Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn.

“Hey,” I said.

Alwyn didn’t recognize me at first, her eyes glancing off me with chilling indifference.

“Oh,” she said, catching herself. “Hi.”

Her smile unnerved me. I knew, now, what casually stony person hid beneath.

I followed her to the concierge’s desk. En route she caught me up on what she’d learned about Madame Ackermann’s movements. She’d been to a spa in New Mexico.

She also told me, displaying a recent New York Times article, that Madame Ackermann had been in the news in conjunction with the surgical impersonators case I’d first heard about at the Regnor panel. There’d been a sharp rise in reports of surgical impersonator sightings (i.e., people refashioning their faces to look like people who had died) in and around New York City, prompting a Manhattan criminologist to speculate that these impersonators were part of a terrorist group engaging in civilian psychological warfare. A number of notable American psychics, including Madame Ackermann, had become interested in the case — they assumed these impersonators to be astral imprints whose sudden abundance suggested there’d been a meaningful “rupture” in the astral membrane.

Hilariously, Alwyn said, the psychics had positioned themselves on the side of reason; Madame Ackermann was even quoted in the Times article as saying that a band of surgical impersonators acting at the behest of (and funded by) a terrorist leader was, comparatively speaking, “an unlikely scenario.”

I noticed Borka across the lobby, reading a butcher-papered book. She waved to me. I waved back.

“Who is that woman?” Alwyn asked.

“She’s skin-care royalty,” I said.

“Really,” Alwyn said.

“Her name means bedbug,” I said. Then I started to correct myself — her name didn’t mean bedbug — but I’d already forgotten what it was that it meant.

“She more resembles a praying mantis, don’t you think?” Alwyn said.

“I guess,” I said.

“She’s astonishingly ugly,” Alwyn said. “I hope she finds a better face soon. Don’t you?”

“I like her,” I said.

I was, I’d noticed, one of the few. Borka did not socialize with the other plastic surgery patients — the baronessas and the wives of import moguls, the members of the varied Austro-Hungarian aristocracies with whom she, in the outside world, presumably mingled. Whenever she passed the card-playing quartets in the lobby, mean whispers fizzed in her wake.

For some reason, however, Borka made me feel at home. Also she taxonomized humans using inscrutable animal metaphors that never failed to amuse me. People she didn’t like were half-dachshunds, people she did like — for example, me — were beetles.

Alwyn suggested I join her for tea in the dining hall. I agreed, even though I was made nauseous by the tea they served between meals, called liver tea because it detoxified the liver, the organ most weakened by psychic attacks.

“So,” Alwyn asked, “how’s the work?”

I assumed she meant my first session with Marta. The airiness of her tone renewed my paranoia that she’d shared with Marta inaccurate information about me.

“It’s fine,” I said. “But I’m a little curious … I’m concerned … what I mean is, I’m wondering what it is that you tell Marta.”

Alwyn regarded me, bemused.

“How can I say this,” Alwyn said, “so that you don’t take this the wrong way.”

“By wondering if I’ll take something the wrong way,” I said, “you’re guaranteeing that I won’t.”

“You’re the last person to be trusted to portray an accurate version of yourself,” she said.

“You, meanwhile, are the first person Marta should trust,” I said.

Alwyn stopped mid-stride.

“I’ve never told her anything you wouldn’t eventually have told her,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“OK,” she said, as though the matter were settled.

“But,” I said, “I’m a little concerned that you might tell her something that I would never tell her because I don’t believe it to be true.”

“Such as?” she said.

“Such as the ridiculous theory that Madame Ackermann wanted me to use her as a mother substitute.”

“Only you would find that theory ridiculous,” Alwyn said. “Madame Ackermann is a medium. A person through whom dead people speak.”

“Believe me,” I muttered. “When I was with her, no one was speaking through that woman.”

I circled back to my original worry.

“But you didn’t tell Marta I had sex with Colophon.”

Alwyn pulled at her little bangs as if they were a furled shade she might draw down over her face.

“What?” she said.

I repeated my question.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Have sex with Colophon? Or tell Marta that I did?”

“Please,” she said. “I know you’re way smarter than to do that.”

Alwyn returned to walking, briskly this time. I marveled at how she was able to project a blanket of certainty over a conversation that was pure jumble, stunning her listeners into shamed muteness. I didn’t dare press her to elaborate on what I’d failed to understand, even though a few crucial logic steps were missing from our exchange, steps wherein actually useful information might reside.

The dining hall was empty. We tapped the hot urns, filled our cups with liver tea.

“I know I keep saying this,” Alwyn said, “but we really do have a lot in common.”

She proceeded to recount in dull detail the gist of a paper published by the Journal of Mental Science in the mid-seventies, one that established a telepathic link between mothers and babies, and proved that babies in orphanages — separated from their mothers and deprived of their first, and most intense, human bond — were forced to search further and further afield for this connection.

“Those babies were twice as likely, by the age of three, to exhibit psychic predilections,” she said. “Would you say that’s when your abilities first appeared?”

“I can’t remember,” I said.

“What I don’t get is why I didn’t develop any psychic abilities,” she said. “My mother might as well have been dead for all I saw of her when I was little. Part of me suspects she must have read that article; she’s so competitive, she probably spent just enough time with me to make sure I wouldn’t develop powers that she hadn’t developed herself.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. It sounded totally insane.

“My stepfather told me she tried to abort me.”

“Recently?”

“She denied it when I confronted her. I’d deny it if I were her. It’s curious, though, right? I mean obviously I’m curious. Why did she want to abort me? Maybe she did have some kind of … power. Maybe she knew I’d grow up to disappoint her more than she disappointed herself.”

“I thought she was an internationally famous shampoo model,” I said.

“You say that so dismissively. She had iconic hair.”

“I’m marveling at the inadequacy of the phrase,” I said.

“Because it was a hair campaign her face was barely visible, thus people assumed she was an unattractive woman whose unattractiveness a skilled photographer was forced to obscure. Passersby on the street would say, ‘You’re the Breck Girl!’ And then, ‘But you’re so pretty.’ She was a famous model, and yet she spent her life convincing others she had a face that didn’t need hiding.”

“That is kind of tragic,” I conceded.

Alwyn pulled a tabloid magazine from her bookbag.

“Odd that you should be asking so much about my mother today,” she said.