Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

She was capable of any degree of blasphemy.

I dragged her e-mail into the trash.

Colophon, meanwhile, had e-mailed me back.

sounds like you witnessed the filming of “up-and-comers, coming, going” and who is this irenke

She was an actress , I wrote back. She claims to be Varga’s daughter .

Colophon responded instantly.

varga had no daughter but if you talk to her again maybe she could help us however be careful she is probably unstable many women were obsessed with varga she had that effect

I told him I’d do my best. I waited for his next parry, a “congratulations” or some expression of enthusiasm or gratitude for what was a pretty significant breakthrough. Nothing.

Then I met Borka in the baths.

As we retrieved towels from the attendant, Borka badgered me about the key.

“Did you do it yet?” she asked.

I told her I had not done it yet. I needed more context. The key was not leading me anywhere.

“But this is the beauty of you, Beetle,” she said. “You get your own context.”

“Can’t you tell me to whom this key belonged?” I asked.

“It’s a hotel room key,” she said. “It belonged to no one. And if I tell you what I’m looking for, you’ll tell me what I’m looking for.”

“That’s the point of all this, I thought,” I said.

She told me a little bit about her past, one that had nothing to do with the key, and truthfully seemed to have nothing to do with her. She told me about her dead husband, a gambling shut-in whom she’d cheated on. He’d given her the cricket cage as a present.

“He was a weak man,” she said. “He wasn’t up to the task.”

“Of being your husband?”

“Of living,” she said.

“And the key?”

“It was once in the possession of someone I might have loved,” she said.

“Not your husband,” I clarified.

She appeared pained. “Correct,” she said.

I asked if she and her husband had had children. Borka adjusted the knot on her headscarf, hauling up on her jaw as though she had a toothache.

“No child,” she said, “would have us.”

Her expression suggested: this was not the truth.

In the locker room, as we undressed, I investigated the sags and droops of her body for signs of motherhood. Even if the heart says no, the body keeps a record of these biological capitulations to others. Or this is how I thought it should be. Those who can’t make scars in time, they make scars in people.

But Borka’s body was unreadable. She was distressingly thin; what flesh remained on her body had slung forward and looked like the pathetic rucksacks in which a person who owned practically nothing had consolidated her possessions. What could have been the stress of a long-ago pregnancy was indistinguishable from the hard wear of years.

“You find me disgusting?” Borka asked, catching me.

“Of course not,” I lied. These regressions took their toll. I wanted to hide in my room with the shades drawn, blot my head beneath a pillow.

“It is not always a tragedy to be unrecognizable as your former self,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because,” she said. “You might be mistaken for someone better.”

She wrapped a towel around her body, forgetting that her face was the scariest thing about her.

My sixth week at the Goergen, I regained yet another talent I thought I’d forever lost.

I awoke one morning to find my pulse quickened, my peripheral vision tinseled. I’d come to understand these symptoms differently since I’d become sick, as dreaded harbingers of a migraine. Prior to my illness I’d welcomed these symptoms; prior to my illness they’d predicted the onset of one of my coincidences. I would learn something . Now, however, they promised an unenlightening journey, one that mimicked the movement of an oil drill, a claustrophobic spiraling into a hole.

I hurried to the lobby where I tried and failed to convince the concierge to slip me my bottle of vicodin.

“You are inhuman,” I whispered.

“You are inhuman,” he replied, and handed me a paperclip.

I spun around; I walked straight into Alwyn.

“Breaking the rules again?” she said. Her face was pale and her hair was a mess, her bangs thrusting upward like the fine tines of a comb.

“I needed an aspirin,” I said. “You also look like you need an aspirin.”

“That’s not what I was referring to,” she said.

I guessed she’d heard from Colophon about my encounter with Dominique Varga. I hadn’t kept this from Alwyn on purpose; I’d figured that Colophon would tell her if he wanted her to know.

“Colophon is fine with me regressing,” I offered in my defense.

“I’m not talking about Colophon. Though he already told me about your visit to the Up-and-Comers set. Very nice, by the way. I’m talking about Marta.”

“What does Marta have to do with this?”

“Marta told me,” she said, “what you’ve been telling her.”

“I don’t tell Marta anything,” I said. “All we do is Mundane Egg.”

“Interesting,” Alwyn said. “That’s not what I hear from Marta.”

“And what do you hear from Marta?”

“Nothing you haven’t presumably heard yourself,” Alwyn said, “given it came out of your own mouth.”

She switched the topic to Madame Ackermann, who’d visited three luxury spas.

“Does she always take so many vacations?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Actually,” I backtracked, recalling what I’d learned of her habits in the crawlspace, “she doesn’t.”

“I’m beginning to worry,” Alwyn said, “that she’s got a lead on Varga.”

“That she works as a masseuse at Canyon Ranch?” I said.

“Could be,” Alwyn said, missing the jibe.

I went to my 10 a.m. Marta meeting, during which we did the usual boring stuff while I waited for my migraine to thunk into gear. Toward the end, I asked her if I could read the notes she’d kept of our sessions.

“That would be against policy,” she said.

“Just what I’ve said to you. I wouldn’t expect access to your notations.”

“No,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”

“But what I’ve told you belongs to me,” I said.

“That is an interesting interpretation,” Marta said.

I shot a look at her clipboard. Marta tipped it closer to her chest.

“Who is Irenke?” she asked.

“Irenke?” I said.

“You wanted to know what you talk about during your sessions. Often you talk about her.”

“I do?”

Marta’s brows cinched.

“Now’s not the ideal time to become involved with people like Irenke.”

“Why?” I asked. I wanted to know what she thought about Irenke. Who was she? Why was she pretending to be Dominique Varga’s daughter?

“You are a medium,” Marta said. “Although so is everybody a medium, an involuntary host to free-floating misery. But you’re a more available one.”

“Available,” I said.

“You are more easily used,” she said.

After our session, I hid in a darkened hallway. I waited until I heard Marta’s door open and shut, her gum soles suctioning over the tiles.

But her door was locked. I glared through the nubbled glass at the inert shapes of furniture, desperate to get inside. What had I told her? Again, I proved a victim of my own inexpertise. I was a clearinghouse for other people’s misery, but lacked the requisite gravity to assert, over these doomy voices, any mastery or control. Mediums, or so Madame Ackermann liked to say, were not merely containers, they were decoders. They imparted meaning and shape to the meaningless and the shapeless. They pulled sense from the sorrowed air.