Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I told him I was most recently employed as a receptionist who answered a disconnected phone.

“And you’re here alone,” he said.

“I’ve noticed I’m one of the few.”

“The spa’s running a couples’ retreat this weekend,” he said.

“What kind of couples’ retreat?” I asked.

Mike didn’t respond. Instead he asked me if I was sexually active.

I told him I was not.

“Good,” he said.

“Is that your way of saying you don’t want to sleep with me?” I said.

“I don’t want to sleep with you,” Mike replied. “I never sleep with damaged people.”

“ Damaged ,” I said.

“Damaged people can fuck up your energy,” said Mike, “especially if you’re fucking them.”

Mike inserted the tip of an elbow between two ribs; he ran the tip along the groove between the bones, back and forth, digging a little deeper with each pass.

“You’re fused together,” Mike said. “This is why I’m pretty sure you got struck by lightning; hypercalcification is initiated by exposure to high-voltage electrical currents.”

Mike asked about my medical history. I told him that I’d had a complicated relationship with an old mentor.

“I’m thinking you’ve misread my toxic relationship with this woman as a lightning strike,” I said. “An easy error to make.”

“I disagree,” Mike said. “What zapped you isn’t human.”

“You’ve never met Madame Ackermann,” I said. “She prefers to work through a mythical Norse wolf proxy.”

Mike’s fingers recoiled from my hip bones; I could sense, in that infinitesimally wider space, the conflicted thrum of his trying not to lock me into a doomed diagnostic category. Fuck , I thought. I’d failed the test, revealed myself as a hopeless lunatic unworthy of his energies. This had happened to me in New York; at Blanche’s suggestion, I’d volunteered to be a test patient at the Manhattan Psychoanalytic Institute, but the interviewer, when I’d mooned to her about my lost psychic abilities, had deemed me too deluded to be helped.

Mike busied himself behind me. Filling out my rejection slip, I figured. I abided bluely, listening to the judgmental scratch of his pencil.

Then he returned to the gurney and pressed downward onto my shoulders — a stretch that was also a restriction — and announced that he was recommending me for the Kluge therapy.

“What?” I said.

Mike elaborated on what he called the “not onerous stipulations” involved with enrollment: I was not allowed to go outside, nor was I to stand within ten feet of any windows. The reasons for these stipulations, Mike said, were obvious — in order to be spared the wear and tear of certain frequencies, patients had to surrender, without interruption, to no less than a weeklong quarantine.

“Not to mention,” Mike warned, “when you’ve been protected from all random frequencies for even periods of time as brief as forty-eight hours, abrupt reentry can cause unpleasant side effects.”

He speed-muttered a list of at least thirty side effects from which I heard “self-disfigurement” and “animal hallucinations.”

I promised him I would stay inside.

“I’ve spent my life inside,” I assured him, thinking of my New York days, of my Goergen days. “Lives,” I modified.

“You’ll find it relaxing to have the voices in your head silenced,” Mike said.

How intuitive, I thought. Mike really was a special healer. He discerned, without me needing to tell him, my unique variety of exhaustion. Maybe he could tell by pressing on my skeleton — I did not always live in my body. I was like an astronaut whose every weightless minute came at a physical cost that could be measured in bone density loss.

“But to be honest I’m not convinced the voices are in my head,” I said, thinking of Irenke. “Sometimes I think I’m a voice in someone else’s head. Like a free-floating consciousness.”

“You won’t be allowed to go anywhere,” he reassured me. “Your mind’s staying put.”

“Great,” I said, honestly relieved. “Great.”

“Also you’ll be put on a special diet. For the most part, however, you’re instructed simply to be .”

“Yes,” I said, “but who?”

I meant this as a joke; I was so many people. But I also meant it seriously. Who was I when I was only me?

I laughed to indicate, to Mike at least, that I’d been kidding. Mike, folding his gurney into thirds, matched my laugh, decibel for decibel, and both of us laughed until all of a sudden we didn’t.

My stomach growled, ready for lunch. Only after Mike left did I realize that he was not an especially intuitive man; my bones had told him nothing. He’d recommended me for the Kluge therapy because, somewhere between the wolf mention and the multiple lives, he’d diagnosed me as schizophrenic.

I spent the rest of the day in the thermal baths — so different from the Goergen’s and yet, as with everything at the Breganz-Belken, so the same — soaking in water heated to the exact temperature of the human body, then leap-frogging through the higher-temperature pools until I reached the hottest one, a crack in the stone floor that mimicked a violent splitting-open of the earth’s crust. When I couldn’t stand the heat any longer, I dunked myself in the neighboring ice pool. Shivering, I’d hurry back to the human body pool and begin the sequence again. I worked this loop for hours. I couldn’t make sense of this need, but later, reduced like a sauce to my most gelatinous essence and lying on my bed listening to the stereo wolves, I made sense of it this way: for the first time in over a year, I was choreographing my own pain experiences.

Then I slept the stone sleep of the happily dead.

I awoke at 6 a.m., ravenous. I sat alone in the dining hall and read a paperback mystery abandoned in my nightstand. Eventually another couple appeared. I didn’t take much interest in them until they started arguing.

In German, the woman berated the man with what sounded like a litany of pent-up complaints, each one threading into the next as though she’d been awake all night lying beside him, writing and rewriting this little monologue in her head. The man, meanwhile, stared at the woman with the drowning O mouth of people trying to survive a conversation that is not a conversation but a tsunami of relentless criticism.

The woman finished. She stared at the man, daring him to respond; he thumbed a spot of juice from her chin, did not kiss her, left.

A waiter approached the woman’s table to remove the man’s plate. She faked for him a bright and believable smile.

I squinted at her face, its features tiny and modular like an actress’s, each piece capable of behaving independently of the others. She registered to me as someone I knew from somewhere, though given her generic attractiveness, this could have been the reaction she inspired in everyone.

Her waiter returned, this time with a magazine, which he placed on the table alongside a pen, and a small digital camera. The woman untwined the hasty morning bun in which she’d stashed her hair, combing it out with her fingernails. When condensed her hair was a chestnut color but now, de-roped and catching the dawn slanting through the dining hall windows, it appeared more reddish-blue, as though it had been dunked to the roots in blood.

Then I knew exactly who she was. The resemblance was unmistakable. Plus I’d seen a picture of her skiing at Gstaad.

This was all too strange — like psychically spying on someone without the psychic part. Clearly, too, I’d been sent here by Alwyn for reasons other than my health. Since I’d refused (in Alwyn’s mind) to use my abilities to help her, she’d dispatched me on a personal errand, possibly to find out why her mother and stepfather had yet to see her vanishing films. Recalling the paparazzi magazines in her Madame Ackermann folder, I suspected she’d spent far more time tracking her mother than she’d spent tracking Madame Ackermann. No wonder Madame Ackermann “disappeared”; disappearing wasn’t very hard when nobody was looking for you.