Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

His eyes bobbled unsteadily, as if he were seeing his wife in the room before him, and maybe he was; the line between senile and psychic was fine, even nonexistent. My father’s father, when he entered his dementia endgame, had let me, then aged twelve, tag along on his sundowner fugues, the two of us traveling together to a World War II naval ship stationed in the Yellow Sea, to a two-story apartment building in Lowell, Mass., his birthplace.

“I guess that’s love,” I said.

“No,” he said, turning back to the photo of Varga and the baby. “ That’s love.”

The snapper’s thumb landed on the infant’s head, blotting it out.

That sudden redaction (thumb over face) provoked me. I passed a hand over the photo. The veins on the underside of my wrist twanged, a taut pulling of melancholy threads. Then it happened. This regression wasn’t painless or dreamy, it was the physiological equivalent of being reduced to a mess of protons and accelerated through the Hadron collider, of being looped at light speed and crashed into other protons that had also, once, been part of me.

I coagulated into a crunchy mass in the Parisian hotel lobby, my body a casing for glass shards. I sat in my usual chair. I made grinding, particle noises whenever I moved.

Across from me, Irenke, drink in hand, wept.

I clutched my head.

Irenke threw her glass against the floor, shattering it.

Then the floor disappeared.

“That bitch,” Irenke raged. She tore at the neckline of her dress.

“Who?” I said. I’d never been scared in a regression before; this time, I was scared. I’d arrived at a forbidden place.

“I wanted to be her muse,” she said. “But instead I am her cameraman. She hides me behind the drapes and makes me watch.”

“But you are her muse. She gave you — or rather she will give you — a necklace and tell you exactly that.”

“She’ll give me nothing,” Irenke said. “Anything I own of hers, I had to steal.”

She sobbed into her elbow crook. Her other hand grabbed my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done horrible things.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. I patted her arm. A glass shard poked through my skin, then another and another. I touched one. They were numb as teeth. “Whatever it is you did, I forgive you.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “She deserved it. She used me to get what she wanted and then she dumped me, pretended I’d never existed. I had to make her suffer for what she did. She was a bad person, you see. You’re lucky you never met her.”

“Your mother?” I asked.

She raised her head. To stare into her pupils was to stare straight at the subatomic engine room of the universe’s collective human misery, its self-annihilating, Hadron-collider core.

“No,” she said. “Yours.”

The old snapper drove me back to the Goergen. I gripped my wrist — the one Irenke had held — but I couldn’t stem the vacuum suck that threatened to empty my veins. I worried that I might psychically bleed out onto the car seats.

The concierge greeted me with his usual indifference. I sat in his desk chair — an off-kilter walnut spin that boinged on its base like those playground horses I rode as a kid, the ones attached to a thick metal spring, the ones that tried to buck you, head first, onto the cement.

Irenke was fucking crazy. She was a deranged astral imprint and nobody’s daughter. Possibly she’d known my mother, but more likely she was a psychic stalker who’d, for whatever reason, chosen to pick on me. Maybe Irenke was a psychic henchman of Madame Ackermann’s, an infiltrator tasked to further sicken and confuse me. This would explain why Madame Ackermann had hurried past us in the Paris hotel lobby. She didn’t want to have to pretend to “meet” Irenke, and risk my cottoning on to their plan.

But regardless of who she was or wasn’t, I needed to break off all contact with her. I’d ask Marta for help.

This plan calmed me.

Then I checked my e-mail. I’d received a reply from Professor Hales.

Dear Julia , he wrote.

Attached please find an essay I would like to submit to Mundane Egg for publication. I wrote it to accompany the monograph of a spirit photographer whose photographs, quite frankly, I despised. The photographer rejected the essay because it had nothing to do with her work. Instead I wrote an essay about Indre Shira’s “Brown Lady” photograph, because I had the good fortune, last summer when I was in England, to visit Raynham Hall. I paid the pound equivalent of US$300 to sit on the actual staircase where the Brown Lady photograph was taken, but as you will see from my essay, the expenditure was not a foolish one, especially if Mundane Egg sees fit to publish my findings. Please tell your boss that I’m a fanatical reader of her publication .

I tried to open Professor Hales’s attachment, but the concierge’s computer didn’t recognize the software. Needless to say, I knew there’d be nothing in there relating to my initial question to him concerning overrides.

I did a quick “overrides” Google search and ended up on a Wikipedia page about computer programming that made me realize: anything can strike a person as menacingly apt. (The implementation in the subclass overrides the implementation in the superclass by providing a method that has the same name, the same parameters or signature, and same return type as the method in the parent class. If an object of the parent class is used to invoke the method, then the version in the parent class will be executed, but if an object in the subclass is used to invoke the method, then the version in the child class will be executed.)

I copied the link and pasted it into an e-mail to Professor Wibley, whose advanced senility rendered him safe to correspond with, assuming he’d heard of e-mail. I dispensed with the pretense of soliciting fact-checking advice for Mundane Egg ; I asked him about overrides, and left it at that.

Then I wrote to Colophon.

Varga had a child; possibly her name was Irenke. But we don’t need her. I’ve found a better source .

He did not write back.

I did not reveal that I’d met the heiress who’d organized the first official festival of Varga’s films, the heiress who’d once been the suspected victim of a Varga-directed snuff but who’d crashed her car on purpose, and who’d mostly survived her mistake.

I cannot say why I did not tell him this.

On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn. She looked like crap, her hair flattened on one side as though she’d been napping all day. Stylistically, too, she’d backslid; gone were the scarves and the little tweed jackets, replaced by holey cardigans, yoga pants, a pair of blue babouches unthreading from their grubby soles.

“Where’ve you been?” Alwyn asked. Even her voice sounded compressed. “I’ve been looking for you for hours.”

“Baths,” I said.

“I checked the baths,” she said.

“I meant the sauna,” I said.

Alwyn worried a pimple on her chin. Her overall vibe was one of depletion, of exhaustion.

I remembered it well.

“Here,” I said, steering her toward a club chair. “Sit.”

She handed me her bag.

“Pull out that file, will you?” she asked.

I withdrew the Madame Ackermann file. Amidst the dot-matrix printouts I found a number of paparazzi magazines, a few of the pages dog-eared.

I held one up.

“This constitutes research?” I said.

“I like to know where my mother is,” she said. “Last week she was in Stockholm for a charity ball.”