Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I closed my eyes again. I savored the wolf.

This is your fault , I thought, thrillingly. Your fault .

I drew a bath. As the tub filled, I stared at my face in the mirror and dared it to care. It did not care. With a gummy razor I cross-hatched, for the sake of experimentation, the topmost layer of skin on my wrists. I held my hand over the toilet and watched the blood drip into the bowl, a sight that made me remember my last menstrual cycle, now more than a year ago, with detached fondness. I would not say I was suicidal. I would never say that.

Besides, there was no point in punishing myself. Madame Ackermann was to blame for my misery. And I was going to make her sorry that she’d ever met me.

My favorite guest at the Goergen was a plastic surgery patient who identified herself, when I met her, as “Hungarian skin-care royalty.” A widow named Borka, she showed zero respect for the anonymity rules by which we were instructed to abide.

At the Goergen, the first thing we’d learned was the peril of being known.

“It means ‘foreigner,’ ” Borka told me of her name. “Always I have been a bedbug in my own family.”

Reedy, turbaned, with a spooky Isak Dinesen expression paralyzing her features, Borka appeared to be in her late sixties, though this remained an uncorroborated guess. Her rheumatoid hands — swollen, hooked, beige — resembled ginger roots, suggesting she might be nearer to two hundred. We sat together at meals, including Silent Breakfast, during which she scribbled instructions on a pad. A typical jotting would read LOOK 11 O’CLOCK, and I would do so, only to witness something I did not need to see: a psychic attack victim flaking her psoriatic scabs with a fork tine, for example.

Before bed, Borka and I played backgammon in the lobby, where marble columns severed the vast square footage into many wall-less cubicles of space. We sat in scarred leather club chairs, our knees touching. Borka tried to psych me out whenever it was my move by intensely owling my face.

“You are a big déjà vu to me,” she’d say, her smoker’s rasp so throaty and mechanical it sounded as though it had been routed through a voice changer.

There were many discouragements at the Goergen, the strictest of which involved leaving it; we were threatened with not being allowed back in if we disregarded this particular admonishment. Given the skittish, high-profile clientele, paparazzi lurked across the street in Gutenberg Square with hopes of catching, as one famously did, the wife of an Austrian diplomat, her postoperative face coated with a salve that reflected the camera’s flash and inspired a number of gossip columnists to speculate that she’d had a diamond surgically implanted in her cheek.

The Goergen thus resembled a more extreme version of my existence in New York, my travels circumscribed now to the interior of a single building, the positions I assumed in chairs — the club chairs in the lobby, the chaises in the thermal baths, the lyre-backed chair in my room — acts of sitting with no pressure attending my inertia, no tourists for whom to speak theatrical Arabic.

I found it, at least until Alwyn arrived five days after I did, relaxing.

Alwyn was not a guest at the Goergen but a quasi-employee; given Colophon’s professional and financial entanglements with Timothy Kincaid (Kincaid’s foundation had awarded Colophon his research grant), and given that TK Ltd. owned the Goergen, Kincaid made an exception to the Goergen’s guest-only rule, allowing Alwyn to liaise with my psychic attack counselor, to make sure I abided by the many discouragements, and to guarantee, in the interests of everyone receiving a decent return on their investment, that I took my healing seriously.

In her spare time, Alwyn’s job was to track Madame Ackermann’s movements and keep abreast of any Varga progress she made that threatened to supersede ours.

Not that we, or I, had made any progress.

I met Alwyn in the lobby where, a mere five minutes after walking through the front door, she was already in a fight.

“Cell phones are discouraged,” the concierge said. “If you do not give me your phone, I cannot give you your room key.”

“Just to be clear,” she said. “You’re not discouraging me. You’re forbidding me.”

“I forbid nothing,” he said. “You are free to sleep in the square with your precious phone.”

“But I’m not one of them,” she said, gesturing toward the club chairs occupied by surgical patients in bandages, psychic attack victims overcome by tics and rashes. “Tell him,” she appealed to me.

“She’s not one of us,” I said.

“How can I say this as a compliment,” said the concierge. “You will not always be a young or unloved girl.”

Alwyn grudgingly relinquished her phone.

“What a puffin-stuff,” she said, after procuring her key. “Walk me to the elevator.”

She handed me her heaviest bag. She’d changed her hair while on her brief vacation in Paris, coloring it burgundy and snipping tiny bangs. She’d traded her sloppy cardigans for a collarless tweed jacket with expensively frayed cuffs and hems; around her neck she’d pinned a scarf patterned by miniature equestrian hardware, stirrups and bits.

Alwyn noticed me noticing her, and in return took my quick measure — my wool robe, my boiled-wool slippers, both presents from Blanche one Christmas when she’d themed all her gifts around the support of a local sheep cooperative.

“You look so convalescent après-ski,” she said critically. “I got here just in time.”

“I’ve been taking my healing very seriously,” I assured her.

“No,” she said. “I mean I got here just in time.”

We slalomed her bags between lobby columns, past a quadrant of club chairs occupied by postsurgical patients in headscarves, cards fanned before their bruised faces, legs slung to the side as though riding horses through a copse of spectral trees.

Alwyn babbled, at an indiscreet decibel level that triggered the lobby’s rat-a-tat acoustics, about the detective her mother and stepfather had hired, and how this detective had tracked her to Paris.

“My old prep school roommate, who lives in the Marais, started receiving phone calls from a man inquiring about me. Where was I staying in Paris? What were my travel plans? Fortunately, I told her I was headed to Sofia. Once a deceitful gossip, always a deceitful gossip. How are things with you?”

I told her about the Goergen’s discouragement against sharing personal information.

“Anything you divulge could be used against you,” I said, quoting the book of discouragements chained to the underside of my bedside table. “The less the other guests know about you, the fewer opportunities exist for them to collude, even unwittingly, with your attacker.”

“Hmmm,” Alwyn said.

“It’s kind of a relief,” I said.

“What is?” Alwyn said.

“Not having to be curious about other people.”

Alwyn smirked.

“What?” I feigned. Because I knew what. Alwyn had made it her conversational goal, for the duration of our nine-hour flight to Paris (at which point I’d continued alone to Vienna), to prod me for details about my mother’s life, of which I could provide, in her opinion, pathetically few, except that she’d grown up in a ragtag corner of Connecticut as the only child of a widowed father who’d never remarried and died of lung cancer when she was twenty-three; she’d been allergic to mohair and developed francophone pretensions as a means of armoring herself against the deleterious effects of her lower-middle-class upbringing; she’d resented her honeymoon to a buggy coast of Canada and hated the leather couches my father had inherited from an uncle and refused, because they were basically new, to exchange for something “classier”; she always took the bigger steak and became wickedly depressed when forced to sleep in houses less than one hundred years old; and while living in Monmouth she’d never had a close female friend or a decent winter coat or any sense of social reciprocity, all of which led the people of Monmouth to believe that she thought she was better than them.