Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

It was her . I willed myself not to move, to cease breathing. Perhaps she’d fail to detect me, purchase her ticket, swan off toward her gate. But then I had to sneeze, and I tried not to, and the pressure built and built until what emerged from my body sounded less like a sneeze than a rock striking another rock.

She turned.

She was not Madame Ackermann.

Still, I took this mistake as a warning. I “saw” people before I saw them, their arrival preannounced by a doppelgänger stranger.

Thank God for the bunker. I’d started to think of my new venue not just as a health necessity but as an architectural narcotic, even a potential vacation.

Before boarding the train, I checked my e-mail at a “free” Internet café, one that required me to purchase a pastry, and demonstrably enjoy it, before I was allowed to touch a keyboard.

I’d received my daily attachment from Madame Ackermann and a very long response to my override query from senile Professor Wibley.

“Concerning overrides,” he began, and thank goodness he did, because the e-mail did not seem to be about overrides at all, but about the dangers of method acting, and how actors, in using their own pasts to animate the emotions of a nonexistent character, replaced their memories with the memories of a performance in which they’d employed these memories, the result being, after a number of “usages,” that these memories became the province of myriad fictional others, and the actor could only access them by worming his way backward through the various roles he’d played, but that his past, once he reached it, was no longer, in theory, only his.

Wibley then veered into a riff involving T. S. Eliot’s artistic quest for a degree of depersonalization “that approaches the condition of science,” and how Eliot and other modernist writers at the turn of the last century viewed it as their ultimate goal to achieve the continual extinction of their personality, resulting in an idealized state that was adopted by the psychics of the time and renamed, in psychic circles at least, “clairvoidancy.”

“Though these days I am suffering,” wrote Professor Wibley, “more from voidancy than clairvoidancy. See me as a cautionary tale. I was colonized by the Mind of Europe even though I superannuated Shakespeare, Homer, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen. Regardless, it is not my intention to depress the youth. I simply hope that I have been of some small consolation to you, whoever you are.”

He’d included, at the bottom of his e-mail, the following boilerplate:

“Some can absorb knowledge, the luckier must sweat for it.”

A few hours past lunchtime, my train pulled into the tollbooth-sized station at Breganz-Belken.

A man in a pale sage uniform greeted everyone who disembarked — myself and two older couples — he took our luggage, he led us to a golf cart. Soon we arrived at a honed monolith that protruded from the ground at a slight angle as though it had been haphazardly dropped from outer space.

Whereas the Goergen was fluted and cartouched and polished to a high gleam, the Breganz-Belken was a Brutalist cave, the surfaces so matte they looked powdered.

I told the woman at the front desk that I had a reservation.

“Julia Severn,” I said.

She had such good skin, this woman. She was so flushed with health that she appeared feverish.

“I’m afraid there’s no guest here by that name,” the woman said, as though we were discussing a third and presently absent person. I showed her the postcard on which Alwyn had written my confirmation number, as if this constituted convincing proof that her database was incorrect.

She inputted the number and her face flickered. Evidently I did have a reservation, but she refused to outright admit this.

“Additional postcards can be found in the night table,” she said, initiating some rapid key commands. “Should you choose to use them, they will appear on your week’s-end bill as ‘additional room charge.’ May I have your credit card?”

I handed her Alwyn’s credit card.

“Also, I’m scheduled to see Kluge,” I said.

“Kluge,” she said. “I believe he’s in Tehran, skiing. But I’m happy to know that women of your generation are taking the aging process so seriously. It’s never too early to start the fight.”

“No,” I said, “actually—”

“However, I can’t enroll you in the Kluge therapy until you’ve been approved by one of our diagnosticians,” she said.

She told me she’d slotted me in for “a ten o’clock Mike.”

Her computer beeped.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Alwyn’s card. “Declined. Do you have another?”

I told her I did not.

“We are not above accepting cash,” she sniffed.

I sloughed a wad of bills from Borka’s Sad Mood stash.

A sage-uniformed porter unlocked my room with a key card made of wood. After he left, I lay in the bed and, nose against the window, peered down the rubbly slope on which the backside of the spa was perched, the vertiginous view a freeze-frame of falling. From somewhere in the nearby woods, I heard wolves. Then I realized it was a recording of wolves, piped through tiny speakers scattered like spores throughout the room.

When I called the Goergen to tell Alwyn I’d arrived, I was told that she was unavailable. I left a message saying that she might want to pay her credit card bill.

She did not call me back.

That evening I ate in the spa’s restaurant. My fellow diners were male-female couples in their fifties or sixties, seated across from one another at broad two-tops. Nobody spoke. Their faces remained slack, incommunicative blanks. Perhaps given my recent experiences — with silence-mandated meals, with postsurgical dining partners discouraged from facial displays of emotion — this did not strike me as unusual.

To my knowledge, I saw no schizophrenics.

After dinner I wandered back to my room, taking the scenic route past the thermal pools, clustered at the bottom of a windowless silo at the spa’s center, its bubbling cauldron core. Maybe it was the pleasing aftereffects of the Grüner Veltliner I’d had with my entrée, or that I’d been inside this frequency-impermeable bunker for five hours, but I felt safe, entombed. Best of all, when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t plagued by Fenrir on the backs of my eyelids; he left me alone, as though scared off by the stereo sounds of other wolves.

As recommended, I ate a light breakfast in preparation for Mike. I drank three cups of coffee brewed from toasted millet that left a husky residue on my vocal cords. Voice aside, I presented an alarming picture of health. My face, when I caught an accidental glimpse of it in my bathroom mirror, resembled those photographs of me I no longer consulted to measure my decline.

I tried to check my e-mail but the woman behind the desk told me that the Communications Suite was under construction. She spoke of its future existence the way some people speak of the pronouncements of Nostradamus, as curious predictions they suspect will never come to pass.

At 9:58 a.m., Mike knocked on my door.

Mike, an American in his forties, resembled in looks and demeanor a surfer who’d been kept too long from the sea. He wheeled a gurney into my room.

With his hands he commenced a methodical sweeping of my body, hovering, on occasion, over a presumed trouble spot.

“So,” he said, after about twenty minutes, “I’m guessing you were struck by lightning.”

“Me?” I said. “No.”

“Perhaps you don’t remember,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure I would remember that,” I said.

“Your circuitry’s been scrambled,” he said. “Do you work in the nuclear physics sector?”