Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Alwyn, I noticed, had worried the pimple on her chin into a scab. She floated her fingertips over this scab, savoring the time when she could return to her room, pry it off, continue her excavation in private.

“OK,” I said. “How?”

“She’s partial to you,” Alwyn said again. She seemed sort of pissed about this. “Just … do what she asks.”

“That depends on what she wants,” I said.

“She probably wants what everyone wants from you,” Alwyn said meanly. “Information.”

I tossed the fax at her. I was in no mood for Alwyn’s jibes.

Alwyn retrieved the fax from the floor. She set it on my bedside table.

“Don’t you find it interesting,” she said, “how you’re allowed to regress or whatever it is you do into my life, but I’m not allowed to pry into yours?”

“I’ve never pried into your life,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, as though she’d been aiming to trick me into this very answer. “And why not?”

“Because I’m taking my healing seriously,” I said.

“Right,” she said, disgusted. “You’re … how do I say this. You’re undiscerning. You’re a psychic slut. Any stranger who’s in proximity, you ‘can’t help yourself.’ So why could you help yourself with me? Why weren’t you interested in me?”

“Because we are work colleagues,” I said, not knowing what else to say — why was it I hadn’t pried into Alwyn’s life? “I figured it was better to respect your privacy.”

“How thoughtful,” she said. She pulled on her bangs so roughly I worried she’d tear them from her scalp.

I put a hand on her forearm. She tensed under me, unwilling to submit to my lame overture.

“Maybe it’s related to the surgeries,” she said dully.

“What is?” I said.

“You’re drawn to infiltrate a weak spot. All of these surgery patients, they’ve made holes in themselves. How could you resist invading?”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking that this category of person did not exclude Alwyn.

“And anyway,” she said, “I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to care about me the same way I care about you. I shouldn’t expect you to do for me what I do every day for you.”

She stared at me defiantly. Suddenly we were having a coded conversation and I was meant to provide my own key.

I could not.

Just as quickly as she’d turned abrasive, Alwyn recalcified into business mode. She’d already arranged, she said, for my train ticket and admission to the Breganz-Belken spa; she, meanwhile, would be staying at the Goergen.

We’d both meet up with Colophon in Paris in one week’s time.

“I’m not coming back here?” I asked.

She told me I was not.

“I think you’ll find your stay at the Breganz-Belken enlightening,” she said.

“Enlightening?” I said. A sealed-off stone bunker, I thought, should promote the opposite of enlightenment: Endarkenment.

“Who knows,” Alwyn said, “you might be forced to learn something you were never curious to learn.”

“About myself?” I said. Given I’d be in a psychic safe house, more or less, mine would be the sole consciousness I’d have access to.

“Well,” she said dryly, “if there’s one person you’re less interested in than me, it’s you.”

Borka arrived as Alwyn was departing. They practically collided in the small aperture to my room.

“ Excuse you ,” Borka said.

Alwyn did not cede her position. Borka pushed her scarf back. She brandished her face like a gun.

Alwyn caved, permitting Borka to enter. Borka did not thank her or acknowledge her for giving way, causing Alwyn to simmer, not that Borka noticed, or would have understood the implicit meaning if she had. Had they become better friends, or rather better enemies, since I’d been in the medical wing? Something was up. That something appeared to involve me. But I was too sapped to care what or how.

Alwyn tried again to leave, and was blocked by an orderly, a polite man who allowed her to huff through. The orderly bound my arm in a Velcro cuff and took a ridiculously long time to measure my blood pressure. I asked him if I had a pulse, and he answered, I’m not sure .

He stopped trying. He checked the progress of my burn, now mostly healed, he wrote something on my chart, he pronounced me well enough to return to my regular room.

“Fantastic,” I said.

As Borka helped me pack my stuff, she noticed the fax on my bedside table.

“What is this?” she asked, pointing.

“Oh,” I said. It was too difficult to explain. Also, I still hadn’t confessed to Borka what I’d learned of her connection to Varga; this would inevitably arise if I showed her the bill of sale with Varga’s name on it. A part of me enjoyed knowing something about Borka that she didn’t know I knew. She’d made it clear — we were friends, but we were members of an information economy, too. A part of me intuited that I’d be wise to preserve this bargaining chit until I needed it.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Alwyn gave it to me.”

Borka stared at it disapprovingly.

“That girl is a half-dachshund,” Borka said. “She will make you sick.”

“Someone beat her to it,” I said.

“She’s your friend?” Borka asked.

I scrutinized the empty doorway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Alwyn as a friend; I simply thought, given how little interest I’d shown in her, that I couldn’t rightly claim her as one.

“No,” I said.

“You’re right,” Borka confirmed, as though she’d been testing me. “She’s not.”

The night before my train was set to leave, I stopped by the concierge’s desk to check my e-mail for the first time since Dr. Papp’s presentation. I’d received no word from Colophon and ten video attachments from aconcernedfriend, none of which, due to the Goergen’s gluggier than usual connection, I could open, and an e-mail from my father, forwarded from TK Ltd.

I saw your film , it said. And that was all. Maybe he’d hated it, but that he’d bothered to see the film in the first place was a loving overture I couldn’t disregard. I wanted to write him back but knew this was not allowed, and suddenly these rules I’d been (sort of) respecting seemed self-defeating and sickness-enhancing and plain idiotic.

I wrote to my father.

I told him that I was in Vienna. I told him not to worry. I told him I planned to come home after I’d completed the job for which I’d been hired, because this vanishing business wasn’t for me. I told him that I was just now (as I was typing this note) coming to realize that the reason I wasn’t so crazy about vanishing was because I’d met people who seemed strangely in line with his ways of thinking about emotional management — also, for that matter, the Workshop’s. Sealing your psychic shell against intruders. Keeping your personal story to yourself for fear that somebody might use it to hurt you, or for fear that you might use it to hurt someone else, even a dead someone else. Is that why he’d never told me how he’d suffered after his wife had killed herself, why he’d never told me what it was like for him to raise an infant alone — a creature that grievously howled as a matter of plain communication — how I must have functioned as a balm against her loss as well as a ceaseless reminder that she was gone? Did he hate her for this? Did he hate me? Did he hate her for making him, on dark occasion, hate me? Did he, after he watched my vanishing film, experience the same guilty rush I had when I realized: I was happy she was dead, because if she were alive, it would mean that we were somehow to blame for her leaving? That her being dead was preferable to watching a film in which she claimed that we were bad medicine, that we were making her sick? And as for experiencing her death as a relief, why should we feel guilty? If we secretly rejoiced and even bonded over our gladness of her death, so what ? She hadn’t left us any less vicious way to commemorate her.