Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

The Regnor was located on the kind of generic Manhattan block that vanishes the moment you leave it. We passed a dry cleaner and a florist and a butcher with signs that read DRY CLEANER and FLORIST and BUTCHER. I paused to stare at the unpetrified roasts in the butcher’s window, their wet surfaces appearing, in the mute December daylight, shellacked.

Once inside the Regnor’s lobby, Alwyn dropped onto a velvet deco couch, its nap balded to the backing fabric in certain popular butt- and head-resting places. Overhead, the lobby was degloomed by a stained-glass skylight that might have portrayed an image of twining ivy, though the ivy might have been snakes. I positioned myself on an armchair so that I couldn’t see my reflection in the giant mirror on the opposite wall. My face — meds-bloated and, due to the recent onset of Bell’s palsy, afflicted by a droopy right eyelid — remained a surprise I could not avoid inspecting.

Alwyn set her coffees on the table, unbuttoned the HELLO LYDIA coat, and lay back, her head notching into one of the upholstery’s denuded spaces.

“My skull’s killing me,” she said.

I reached into my bag’s inner pocket and withdrew a handful of plastic pharmacy bottles.

I shook three painkillers into my palm.

“Pick one,” I said.

Alwyn chose a pink Darvocet and washed it down with a swig of cappuccino. I followed with six different pills. These I swallowed dry. Caffeine was contraindicated for thirteen of my twenty-three medications; plus I was a practiced pill taker now, my esophagus an inflatable airplane slide. Nor did I mind that these medications caused my psychic abilities to disappear. Shorting out a streetlamp by walking beneath it seemed as impossible to me now as extinguishing, by walking beneath it, the sun.

“So this is where the textile conference is being held?” I said.

“What textile conference?” Alwyn said.

“Aren’t you here for a textile conference?” I said.

“No,” she said. “A film conference.”

“Ah,” I said, wondering where I had come up with the idea of the textile conference. This was not unusual for me these days, to fail to make proper inquiries of people, to stopper their blanks with my uninformed filler. In the past, I hadn’t needed to ask. “What kind of film conference?”

“A lost film conference,” she said.

“Ah,” I said again. “The films were lost?”

“ ‘Lost’ refers to the people in the films,” she said. “Though it’s slightly more complicated than that.”

I nodded as if I understood. She dug into the pocket of the HELLO LYDIA coat and withdrew an enameled cigarette case that she, or more likely Lydia, used to store breath mints.

“So,” she said, “what’s up with all the medication?”

“I’m living the dream,” I said. “Bewildered girl in her mid-twenties moves to the big city, works a crappy, unrewarding job, and dulls her existential disorientation with drugs.”

“These are recreational,” she said. “You’re not sick anymore.”

My eyelid spasmed.

“I heard you’d been sick for a long time,” she said.

Behind her, the lobby elevator disgorged a trio of ashen people. One of them was crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

“Thirteen and a half months,” she said.

“Since we’ve met?”

“Since you became sick.”

I did some creaky arithmetic.

“That’s more or less correct,” I said.

“More or less since the twenty-fifth of October, two Octobers ago.”

“More or less exactly,” I said, getting nervous. Who the hell was this person?

Alwyn leaned closer.

“I say this as a friend,” she said. “There’s nothing you could tell me about yourself that we don’t already know.”

We, I thought. Then, Ah . Alwyn was a Workshop person; maybe, it occurred to me, and not without a little bit of envy and indignation, she was Madame Ackermann’s new stenographer. Or maybe she’d been sent here by Professor Yuen to check on me, less because Professor Yuen cared, more because she needed, from an administrative perspective, to discover whether or not I “merited” another semester’s medical leave. (“The student must prove,” she’d written in an e-mail, roboticized by her trademark form-letter-speak, “by submitting a T-76 form, filled out by a physician, an ongoing medical condition, or take a leave of absence and pay $1,000 per semester to hold his or her spot until that future point when he or she is medically sanctioned to return.”)

“But you’re not my friend,” I said.

Alwyn considered this.

“True,” she conceded, flopping back against the couch. “But I will be.”

I registered this as a threat.

OK , I thought, bored enough by my life to find her coyness intriguing. I’ll play your game .

“Could I have a mint?” I asked.

I recognized her now, or at least I thought I did. She was Stan’s cousin; she’d visited him a few falls ago as a Workshop prospective.

That Madame Ackermann or any of my old friends at the Workshop were gossiping about me struck me as the height of insensitivity, especially when not a single one of them (save Professor Yuen) had bothered to shoot me so much as an e-mail to see how I was doing. The only person who wrote to me was aconcernedfriend; the e-mails themselves had no content, but they always included the same video attachment of swirling fog, through which I could see a woman on a bed.

But my indignation ebbed, replaced by a far more pathetic response. People at the Workshop were talking about me, Madame Ackermann was talking about me, ergo — I still mattered.

Alwyn offered the cigarette case. I accepted a mint. I suctioned quick craters in the surface.

“So,” I said. “You must be a first-year Initiate.”

“I’m no longer at the Workshop,” she said. “According to Madame Ackermann, I wasn’t ‘initiate material.’ ”

“You were never her stenographer?” I said.

“I was a Mortgage Payment,” she said.

She appeared more bothered by this failure than she cared to let on.

She gestured to a porter.

“Could I get a sherry, please?” she asked.

The porter nodded. He peered at me.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” I said.

“Nothing?” Alwyn asked.

“Maybe a seltzer,” I said.

“We have a lot in common, more than just our rejection by Madame Ackermann,” Alwyn said, and then proceeded to describe a life with which mine shared nothing in common (including “rejection by Madame Ackermann”—I didn’t have the energy to parse the distinctions between her and me on this matter; I had never been a Mortgage Payment). She’d grown up in Scarsdale and gone to boarding school in Switzerland, her mother had once been a famous shampoo model known as “the Breck Girl,” her father died when she was thirteen, after which her mother had a series of boyfriends before marrying a Jungian psychotherapist and moving to Berne. Before her brief stint at the Workshop, Alwyn had been a Women’s Studies major at Bryn Mawr, where she’d written her thesis on passivity as a form of feminist protest in the films of Dominique Varga.

She stared at me as though I were meant to glean some extra significance from this information.

“Dominique Varga,” she repeated.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Dominique Varga is the Leni Riefenstahl of France,” Alwyn said. “The woman whose office you visited when you were Madame Ackermann’s stenographer.”

My eyelid spasmed again and refused, this time, to stop. I associated the Leni Riefenstahl of France with my Autumn of Deception, which was, I believed at that point, to blame for my sickness. Chronic fraudulence, and endeavoring to do things beyond my abilities, had destroyed my immune system — in the words of one internist, I’d zapped my motherboard .