Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

It was a lonely time.

Anna, Madame Ackermann’s housekeeper, struggled to light a fire in the fireplace and was finally assisted by Professor Janklow, who propped his shrimp in a dirty ashtray in order to show Anna the proper tepee-like way to arrange the kindling, the exact pressure to apply to a newspaper ball to achieve the optimal degree of oxygenated scrunch.

Once the fire was lit, Madame Ackermann dimmed the horn chandelier and announced that it was time to tell a story.

“Gosh,” sniped Professor Yuen. “I wonder which story it will be.”

The story — about Madame Ackermann’s seminal psychic experience, and with which we were all familiar — was this.

Madame Ackermann, freshly graduated from the Workshop (summa cum laude, she made sure to mention), decided to decompress via a backpacking trip through southeast Asia with her tragic boyfriend, a rising third-year initiate of no academic distinction whatsoever who abandoned her, without warning or explanation, in a beach hut on the coast of Thailand. She’d told herself, upon discovering him gone, that she’d long ago fallen out of love with this boyfriend, and to prove it slept that afternoon with a local fisherman, drank half a bottle of Mekong whiskey, and stumbled into bed alone, only to awake two hours later to see, at the foot of her bed, a milky shimmer. But then this specter grew bones before her eyes. Its skeleton rulered the air with wet, gray notches; it thickened with muscle and then bound itself in an opalescent casing from which sprouted a steely fur. Two eyeballs emerged above a snout that cracked apart to display a prehistoric maw of teeth, row upon row of enamel sawblades to which it appeared the pinking shears of a vicious evolution had been applied.

Fenrir . Madame Ackermann identified the specter immediately: her boyfriend had forgotten his beach read, a book of Norse mythology called the Poetic Edda , and Madame Ackermann had, before falling asleep, finished the stanza in which an old woman living in a forest had bred there broods of Fenrir. There will come from them all one of that number to be a moon-snatcher in troll’s skin .

At first, Madame Ackermann said, she believed this mythical Norse wolf monster had been sent to attack her by her boyfriend, a man prone to territorial jealousy even toward women he’d discarded, a man who would “ultimately prove not untalented in the psychic arts,” this assessment based on the fact that he would, by his late twenties, become a successful real estate speculator on the Iberian peninsula.

But then Madame Ackermann saw, connecting her to Fenrir, a kinked, reptilian umbilical, a viscous mirage through which she could slice her hands but which she could not, no matter how she thrashed, sever. Despite her Mekong whiskey fugue, she understood: this monster had not been sent by the boyfriend. It had initiated from her. It was, she claimed, the literal embodiment of her humiliated, heartsick rage.

Then the wolf — her wolf — attacked her.

I tried to kill myself , she was known to claim. I was the victim of my own worst self, loosed upon the world .

As Fenrir closed its giant jaws around her chest — she would show, as proof of this attempt to puncture her heart, the moles flecking her chest, each of them, she claimed, an indelible astral tooth mark — she lost consciousness. When she awoke she discovered a pile of pitted black rocks on her hut’s threshold, byproducts of her psychic eruption. (These she employed as bookends on her office shelf. I had held them in my hands; they were weightless, as though made of malt.)

And so. While I had never before attended one of Madame Ackermann’s birthday parties, I had nonetheless heard the Fenrir story numerous times since I’d matriculated at the Workshop the previous fall. I’d first heard it during the opening lecture of Madame Ackermann’s Basics seminar, the details of which we’d slavishly recorded in our notebooks; she’d repeated the Fenrir story during my one-on-one student conference, presenting it as a secret she’d chosen to share only with me. She’d told it to me last April, when she interviewed me for the stenographer position, again in May when she called to officially offer me the position, and most recently when we were sorting through storage boxes in her A-frame’s crawlspace. One couldn’t study with Madame Ackermann, and become her protégée, and then her stenographer, and then her archivist, without coming to know the Fenrir story as familiarly as one’s own personal memory of a vindictive family pet.

I was not alone. As Madame Ackermann described the rat droppings she’d found on her beach-hut pillowcase before falling into her drunken slumber, the party guests, Professor Yuen in particular, projected an air of jealous boredom.

I was bored but not jealous; rather than listening to Madame Ackermann, I leafed through the new paperback edition of her latest book, E-mails from the Dead . Because while the Fenrir story was told to emphasize to us, her students, and to these birthday guests, her colleagues, her potency as a master of the paranormal — few people, it was true, had the ability to create “visible thought forms”—I had come, over the unsettled course of my relationship with Madame Ackermann, to understand its meaning differently. As much as it destroyed me to admit it, the Fenrir story was not about the dawning of her powers; rather, it represented the youthful apex of her career, to which she now, in her gloaming hours, desperately clung.

As her stenographer, I’d gained unwanted firsthand knowledge of Madame Ackermann’s troubles. My job, as Madame Ackermann had described it when she’d hired me, was thus: beginning the first week of August, I would join her in her home office and sit in a chair across from the Biedermeier sofa where she reclined, eyes blinded beneath a silk pillow. Since she’d inherited a not insignificant collection of mid-century modern furniture from her father, she informed me, I’d have the honor of sitting in his favorite Barcelona chair.

At the time — sitting in a Workshop-issue molded bucket chair in her office, one that reminded me, in its shape and its color, of an institutional bed pan — her father’s Barcelona chair sounded really delightful, its name inspiring visions of Picasso trailing a parasol-wielding Dora Maar along the sand, of salt-stained canvas awnings, of bottles of lukewarm cava and abandoned espadrilles.

Then, on my first official day as Madame Ackermann’s stenographer, I saw the actual chair. Despite its beachy rock-skip of a name, my first thought was, Oh , that chair . I’d seen it in movies and on TV, usually in thuggish pairs, usually in the offices of slickly evil corporations or the living rooms of loveless career couples.

While Madame Ackermann brewed tea, I took wary stock of my Barcelona chair. Its frame looked like two swords locked in a fencing parry, the inside edges made safe for human repose by a pair of quilted black leather slabs. When I later mentioned my guarded impression to Miranda, she laughingly referred to the chair as the “Blowjob Chair,” because her older brother, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, kept one in his office for the following reason — given the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive.

In my capacity as stenographer, I sat in the Barcelona chair five mornings a week — knees splayed, a mug of tea on the floor — while Madame Ackermann projected her consciousness at will, to any human, alive or dead, occupying any space or time, while I recorded, on a notepad, every word that she said.