Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I spent the rest of the morning going crazy.

I attributed my brain’s mean squirrelliness to the fantastic sleep I’d been getting, the low-glycemic-index spa food I’d been eating, the minerals I’d been osmosing in the thermal baths, the metallic mountain air. Health, I’d forgotten, was a chore of options.

From my room I called Colophon’s number in Paris.

No answer.

I tried to reach Alwyn at the Goergen, but was informed that she’d checked out last night.

To test that there were, in fact, no cracks in this fortress, I removed Borka’s key from my suitcase. I lay on the bed and clutched it in my hand. Nothing. It didn’t increase in temperature by a single degree. Using the spa-branded pencil I drew on the spa-branded paper pad, thinking I might doodle my way to a regression. I doodled a tree, I doodled a city skyline, I doodled a mountain range, I doodled any shape that might lend itself to inadvertent language, to communication, to a message. I stopped to see what I’d written.

A tree, a skyline, a mountain range.

I felt as though I’d suffered an amputation. I felt as though I’d been buried underground.

It didn’t help that I had no e-mail.

I returned to the lobby and, standing at a safe distance from the windows, stared longingly outside. All I had to do was enter it, but like a regression I couldn’t activate, it warded me off, an impenetrable scene protected by triple-paned glass, a diorama of a world, not a world.

Then I saw the man.

I did not immediately recognize him, kitted out in khaki shorts and hiking boots. He examined the shard-shaped pieces of wood nailed to the top of a stake and indicating, with their pointiest points, directions to various local attractions. When he turned toward the lobby I saw that it was Alwyn’s stepfather.

I exited through the side doors. The day was warm and overcast, the air alkaline. The paths that led to the saunas had been groomed of stones and roots, the soil packed and swept by the attendants.

I caught up to him.

“Heading to the saunas?” I asked.

My presence, from which he initially recoiled, modulated once he saw what I was: in the spa scheme of things, a moderately attractive young woman.

“I’m hiking to the sister spa,” he said, in German-accented English.

“Me too,” I said. “Going for my treatment.”

“Treatment?” he said. “What treatment?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

He pinched his chin.

“That’s part of the treatment,” I said, “not knowing what it is. I was told that preconceptions risk negatively impacting the results of whatever treatment it is that I’m getting.”

He resumed his uphill lumbering. I took this resumption as acceptance of my companionship.

I asked him what he did for a living and he told me what I already knew — that he was a Jungian psychotherapist from Berne.

“How far is it to the sister spa?” I asked.

“About three kilometers,” he said. “This was the original spa, what they now call the sister spa. I used to come here with my grandfather when I was very small. We had to hike from the railway station. There were none of these silly carts to drive you about. There was nobody idiotic enough to sweep paths with a broom. It’s going to rain.”

Two seconds later, it started to rain.

We hustled the last partial kilometer, the path concluding at a large granite bowl that swooped between two peaks. A small, gunmetal lake at its center glistened like a clogged drain. As we neared the front door of the sister spa, located on the lake’s edge, I clocked that it was not an active spa at all but a scenic Alpine ruin. The windows had been de-glassed. What remained of the roof was upholstered in yellow lichen.

Near a giant stone hearth we found a pile of logs, with which Alwyn’s stepfather built a little tepee in the fireplace.

He pulled a matchbook from his shorts and set the wood ablaze.

“So tell me more about this treatment you’re getting,” he said.

I considered running with my original lie — this was the treatment, what kind of preconception buster is better than this, to send a person to a spa that is not a working spa — but decided instead to come clean.

“I know your stepdaughter,” I said.

He grunted.

“Given my experience, that strikes me as impossible,” he said.

“Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough,” I said.

This was an accusation he’d heard before.

“She’s a troubled one,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “Me, I see only the manifestation of her demonic animus.”

“Because she slept with Kluge?” I said.

He did not seem surprised that I should know about Kluge.

“Kluge and my wife were involved years ago. Alwyn is very competitive with her mother. Ergo, she slept with her mother’s former lover.”

“You make it sound so logical,” I said.

“I once believed it was logical,” he said. “I once believed that Alwyn’s father had molested her as a young girl, and that this had created a sexually competitive relationship between the daughter and the mother, with unhappy results for both.”

“You don’t believe that now?” I asked.

He poked at the fire.

“People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn’t any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it’s because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?”

I shivered in my wet dress. He removed his sweater — also wet — and wrapped the arms around my shoulders.

But problems don’t arise from nothing, I thought. This man, this professional interpreter of the source codes of neuroses, was blind to the contributions Alwyn’s mother had made to the emotional construction of Alwyn. Though I was primed, via my Workshop courses, to mock and reject psychological causality, in Alwyn’s case, such causality seemed inescapably apt. After spending a matter of weeks with Alwyn and a mere ten minutes with her mother, theirs struck me as a behavioral muddle with a tragically easy explanation — Alwyn’s mother could not square her identity as a sexualized woman with that of being a mother, thus her neglected daughter’s sole option was to de-daughterize herself by becoming a sexualized woman, and subsequently a competitor worthy of her mother’s attention.

I inspected Alwyn’s stepdad, his new hiking boots, his expensive watch. Maybe this variety of blindness was his husbandly mandate; maybe, like my father, it was not his role to understand his remote wife, or to act as her spokesperson to her offspring. Still, it seemed undeniably evident that his wife had played a role in Alwyn’s Alwyn-ness in that she’d refused to play a role. She’d been an emotional absence, a neglectful null.

I corrected my original thinking. Indeed, problems do arise from nothing, arguably the most vicious ones do.

We have a lot in common, you and I .

It turned out that Alwyn and I did.

Alwyn’s stepfather and I stared into the fire. He was a nice man, not just because he’d given me his sweater, or because he reminded me of my own dad in a way, a man who interpreted his “protector” role as an internal affair. He was not protecting his family members from outside threats; he was protecting them from each other.

“My mother killed herself when I was a month old,” I said.

He took this in professional stride.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” I said. “That’s why I don’t tell people.”

He asked for the details: I told him that she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills while I’d been napping in the next room. The fact that she’d killed herself in such close proximity to me was often cited by our town gossips as proof of her derangement: What kind of person could have killed herself with her infant so nearby?