Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

She lit a cigarette, eyed me along the barrel. She didn’t appear to recognize me.

“Julia,” I reminded her. “I don’t mean to bother you—”

“Except that you do bother me,” Irenke interrupted. “Every day.”

“Really?” I said. I had no recollection of this. So far as I knew, I hadn’t seen Irenke since the Regnor.

“Every day like clockwork,” she said.

Her claim unnerved me. It also thrilled me. It suggested that I’d regressed without any knowledge or memory of doing so; I might even be a living-dead trancer. Without a stenographer present, who could say?

Irenke, fingers throttling her cigarette, was evidently in a mood.

“Let’s try this again,” I offered.

“Too late,” she said. “We’ve been overridden. Or overrode. I never was very good at grammar.”

“What do you mean, overridden?” I asked.

“You’re the paranormal expert,” she said. “Ask one of your professors. The past is not past if it is always present. Memory is an act of murder.”

She loosened a buckle on her dress.

“I’m fat,” she complained. “I shouldn’t eat cream soup. Do you know what this is called? A self-belt. Such an ugly term. Sylvia Plath should have written a poem called ‘Self Belt.’ She liked those staccato word punches: Black shoe. Fat black stake. God-ball. The villagers never liked you. Achoo .”

“We spoke about Sylvia Plath the last time we met,” I said. “Or rather, the time I met you in New York.”

She wasn’t, I noticed, wearing her pendant.

“You must have me mistaken for another girl,” she said. “I’ve never been to New York.”

She stood, smoothed her skirt, tossed her empty cigarette packet on the coffee table.

“Be right back,” she said.

A weeping woman strode past Irenke, clipping her elbow. Irenke glared at her.

In my head I recited the final lines of “Death & Co.”

The dead bell ,

The dead bell .

Somebody’s done for .

A waiter appeared.

“Drink for the madame?” he asked in French.

“Whiskey sour,” I said.

“And for the madame’s friend?”

“Make it two,” I said.

Irenke returned before our drinks arrived. She unfoiled a new pack of cigarettes.

Two more weeping women exited the elevator.

“Guess they didn’t get the part,” Irenke said.

“What part?”

“The part of the dead girl,” Irenke said. “There’s a casting call upstairs.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, there’s probably an upside to not getting that role.”

“My mother’s the director,” Irenke said. “I’ve heard she can be very abusive to people who disappoint her. Which is why I’m nervous about auditioning.”

I recalled that Irenke had told me about her mother at the Regnor, how this mother had given her the necklace and called Irenke her “muse.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re a shoo-in.”

“A what?” she said.

“You’re her muse,” I said. “How could she give the role to anyone else?”

Irenke appeared horrified by this suggestion.

“You think a mother should cast her own daughter in a porn film?” she said.

“Your mother directs porn films?” I said.

I knew, then, who this mother was.

Was this why Irenke had visited me — or rather, why I had visited her?

I cased Irenke for proof that she was Dominique Varga’s daughter. I’d only seen Varga once, in Not an Exit ; my brain conjured a woman with a jutting, aggressive face, one unwilling to succumb to the victimization of an anonymous hand, even as her motionless body did. Irenke’s face, meanwhile, melted downward, failing to refute the melancholy gravity that pulled at it.

“But she doesn’t know she’s my mother,” Irenke clarified. “I only found out recently myself.”

“And so … you’re here to tell her?” I asked.

Irenke laughed.

“That would be a mistake, don’t you think?”

Probably, I thought.

“You’re here to spy on her, then,” I said.

“I’m here to audition ,” Irenke said. “I want to see if she knows who I am. Don’t you think a mother should recognize her own daughter? Even if she abandoned her at birth?”

“I didn’t know that Dominique Varga had a daughter,” I said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Irenke said. “She erased me. She overrode me. A woman like her couldn’t be a mother.”

The waiter appeared with our whiskey sours.

“I didn’t order this,” Irenke said.

“I did,” I said.

“What is it?” she said.

She took a sip.

“It’s good,” she said. “I like it.”

We clinked glasses. Irenke withdrew a camera from her purse and asked me to take her picture.

“I want to remember this day,” she said. She wheedled a compact from her coat pocket and reapplied her lipstick.

She tried, with mixed results, to smile.

I took her picture anyway.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“So,” Irenke said. “Have you decided yet?”

“Decided what?” I said.

“Do you want me to help you punish her or not?” she asked.

“Punish who?” I said.

“I’m an expert at ruining people’s lives,” she continued. “It’s the one talent I possess.”

She flashed her drink, already half gone.

The elevator dinged. Two red-eyed women exited, followed by a woman obscured by long, black hair. Her step, unlike that of her dejected elevator mates, was springy, elated. She noticed Irenke, absorbed again in her makeup compact, picking at her lashes. The woman’s shoulders flicked together. She sped her gait and cut to the left, skimming so near to my armchair that her hand glanced off my cheek as she passed.

She hurried past the doorman, who followed her with his eyes.

Madame Ackermann . For certain, it was she, her hair shivering thickly across her back as she strode into the street without checking for traffic, hailed a cab, was gone.

My cheek burned where she’d touched it.

She’d been upstairs, I thought. She’d possibly met Varga. Apparently, too, she knew Irenke, or at least of her, and had chosen, for whatever reason, to avoid her. What did she know that I didn’t? Quite a lot. We’d funneled our way back through the same regression wormhole, Madame Ackermann and I, but she was leagues ahead of me.

I considered chasing after her, confronting her, threatening her, even ( I’m onto you ), but decided against it. Psychics died doing this sort of thing. We were data collectors, not participants. Madame Ackermann’s mentor, for example, had drowned as an astral stowaway on a doomed Great Lakes cruise ship in search of a grandfather she’d hoped to save. Madame Ackermann, as her stenographer, had recorded her final, shrieking words before the water sucked her down.

“You know,” I said to Irenke. “I could use your help with a different matter.”

I told her that I wanted to accompany her on her audition. I wanted to meet her mother.

“That’s impossible,” Irenke said. This request spooked her. “I’m sorry, no. She doesn’t want to see you.”

“Your mother?” I said. “But she doesn’t even know me.”

Irenke fell silent.

“Why do you want to ruin people’s lives?” I asked her.

“This isn’t about what I want,” Irenke said. “It’s about what you want.”

“But I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life.”

Agitated, she drained her sour.

“Look,” Irenke said, calming herself. “I’m trying to make it up to you in the only way I can. Please. For my sake. Accept my help.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but she wasn’t going to help me in the way I wanted to be helped until I relented. What was the harm in saying yes? I could pretend to accept her offer, I’d let her think that she was doing me this favor. Because then maybe she’d be more amenable to doing me an actual favor, and introduce me to her mother.