Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

A telepathic novice, I had no intention of catching Madame Ackermann’s throw. Two years of study were required before we initiates were permitted to attempt acts of mental telepathy, and no initiate was accepted into Madame Ackermann’s advanced workshop until they’d first proven their psychic fitness by petrifying a piece of meat. Indeed. For two hours a day during August and leading up to the meeting of the first classes in September, all rising third-years dedicated their energies toward petrifying a one-pound chunk of pork, stashed out of sight on a high bookshelf in our rooms. Despite the rising third-years’ familiarity with Bell’s Theorem, the success rate for this exercise was pitifully low, and explained why the initiate dormitory, by the end of August, stank like an abattoir. Even so, each year one or two initiates managed to arrive for the first day of class with a blackened, odorless object in a book bag, one that resembled a mummified human head. (Madame Ackermann kept her own petrified meat samples, cracked in half, atop her desk. Hers were like geodes — fanged, crystallized, a display of gorgeous knives.)

Which is to say that I had no intention, given my lack of training and run of academic failures, of participating in the SAD game; I was happy enough to be the spectator to a sport with no balls and no visible signs of participation save a few bunched-up brows and jalandara-bandha-tucked chins. I did, however, create a contest for myself — I decided to test if I could read in a catcher’s expression his or her clear reception of Madame Ackermann’s throw.

In particular I concentrated on the boyishly moist Professor Penry, who, after Madame Ackermann, was the most sought professor, and who’d recently returned to the Workshop following a year’s “reprieve,” forced upon him by the administration because of an affair with a second-year initiate, now mother to his infant son.

So I was looking at Professor Penry when his face, sheenier now due to his enthusiastic martini consumption, receded into a haze of pink, tinted on the edges by a ring of blue. The pink moved counterclockwise and mutated into a funnel, at the far end of which I saw a black spider with silver legs.

“Spider,” I heard Professor Yuen call out.

“Spider,” confirmed Professor Penry.

“Spider,” said Professor Blake.

But then something unexpected occurred. The spider continued to evolve. It caught a leg in the candy-cotton whirl (or so it appeared); the funnel dismembered the spider, its legs cycling about like the metal remnants of a shuttle drifting through deep space. As they approached me, the pieces reassembled into a very familiar shape.

“Spider,” said an unidentifiable someone.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said the emeritus and senile Professor Wibley. “I can see nothing but a piece of bacon.”

“It’s not a spider,” I said.

Nobody heard me.

“It’s not a spider,” I repeated. “It’s a Barcelona chair.”

The moment I said “Barcelona chair” the vision evaporated, leaving me naked before a great room’s worth of eyes, but none so penetratingly set upon me as Madame Ackermann’s.

Glaring between her bead curtains of hair, her single visible eye appearing not unlike a funnel that could tear me limb from limb should I catch a toe in it, Madame Ackermann said, “I’m sorry, Julia. It was a spider.”

I receded into the landing’s shadow. I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew she was lying. This disturbed me, but not for the reasons it ought to have disturbed me. I felt humiliated, as I had when she’d insisted on telling the professors that I was her archivist, thereby more or less announcing that I had failed as her stenographer. She’d invited me to her party, I began to suspect, to embarrass me.

This was, I later learned, the mildest interpretation of her intentions.

The throwing continued. Keeping her promise to Professor Yuen, Madame Ackermann stuck to dull, unevolving objects: A hurricane lamp missing its shade. A tin trunk with an overbite. A chipped enamel skillet. A dust-jacket-less copy of The Joy of Cooking . It was like being at a metaphysical yard sale. That she should be throwing old and broken domestic items could, in the kindliest of scenarios, be seen as a form of housecleaning — Madame Ackermann, on her forty-third birthday, wanted to dispense with the deadweight of her mental storage space — but could also, and less charitably, be read as a direct insult to her birthday guests. Madame Ackermann was known for her unsubtle throwing subtexts, especially when Professor Yuen was involved, and she’d been in such a foul mood since her regression troubles began that it seemed justifiable to her, perhaps, to pelt her schadenfreudy colleagues with telepathic junk.

But I was far more transfixed by this: not only could I receive everything Madame Ackermann threw, but I received her throws nearly a full second before anyone else. I didn’t know how this could be; I’d yet to even attempt to petrify meat or earn beyond a B in any of my courses. And yet I proved to be unexpectedly good at SAD; I was, based on my observations, the best player of SAD in the room. Better than Professor Penry (who, granted, had had too much to drink), better even than Professor Yuen, who, despite Madame Ackermann’s slight, was the furthest thing from a blunt perceiver.

This realization — that I, without the proper training, excelled at SAD — made me reconsider a few other happenings of the past few weeks. For example, the missing film reel sought by Colophon Martin. True, Madame Ackermann had failed to regress herself to the Paris Institute of Geophysics circa 1983–1984. But of this failure I’d made certain she was unaware.

In the second week of September I decided that unless Madame Ackermann awoke from her nap to some evidence that she’d regressed, my presence would be eradicated. I’d lose my position as her stenographer; I’d be demoted from Initiate of Promise to, as she termed the less adept students at the Workshop, a Mortgage Payment, i.e., a hopelessly untalented person whose only conceivable contribution to the world of psychic scholarship was to help pay, with their tuition money, the Workshop’s bills. Starting around that second week of September, I guaranteed that Madame Ackermann awoke to find, curled on the floor between us, a pile of scrawled-upon ghost-grid paper, from which I would then read aloud.

In other words: I made shit up.

The risk was considerable; typically, per Miranda, Madame Ackermann emerged from her regressions with an accurate memory of what she’d reported. I thus worried that when Madame Ackermann awoke to be told, for example, that she’d spoken in the voice of an Argentinian-born psychotherapist living in London during the Falklands War, a woman who’d engaged in amatory adventures with her Cabinet patients in order to acquire strategic military information for her brother, a commander of the Argentine navy, she would be perplexed and then suspicious, recalling none of this.

So I did some research. Madame Ackermann, ironically, provided me my own best alibi. While completing her postdoc at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, she’d written a paper called “Trance Qualities and the Ideal of Bodily Departure,” which claimed the ideal trance state to be indistinguishable from what she called a living death . Such deep trances — identifiable by certain measurable physiological responses, such as heart rate — allowed a person to travel beyond the boundaries of consciousness, resulting in regressions of unusual detail. But most notable, for my purposes, was this: the living-dead regressor awoke from these trances with no memory of where she’d been. She relied, for proof of her journey, on her stenographer.