Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Sun asked Borka a question to which Borka testily responded.

“I told her we don’t want dinner,” Borka said. “Only some tea.”

“I’d like some dinner,” I said.

“It will have to be cold,” Borka said. “I cannot tolerate food smells in the evening.”

“Cold is fine,” I said.

Borka sat in the wing chair and busied herself by reading one of Sun’s newspapers.

I ate the cold dinner Sun delivered while Borka flipped through her paper with the rage of old people in charge of television remotes. Finally she settled on a page, her blinkless Strigiforme eyes seeming to literally absorb its contents. Folding the paper, she showed me an article accompanied by two photos, one of a man caught on a short-circuit video camera, one of a second man, or maybe it was the same man, wearing a tie and smiling.

“He is pretending to be this young fellow,” she pointed to the tie guy, “who jumped in front of a train.”

“Why would he do that?” I said.

“Because he was sad,” she said. “Though I can’t say why. He had a beautiful wife and three boys. He managed a hedge fund and had recently bought a house in New Jersey.”

“The sad man’s pretending to be the happier man?” I said.

“No,” she said. “The man who jumped in front of the train was sad. And this one had his face fixed to look like the sad man’s face.”

“Oh,” I said, more interested now. “He’s a surgical impersonator.”

I examined the photographs. The two men looked alike but also not.

“So these impersonators exist,” I said.

“Of course they exist. It’s only people like you who believe ghosts are the more sensible explanation.”

She continued reading, her lips moving.

“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the dead man’s wife is upset. Her husband killed himself. And she remarried to forget about him. And now she doesn’t have to forget about him. What is so terrible about this?”

“Well,” I began. As usual, Borka proved immune to standard emotional logic; it seemed injurious to her person to correct her understanding.

“If someone asked you to change your face to look like someone they loved, would you do it?” she said.

“Would you ?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “I am heartless that way.”

“You mean selfless,” I said.

“Maybe it is because I do not have any special attachment to my face,” she said. She poked her cheek. “This one is not even mine.”

Borka folded the newspaper; she lay it atop the other papers stacked beside the room’s tiny fireplace, over which loomed a massive marble mantle, as though any heat the fire might provide was an afterthought, really what she needed was a surface on which to place knickknacks. And knickknacks she had, a hamlet’s worth of little china people holding shepherd crooks and parasols, trailing detritus in the porcelain aura that encased their feet — a family of ducks, a dog, a dropped bonnet.

Borka did not seem like the sort of woman to collect these sugary inanities, but perhaps she was compensating for the fact that mantles beg for photographs, and she had none. Not anywhere. I did not find this absence peculiar, however, because I knew from experience how unsettling it could be not to resemble the person once known as you. Whatever new face the car accident and the shitty surgeon had given her, it had required, for sanity’s sake, the total eradication of the old one, even in pictures.

“Come,” Borka said.

She led me to an upstairs study. From a desk drawer, she removed a perforated metal box.

“I wanted to show you this,” she said.

“It’s pretty,” I said. It wasn’t. “What is it?”

“A Japanese cricket cage,” she said brusquely, as though, given my supposed gifts, this were a question I should be able to answer myself.

She withdrew from the interior a key attached to an elongated diamond of green Bakelite, embossed with the number thirteen.

Sitting at the desk, Borka wrote on a piece of blank card stock, her marks filling the entire white space, her penmanship buoyed by irregular aerial loops.

New York City. 152 West 53rd Street. Room 13. October 24, 1984. 4 p.m.–9 p.m .

“What’s this?” I asked.

“You are invited,” she said.

She closed my hand around the key. The chilly metal heated to skin temperature, then grew rapidly hotter until I was palming the equivalent of a live ash.

I dropped the key back into its cage.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”

“But it is no big deal for you,” Borka said.

“I’m not allowed,” I said. “I’m working for other people at the moment.”

Borka appeared not to hear me.

“We can help each other,” she said desperately. “I can give you what you most want to find. I can help you see her.”

“Who?” I said. “Dominique Varga?”

Her eyes slid toward the floor.

“She’s alive?” I said.

Borka nodded.

“How do you know?” I said.

“You don’t trust me?” she said. “You should. I have your heart in mind.”

She searched my face for something that she appeared both relieved and saddened not to find.

“Why do you care so much about her?” she said.

“Varga knew my mother,” I said. “So maybe she could tell me about her. Since my mother will not let herself be known to me.”

“You might learn things you’d prefer you hadn’t,” she said.

“I’m willing to chance it,” I said.

“Also Varga’s unreliable,” said Borka. “She’s an international liar.”

“A lie is more valuable than nothing,” I said.

Borka’s eyes were the strangest color, brown with a ring of pale blue encroaching upon her pupils like a milk fungus.

She pressed my hand between hers.

“That’s very true,” she said. “In some cases, a lie can be more valuable than the truth.”

“In some cases,” I agreed.

She smoothed my hair with her hand.

“I will help you,” she vowed.

“You will?” I said.

She handed me the cricket cage.

“We will help each other,” she said, blinking.

Inwardly, I smiled. Classic Borka. She never gave something for nothing, not even a lie.

I removed the key from the cricket cage. Again the metal rocketed from cold to branding-iron hot. I dropped it into the pocket of my sweater.

I tried to return the cricket cage.

“No,” Borka said. “You keep it. A gift.”

“A bribe,” I clarified.

Borka hugged me, smearing my hair with the softening ointment she rubbed on her face. She pressed her mouth against my skull so forcefully that I could feel her teeth.

“Silly Beetle,” she said into my head. “As if there is a difference.”

When Borka and I returned to the Goergen, nobody appeared to have noticed that we’d left.

I found this interesting.

The next morning I decided to go outside again. I spun through the revolving front doors, hunched against the sprung alarm, the bark of security dogs — but nothing.

Ha, I thought, as though I had gotten away with something sneaky. Then I realized I’d proved that we were cows, balking at a few white lines painted across a road. The discouragements were bullshit; maybe they existed as some form of thought experiment. Or thoughtless experiment, proving we’d failed to think for ourselves. How thoughtless can people be?

People can be remarkably thoughtless.

The park was empty at this hour, no nodders, no snappers. I sat on a bench to eat a roll and to better inspect, in the daylight, Borka’s cage and key.

A sunglassed man entered the square. He wore coveralls and carried a canvas bag full of what sounded, when he set them on the octagonal paving stones, like tools. I decided that there was something suspicious about him, as though he’d determined which precise shade of brown promised to fade into most city backgrounds and render its wearer unmemorable, failing to register with witnesses save as a beigy blur.