Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

The file contained newspaper and wire clippings about the surgical impersonation case, some of which I’d read before, some of which I hadn’t. In particular I had not read the classified Interpol reports, which described in greater detail the sightings and, in a few cases, the arrests. When questioned, the impersonators claimed to be working for a leader whose name they could not disclose because they did not know it, they communicated with this leader via a website that, once traced by authorities, was proven to belong to an artist who’d assumed the identity of a Hungarian cosmetics heiress named Borka Erdos.

I experienced a brain disorientation so intense it was like an upheaval of tectonic plates. I did not need to be told who this artist was.

But this was hardly the worst of it. Included in the file was Dominique Varga’s mission statement for her current performance art piece, Memorial .

We are against forgetting the dead. We are against recovery and healing. To “heal” is to entomb, forever, the sickness. To that end we are bringing the dead back, not to haunt, but to remind us that we are always in the presence of their absence. Because when are we most aware of missing someone — when they are not with us, or when they are?

I experienced her words like the over-and-over falling of a dull ax against the exterior of my mundane egg. At first my shell resisted, but soon a powdery indentation appeared that deepened into a crevice and then, as the ax-head penetrated, I felt my eggshell explode into a million crystallized pieces, like a windshield after a body’s been catapulted through it.

Which is to say: I knew what I was going to find before I flipped to the final page, and not because I was psychic, but because I was no longer blind to what had been right in front of my own eyes.

On the folder’s inside back cover, someone had taped a grainy telephoto head shot of Borka — I mean, Dominique Varga. She wore a scarf over her head but it did not disguise her so thoroughly that I couldn’t discern, from within its shadows, the beginnings of my mother’s face.

The Goergen appeared to have aged a decade during my absence; a slab of facade, the shape reminiscent of Munch’s Scream figure, had crumbled off the south wall, exposing a rusted capillary system of rebar.

I couldn’t say what I was doing here, but I knew that it involved a surgical intervention, it involved blood. I would confront Borka — or rather Varga — and tell her that this was not our deal, we were no longer helping each other, and I’d urge her to take a knife to my mother’s face and slice it off, and if she didn’t, I would do it for her.

And then what would I do? What would I do? Keep it? Bury it? Drape it over my own? It was her, even if it wasn’t her. I imagined folding that face up tiny and swallowing it like a pill, I imagined that it could make me better, or it could make me sicker, but regardless I was the chosen receptacle, I was the urn, I was a functional neutrality, I no longer mattered.

These were the kind of deranged thoughts I was thinking.

I also thought about Irenke, Varga’s daughter, who’d killed herself without a note. This, apparently, was where the hotel room key was meant to lead me. How does it feel? I wanted to ask Varga. How does it feel not to know why? But is it any mystery? I can tell you without ever visiting that room. She did it because of you. I’d kill myself too if you were my mother .

Gutenberg Square was oddly empty of both snappers and nodders. On the pavers someone had traced with yellow paint the shape of a fallen body, its arms raised overhead as though slain in the act of making a snow angel.

I shivered. I hated this square, which wasn’t even a square; it was a circle, or more of an oval, and it had tricked me to underworlds I had no further need to explore.

Before I could cross the street, a white van pulled up. Two suited men walked inside; seconds later they escorted Varga from the Goergen, head shrouded beneath an overcoat.

The van drove away. No sirens, no pomp. It might have been the very casual kidnapping of a person nobody would miss.

This was exactly what it was.

The van turned the corner and I experienced the same stretching and snapping sensation as when the wolf had retreated into the woods.

But this was different. I did not turn around to search for her, and I did not experience an emptiness when she was gone. I experienced a release, a blessed absence of pressure, as though a tumor that had been pushing on my diaphragm had been removed.

I never, never wanted to see that woman again.

Also — I was done. I experienced this conviction as a measurable drop in blood pressure; this certainty I could have physiologically recorded, if I’d had the tools. I was going home. Wherever that was. I would begin my search by a process of elimination. Home was not here.

I was leaving.

As I readied myself to walk back to my hotel, pack my bags, take a taxi to the airport, fly as far away from this place as possible, a limousine stopped in front of the Goergen. This struck me as odd; most guests did not travel by limousine because a limousine was a snapper magnet. The driver discharged his passenger, a woman. She turned in my direction and gave the square a quick once-over. I hit the pavers; I felt her gaze move above me like the slow-motion trajectory of bullets, a murderous optical sweep of the area.

Madame Ackermann.

I panicked. She found me . But then I remembered, with a brief, bitter chuckle, that she’d been tracking Varga, too; she’d discovered, as Colophon had discovered, that Varga was at the Goergen.

She was not here for me.

Unfortunately for her, I was all she’d find.

So sorry, Madame Ackermann , I imagined saying to her. You just missed her .

I fantasized our confrontation scene, one that might take place in the dining hall over liver tea. I imagined telling her what a shitty psychic she was, slower even than an undistinguished academic when it came to locating her research prey. But nor was that her most notable failure. In her capacity as a psychic attacker, she’d really been outdone. She thought she could haunt me with a stupid e-mail attachment of my “mother”; did it ever occur to her to bring her back to life?

Compared to Dominique Varga, I imagined saying to her, you’re an unimaginative bully.

I remained on the pavers, hands in a push-up position, ready to launch if I heard her approach. A pointless plan; what good had running away ever done? I’d run a quarter of the way around the world, and here she was, and here I was, and here we were, and somehow, even though she sucked at psychic attacks, she remained to blame for my life’s every crappy turn. Fair or not, I fingered her as the reason it had become a black hole, where nothing proved tangential, where everything, to a cruelly comical degree, mattered.

As I raised myself off the cobbles, I noticed that I’d been lying face down inside the expired person outline. This seemed less creepy than apt. As far as Madame Ackermann was concerned, I was about to rise from the dead.

The concierge was not pleased to see me.

“I don’t suppose you’ve returned to settle your bill,” he said.

“My bill was covered,” I said.

He handed me an invoice. “The Internet costs extra,” he said. “Also your friend left you something. We charge a storage fee.”

He handed me a manila envelope marked by Borka’s handwriting.

I refused to take it from him.