Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Oh,” I said. “She still hasn’t seen your vanishing film?”

Alwyn confirmed that she hadn’t.

“I mean obviously she’s busy, right?” she asked.

She stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“She’s busy,” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

“You guess?” she said sarcastically.

She engaged in an intense calculation that involved me, but didn’t.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I know better than to ask anything of you.”

I wasn’t certain what I’d done or failed to do. I left it alone.

Then Alwyn confessed that she’d encountered a “bit of a dry spell” with respect to her Madame Ackermann research.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means I don’t know where she is,” she said.

“Did you call the Workshop?”

“I was informed that she was on medical leave,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “She likes to be seen. You’ll find her.”

“Oh, and before I forget,” Alwyn said, “Marta requested a meeting with you at three. Also, tonight’s that presentation by the psychic vampire expert. Marta and I both think you should attend.”

“Am I in trouble?” I asked. Marta had never scheduled any extra meetings with me before.

“I don’t know,” Alwyn said. “Are you?”

“Maybe,” I said.

I confessed that I’d broken the discouragements again; that I’d gone to the flat belonging to one of the paparazzi in Gutenberg Square; that I’d discovered Dominique Varga had had a daughter, and that I’d met a woman pretending to be this daughter, and that this woman, a liar, was a disturbed astral imprint, in fact I worried that she was psychically stalking me, maybe at the behest of Madame Ackermann.

“I know that sounds a little crazy,” I said.

“I knew it,” Alwyn said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is what I get for not listening to you.”

“I knew it,” she repeated. “I told Colophon that Varga had a baby. Of course he never believed me .”

“Wait … you knew?”

“Gut feeling,” she said. “It’s not so special what you do. Everyone’s a latent psychic. They just don’t make a big deal about it. They don’t get degrees in it.”

“I don’t think I make a big deal about it,” I said.

“And let me guess: she abandoned the baby, right? Because being a mother marked her as sexless and ambitionless?”

“Given what we know about Varga,” I said, “I’d wager she did her daughter a favor by giving her away.”

Alwyn kicked a dust bunny. The Goergen’s floors were always gauzy underfoot.

“Of course you would think that.”

“Of course I would think what ,” I said.

Alwyn scrutinized a pair of surgical patients playing backgammon. They resembled — given their gigantic white head-bandages, and the underwater slowness with which they moved the backgammon pieces — very relaxed astronauts.

“I’m honestly curious,” she began.

She hefted herself to a standing position.

“Yes?” I said.

“What does a woman have to do,” she said, “to be classified by you as a monster?”

She put a hand on my bicep and gave it a mean squeeze, though it’s possible she was using me to adjust her balance. She stomped off toward the elevators.

I collapsed into her chair. I wondered, too, what a woman had to do.

At 2:50, I initiated the long wend to Marta’s office.

Marta ushered me inside without a greeting. She eyed me skeptically.

“I’m afraid I cannot be an accessory to your rage any longer,” she said.

“My what?”

“You and this Irenke,” she said. “You are both so angry.”

“She’s the angry one,” I said. “Believe me, I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“You’ve both lashed out at the people you think are to blame for your misfortunes,” Marta continued. “But the blame, you must accept, begins with you.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said.

“You aren’t aware,” she said. “You blame Madame Ackermann. You think it’s her fault.”

“Isn’t it?” I said.

“Even if it is,” she said. “It doesn’t justify what you’re doing. You cannot do to others what they have done to you.”

“It’s do to others what you would have them do to you,” I corrected.

“So you think it is fair to attack a person because she has attacked you.”

“I’m not attacking anyone,” I said.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Regardless, we’re going to stop these sessions for the time being.”

“But I need your help,” I said. “I don’t want to visit Irenke anymore.”

“Then,” Marta said coolly, “don’t.”

There were ten of us at Dr. Papp’s talk.

Borka did not attend. She had not been at dinner. It was as though she somehow knew that I knew about her past with Varga. She did not want to be asked why she’d hidden this from me.

As Dr. Papp spoke, he bounced a ball of kitchen twine in one hand.

“Have you ever heard of the expression ‘bubbling over with happiness’?” asked Dr. Papp, winding the twine around the neck of each guest, connecting us chain-gang style. “Your emotions are like water; they pour onto the people around you.”

Dr. Papp explained, as he distributed pairs of nail scissors, how throwing bad energy caused rips in a person’s psychic carapace, thereby leaving the attacker vulnerable to retaliation.

“This affects all of you,” Dr. Papp said. “You,” he said, pointing at a countess who’d had a face-lift, braiding the fringe of her head scarf. “You’ve sliced open your carapace. Do you think it’s only germs that can find their way into the wound?”

A crucial part of daily hygiene, Dr. Papp said, was to survey our emotional attachments and cut the unhealthy ties.

He instructed us to identify an unhealthy attachment growing from our carapace. Then, using the scissors, we were to cut the string that bound us to the neighbor on our right.

I identified Irenke as my attachment.

Before we cut our string, however, Dr. Papp recommended we imagine our attachment in the basket of a hot-air balloon.

“Revenge is a counterproductive therapeutic goal,” Dr. Papp said, echoing Marta. “Pretend you are sending your attachment on a nice vacation.”

I wedged my fingers into the scissors’ tiny metal loops; the edges were dull, the blades chewed at the string one fiber at a time. The action made me sleepy. Finally the string snapped and I watched my balloon rise. The basket, however, appeared empty. Where was Irenke? I’d launched an empty balloon.

Then I saw her.

She called my name.

Julia , she said. I tried to say I was sorry .

What happened next happened, I later concluded, because my brain was overtaxed by the many exercises and regressions I’d subjected it to. The carpet morphed underfoot to a bed of nails that gouged my legs, and made them bleed and bleed and bleed, until I had to hold my chin up so that I didn’t drown in it, my own rising red death.

Then a storm started. The wind scooted along the surface of the blood, carving it into sharp ridges until the blood was no longer blood, it was an ocean of fire that the wind fanned higher and higher, the waves flicking the balloon’s fabric, saturating it red, then orange, then black.

From the basket I heard screaming.

“Stop now!” Dr. Papp yelled in order to be heard above Irenke’s screaming (which, in theory, only I could hear). Then I understood: I was screaming.

“Bring it in for a landing!” Dr. Papp commanded.

It was too late. The flaming balloon refused to land, powered by its own manic gusts of heat. It made a swipe at me, zooming so close that I could feel its furnace exhale against my cheek. I looked into the eyes of the passenger’s terrified face.