Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“So the pocket is on the outside,” said the second guard. “It is a fanny pocket.” He patted his rear.

“Yes,” I said, “except I wore mine in the front.”

“And where is it now, your fanny pocket?” he asked.

I told him that the straps had been cut by a thief, thus the whole pack, or pocket, was gone.

“Fanny pack,” the first guard said. Saying it gave him permission to stare at my ass. “Fanny pack.”

He let me through without paying.

The air inside was palpably damp, and no surprise given the archives were housed in an old monastery with thick stone walls that weep as a matter of clichéd atmospherics.

I walked past the exhibit halls to the computer terminals, located in a crypt-like annex. I enlisted the help of a clerk wearing a bolo.

“Dominique Varga,” I said. “Everything you have.”

The clerk disappeared through a turnstile activated by an ID card hung from a chain that dangled to his groin. He was gone for so long I suspected he’d used my request as an excuse to eat his sandwich. A half hour later the turnstile beeped.

He beckoned me to follow him. He placed a binder on a desk; he pulled it gingerly, like evidence of a long-unsolved crime, from its clear plastic bag.

“No films?” I asked him.

“ Madame ,” he said, understanding the sort of films I was referring to. “No.”

The binder contained chronological photos — of Varga’s elementary school class (girls in braids and shin-length jumpers), of Varga in a skiff, of Varga on a park bench framed by plane trees, of Varga at a gallery opening, of Varga at her murder trial, of Varga on the courthouse steps beneath the damp crow slump of an umbrella.

At the back of the binder I found a sealed envelope with my name typed on the front.

I checked to see if the clerk was watching me. He wasn’t.

Inside the envelope were photos of the naked protester who’d lain in the courtroom aisle during Varga’s trial to exonerate her of the murder charges, the woman who’d appeared in her fake snuff films.

A close-up of her face made my pulse seize.

I passed a hand over the image of my mother lying on the courtroom floor. “Excuse me,” I said to the clerk. “Who is this woman?”

The clerk, wary, approached.

“Ah,” he said. His face assumed a sly cast.

“She was … an actress?” I asked. I wiped my forehead; according to the blue light cast by the overheads, I was sweating a clear liquid the color of antifreeze.

“She was her muse,” he said.

“Her muse?” I said.

I recalled Irenke and her apologies. She used me and then she dumped me, pretended I’d never existed. I had to make her suffer for what she did .

This voice-over loop accompanied an image I retained from my first visit to the Parisian hotel lobby, the day of Irenke’s audition — Madame Ackermann stepping blithely off the elevator while the women around her wept.

This image hiccuped, rewound itself. Madame Ackermann stepped off the elevator again. And again. Finally the film rolled forward. Madame Ackermann strode toward the front door. Her hand grazed my cheek, flicking the exact spot I’d burned during my Dr. Papp balloon exercise, the spot that had darkened despite the ointments I’d applied, becoming an indelible shadow.

And I knew.

That woman was not Madame Ackermann; that woman was my mother, fresh from her audition. She’d avoided Irenke. I witnessed her moment of no longer needing Irenke’s help, of “dumping” her. She’d won the role, she was the muse. Did that explain why she hadn’t stopped to talk to me? Because I was sitting near the last person she wanted to confront?

She must have known I was there. She must have known. How could she not have known? A funny thought occurred to me — funny because it was temporally impossible, also funny because it was so banal, it was such a predictable and self-centered daughterly gripe —she chose her career over me .

I turned over the photograph.

152 West 53rd Street, Room 13, on October 24, 1984 , Borka had written. We have our deal .

The stone walls bulbed outward like overfull sponges. I could see the pores. They leaked, and I could hear them leaking, but the sound wasn’t of plain water, it was the hiss produced by acid, a cold wetness that is also a burn.

I had to get out of here.

“You don’t look so good,” the clerk said.

He offered to escort me to the exit. En route we passed a woman in a headscarf.

“Hey,” I said, grabbing the sleeve of Borka’s coat.

But when the overhead fluorescents illuminated her face, I saw it wasn’t her.

I walked more quickly, the hallways contracting and lengthening and making it seem as though I were moving backward on a conveyor belt.

Just beyond the stinking lavatories, the clerk and I passed an exhibit room. A black-and-white banner inside caught my attention.

“Wait,” I said.

The clerk followed me into the room.

“What is this?” I asked him.

“It is a traveling show,” he said. “It translates to ‘Unexplained Tchotchkes.’ ”

The exhibit resembled the others I’d passed on the way to the computer room — random objects in vitrines.

These particular cases were filled with bits of paper pinned to cork. I recognized a few: A parking ticket from Provincetown (expired meter). A receipt from the Norma Kamali store in Manhattan (two maillots and a turban).

I pressed a hand to the wet glass. I left a beaded print.

“I worked on this exhibit,” I said. “It must have traveled from Scotland.”

“Mmmm,” said the clerk.

“This woman’s parents were Viennese,” I said, as though trying to explain to myself what the hell this exhibit was doing in Vienna.

The clerk didn’t respond.

“It’s called ParaPhernalia,” I said.

I put a hand to my face. My fingers could feel the cheek but the cheek couldn’t feel back, as though the nerve endings had retracted into my spinal column, leaving my face to die.

“That’s the word in English,” I said, leaning on the clerk’s shoulder.

The clerk hustled me to the exit. I was fast maturing into a problem.

The guard stationed near the front desk waved and smiled.

“Fanny pack!” he called after me.

Once outside I hailed a cabdriver, then realized I had no money with which to pay him.

I spent the next four days in the hotel my cabdriver recommended, one that accepted Alwyn’s credit card. I lay on my bed, I gripped Borka’s key, I tried to regress. Borka had lied; she had known my mother. Apparently she intended to toy with me until I gave her the information she wanted.

For obvious reasons, I did not think too much or too vividly about the implications of the photo I’d seen in the archives, because to do so required a leap my brain could not, given my special brand of inexperience, make. Dead mothers don’t have sex because dead mothers don’t have bodies, they do not kiss fathers or partners, they do not nurse children, they are not touched and fondled and invaded and reviled, they have never provided a confusing source of comfort, disgust, shame, delight. I had not grown up with a mother, true, but more specifically I had not grown up with a mother’s body. I had not understood this body, from the time of my first awareness, as a body used with and by the bodies of others.

To contemplate her as a sexual being placed me in the strangely inverted position of a mother contemplating her daughter as a sexual being — what never was suddenly is . An innocence is lost. Arguably that innocence was mine. I saw things in my head that I tried very hard not to see, and only on occasion succeeded in not seeing them.