Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I was only too happy to oblige.

After catching Madame Ackermann’s yard sale junk for nearly thirty minutes, the professors began to get bored. Professor Blake, unable to secure a martini refill, defaulted to sipping abandoned drinks. “Is it cake time?” whined Professor Hales. Professor Yuen, a recreational harpist, strummed a bookshelf bungee.

“One last throw,” Madame Ackermann begged. “A torque for the road.”

The professors, Yuen included, agreed to humor Madame Ackermann.

I stood on the landing of Madame Ackermann’s staircase, hands gripping the banister, peering over the heads of my professors, ego inflamed by my superior conviction that I was, in so many literal ways, above them all.

Again Madame Ackermann hair-curtained her eyes, locked her chin. She leaned so far forward, shins hovering at a ninety-degree angle, it was as though she’d nail-gunned her Dr. Scholl’s to the floorboards. For the last time that evening, she threw.

This was the throw for which she’d been reserving her energies, and explained why she’d spent the past half hour lobbing meaningless trash; she’d been building to what was known as a psychic cascade, when a person’s superior abilities have been utilized for silly tasks, thereby causing a surplus of energy to accumulate.

I did not intend to “catch” what Madame Ackermann threw, but to avoid doing so was like trying not to watch a car burn. What tumulted through the air was a wheel of horror (dismembered limbs, splatters of gray matter) that repeated its sequence as it rolled toward me. I clutched the banister. Dizzy did not begin to describe how I felt.

The wheel slowed as it came within inches of my face, the images condensing into a compact gory redness. She threw a bloody egg , I thought. But no. Spidery fault lines appeared in the egg’s surface as Madame Ackermann’s hairy-eared torque emerged from its chrysalis.

Fenrir.

His oversized wolf jaws parted and I saw, bobbing in the glottal gloom, my own disembodied head.

More distressing still: nobody else saw what I was seeing.

“Sorry, love,” I heard Professor Penry say to Madame Ackermann. “Botched that one.”

“The risk of throwing torques when you’re forty,” said Professor Yuen. “The blank rate is one in three.”

“Cake time,” said Professor Wibley.

In my sensitized state, I could practically hear the gloating. My professors thought Madame Ackermann had thrown a blank (i.e., a torque that fails, from the outset, to coalescence into anything more precise than a blob of spinning fog). And she had thrown a blank. An intentional blank. But that wasn’t all. Whereas her first throw of the night had been a straightforward torque — a single throw that appears to most as one thing, but to the skilled few as its evolved, “second-phase” form — her final throw was a double torque, wherein two unique throws occur in parallel, in this case a blank and a spiral (alone a highly advanced maneuver).

At that moment, however, I was too locked inside my own skull to see anything beyond its dome, upon whose surface strobe-lighted an explosion of over-exposed images.

Then my life went dark.

I awoke on Madame Ackermann’s Biedermeier to the clipped sounds of Professor Yuen speaking on her cell phone to the school nurse. I felt as though someone had inserted a hacksaw at my hairline and removed the top of my skull. A foggy substance whisked over my brain, cooling it dangerously, cooling it to the point of hyperthermia; I sensed my brain shutting down, and yet in the midst of this psychic twilight I was beset by visions, the last ones I’d have for a while. I stared at the water-stained ceiling above the Biedermeier. This is what she sees from here . Madame Ackermann, poor dear, looked at her ceiling and saw only a ceiling. A hilarious idea intruded on my delusional state, one destabilized, still, by the peripheral darts of jaws and teeth —someday I’ll take her place .

Then I heard a horrible noise, like someone mortar-and-pestling shards of glass. I turned my head. Madame Ackermann, I noticed and with some alarm — had I spoken my thoughts aloud? — sat next to me on the Barcelona chair, attention trained on Professor Yuen while one hand rested on my forehead, holding against it an icy dish rag.

She scratched an oval of eczema on her collarbone. The bottom of the oval disappeared into her shirt, presumably connected to the original patch now armoring her entire abdomen and making a play for her face. Her fingers provoked an irritated blush that yielded, as she clawed her way downward, to the sleepy burble of actual blood.

She appeared pursued, even trapped.

Madame Ackermann was scared .

This unnerved me more than the dizziness, more than the snouts and teeth that continued to buzz my optic nerve, more than the one-by-one extinguishing of my brain cells. What was she scared of? Who was going to help me now?

I groaned.

Madame Ackermann noticed that I was conscious and reset her facial expression, staring at me with what I still stupidly read as concern.

She leaned over me. I thought, for a deranged half second, that she was going to kiss me on the lips.

“You poor thing,” Madame Ackermann whispered, mouth inches from mine, fingers raking her neck. “You look like you’ve seen a wolf.”

The rumor that made the rounds claimed I’d had a seizure at Madame Ackermann’s house, brought on by my attempts to catch as a novice. I’d strained something, or broken something, or disturbed some precious equilibrium by exhorting my brain to perform an activity it was not trained to perform.

I believed this, too.

I remained at the Workshop through the end of the semester even though I spent most of my waking hours in bed, too ill to attend class. Madame Ackermann released me from my stenographer/archivist duties and replaced me, “only until you feel well enough to resume your position,” with an initiate named Pam. At the behest of Madame Ackermann, Pam became my unofficial nursemaid, appearing at my apartment with tin-pan strudels and liter containers of broth. Because I was too weak to drive, Pam took me to my appointments at the hospital in the next town. There I was administered blood tests, screened for Lyme disease, lymphoma, mono, lupus, and MS, prescribed antibiotics, anti-seizure meds, SSRIs. By winter break, I had been diagnosed with seven different diseases, fetal medical hunches that never survived the subsequent rounds of testing.

The very worst of my symptoms, however, was this: a chronic insomnia unhelped by the winking pricks of light I saw on the backsides of my eyelids. To close my eyes was akin to being flashed by a car’s high beams.

Before the Workshop closed for winter break, I received a letter from Professor Yuen suggesting that I take a leave of absence. She followed her suggestion with a citation of policy, something to the effect that new semesters could not be embarked upon until the incompletes issued the previous semester had been resolved.

On December 12, I packed my suitcases and broke my lease. I e-mailed Madame Ackermann to thank her for all she’d done, and two days later got an auto-response from her that said, “This message has no content.” Soon I began receiving regular spam from an online dating service whose e-mail handle was “aconcernedfriend”; their motto was “Anything Is Possible.” When I clicked the video attachment, all I saw was a blob of clockwise-spinning fog, inside of which I could occasionally discern the shape of a woman lying motionless on a bed.