Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I put a finger over my eyelid; I pushed. I often had the sense that my symptoms were insects, and to eradicate them was to cause a mess of little deaths.

“You mean Madame Ackermann visited her office,” I corrected her. “I wrote down what she told me.”

Alwyn smirked.

“Right, well,” she said. “I’m sure it’s hard to tell who did what. I imagine you must have lost your sense of self while working for such a visionary. In an exciting way, I mean.”

A waiter arrived with the sherry and the seltzer. Alwyn signed the check and held out her glass.

“To Dominique Varga,” Alwyn said.

I clinked her glass warily. My seltzer was flat. As with all previously carbonated liquids, the departed air made the remaining liquid seem heavier than regular liquid, like a saline syrup.

“Varga’s best known for her political propaganda,” Alwyn said, “but I’m more interested in her porn films. As part of my college thesis, I remade a few of them.”

“You made porn films?”

“And starred in them.”

“Huh,” I said. I suspected that I was being baited, but couldn’t divine what with or for what purpose. “Did you lose your sense of self in an exciting way?”

She squinted at the skylight.

“You sound like Colophon,” she said.

“Colophon?” I said.

“Even though we work together we’ve never seen eye to eye, ideologically speaking, on Varga’s porn.”

“Colophon Martin?” I said. I repeated his name in my head, though with far less composure.

“I’d call him to come meet us but the lobby’s courtesy phone is busted,” she said. “And there’s no cell reception in here.”

“No, really,” I assured her. “That’s fine.”

The elevator dinged. Seven people emerged. Three of them were crying.

This encounter was now officially freaking me out.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Alwyn. “Who are you?”

“I’m the person who’s here to help you,” she said.

She stared at my hands, oven-mitted by eczema. I slid them beneath my thighs.

“Contrary to how it might appear,” I said, “I don’t need your help.”

“Trust me,” Alwyn said. “You do. Colophon will explain everything. He’s excited to collaborate with you on his Varga project.”

“What Varga project?” I said.

“I should also tell you that I’ve slept with him,” she said.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” I said.

“Just a little pro forma full disclosure,” she said. “If you learn later that he and I slept together it would make the previous months that you and I worked with each other seem like a prolonged period of betrayal.”

“I already have a job,” I said. I clutched the padded arms of my chair; I squeezed them so hard I touched its underlying skeleton. This mortal chair , I thought. “A position. I’m sorry. What are you offering me?”

“I can’t disclose the details,” she said, “because Colophon is a control nut and insists on telling you himself. Also,” she continued, “I suppose, if I were to be honest, I’m in a not-so-direct way warning you not to sleep with Colophon. According to my Jungian stepfather I’m pathologically territorial and view all females as competition, even for people or things I no longer want.”

A woman emerged from the elevator sobbing quietly, her dignified sorrow amplified to hysterics by the lobby’s acoustics.

Alwyn squeezed her temples between a thumb and forefinger.

“Could you help me up to my room?” she said. “I need to lie down.”

I started to refuse. I had done for Alwyn what any sick stranger owed another sick stranger, and now I could go home. I imagined exiting the Regnor and walking past the shellacked roasts in the butcher’s window, free from whatever complications a further relationship with Alwyn and Colophon Martin and a “project” concerning Dominique Varga would doubtless guarantee, until I remembered the tedious existence, momentarily upset by this woman and her engineered accident, my leaving would force me to resume. The return to my low-ceilinged apartment, the ceaseless strobe lights on the backs of my eyes, the steroid creams that smelled like mildewed bath towels, the friendlessness I’d cultivated as a means of limiting my social shame to a circle of one, the pill routine, the stupid job, the loneliness, the fact that my life, at twenty-six, had already notched onto a joyless track, the only derailment option one I would never, given my family history, consider.

I caught an inadvertent glimpse of someone in the lobby mirror; I mistook that someone, me, for a frightened old lady, tensely palpating the chair in which she sat, appearing like an Alzheimer’s victim who’s emerged from a sundowner fugue with even less of an idea than usual who or where she is.

A disruption to the given system.

Even knowing what I know now, I cannot blame myself for making what would reveal itself to be a very poor decision.

I stayed.

Alwyn’s room smelled of frequently vacuumed carpets. While I poured the cappuccinos into a water pitcher and removed the contents of the minibar in order to chill it, she lay on the sofa and told me about Colophon’s involvement with the Lost Film Conference.

“I thought he was a control nut,” I said of Colophon.

“He trusts me with his backstory,” she said. “I’m his authorized context provider.”

“That’s your job title?”

“Job title would imply I was paid,” she said.

“I guess that’s why he had sex with you,” I said. “As a form of compensation.”

She smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth.

“I like you,” she said. She seemed more impressed with herself for liking me than with for me being likable.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Seriously,” she said. “I don’t tend to get along with women.”

Reclining on the sofa with a can of minibar beer pressed against her forehead, Alwyn told me how, while researching his book on Dominique Varga, Colophon had become acquainted with a man named Timothy Kincaid, a billionaire Cincinnati businessman plagued by Howard Hughes-ish behavioral oddities who was, more notably, the biggest private collector of Varga’s films. Though Kincaid initially refused to share with Colophon his Varga collection, he’d been impressed by Colophon’s résumé and hired him to help his company, TK Ltd., archive the film holdings generated by Kincaid’s pet project, a suicide prevention service called vanish.org.

Best I could ascertain from Alwyn’s description of it, vanish.org functioned as a type of witness protection program for people who weren’t in danger of being killed by anyone but themselves.

“Kincaid studied the negative psychological effects of what he called ‘disambiguation,’ ” Alwyn explained, “meaning the supposed clarity that follows the removal of ambiguity, which is the counterproductive goal of so much talk therapy these days.”

“Disambiguation?” I said. My stepmother Blanche was an occasional disambiguator on Wikipedia; when she wasn’t tamping her manias on the potting wheel, she was disambiguating a Wikipedia page on rice.

“Clarity, it turns out, is a death sentence,” Alwyn said. “Kincaid decided that by introducing patients to ‘reambiguation,’ i.e., by removing a person from his or her ambiguity-free, suicide-provoking context, he could offer them a viable suicide alternative.”

“How does a person reambiguate?” I asked.

“Kincaid prefers to call it vanishing,” Alwyn said.

“How does a person vanish?” I said.

“They leave and never go home,” she said. “It’s a very simple process.”