Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Exactly,” I said.

“Sometimes her eyes look blue and sometimes black,” she said. “And what was she thinking with the over-the-head braids? She might as well have tattooed the word hausfrau on her forehead, or what little you could see of it under those dustpan bangs.”

“ ‘He tells me how badly I photograph,’ ” I said, quoting from the poem “Death & Co.” Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself — she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me — no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face.

“Irenke,” the woman said, failing to extend a hand.

“Julia,” I said.

Finally the bartender appeared.

“Can I get you something?” he asked.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

“I’ll have what I’m having,” Irenke said.

“Make it two,” I said to the bartender.

“Two what?” he said.

“Whiskey sours,” Irenke said.

The bartender grew very irritated.

“Well?” he said.

“Two whiskey sours?” I said. “Please?”

“All you got to do is ask,” he said gruffly.

Irenke put on her coat.

“It’s so cold in here,” she complained.

“It’s really cold,” I agreed.

“Tell it to the management,” the bartender said.

He throttled up a pair of whiskey sours and placed them both in front of me, as though Irenke weren’t even there.

I slid a sour to her.

We sat without speaking. She snapped beer nuts between her front teeth and shot me sidelong glances when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

“I think we are suffering in the same way,” Irenke said finally.

“Huh,” I said.

“We have both been jilted by people who might have loved us,” she clarified.

“I practice a no-attachment policy with men,” I said. “I’m all business.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re a call girl?”

“I used to call on people,” I said. “But I was never paid.”

“It’s no big deal to be used by strangers,” Irenke said. “It’s when you’re used by people you know that life becomes unfathomable.”

She announced she had to visit the ladies’ room.

“Need anything?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe a toilet.”

She examined me at unabashed length.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Your life is about to get better.”

“It is?” I touched my cheek, always an alienating sensation. The anti-seizure meds numbed my skin; to touch my face was to enter a failed romance between body parts.

“You must have been such a pretty girl,” she said. “We should get her back.”

“Get who back?” I said.

She touched my droopy eyelid with a fingertip.

“The woman who did this to you,” she said.

Her lids flung wider. Suddenly her madness, like the flecks of lead sifting to the surface of her blue irises, was all that I could see of her.

I shied away.

“Nobody did anything to me,” I said.

“You did this to yourself?” she asked.

“I’ve contracted a virus,” I said.

“Fascinating,” Irenke said. “And how’s that going?”

“How’s what going?”

“Believing that.”

As she dismounted her stool, she knocked my bag to the floor. She shoved the pill bottles back inside. She handed it to me.

“When you’re ready to fight,” she said, consonants blurring, “give me a call.”

I amended my diagnosis. Irenke wasn’t crazy, she was drunk.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know I’d do anything to help you,” she said, flipping up the collar of her coat. “I owe you that much.”

“You owe me a lot more than that,” I said, humoring her.

“You’re right,” she said. “I owe you much, much more than that.”

There was no point in correcting her drunk’s outsized commitment to our insta-barroom intimacy — we didn’t know each other. She owed me nothing.

“I mean it,” she said. “When you decide you need my help, call on me, call girl.”

“I will,” I said. “And same here. If you ever need my help. Don’t hesitate to call.”

She steadied herself on the edge of the bar.

“Not to worry, Julia,” she said. “There’s no helping me.”

Irenke disappeared through the door, over which an exit sign buzzed. I swear I heard the sound of dirt raining onto a coffin lid. I experienced, or thought I experienced, what might be described as a muscle memory, if the brain could be considered, as psychics considered it, a muscle — my gray matter straining to interact, for the first time in over a year, with those ulcerations in the astral plane. But then I realized that there was nothing psychic going on here, this was plain old human intuition kicking in — an arguably more useful talent for me to manifest. Because it didn’t require any special talent to know: Irenke was doomed.

My phone alarm beeped. It was time to take my 6 p.m. pills. I swore to myself as I struggled with the tops. My pharmacist refused to give me non-childproof bottles even though I promised her I knew no children.

On the bar I lined up one Dramamine, three ibuprofens, two vitamin Cs, four folic acids, a Voltaren, and two psylliums. Handling pills, even after a year of copious pill taking, still gave me an illicit charge. I did not touch, but often visited, the prescription bottle I’d found in my father’s bedside table when I was seven, a bottle with my mother’s name on it containing a single, half-nibbled pill.

Weirdly, I couldn’t find my bottle of diazepam. I emptied the contents of my bag onto the bar. I checked under the stools, searching the shadows where an errant bottle might have rolled when Irenke spilled my bag.

Then I understood: Irenke had stolen my diazepam. She didn’t strike me as a drug addict, but as something worse — a creepy collector of souvenirs.

Her odd violation tiptoed me to the brink of dissolve again — really, what was wrong with me? If there was one victory I could claim to have achieved over the past thirteen and a half months of illness, it was my refusal — or inability — to wallow. Perhaps, I thought, my unsteadiness could be blamed on the whiskey warming my chest, and its bittersweet reminder of my carefree early Workshop days, when the only schedule I respected, after basking, hungover, on the campus green, was one that landed me each afternoon in the windowless reading corridor because I liked the packaged butter cookies the librarians served with the four o’clock tea, the silly daintiness of this ritual leavened by the violent death images on the reading corridor walls, painted by a forerunner of the Mexican mural movement.

Such nostalgia left me vulnerable, however, to the understanding that this person didn’t exist, and not only because I’d left the Workshop. I didn’t count my life in days anymore, I counted it in hours. I counted it in pills. That carefree person no longer functioned as the norm from which I’d deviated. As the months elapsed, my old self would be vanished by this new self. It was a mean variety of suicide that permitted you to keep living, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Your life is about to get better .

I clinked Irenke’s empty glass.

As I finished the last of my sour, the bar door opened — Irenke, I assumed, returning from the ladies’ room. But no.

Alwyn entered, followed by a balding man in a charcoal muffler.