Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Point being,” Alwyn said, “you could also get a nose job while you’re there.”

Colophon examined my face for possibly the first time since he’d met me.

“I like her nose,” he said.

“Maybe truer to say that her nose is the least of her problems,” Alwyn said. “Sometimes it’s nice to fix what you can.”

“Psychic attack victims vanish?” I said, ignoring Alwyn.

Colophon nodded. “Psychic attacking vanishings account for a decent percentage of TK Ltd.’s business, one that increases by the year. You are far from alone.” Psychic attacks, he explained, both the conscious and the unconscious varieties, had become rampant among the non-psychic population — among members of book groups, for example. People were attacking each other via shared texts. Many more attacks were launched through social media sites. The possibilities for connectedness, and for privacy invasion, had unleashed what Colophon called “an epidemic of opportunity.”

“I still don’t understand why you want to ruin Madame Ackermann’s reputation,” I said. “She lied to you, OK. But so what?”

“Oh,” Colophon said. Then to Alwyn, “See? You overlooked a major detail.”

“So stab me,” she said.

After he’d received the ligature assessment from the automatic handwriting expert, Colophon explained, he’d accused Madame Ackermann of lying to him about her role in the recovery of the film safe serial number. She’d denied it. A week later, she’d informed him, via e-mail, that she wouldn’t be able to further discuss her research methods with him due to the fact that she’d decided to write about Varga. She, too, was convinced that Varga was alive; she, too, had decided it would constitute a bold career move to find her.

“I understand Madame Ackermann has a habit of nicking other people’s ideas,” Colophon said. “Which is why, if you managed to do what it seems you somehow managed to do — find the correct serial number — then it would appear you have a talent that could help me, and we could be of mutual use to one another.”

“Ah,” I said. It was less a sound of revelation than of defeat. Ah .

Had it come to this? I thought. Was I this sick, this desperate that I’d embroil myself in a relative stranger’s revenge fantasies against my former idol in order to punish her for misfortunes that were, best I could tell, nobody’s fault but mine? And regarding Madame Ackermann’s psychically attacking me, well … I couldn’t see how I was worth the personal cost such an act would incur. Psychic attacks risked destroying the health of the victimizer as well as the victim.

I picked the prosciutto strips out of my meal. The stink of air-cured meat turned my stomach and reminded me of my first late August in the Workshop dorm, the air redolent with what amounted, in hindsight, to the ridiculous ambition to alter the molecular state of dead animal flesh with one’s spastic, twenty-three-year-old attention span. I remembered thinking, as a first-year initiate, this is the smell of my future . I would be a giddy, sweating failure, but then I would, without question, succeed. When I matriculated at the Workshop I was under the impression, as was probably every untried and untested initiate, that I was fated to be famous. Every streetlamp I walked beneath and darkened was proof of this. The Workshop, thus, had always been, in my mind, a temporary resting point on my life’s journey to greatness. But it hadn’t happened that way. Nothing about my time at the Workshop was restful. And while greatness no longer seemed a destination within my reach, I no longer knew, even in the average scheme of things, where the hell I was going.

I couldn’t sleep that night, even though I’d swallowed one Nembutal, two over-the-counter sleep aids, a glass of valerian-browned water. Finally I decided to kill the hours that remained until day watching the DVD Colophon had given me. As he’d chased a runny tiramisu around a plate, he’d emphasized: in order to cure myself of this psychic attack — in order to become well enough to humiliate and discredit Madame Ackermann by finding Dominique Varga before she did — I would first have to vanish.

There was no other way.

“And if you’re going to make a vanishing film,” he’d said, “you might as well be inspired by the master.”

I slipped Not an Exit into my computer. I clicked “Play.”

Varga’s film was about five minutes long, and I watched it fifteen times in succession. I couldn’t help but giggle at the title, until, by about the sixth watching, it no longer seemed funny, Varga and her mean love affair with an anonymous hand. Nor did the single line of dialogue, delivered by voiceover, possibly Varga as well, while a child cried in the background: It’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it .

Then I became depressed.

I removed the DVD, I drew a bath. As the tub filled I hunched on the toilet lid and considered the possibility that I was being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann. Professor Blake had explained psychic attacks with one simple and incontestably true statement: People make other people sick. Blake tweaked that statement to suggest that sickness was purposefully, malevolently, caused by other people. After an hour of witnessing Blake at his twenty-foot-long slate board, layering chalk scribbles over fist-erased chalk scribbles, his hands by the end of class as dusty and swollen as a wrestler’s, his ideas seemed the furthest thing from radical. They seemed obvious. They seemed like the only viable ideas.

I closed my eyes. I tried to sense Madame Ackermann inside of me, like the chatter of enemy bacteria I could sometimes hear when I had an ear infection. Surely there would be a trace of her; more than a confusion of symptoms, Madame Ackermann would want to leave her personal mark.

And she had. My pulse gonged in my ear canal as, eyes closed, I stared at it. And stared at it. And then marveled how, for all the hours I’d spent looking at the backs of my own eyelids, I had never until this moment realized what should have been apparent to me from the start — the annoying constellation of light pricks outlined the shape of a very familiar wolf.

I tested this suspicion. I opened and shut my lids rapidly. I tried to dislodge her design on me. But the pricks remained.

It was she.

I should have been alarmed. No, I should have panicked. I was being psychically attacked by the most powerful person in the field of parapsychological scholarship. But instead I was so relieved that I could almost hear the endorphin floodgates sliding open.

My sickness had a cause. What had been, for over a year, my free-floating, possibly fabricated (according to some doctors) state of misery had been validated and identified. I knew where it lived, what it ate for breakfast, what kind of parking tickets it amassed on vacation, the type of sheets it desired.

It even had a name.

I ran to my computer to e-mail Colophon. He’d been right. I had proof. But when I opened my inbox, I’d received another e-mail from aconcernedfriend — my third that day — with the same attachment of the woman on the bed. And then I nearly slapped myself in the head, it was so obvious: aconcernedfriend was Madame Ackermann. These e-mails constituted a form of psychic warfare, proving she’d hacked into my immune system and also my past. She’d been invited places that I’d never been invited to go. She’d been to my mother’s death bed, and she’d filmed this dramatized artifact to taunt me.

I watched the attachment so many times that it started to collapse, in my mind, with Varga’s vanishing film, the woman lying on the floor and the woman lying on the bed becoming one, and I could hear Varga’s voice saying, it’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it .