Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“But the windshield did not ruin my face quite so much as the doctor who fixed it,” she said.

I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was true that hers was not a face that anyone would pay for. This explained why she always wore a hood-like headscarf even though she’d yet to have any procedures or suffer any discoloration or swelling that required, per the Goergen’s unspoken dress codes, polite obscuring. Her face, uncut, was a weapon.

“Now I want to right the wrongs that were done to me,” she griped. “And this indicates that I am insane.”

“You want to be yourself again,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “For what it’s costing, there are far more worthy people to be.”

As we walked down a hallway that narrowed as we progressed toward its endpoint, Borka inquired about my attack.

I knew it was against the discouragements to tell her, but Borka was a harmless old lady and not the sort to hurt anyone. We were friends. Despite my experience with Madame Ackermann and my instinctual resistance to Alwyn, I was not so spiritually wrecked that I’d come to distrust all people.

I related to her a basic version of the events that had landed me in the Goergen.

“So you are like Eve in All About Eve ,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I am like Dumbo in Dumbo .”

I told her that I was looking for a Hungarian artist.

“Dominique Varga,” I said. “Maybe you know her work.”

Borka’s body recoiled minutely, as though she’d inhaled a sharp odor; otherwise, she appeared not to have heard me.

She asked me where I’d grown up, what my full name was.

“Severn,” she said. She practically chewed this information. “That is an aristocratic-sounding name.”

“I think, like most aristocratic-sounding names, it used to be Slevovitz,” I said. “Or Severnsky. Or Sevethanopopakis.”

My father, I told her, was born to murky people — the only child of parents whom I remembered best for serving me sandwiches filled with a paste of ground bologna, mayonnaise, and pickles, a combination that suggested either high American Waspiness or one of its many immigrant opposites.

“And your father? What does he do?”

“He’s a geologist obsessed with sinkholes,” I said.

“Here we call them drains,” she said, unimpressed.

“No … well …” I said.

I explained to her about sinkholes.

“They may be formed gradually or suddenly,” I said. “But the sudden ones swallow cars, buildings, sometimes people. My father studies sinkholes caused by human activity, namely industrially produced waste.”

Her stare grew keener.

“And your mother?” she said.

“My mother is dead,” I said.

I expected her expression to stall in that gear of generic pity I’d come to so detest, and tried never to inspire.

But it didn’t.

“No wonder your father is obsessed with holes caused by people,” she said.

We arrived at Marta’s office. The top half of her door was windowed by nubbled glass; on the other side, a dark shape bent and straightened, as though stretching before a hike.

“Put in a good word for me,” Borka said. She scampered down the hallway as though scared of being spotted by Marta in my company.

Marta, a woman with Hunnishly high cheekbones and turquoise bifocals, did not shake my hand when I entered her office, gesturing me instead toward a tweeded loveseat.

Marta riffled through some documents in a desk drawer before sitting across from me in a matching armchair. She wore a patent belt high on her waist that forced her stomach outward and created a convenient podium on which to rest a manila file with my name (“Severn, Julia”) written on the tab.

I recognized the Workshop insignia atop what appeared to be my school transcript.

“It is not specified by the discouragements,” said Marta, “but in the same way that prayer is discouraged, so are regressions or any kind of psychic foray, unless supervised by me.”

She asked me to explain my attack situation.

“In your own words,” she said, as though she’d already heard my story from someone else, probably Alwyn.

I told her about Madame Ackermann, my stenographer demotion, Colophon Martin, and so on.

“You’ve had sex with this Mr. Martin,” Marta said.

“No,” I said.

“In your own words, please.”

“No,” I said. What had Alwyn been telling her?

“It’s apparent to me that she’s enacting some kind of revenge on you,” said Marta.

“Alwyn?” I said.

“Madame Ackermann,” she said. “A revenge driven by the fact that you rejected her as a mother substitute. But your rejection did not stop her from acting ‘motherly’ toward you, and resenting the fact that her powers were on the wane at the precise moment that yours were on the upswing. And by powers,” Marta explained, “I mean her sexual attractiveness and her potency as a mystic, the mutual degenerations of which, alas, tend to coincide.”

Marta played with the bridge of her bifocals, sliding them up-down, up-down, and staring alternately at my file and then at me, as though, of the two, I was the one refusing to appear plausibly 3-D to her.

Madame Ackermann, I informed Marta, had no shortage of willing sexual partners.

“Everyone wants to have sex with her,” I said, unclear why I was so determined to defend her on this point, but it did seem a kind of blasphemy to deny Madame Ackermann, even to this woman who would never meet her, her epic allure.

Then I explained the significance, by way of debunking Marta’s occult mastery decline theory, of the double torque Madame Ackermann threw at her forty-third birthday party.

“Hmmm,” Marta said. “Perhaps this Madame Ackermann is a psychic vampire. Perhaps she siphoned your energies in order to attack you.”

“Meaning I attacked myself?” I asked. Marta made it sound as though I suffered from a psychic autoimmune disorder.

She recommended I do some reading on the subject in the Goergen’s library.

“We’ve scheduled a renowned psychic vampire expert to give a presentation here in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll remind you to attend.”

She slid my file into her desk drawer and announced that it was time for us to perform an exercise called Mundane Egg.

“Many people have fissures or holes in their eggshells,” Marta said, “that allow the foreign entities to invade.”

She instructed me to lie on her sofa and visualize my eggshell.

“Now imagine it’s thicker,” she said.

Marta asked me to inspect my shell for cracks or holes. I imagined running my hands over the bony smoothness until I found an irregularity — a tiny checkmark-shaped fissure.

Marta instructed me to patch it.

“We’ll do this exercise every session,” Marta said. She warned that I’d find new holes to patch as my abilities for espying imperfections in my shell grew sharper.

“In order to get better I must become more skilled at detecting how I’m sicker?” I said.

“If that’s how you need to see it,” Marta said. “Regardless, you cannot take these exercises lightly. I don’t want you to make poor choices.”

“Choices,” I said.

“I want you to channel your energy inward, not outward,” she said. “I stress to my psychic attack patients — revenge is not a compelling therapeutic goal.”

“Revenge is a very compelling therapeutic goal,” I said. “It’s just not a very noble one.”

“For a woman of your exceptional abilities, these exercises are far more dangerous,” she cautioned. “What you do when you leave here is your business. But while you are in my care, I cannot assist you with your … unconscious warfare.”

I promised Marta to engage in no unconscious warfare. In good faith, I promised her this. I was innocent, at the time, of the lengths to which my unconscious would go to mock my inability to know my own warfare intentions.