Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Perhaps this man was Alwyn’s detective. She’d barely left her room in the past three days, convinced that the detective was posing as a snapper in the square, one with a very powerful telephoto lens that might catch her, through the giant windows, in a first-floor common room.

It seemed, for once, that Alwyn was not being dramatic or paranoid.

The probable detective asked me a question in German.

I smiled.

“I said,” the man said in English, “got a problem?”

“Thanks for noticing,” I said.

The man finished his cigarette, checked his watch, opened his bag, and removed three telescoped metal tubes, which he lengthened and attached to one another via a flat, rotating platform.

“So you’re a detective,” I said.

“Huh?” the man said. He pulled a camera from his bag and affixed it to the top of the tripod he’d assembled. He loaded it with a Polaroid cartridge and photographed the pigeons at his feet. He yanked the Polaroid from the camera, shook it, peeled away the black skin. He stared at it. He showed it to me.

It was a Polaroid of pigeons.

“Do you mind?” he asked, pointing the camera at me. “I need a human being.”

No question it was a bad idea to have my photo snapped by a probable detective in Gutenberg Square.

He dialed the focus. “Think about someone,” he instructed.

“What kind of someone?”

“I tell people before I take their picture to think of a person they love. Then the picture will not only be a picture of their face. Because who cares about a face? A face is a hole in the landscape. How ugly,” he said, pointing to the cricket cage. “Please, will you hold it?”

I held the cricket cage in my lap. I tried to think of a person I loved, but no one person stuck. Faces spun in blurry sequence. A sped-up odometer of faces.

“Another?” he asked. “Over there.”

I shifted to a different bench. For some reason he used a flash, even though it was bright and getting brighter, the sun threatening to clear the roof of the easternmost building on Gutenberg Square.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them to total darkness. I couldn’t see the buildings or the bench or the man or the pigeons.

Beside me was an animal; its hairs prickled against my forearm. It swung as though attached to a meat hook, then collapsed in a heap by my legs.

A coat.

I felt to the other side of me. A second coat.

My feet, when I moved them, encountered a battalion of shoes.

I was in a closet.

Then I heard voices.

“You’re so proud to be a bastard,” said a woman.

“A boy shouldn’t ignore his talents,” said a man.

Bed springs depressed.

“Tell me,” the woman struggled to say as the man kissed her. “Tell me why you don’t love me.”

The man didn’t respond.

“Tell me why or this stops now,” the woman said.

The noises ceased. The man laughed.

“Because you’re soulless,” the man said. “And pathetic.”

The noises resumed. There was wetness and gasping.

“I should be blamed for permitting you to fuck me,” the woman said.

“No, for that you should be pitied,” the man said.

“Pity me,” the woman moaned. “Please.”

The act was quick. Afterward there was silence, followed by crying.

I slid my hands along the door molding, feeling for the knob. I turned it.

Through an arched doorway I could see bodies on a bed, clothing askew.

I recognized this room.

The man still wore his shoes.

“Stay,” the woman said. She clung to the man. “I love you.”

The man unpeeled her hands from his torso.

“You’re such a parasite,” the woman said, voice rising. “A nothing.”

Now I was certain: I had been in this room before, during one of my Barcelona chair regressions. I recognized the drapes, behind which, I knew, hid a young girl with a video camera. I recognized the intimidated and repulsed young man; I recognized the woman’s hands, the ones that appeared to have squeezed many necks. Her face, however, remained a blur, as though she were a pedestrian caught in the periphery of a reality TV show, her head digitally smudged to avoid a lawsuit.

“The question we should be asking ourselves,” the young man said, “is why I agreed to this.”

“Because I’m the only contact you’ll ever have with fame,” the woman retorted. “I am the one successful work of art you’ll ever make.”

She reached toward him as he sat on the edge of the bed, cinched a shoelace.

“Pity me again,” she said. “Please.”

The man stood. He straightened his belt. He stepped on the woman’s discarded clothing: a pair of jeans, a striped sailor shirt.

He yanked his jacket off a chair and left.

The woman curled herself around the absence on the bed, dredging from her body hideous scraping noises.

This went on for quite a while.

Then the woman was overcome by a case of hiccups, or what I initially mistook for hiccups.

In fact, the woman was laughing.

Clutching the bedsheet around her like a towel, she yanked the drapes open to reveal the young woman and a video camera on a tripod. The young woman appeared as a silhouette to me. She shivered; her dark boundaries blurred. Even so, I couldn’t fail to recognize her. This was why, when I’d met Irenke at the Regnor, she’d struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before.

The woman kissed Irenke on the cheek, played with her hair.

“Let me get you a sweater,” the woman said.

She walked toward my closet, sheet dragging over the floorboards and toppling a spire of books. She flung wide the closet door and her face snapped into focus, her features sharp, unsheathed.

Up close, there was no mistaking who she was.

Dominique Varga reached toward me with a hand. I closed my eyes, I waited for her fingers to close around my throat and begin to squeeze.

“Stop squinting,” the man said. “Smile a little.”

He kneeled on the pavers, his camera against his face.

I reclined on the bench, overcome by wooziness. I felt as though I’d leapt from a speeding motorcycle. The sensation of sideways falling was impossible to shake.

I asked the concierge if he had a camera I could borrow.

He told me that cameras were not allowed at the Goergen for reasons that were likely very obvious to me.

“How about a flashlight?” I asked.

Back in my room, I shut myself into my wardrobe and beamed myself in the face with his flashlight, hoping to prompt another regression.

No regressions occurred.

I returned the flashlight and wrote an e-mail to Colophon. Intriguing progress to report .

I described to him my “encounter” with Dominique Varga and a woman named Irenke, while stressing to him that my regression had been accidental (I’d been, as Alwyn had surely reported to him, mostly pretty respectful of the discouragements). Then I watched the latest attachment from Madame Ackermann. She’d sent me a new version, one less obscured by fog. I could see the woman on the bed more plainly, she had long black hair and resembled, as she was meant to resemble, my mother — though “she” was no doubt Madame Ackermann.

I could imagine the dramatic arc of these attachments (and frankly I was impressed by the amount of time, money, and creative energy she was willing to dedicate to my attack). Madame Ackermann would become more and more visible, until the figure on the bed was unmistakably her, at which point she would address the camera with fake concern and say, you poor thing, you look like you’ve seen a wolf .

Then she’d laugh until she passed out. Or she’d tempt the video artist from behind his camera and have sex with him on the bed.