment I could click open by touching my hand to the knob. I waited. I heard wind. I touched the door. It opened. The interior was obscured by clockwise-swirling fog.

I entered.

A shadow at the back of the room took on volume and shape. My mother. She lay on the bed. I said nothing, not wanting to disturb her, not knowing if I was welcome—nor if I wanted to be. I took a step closer. Then another. She watched me approach; she did not, like some uncertain bird, flee.

Why now? I wanted to ask her. Why now, after all of these
years? But I didn’t dare talk. Words had no place in this foggy cocoon. We were, for the first time, meeting. We were only bodies.

But as I drew alongside her bed, she died. Before I could grab her hand and expect it to grab mine back. She closed her eyes and she died. Her body vanished. On the bed there was no trace of her, not even a fossilized rumple of sheets.

This was astonishing. Stunning. Then a boiling, obliterating rage burst from my mouth. The words ricocheted like bullets shot by a person sealed inside a shipping container. Trapped velocity. These words could hurt no one but me. This did not stop me from saying them. Couldn’t she have waited until I reached her bed to fucking die? Was that too much to ask? I was sorry that she’d been so miserable. But I did not accept this as an excuse. She’d had a duty to be interested in me; that alone should have kept her alive, at least until my first Christmas, or until my first day of school, or until my first heartbreak, or until my first bad haircut, or until the first time I had a stomach bug and needed someone to hold my head out of the toilet. I had never blamed her for this failure. Not once. Nor did I blame her for possibly sickening me for over a year, or for my entire life. If I had never properly grieved, was that my fault? I couldn’t miss her because there was no one to miss. Which made me confused, it scrambled my emotional compass, this magnetic craving toward norths that didn’t exist. It was like missing a missing. So the least she could do was wait until I’d reached her bed to die. The least she could do was give me one experience, one, so that I could grieve her—not her absence,
her
—every single day of my life.

The necklace choked me. It was a drag, an unhealthy attachment. I freed my head from its noose. I threw.

Professor Hales genially chalked my misbehavior up to drunkenness, and asked that I pay for the cost of replacing the giant window, which would run me $2,000. Professor Yuen confiscated
the necklace from me as though it were a mace I might use to brain an innocent party guest.

“Keep it,” I said.

“I’ll keep it for you,” she said.

“You can sell it on eBay,” I said. “You can throw it in the fucking river.”

“I think there’s been enough throwing for one evening,” Professor Yuen responded curtly.

That night I went home and put a block on my e-mail account. aconcernedfriend was not and had never been Madame Ackermann. aconcernedfriend was my mother. And I rejected her variety of concern. I did not need her fucking concern. Concern was a bullshit way of caring for a person you couldn’t or wouldn’t love.

I figured my breakdown at Professor Hales’s would mandate a tarnishing of my status in Workshop circles—I was a lunatic—but instead the shattering of Professor Hales’s window was read as further proof of my fiery unpredictability and reinforced my reputation as a person who caused interesting harm.

I was the not-to-be-messed-with genius.

I was the new Madame Ackermann.

This was my victory. This was fate—to become the bad person I apparently, despite the extreme measures taken to prevent my contamination, could not help but become.

In the short term, taking Madame Ackermann’s place was my way of graciously permitting the mistake that had been made, for the time being, in my favor. This lie I cultivated because I preferred it to people knowing that I experienced every day as a solitary hell. If I had come to miss my pain, it was not because I was a masochist or a martyr, but because to be free of pain was to be, in the most soul-vacant way, alone. The reason I preferred pain was nothing that a poetic if inaccurate application of the first law of thermodynamics couldn’t explain. If matter cannot be destroyed, neither
can the lack of matter be destroyed, because the lack, over time, becomes matter, it becomes the equivalent of the plaster cast of the interior of an empty room.

A year later, I scrolled through my e-mail inbox—somehow I’d accumulated 3,689 unread messages since I’d returned to East Warwick—and noticed the e-mail from Colophon to which I’d never responded. His yearlong position at the university in Lyon had terminated in the interim, and he hadn’t bothered to send me an update on his whereabouts.

Again I saw the link he’d included. This time I followed it.

IS FAILURE TO GRIEVE A CRIME AGAINST THE DEAD? read the headline of an article published in a London art journal. I examined the accompanying photo of Alwyn and Dominique Varga.

A severe bob fit Alwyn’s skull like a downhill ski-racing helmet. She sat on the arm of Varga’s wingchair, Varga’s hand stilled in the act of smoothing Alwyn’s head, a gesture so familiar it made me—as though I were the one being touched—recoil.

Varga’s face, fortunately, was obscured by shadow.

The article detailed what I’d deduced to be true about Alwyn’s involvement with Varga. Varga had contacted Alwyn after she’d seen Alwyn’s film homages to her own work. Alwyn, as coincidence would have it, was by then assisting a scholar named Colophon Martin who was writing a book about Varga. Varga’d quite liked Colophon’s theories that she’d been “exploiting an ideology,” and so hired Alwyn in order to manipulate the story being written about her from within.

“We decided, however,” Alwyn was quoted as saying, “that the truth would be more fruitfully misleading than yet another lie.”

Alwyn spoke about her undergraduate dissertation—scheduled,
with updates, to be published as a book—that promised to show how Varga’s portrayal of female exploitation and passivity (deemed “masochistic” and “viciously retrograde pornography” and “satire without the satire” by her critics) could be construed as an antifeminist message that was, in fact, urgently feminist. Feminists, Alwyn said, had been “killing the mother” or “killing the daughter” for decades in the name of advancement.