Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d love your help.”

After dinner, I stopped by the concierge’s office to check my e-mail. I had one message, from aconcernedfriend; though it was against the discouragements I clicked on Madame Ackermann’s video. What hurts you makes you stronger, I rationalized. And I needed to be stronger. I’d seen Madame Ackermann in a hotel lobby in Paris, circa 1980-something. We were fated to collide in the astral ether; I wanted to be up to our future encounters.

The fog registered as green-toned, though perhaps this was due to the concierge’s crappy monitor. I watched the entire attachment. It centered me.

Then I wrote Colophon a quick note. Did Dominique Varga have a daughter?

Then — though it violated the vanishing contract I’d signed — I wrote an e-mail to Professor Hales. Professor Hales, I reminded myself, was so freakishly self-involved that he couldn’t be bothered to care that I’d vanished. He likely hadn’t noticed I’d left the Workshop.

Dear Professor Hales , I wrote. Wondering if you could tell me a bit more about regressions via memory byways, and if you’ve ever heard of a phenomenon called “override.” I ask because I’m interning as a fact-checker at a new parapsychology journal based in the former Yugoslavia called Mundane Egg.

I reread what I’d written. This notion of override was interesting. Though not the word used by my father, override might well have been the reason cited for his refusal to hypothesize about my mother, a request I made frequently as a girl. For example: we are on a beach, he and I. We watch a boy build a sandcastle alone while his mother sunbathes on a towel with a book, we watch a pair of sisters digging holes while their mother hauls buckets of water from the shore. Which mother would she have been, I ask him, the tuned-out sunbather or the hauler of buckets?

This would elicit from him an evasive response, the gist of which was this: Of course it would make sense for me to claim that she would have been the hauler of buckets, because what’s the harm in conjuring a mother of exquisite selflessness? My response would not be a truthful attempt to answer your question, it would be an attempt to compensate for your loss by creating an ideal person whose absence you can mourn unreservedly. However, this puts me in the position of making her into someone she was possibly not; it forces me to falsely represent her to you, and in doing so I become, not the keeper of her memory, but the re-creator of her past, and that role makes me uncomfortable; also I believe it is, in the long run, a disservice to her, because you will grow up missing a mother that you would never have experienced, had she not died. And this strikes me as a second kind of death, a more complete and horrible death, to be annihilated and replaced by a hypothetical person who is not remotely you, thus I think it is better that she remain a quasi-mystery, a pleasant unknown, than an absence filled with compensatory narratives supplied by your guilty father.

Of course he never said this, but he did, in his way, say this. How, as a child of five, of seven, I came to understand what he meant without his ever articulating it was less a measure of my psychic abilities than of my skill for interpolation, a skill that motherless children, raised in a preverbal communication void, come to master. Because he was telling me too, without telling me: She would not have been a hauler of buckets. She was not selfless. She would have been an absence even if she’d been there. And while it was true that he didn’t want to do a disservice to her memory, his reasons were maybe less noble than he was comfortable admitting to himself. He didn’t want her turned into a saint because she didn’t deserve sainthood. He was not so generous that he could allow her a posthumous glory she had not earned.

I respected his caution. Some things, once done, can never be completely undone. Only a trace remains of the original, a scar in time.

Before sending the e-mail to Professor Hales, I added a sentence about my boss at Mundane Egg , an attractive brunette who was a huge fan of his last book.

I checked my account one last time; Colophon had responded.

no daughter .

The halls were empty. Dinner had ended long ago. Alwyn, thankfully, hadn’t shown — she’d had a meeting with the head of the Goergen’s privacy division, because her detective had tracked her to Vienna and was sending her menacing postcards — so I was spared having to lie to her about what I’d done all day. Lately Alwyn emitted a carcinogenic unhappiness that rendered me so anxious that I’d found myself, at one point, making an odd grunting noise with my back teeth like my father sometimes did when he was around me.

From behind the guest room doors came sitcom laughter. The Goergen, at this hour, resembled the interior of an insane person’s medicated brain, the halls like vacant neural pathways lit by the occasional lunatic spark of activity.

I didn’t want to go to my room. I’d started to find discomforting the height of the ceilings. To recline on my bed was not unlike lying at the bottom of a well.

Instead I took the elevator to the fifth floor and stopped by Borka’s suite, for which she’d paid extra, but she didn’t answer when I knocked, and no wonder — when I unlocked my door I found her sitting on my bed wearing her coat and a headscarf.

“I have a treat for you,” she said.

Borka unhangered my parka; she zipped me into it like I was her child.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We are going not-here,” she said.

“But that’s discouraged,” I said.

Borka rolled her eyes.

“Distinguishing us from the other guests,” she said, “is that we are not cows.”

From the street, Gutenberg Square appeared shabbier than it did from my window; the apartment building entrances were graffitied, the square itself populated by drug addicts and paparazzi. Borka called them nodders and snappers.

“There’s one snapper in particular,” she said. “He’s followed me for decades. Now I find I miss him when he isn’t there. You know how these hateful people can become a daily part of normal.”

Borka pulled me through the shadows of the buildings and along the cooler perimeter of the nearby woods. As I swayed down the sidewalk, Borka sped along at a hasty clip ahead of me. She wouldn’t take a taxi because, she said, the taxi drivers were spies, and besides, the metro led to the house her husband had purchased right before he died.

I asked why he’d wanted to leave their hometown of Budapest.

“Because Budapest is the City of Egrets,” she said.

She means the City of Regrets , I thought, then reminded myself — this was Borka.

City of egrets, city of tall, thin, spooky, watchful people.

We emerged from the metro in a neighborhood where apartment buildings yielded to stand-alone houses. The air was dirtier, the heated smog hovering at the height of the rain gutters in a tobacco-colored band.

Borka rang the doorbell of a stone house. A silhouette scurried back and forth in front of the parlor windows.

“My maid,” Borka said. “She loves to sit in my chair when I’m out and read her smutty papers.”

Finally a woman in a robe unlocked the door.

“This,” Borka said to me, “is Sun. It means hedgehog in Magyar.”

“That’s her given name?” I asked.

“Of course it is given,” Borka said. “I gave it to her.”

Sun led us to a living room with walls painted the black-blue of an aquarium for nocturnal fish. Borka prowled around a wing chair — testing the spring of the cushions, brushing her palms over the armrests, inspecting it for illegal use.