Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

The wolf growled. It took two steps closer. It growled again.

“Go the fuck away,” I yelled. “Go the fuck away, leave me the fuck alone .”

The wolf pawed at the ground so viciously I heard the thick canvas sound of its footpads tearing.

“Leave me alone,” I said, holding my ground. “ Leave me alone, you bitch.”

The wolf lurched — it intended to remove a chunk of my throat, I thought — but no. It bowed its head to the ground and made horrible noises, roiling gags that threatened to bring up an organ.

Jesus, I thought, watching it convulse. This was no monster; this was barely more than a plain animal, shivering in the astringent wind that, once freed from the toothy firs, gusted unobstructed across the stone.

To think I’ve been afraid of this , I thought. To think I’ve been afraid of you.

The astral swirl of Madame Ackermann was barely visible now, her hair dissipating into the air like smoke from an extinguished fire.

I reached out to touch its fur — whatever “it” was. Not to pet it, not to comfort it. Just to ascertain to what degree it was really there.

But the wolf backed away, reversing a few frightened paces. We stared at each other. The eyes — it would be wrong to say that I recognized them, more accurate to say that I recognized something in them. A flash of myself, a trapped and desperate filament of me.

I reached toward it again.

“Come here,” I said.

The wolf seemed caught between instincts, uncertain whether or not to flee.

“Come,” I repeated. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I’d like to think I meant it.

“What’s happening out here?” said Alwyn’s stepfather, exiting the ruin.

He saw the wolf. He froze.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He grabbed a crutch-length walking stick, whittled by a bored hiker and abandoned beside the doorway. He wielded it like a lance.

“Gehen Sie zuruck zu ihrem holz!” he yelled. He jabbed the stick toward the wolf’s muzzle.

“Careful!” I said. “It’s sick.”

The wolf reared back on its hind legs.

“Zuruck zu ihrem holz!” Alwyn’s stepfather yelled again.

The wolf turned, its body rolling over its ribs with a serpentine smoothness, and disappeared into the woods.

I experienced a tugging sensation in my chest; then a snapping, a sharp elastic recoil, followed by a dull pain.

I knelt on the granite. Tiny puddles of blood marked the wolf’s departure. I touched a wet, oblong spatter. The ache behind my ribs sped to a state of fibrillation, a symptom taking flight.

The ache subsided. And then I felt emptier than ever.

“My God,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “How long was it standing there?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

He helped me up. As we started back down the mountain, I repeatedly swung my eyes backward. I wanted to see the wolf again.

“So,” I said. “What would Jung say?”

“Jung?”

“About the wolf.”

“Often the self is represented as a helpful animal,” he said. “But I imagine Jung would say you were lucky not to be killed.”

“By my own subconscious?”

I glanced behind us. Nothing followed us but wind.

“Wolves,” he muttered. “Wolves are the footmen of the weak.”

At the spa we were greeted with disbelief.

“There are no wolves in Breganz-Belken,” said the man who’d driven me from the train. He was, or so I guessed, the closest thing the spa had to a security guard.

Alwyn’s stepfather assured the man that we’d indeed seen a wolf.

“How big?” the man asked.

We estimated the size with our hands.

“As I said, we do not have wolves in Breganz-Belken,” he said. “The altitude is too much for them.”

I asked him about the wolf sounds that were piped into my room. Certainly this suggested that wolves were native to the area?

“Those are not wolves,” he said. “Those are lynxes.”

“It was sick,” I said.

“Rabies,” said the man. “Only a wolf that had lost its mind would come to Breganz-Belken.”

He regarded me meaningfully. I guessed that he’d been apprised of my schizophrenia diagnosis.

The man issued German orders to an underling with acne so severe it would seem grounds for firing.

The underling unlocked a nearby broom closet. He removed from it a long rifle.

The woman with the pearlized skin found me by the windows, watching the underling hike up-mountain with his gun.

“Do you believe I saw a wolf?” I asked her.

“As opposed to a lynx?” she asked.

“No, I mean … the exposure to energy frequencies after leaving the spa, I was wondering if maybe the wolf wasn’t an actual wolf.”

“You think it was a mirage,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, though the phrase in my head was visible thought forms . I recalled a comment Alwyn’s mother had made: your worst self loosed upon the world .

Had this wolf come for me or from me? I’d assumed the wolf was connected to Madame Ackermann; now I wasn’t so sure.

“But Herr Schweitzer, he saw the wolf as well,” she said.

“Who?”

“Your friend,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” I said. I’d never learned Alwyn’s stepfather’s name.

“Herr Schweitzer is not enrolled in the same therapy,” she said. “So I would think that your wolf was a wolf.”

“Except that there are no wolves at this altitude,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “it would be more true to say that there are not a lot of wolves at this altitude. We wouldn’t want to discourage the hikers.”

She withdrew some papers from her briefcase.

“As disappointed as I am that you were unable to honor the terms you agreed to,” she said, “I think that we can reach a fair termination resolution.”

The terms were this. I’d be expected to pay half of what I owed so long as I departed immediately and promised never to mention the wolf.

The pearlized-skin woman also agreed to give me a week’s worth of the supplements prescribed to successful test subjects.

“These will ease the discomfort of reentry,” she said.

I visited the front desk to settle my bill and book my train to Paris. I’d be arriving earlier than Colophon or Alwyn expected me to arrive, but no matter. After my Madame Ackermann encounter — if that’s what it had been — I felt desperate, unhinged.

“Oh,” said the woman behind the desk. “This arrived with the morning mail.”

She handed me a postcard mailed from Vienna, the front of which featured a photograph of a building unprettily named the Szechenyi Austro-Hungarian Gallery Archives.

I recognized Borka’s script.

“YOU WILL FIND HER HERE,” she’d written. “ASK FOR FILES ON DOMINIQUE VARGA.”

Given my repeated failures to intuit when danger awaited me, it should come as no surprise to learn: I went.

Ipaid the taxi driver with Borka’s money. After settling the Breganz-Belken bill, I was down to my last few euros. I tipped him amply, honoring the tradition of reckless generosity exhibited by the soon-to-be-destitute.

When asked to pay an entrance fee at the Szechenyi Austro-Hungarian Gallery Archives, I made a great show of looking for a fanny pack that had been stolen. The first guard summoned a second guard. I thought that everyone who’d ever met an American tourist knew of the term fanny pack, but this wasn’t the case with these two. Much more attention was paid to the bewildering phrase “fanny pack” than to the pretend fanny pack’s theft.