Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Madame Ackermann, at least via the usual channels, never contacted me again.

The first time I met Alwyn I mistook her for a Lydia.

It was just past lunchtime on a broody day in December, the sky issuing over Manhattan a slushy gruel. A girl hurried through the electronic glass doors of the Belgian Natural Fiber Flooring Company Showroom balancing, on one upturned palm, a molded takeout tray plugged with four coffee cups.

In the twelve months since I’d left the Workshop and assumed my position at the flooring company — literally, I’d been hired to assume a position , to sit for eight hours a day in a chair whose name, if it even had one, I never bothered to learn — I’d ascertained that the majority of our customers weren’t customers at all, but tourists who mistook me for an art installation. Despite its name the showroom showed very little save a clear Lucite desk, a jute rug — a barbed and unkempt thing, woven of coconut shell fibers and resembling, because of its swirled weave, the hair that collects over a shower drain — a red dial telephone, and me; as pedestrians walked by the plate glass that faced Park Avenue, I’d been instructed to hold the phone against my ear and move my lips. Because wires would have been visible behind the clear desk, the phone wasn’t connected; nonetheless, when a person entered the showroom I was to speak in prescripted Arabic to a pretend customer calling from a state within the United Arab Emirates. When I asked my boss, a beautiful Belgian-Iraqi woman, about the significance of the Emirates, she responded, arms outstretched to indicate the whole of our white, hypercooled space, “Because we call this concept The Emirates.”

But this girl — I categorized her as an unusual customer. I noticed her sodden Mary Janes, her so-thin-it-was-pointless coat, the sticker adhered to her lapel; beneath the preprinted HELLO a person, presumably she, had written LYDIA in blue ink.

I experienced a twang of jealousy for these assistants and the interns of the city, robust young people running around in imprudent outerwear with no need for health insurance, people who were the same age as me but who’d proven immune to physical and psychological downturns lasting longer than a weekend matinee.

As this unusual customer beelined for my desk, however, she caught her toe on the corner of the jute rug and departed the floor, kraft tray outstretched and then released so that it collided with my chest as I’d been uttering in Arabic to no one, “I’ll transfer you to the sales department.”

The brown milk soaked my dress, but given that my late-morning round of pills had hummed into effect — blunting both my nerves and my reaction time — I felt neither the heat nor the shock.

The girl lay in a heap of coat, two fingers pressed above her eyebrow.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She peered upward through the Lucite desk, the curve of which distorted her head into an encephalitic swoop. She had red hair and blond roots that were the photographic negative of most roots, white instead of dark. They made her middle part seem two inches wide, a firebreak shaved over her skull that traced the exact path of the longitudinal brain fissure located beneath the bone.

“Huh,” I said, staring at that firebreak.

She palpated her left frontal lobe.

“Some people have an electrified steel plate inserted between their left and right brain hemispheres,” I said, wondering if perhaps she’d had this operation.

“What?” she said.

“To prevent bilateral contamination,” I said.

“I hardly think it’s that serious,” she said. “It was just a little graze.”

She trained her eyes spacily on my feet.

“I like your boots,” she said.

I was wearing my silver party boots, though I now considered them simply boots. The last party I’d attended I’d been felled by such a gutting attack of vertigo that I’d been forced to spend the night in the stairwell of the hostess’s apartment building, the flights of steps throbbing above me like a stressed vascular system. The last date I’d been on I’d bled from the mouth when kissed. My last visit to a restaurant I’d spent voiding my intestines in the unisex bathroom. Whereas I’d once been able to infiltrate other people’s lives and heads while I remained unknown to them, now the opposite was true. Everyone was an impenetrable stranger to me, while I proved a livid advertisement for myself. My symptoms were an ugly secret I couldn’t help but share. Save to go to my job or the occasional doctor appointment or yoga class taught by the soothing adherents of a Canadian named John, I’d become a hermit. If I could not prevent the nausea, the insomnia-provoking pricks of light on the insides of my eyelids, the canker sores, the explosive bowel, the numb extremities, the swollen joints, the eczema-covered hands, I could at least limit the unattractive way that people came to know me when I was anything but alone.

“Thank you,” I said of my boots.

“Your dress,” she said. “I’ve ruined it.”

“It’s fine,” I said, though it was not.

“And your rug,” she said.

“Not my rug,” I said.

“Do you have any stain remover?” she asked. “It’s important to apply stain remover within the first two minutes of the stain event.”

“I believe there’s some in the break room,” I said.

I started alone toward the break room, where there was a folding table and a charry old coffeemaker — we’d been told never to bring a customer to the break room — but it seemed lawsuit-worthy, not to mention very mean, to abandon a customer with a head injury.

“Come with me,” I said. “We’ll get you some ice.”

The girl stood woozily, though it’s possible she always stood that way — her body was a bad bit of engineering, her legs pick-thin and double-jointed, her large breasts seemingly transplanted from another girl.

“I don’t need ice,” said the girl. She held out her hand. “I’m Alwyn,” she said.

I glanced at her HELLO LYDIA nametag.

She unbuttoned her coat to reveal a mussy cardigan underneath, to which was affixed a HELLO ALWYN sticker. While Lydia wrote her name in architecturally precise caps, Alwyn’s script looped around like a piece of dropped string.

“I’m Julia,” I said.

I located the stain remover in the cupboard above the coffeemaker.

“Dry cleaners will scold you for pretreating a stain,” Alwyn said, “but thirty-five percent of stains can be positively impacted by pretreatment.”

“You know a lot about stains,” I observed as Alwyn, seated at the folding table, sprayed my dress.

“I’m the daughter of a textile magnate,” she said. “When I was young I thought that meant he was a man to whom fabrics would gravitate and stick.”

“Are you in town on textile business?” I asked. This, of course, would explain why she had entered the showroom.

“I’m here for a conference,” she said.

The conference was being held at a hotel I hadn’t heard of called the Regnor.

“There,” she said, finishing with my dress. “Let’s do the carpet.”

She stood up. She sat back down.

“Dizzy,” she said.

My cell phone rang. It was the Belgian-Iraqi woman.

She said she’d heard there’d been a mishap at the Emirates. I confirmed this to be the case. She ordered me to lock the doors.

“But I have a customer right now,” I said.

“Get rid of the customer,” she said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

For what would prove to be the first but not the last time in our relationship, I wondered how to get rid of Alwyn.