Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Love, Julia , I typed.

I moused over the “Send” icon. But I didn’t send. I veered toward the delete icon. I deleted.

I wrote to Madame Ackermann.

Dear Madame Ackermann , I wrote. Wondering if we can call a truce. Forever your student, Julia .

This one I sent.

I checked my e-mail one final time before logging out. I’d received a message from The Workshop.

It read:

The faculty member you are trying to contact is on leave. If you’re looking for general information about the Workshop, please contact Dr. Karen Yuen at kyuen@theworkshop.edu. If you’re trying to contact this faculty member in particular, we don’t know what to say. Your e-mail will be forwarded to his or her personal account, but we cannot guarantee its receipt, nor, if received, that it will ever be read. Of course this is always the case with missives, virtual or otherwise; we’re just pointing this out, should you be under the impression that any form of communication is fail-safe. Regardless, if you do not hear from this faculty member, the Workshop is not to blame .

That Madame Ackermann was unreachable was not news to me, but nonetheless this auto-reply ignited a tiny pilot light of panic in my sternum. I was not safe here.

I’m so fucking happy to be leaving , I thought. The Goergen’s loose windowpanes, the gaps between the floors and the walls, the hundreds of drains, the women with the holes in their heads, everywhere I looked I saw opportunities for infiltration and loss.

After packing, I went to Borka’s room to tell her I was transferring to a spa for old people and schizophrenics. Also I wanted to return the key and cricket cage. I’d failed to regress to 152 West 53rd Street, Room 13, on October 24, 1984, between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., and now I was headed to a maximum-security building where it would be pointless to even try. Whatever information Borka possessed about Varga, she would have to give it to me without the promise of anything in return.

I found her in the rare giddy state; Marta had approved her surgical objectives. It appeared she’d already had a procedure or two — her eyelids were swollen, her upper lip distended.

“I can’t wait until you see me again,” she said.

I didn’t bother telling her: I was never going to see her again.

Though I tried to discourage her, she insisted that I take her money.

“For sad mood days,” she said, pressing a hamster-sized roll of bills into my hand.

When I returned the cricket cage and key, however, her mood hairpinned.

“You’re giving up?” she said. “After all I’ve done for you?”

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I can’t.”

She grabbed my hand.

“Tell me what you need to know,” she said. “I’m ready to help you now.”

“I don’t know if that would make a difference …”

“Someone died in that room,” she blurted.

I blinked at her.

“Who?” I said.

“A stranger,” she said. “But her conceits were sent to me.”

“Conceits?” I said.

“Clothing,” she said. “Belongings.”

“Why would a stranger send you her belongings?” I asked.

“There was a note,” she said, “instructing the concierge. Should anything happen to her, I was to receive her conceits.”

“What else did the note say?”

“Nothing,” she said bitterly. “It said nothing.”

“So you want to know why this stranger sent you her things?” I said.

She nodded.

“I want to know if I am somehow to blame,” she said.

“Why would you be to blame?” I asked.

She pushed her fingers into her eyeballs. Literally, her fingers disappeared to the first knuckle, her old face like a snakeskin beginning to molt.

“These people,” she said. “These people who die and you never knew them. What are you supposed to feel?”

She really wanted me to tell her. She really thought that I would know.

“Nothing,” I said, tossing the key on her bed. “You’re not supposed to feel anything.”

She removed her fingers from her eyes, and it was, I swear, as though she’d pulled her fingers from holes in a dyke that had previously held back a flood. It struck me with the force of a riot hose.

“Oh really ,” she hissed. “Hasn’t your blighted, miserable life taught you anything? You’re just like her. Doomed to fail because you’re too scared to try.”

“Who?” I said. “Who am I like?”

My mother, I thought. Since she’d been in cahoots with Varga, maybe Borka had known my mother, too.

It was possible.

“My mother?” I said. “Did you know her?”

Borka laughed meanly.

“No,” she said. “I did not.”

I didn’t push her to explain; to do so would be pointless. She wasn’t giving me anything I didn’t earn first. But I wanted her to understand: I had information, too.

“I discovered your Varga secret,” I said. “I know about your ‘death.’ ”

I didn’t say: I know you disfigured yourself on purpose, that you drove your car into a cliff because you were an attention-hungry rich girl who wanted to be a celebrity, or maybe because you despised, with an intensity that drove you to violence, your face.

She scrutinized me as though I were a math problem, an x-value that remained momentarily, and terrifyingly, beyond her comprehension.

But whatever she divined reassured her. The wrathful floodwaters withdrew; she tamped her real self back to invisibility. Again, she was only ugly on the outside.

She smiled and held out her arms to me. I allowed her, one last time, to smooth my hair.

“Silly Beetle,” she said. “You know so much nothing.”

She forced the key into my robe pocket.

“But we still have our deal, right?” she said.

I didn’t tell her that I had no intention of touching this key ever again. Whatever she wanted me to discover in that hotel room, it was a fool’s errand. No matter what I found out, no matter whose face she had, it would not stop her from hating herself.

“We have our deal,” I lied.

Back in my room, I opened my French doors and stepped onto my room’s small patio. I took a mental snapshot of the view — the distant lights of the various bridges stretching over the Danube, and the blackened void of the Vienna Woods; the immediate quiet of Gutenberg Square, and the lighted flat windows across the square, revealing the collapsed cushions of easy chairs and dirty plates on tables but never people.

Soon, my presence was detected; below me, the camera flashes popped. I canted my face downward so the snappers could get a clear shot of my face. I waved. I smiled. I hoped that Madame Ackermann would see these photos and be lured to the Goergen in search of me. Let her come, I thought, because I will be long gone.

The flashes weakened, flickered, extinguished. Now there was only night down there. What I’d taken for flashes were the flames of many individual lighters as the nodders fired up their pipes. In the newly keen silence I listened to the wind that, when I closed my eyes, became the sound of the nodders’ gaseous brains leaking from their bodies, whirling around Gutenberg Square, filling whatever lonely vacancies.

From Vienna I took a train through the Carpathians. The scenery was stunning but I barely registered it, instead spending most of the trip recovering from a fright I’d had at the station when a woman wearing a familiar Pucci scarf cut in front of me in the ticket queue. Her black ponytail hair lashed my cheek as she pushed behind a businessman, knocking his briefcase from his hand.