Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

When Varga disappeared again in 1984, this time for good, no one, Colophon said, was surprised. Some people believed she’d been kidnapped and killed by either the leftist radicals who’d been sending her death threats or by a member of Le Pen’s own security team, many of whom boasted backgrounds in organized crime; others believed that she committed suicide, a claim buttressed by Varga’s last known film, Not an Exit , interpreted by some as a suicide note, in which Varga stars as a woman who’s violated by an anonymous hand.

Colophon drank two glasses of wine in quick succession. Alwyn, entranced again by her napkin-burning project, seemed unaware that her lips were pursed and twitching, like a person unpleasantly dreaming.

“And what do you believe?” I said to him.

“He believes she ran off with Cortez,” Alwyn said. “He believes the fact that the film reel was found in Cortez’s safe proves that they were collaborating, and that Varga wasn’t a fascist, or a pornographer, but a bold crusader against ideology. Her ‘fascist’ project was a performance art piece, aimed to undermine all ideologies.”

“The love of clandestine perversions, of exploiting opposing sides of the political propaganda machine, is a familiar Vargian trope,” Colophon retorted.

“Only if you think she was exploiting anything other than her own ability to be exploited and to exploit,” Alwyn said.

“And what do you believe?” I asked Alwyn.

“Me?” she said.

“Is she alive or is she dead?” I said.

“I have no idea,” Alwyn said.

I don’t know why but I did think: she’s lying .

“What I mean is,” she clarified, “something happened to her.”

“Clearly,” Colophon said.

“She was emotionally derailed,” Alwyn said. “Watch Not an Exit if you doubt me.”

“Probably she had her heart crushed,” Colophon said. “Don’t let the porn hobby mislead you. Alwyn’s a closet romantic.”

“This from the person who refuses to consider the woman who directed films about pretend-dead girls being fucked by strangers to be a pornographer,” Alwyn sniped. “She wasn’t exploiting people, she was exploiting an ideology.”

Alwyn excused herself to the ladies’ room at the precise moment that the waiter delivered our meals. Colophon and I waited five minutes for her to return, then gave up and started eating.

“I don’t suppose you have an opinion,” he said.

“About whether or not she was exploiting an ideology?” I asked.

“About whether or not she’s alive,” he said. “You were Madame Ackermann’s protégée. I’m assuming you exhibited some sort of … facility.”

“I don’t have an opinion about that, no,” I said.

“Of course not,” Colophon said. “Madame Ackermann mentioned you’d become sick. That you were taking ‘time off.’ ”

Colophon, chewing, inspected me. Then he reached beneath the table and produced, from his briefcase, a familiar sheaf of ghost-grid paper describing Madame Ackermann’s “trip” to the Tour Zamansky.

“I asked around to find out whose handwriting this was,” he said.

“It’s mine,” I said. “I was her stenographer.”

“Madame Ackermann’s account of how she found the film safe number always struck me as suspicious,” he said. “Among other things, she described the Tour Zamansky as Neo-Gothic, when really it was designed by a disciple of Le Corbusier.”

“To her credit,” I said, “Madame Ackermann’s not a googler.”

“I consulted an automatic handwriting expert,” Colophon continued. “He said that there’s a difference between writing produced from external aural prompts and internal aural prompts, which can be seen in the length of the ligatures. Ligatures refer to letters joined by links.”

“I know what a ligature is,” I said. I had no clue about ligatures.

“When a person is taking dictation, you see ligatures of three to four letters. But when they’re taking what is known as ‘auto-dictation,’ i.e., transcribing an internal voice, the ligatures tend to be five to seven letters in length.”

Using the clicker end of his ballpoint, he counted for me — five, six, five, seven, seven.

“According to the ligatures, you were not taking dictation from Madame Ackermann.”

“Huh,” I said, as though this were news to me.

Then he asked me how familiar I was with the phenomenon known as psychic attack.

I told him that I knew a little bit about psychic attacks, though I knew more than a little bit.

“I don’t want to seem as though I’m diagnosing you,” Colophon said. “But I believe that you’re being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann.”

I thought he was joking. He was not.

“Why would she waste her energy on me?” I asked. “I’m a nothing.”

“Well,” Colophon said, wiping his mouth. “You are now.”

Alwyn returned from wherever she’d been. With a spoon back, she methodically flattened her gnocchi one by one. It was like watching a child kill bugs, and did very little to warm me toward my own meal, a colorless dish scarred with prosciutto.

I was not a fan of gnocchi.

“So,” Alwyn said. “Did you tell her?”

“I was in the midst,” Colophon said.

“Just tell her already,” she said.

“I’m getting to it,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “I may die first.”

She turned to me.

“Madame Ackermann hates you because you were able to do what she failed to do, namely find the film safe number, and this humiliated her and made her feel old, obsolete, sexually diminished, etcetera, and so she’s psychically attacking you, which means you’re screwed because even though her career is on the wane, she’s still more powerful than most people in your field, but Colophon, contrary to how he might have presented himself to you while I was out smoking, does not feel ‘responsible’ for what happened to you, and thus if he’s offered to help you it’s not because he’s an altruistic guy, trust me, he’s an academic, i.e., an egotistical bastard who’s willing to pay for you to go to a pricey psychic attack recovery facility only if you agree, in exchange, once you’re better and once you’ve regained whatever powers you possessed to the extent that you possessed any at all, to help him resuscitate his failing career by finding Dominique Varga, whom he believes to be alive, and if he can prove it his career will be pulled from the scholarly junk heap and maybe he’ll get tenure somewhere decent and will no longer be forced to take visiting lectureships at agrarian schools in the Urals, but regardless he’s hoping, given what he presumes to be your shared personal interest in ruining Madame Ackermann’s reputation, that you’ll accept his offer to help you avenge your bodily misfortune.”

Alwyn forked a pair of gnocchi into her mouth.

“I might have phrased it a bit differently,” Colophon said.

“Of course you would have,” Alwyn said, chewing. “And yet here we are, meaning the same thing.”

Colophon withdrew a brochure written in German, Hungarian, and English (denoted, in case the language alone failed to signify, by nation-appropriate flags) from his briefcase. On the cover was a photograph of an art nouveau building located, according to the English copy, in a wooded district of Vienna, abutting a place called Gutenberg Square.

“The Goergen specializes in curing victims of psychic attacks,” Colophon said.

I noticed, on the brochure’s bottom right corner, the TK Ltd. logo.

“Currently the Goergen services two types of guests,” he continued, “those wishing to recover in secret from plastic surgeries, and victims of psychic attack who’ve been forced, in order to evade their attackers and recover their health, to vanish.”