Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Why don’t I walk you back to your hotel,” I offered.

To replace the coffees she’d spilled, I took her to a Greek café that served hot beverages in Styrofoam cups, the kind with the rims you can’t resist biting.

As I was waiting for her to pay, my cell phone rang again. The Belgian-Iraqi woman, I assumed, checking to make sure I’d locked the showroom doors. I dug around in my bag, trying to distinguish by touch the plastic of my many pill bottles from the plastic of my phone. The plastic of my phone pretended, to the eye, to be stainless steel, and to the touch it did feel slightly colder, though perhaps that was my imagination.

It was not the Belgian-Iraqi woman.

“Hi,” said my father.

“Hi,” I said.

While he said nothing I held the phone a safe few inches from my ear, his audible unease registering to me like a neglected teakettle’s whistle. He and my stepmother Blanche had just arrived from Monmouth, New Hampshire, where I’d grown up, where they still lived. They’d come to Manhattan on the pretense of seeing a ceramics exhibit of a onetime mistress of Duchamp, but their real reason, I knew, was to check on me.

Finally he spoke.

“I’m just making sure we’re still on for dinner,” he said.

“We’re still on,” I said. My poor father acted around me like a guy expecting to be dumped.

I asked him what else he and Blanche had planned during their visit.

“Tomorrow I’m having lunch with a former colleague from South America,” he offered. “He’s in town delivering a paper about the sinkholes in Guatemala City.” My father also specialized in sinkholes, though his area of expertise was a man-made phenomenon called “chemical weathering.”

“The Guatemala City sinks,” my father continued, “certainly have, I’m not denying it, an inexplicably perfect roundness.”

He paused. He’d been headed somewhere with this information, but he’d temporarily forgotten where.

“Oh,” he said, remembering. “The inexplicable perfect roundness. Did you know there’s such a thing as Paranormal Geology?”

“I didn’t know that, no,” I said. Of course I knew it, but it excited him to think he was telling me something I didn’t.

“I thought you might get a kick out of that,” he said, making it clear that he absolutely did not get a kick out of it — territorial incursions by soft science into hard he found distressing — but that he could, as a father, allow himself to get a kick out of my getting a kick out of it, and wasn’t that something?

I had to agree that it was.

More ill-at-ease silence. I held the phone away from my head, the full length of my arm. I recognized, however, now as always, it wasn’t his fault that he behaved toward me as he did. To be honest, I doubt I would have been able to receive his adoration in any less clumsy or oblique a manner. Our relationship was a sensitive coproduction, no one person’s brainchild, no one person’s fault.

“And so how are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Good, good. By any chance did you get the article Blanche sent about candida?”

“The opera?”

“The systemic yeast infection,” he said. “A common affliction among unmarried women in their twenties. You should ask your doctors about it.”

I promised I would. This prompted him to launch into a story about a colleague who’d contracted a rare variety of flesh-eating bacteria while hiking in New Hampshire, but none of the doctors could quite believe he’d contracted the flesh-eating bacteria where he claimed to have contracted it, because this particular flesh-eating bacteria had never been documented so far north of the equator.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this anecdote. That doctors were immune to surprise? That his colleague was a hypochondriac, an amnesiac, or a liar?

The latter was the more likely interpretation, given my father and Blanche were effortlessly, incurably healthy people, and thus convinced that a variety of mental weakness must plague any person who wasn’t equally vigorous. Though neither my father nor Blanche had ever said as much, I knew they both figured me for a hysteric, Blanche repeatedly plying me with copies of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and reminding me that “hysteria, in Greek, means ‘traveling uterus.’ ” They were concerned but skeptical; they doubted the symptoms, if not the existence of a cause.

I did not take their concerned skepticism personally. Concerned skepticism, after all, had been my father’s default mode toward me since the age of three, when I was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist with electromagnetic hyperactivity, which explained why our household appliances — toasters, radios, computers — were perpetually blowing fuses or known to spontaneously, in my presence, fail. By the time I was eight I could darken streetlamps by walking beneath them, I could set off car and house alarms and inspire automatic garage doors to a state of rapid fibrillation. By the time I was twelve I realized that I could, on the random occasion, mindfully direct these electrons (if that’s what they were) into spaces where my body had never been. I knew when I saw a woman crying on the street that she’d had her purse stolen on the train. I knew by the backs of a bank teller’s hands that his wife had recently suffered a miscarriage.

My father and I did not speak about my predilections, and I honored his sense of decorum by keeping to innocuous practices, such as telling him that he should be very nice to his secretary because her husband had lost their nest egg at the track. We functioned as a family until I started menstruating and Blanche became necessary. When I left for boarding school, at fourteen, my father treasured me as much as anyone can humanly treasure a person who has come to resemble his dead first wife.

“And now he’s lost his foot,” my father said of his colleague.

“Insane,” I said.

“Which could be good for him,” my father said. “A disruption to the given system.”

I indulged a mental eye roll. “A disruption to the given system” was a well-worn phrase of my father’s, his way of cauterizing any conversation or situation that risked devolving into an emotionally messy bleed-out.

“At any rate, keep a lookout for that candida article. You should have received it last week.”

“It could be a while,” I said. “My mailman’s an alcoholic.”

This initiated a different sort of silence from my father, a disapproving silence. My internist had forbidden any type of psychic activity, and had gone so far as to prescribe an anti-seizure medication that cut all psychic radio signals, making it impossible to disobey his orders even if I’d wanted to.

“He stinks of gin and has a clown nose,” I said. “Even you would know he was a drunk.”

Alwyn, I noticed, was resting her head miserably on the pastry display case. I thought, the weight of the world . I thought, the girl with two lonely, decontaminated brains . Then I remembered: she was hurt.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll see you at the restaurant.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Very good,” he said. “Good-bye.”

Good-bye , I started to say.

Instead I said: “I can’t wait to see you.”

“We’ll talk then,” he said.

“Then we’ll talk,” I said.

I snapped our connection to a close, but an aftershock remained. From within my phone’s fake metal shell I sensed the weakening pulse of the many words we never found we much needed, once confronted with each other’s actual faces, to say.