Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

That night I had a vivid dream.

The locker room could have been any locker room in any former Eastern bloc country — tiled, steam-noisy, the locker doors painted noxious shades of citrus, the vibe vaguely gas-chamberish. A little girl stood naked while a naked woman — her mother, I guessed — dried her back, her breasts and haunches bobbling with the effort.

The mother disappeared to the lavatories; the girl pulled on her sweater, her too-short pants. Beside her, a young woman disrobed with professional efficiency, quick and fluid. At first I did not recognize her — Helena was a blonde now, and thirty-odd years older. She removed her engagement ring, its diamond minuscule, more of a chip than a stone, and placed it in her locker. Without padlocking the door, she, too, disappeared to the lavatories.

Sneaky as a shadow, the young girl slipped her hand into the locker. She posed in front of a long mirror, hand against her cheek, stolen quarry glinting on her finger.

“I” stood behind her.

As in my previous regressions, I did not appear in reflective surfaces. My consciousness was not embodied, though I inflicted on this world my ghostly void. When I stood before the locker room mirror, a white spot in the shape of a person appeared where I should have been, as though someone had taken an eraser to a charcoal drawing, rubbed me out.

The girl’s mother called her. The girl stashed the ring in the shallow coin pocket of her pants, but as she hurried toward her mother’s voice the ring jogged loose and rolled onto the tiles. It carved a wide ellipsis, its orbit narrowing and quickening toward the drain. The girl fell to her knees and, trying to intuit the ring’s trajectory, snatched at the future space it might inhabit. But then she was distracted by something — me, it seemed — and missed her chance to grab the ring before it disappeared through the drain’s vertical slots.

The girl stared at the drain before returning her gaze toward me, as though I were to blame for the ring’s loss, as though I were the thief.

I awoke to my alarm at 6:30 a.m.

I dressed, ate very little breakfast, did Mundane Egg with Marta, ate very little lunch, took the elevator to the basement to soak in the thermal baths. I’d felt vague all day, my post-dream self like an organ transplant slow to take. I grabbed my towel from the bath attendant. I shakily undressed. I needed, after each slipper removal, to rest on the wooden bench that paralleled the lockers.

Even so, my sense of disequilibrium surged.

I lay on the floor, the tiles against my cheek like hot teeth. At this point, I believe I fell asleep. Again I dreamed, or thought I was dreaming, because again I saw the drain and the ring falling into it, over and over I saw this, I saw the younger Helena, I saw her returning to her locker to discover her ring missing, I saw her telling her fiancé outside a restaurant that she had lost his ring, and I saw him wanting very badly, were it not for the sidewalk spectators, to hit her. I saw all of this except that my eyes were open, and I could hear Borka berating the bath attendant for failing to call a doctor when a doctor was needed.

“But she looks so happy,” the attendant said.

When the doctor arrived he asked me hyper-articulated questions most people could not fail to understand.

“Did you check the drains?” I asked. All I could see, still, was a drain, over which the doctor’s features were superimposed.

The doctor shone a penlight in my pupils.

“Helena’s ring,” I said, “did you check the drains?”

“Of course they checked the drains,” said Borka.

“Can you tell me the date of your menstrual cycle?” asked the doctor.

“All of them?” I asked.

“All of the drains were cleaned yesterday,” the attendant said.

“Just the last cycle,” the doctor said.

I flipped onto my stomach; I crawled across the floor.

“Even a rough estimate,” said the doctor, following me.

I pried the drain’s grate loose with a fingernail.

The string was very long; whoever tied it to the grate’s underside wanted to make sure that a flashlight beam, flashed into the drain, wouldn’t snag Helena’s diamond.

I pulled until the ring flipped onto the tile floor.

I smothered it in my fist.

“Has it been one month?” asked the doctor. “Two?”

“Who did this?” asked Borka, without a touch of curiosity.

“It’s important that I know,” the doctor said.

My body tingled with endorphins. The ring in my hand required no coddling to tell me its tale of future sadness, Helena married to a man who killed her daily.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing the ring away from me. The metal radiated a repulsive sliminess I did not dare absorb. “I haven’t menstruated in over a year.”

That night, we received a memo under our doors.

“Dear Guests,” it read. “Your discretion and relaxation are our utmost treasures. Memory is unnecessary work. To forget is to respect the past, and to enable your pleasant future.”

Soon everyone knew about my role in the recovery of Helena’s ring. I could sense their knowing most forcefully in the lobby, a space unwisely constructed of palissandro bluette marble, a stone touted for its properties of thought amplification. The robed women in the club chairs emanated what I can only compare to a wireless signal that would have measured five full bars; via these frequencies we were bound.

Borka, meanwhile, installed herself as my bodyguard, escorting me to meals, protecting me from the other guests.

“Why did you hide from me the true you?” she said.

“There was nothing to hide,” I assured her. “That part of me was dead.”

“You must have missed yourself,” she said.

“I did at first,” I said. “But then I figured, what’s gone is gone.”

She owl-eyed me weightily.

“I’m sure you have a lot of experience in that area,” she said.

“Me?” I said.

“Because of your mother,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I never experienced her as missing, though. I was so young, you see, when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Borka asked.

“When she … died,” I said. Borka’s inability to process basic tragedies meant that she might not register the distinction between plain dying and suicide.

“But you have visited her,” she said. “So now you can miss her.”

“I’ve never visited her,” I said. “I’ve never been able to.”

“Because it is beyond your abilities?” she said.

“Because I am not invited,” I said.

Borka’s eyes teared up, though probably I mistook for tears the light from the lobby’s chandelier silvering the ointment she rubbed on her lids, preparing her face for its eventual surgery.

Alwyn, when she caught wind of the ring kerfuffle, acted mad.

“I’m obligated to tell Colophon that you’ve broken the rules,” she said.

Beneath her sternness, however, she seemed oddly energized by my breach.

“But I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It’s because they don’t allow any stupid pills in this place.”

“If you don’t abide by the discouragements, you won’t get better,” she said.

“Evidently I am better,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said. “You aren’t.”

I did try to abide by the discouragements. I did. It wasn’t my fault that soon I was being propositioned in the lobby, the thermal baths, the lavatories. An Austrian woman wanted me to find out whether or not her husband was cheating on her while she recovered from the chin tuck she hadn’t wanted but which he’d given her anyway for her birthday. A French woman kept a journal about her sexual activities with a coworker that she worried her teenage daughter was reading in her absence. A former model wanted to know if the tiny newborn she’d abandoned in the waiting room of a doctor’s office seventeen years ago had found a happy home.