Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“You can’t deny that it’s a crazy coincidence,” Blanche repeated.

My father and I exchanged a baleful glance. Before my illness, this was another of my so-called abilities, what my father chose to see as an aptitude for engineering credulity-straining twists of fate. When I was ten he’d taken me to Hong Kong for a geology conference, and we’d met a photographer on the plane who told us about his assignment to track a nomadic eco-terrorist through “China” (he refused to be more specific), and since we, too, were headed to China — we planned to explore the caves in the Guilin karst region, those ulcers formed by salt water percolating through the limestone over a period of time measured by glaciers — we made plans to have dinner with the photographer in Hong Kong the next day, but the photographer never showed at the restaurant (we later learned he’d gotten food poisoning). Two weeks later my father and I flew to the tiny airport in Guilin, we took a four-hour boat trip down a river and then, when the river became too shallow, a flat-bottomed canoe, and as we approached the dock to our tiny stilted guesthouse we saw, standing at the end of the float, snapping photos of the birdless twilight sky, the photographer.

Coincidence, of course. But after a while you can begin to feel stalked by coincidence, or as though you can manipulate the world by expressing a narrative desire — this thread is loose, this thread inconclusive. It must be doubled back upon, it must recur. You can start to suspect, as I suspected, that I provided a gravitational center to which all lost people, past and present, were invisibly tethered, to which they were drawn. I know this sounds like the most profound sort of egoism. I don’t know how to make it sound otherwise.

But while I wanted to disregard Blanche’s exhortations to, as she put it, nurture life’s random alignments, I had to admit that I, too, was piqued by the fact that Varga had known my mother, and that, despite having at my disposal a few new data points, my mother had become (if this were even possible) more of an unknown to me. The longer I turned these new facts in the cement mixer of my mind, the more I failed to spin from her vexing particulates a substance that could harden without trapping, within its interior, a billion weakening voids. What was this resistance she lacked, what were these bad ideas? I could not synchronize the woman who’d married my sinkhole-obsessed dad with the woman who had lived in Paris, pawned ugly jewelry on the street, and hung out with artistic pornographers. If my dead mother refused to visit me, perhaps I could visit Varga, wrest from her the account I would never get from my father, who hadn’t been in Paris with her anyway.

For this reason, I met Alwyn and Colophon at the Regnor. If he wanted me for his “Varga project,” whatever that entailed, well, I could only assume our mutual goals would coincide, and I could quit my job at the showroom.

Though I wasn’t due at the Regnor’s bar until 6 p.m., I decided to go early and check out one of the Lost Film Conference panels. Alwyn had recommended “The End of Scarcity” since it was being moderated by Lydia, owner of the tweed coat.

The Regnor’s lobby was empty save for a lone weeper crying into the handset of the lobby’s busted courtesy phone, a sight that made me think, not wrongly, of me on my red phone in the showroom, a person speaking in public to the disconnected air.

I took the elevator to the third floor. Save for the flapping crepe paper sounds emitted by the floor vents, the hallways of the Regnor were silent, as though the building were host to a Zen meditation retreat rather than a film conference. I’d hoped that the door to Room 337 might be open to latecomers. It was not. I contemplated the door’s faux-wood paint job, wondering if I should knock or just enter.

I knocked.

The door opened; a person hushed me inside. People sat cross-legged on the bed and on the floor or stood against the wall; the four panelists occupied folding chairs pushed against the drapes, which were drawn.

One panelist, a sexpot in fishnets and ankle boots, eyed my awkward attempts to puzzle myself against a wall blank. She, possibly Lydia, announced that, prior to the panel, she planned to screen a few vanishing films rated “inspirational” by focus groups.

She killed the lights and, using a remote, thrummed up the room’s TV.

Each vanishing film began the same way: a black screen with a white identification number that cut to a person standing before a fake backdrop — of the Tokyo skyline, or of the Matterhorn, or of a Mars-scape roamed by mustangs.

A woman in her thirties, identified as 3298732-MU (backdrop: file closet interior), read an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) before reciting, for the remaining four minutes, the sentence “I thought that I could love you.”

The blandly pretty 7865456-BK (backdrop: rain ticking down a window screen) told stories about her childhood summer lake vacations in Minnesota. All of the people in her stories came off as charming and decent, her parents and siblings, her cousins and grandparents, even the stepfather who, she maintained, had molested her when she was twelve, but not without her permission.

A twenty-something man with a chapped upper lip, 8764533-WE, told a story about himself in the third person when he was babysitting the neighbors’ two-year-old son. The neighbor’s son was prone to running into the road, and so he’d decided to strap the boy into a plastic toboggan on the lawn, but then the family’s dog ran into the path of an oncoming car, and the car, in order to avoid the dog, swerved onto the lawn and crushed the boy, who was strapped into the toboggan and unable to save himself.

“But the truth was that the man had never liked that kid,” he said of himself. “He’d even, on occasion, wished him dead.”

We watched three more films, the most squirmy-making an homage to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , in which a man slit open a cow’s eye with a razor blade while speaking dispassionately about the pains of his dyslexic childhood.

The films ended, the TV screen cataracted by a brilliant block of cobalt. The room shifted as the people readied themselves again to be seen. Possibly-Lydia cued the lights.

A hippie panelist with Asian coin earrings opened the discussion by raising the issue of scarcity. Was scarcity scarcer than ever?

“My specific question,” she said, “is whether or not reproductions — of paintings, of people, but specifically I suppose I’m speaking about these films — create scarcity or negate it.”

“But we’re not talking reproductions,” countered a panelist who resembled, with her asymmetrical bob, a brunette Cyndi Lauper. “It’s not as though TK Ltd. is a wax museum. These are testimonies. These are not substitutes for actual people. You cannot touch them or hug them or fail to be hugged back.”

I struggled to focus my attention, finding it difficult to hear the panelists speaking over the voices of the vanished people, their testimonies echo-calling to one another in my head, their individual explanations weaving together to form a suffocating textile through which I found it hard to breathe. A sharpness, like an exercise cramp, cinched the underside of my diaphragm. Would you rather your mother be dead than alive and living somewhere else?

My answer was ugly and unequivocal. Given the choice, I’d prefer her dead. To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself . To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you .

“But you can’t deny,” Cyndi Lauper said, “that a wax museum carries a heavy death implication due to the embalmed quality attending even the best reproductions. Did you know that many so-called wax artists learn their tricks by apprenticing for morticians?”