Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

He rattled it impatiently.

I took it. Inside was something small, something hard; maybe, I thought, it was her fucking heart.

“I need to talk to her,” I whispered.

“Regrettably, ‘Borka’ is no longer with us,” the concierge said.

“Not Borka,” I said. No, no, not her. I was unmoored, a balloon adrift and about to burst into flames. Who did I need to talk to? What was I doing here?

“The woman from the limousine,” I said.

“I’m not at liberty to talk about our guests,” he repeated.

“She’s no guest ,” I said. “She’s my attacker. Call security and tell them the Goergen’s been compromised.”

He rang a tiny bell. A pair of bellhops, or maybe they were orderlies, stepped from behind a pillar.

“This woman is no longer with us,” he said to them. “Please escort her to the outside.”

“What?” I said.

The head-bandaged women in the lobby held their playing cards higher in order to more invisibly observe me.

I appealed to their sense of paranoia and elitism.

“The woman who’s been attacking me is here,” I informed them. “She’s posing as a guest. This is an unacceptable security breach.”

A woman in a sequined turban approached. I recognized her. She was some Hungarian variety of countess.

“Is it true what she’s saying?” she asked the concierge.

“There is no knowing the truth from this person,” he said.

“It’s the truth,” I said.

The countess spoke German to the orderlies, who retreated into the shadows.

“Let’s get you some tea,” she said.

She gestured me toward a club chair. “You are Borka’s friend,” she said. “Or whatever her name is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this.

“Of course I suspected she was not Borka all along,” the countess said. “I knew the real Borka when we were girls. We called her Potato. The real Borka was always struggling with her waistline.”

“Do you know where she went?” I asked.

“I’m sure she’s just dead,” the countess said. “She was not a very original girl.”

“I meant the woman who was pretending to be Borka,” I said.

“The police took her away,” the countess said. “And what about all that money? She inherited millions. I wonder what will happen to it now.”

I thought, but didn’t say, that she probably didn’t have much money left after bankrolling all of those surgeries.

“And what she was doing to her own face,” the countess said. “Some people have no taste.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty tasteless to want to look like somebody’s dead mother.”

“Why choose to be a person so ugly?” the countess asked.

I started to correct her — Borka didn’t look anything like my mother, some varieties of ugly are innate to the host, you cannot excise them with a scalpel — but I did not bother. Who knew what varieties of ugly were innate to my mother? Maybe Borka’s new face was unflinchingly apt.

The countess peered around for a new conversation to join, as though we’d been chatting at a cocktail party and tapped our single vein of common interest.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind me, “but is this chair free?”

I froze.

Her voice was both unmistakable and unrecognizable. The girlish rasp had hoarsened, her voice box clogged with wet lint. Also it had none of the sonorousness I remembered; instead it was flat, toneless, generic, like a voicemail’s mechanical beep.

I turned to confirm that it was her. It was. And yet — it wasn’t.

Madame Ackermann lowered herself into the club chair. She set a teacup and saucer on a nearby side table, the porcelain rattling, the acoustics of the lobby seizing upon the noise and amplifying it to the decibel level of an alarm.

“So sorry,” Madame Ackermann whispered to her more immediate neighbors.

She removed a pair of foam plugs from her robe pocket and screwed them into her ear canals.

Afflictions, many of them, had befallen her. The limp, the robotic voice, the sound sensitivity, yes, but her aura, too, pulsed a damaged Morse. Her face had lost its youthful puff and sunk into dusky channels, her eyes obscured beneath lids so thick they looked blistered.

For a moment I forgot that this woman was attacking me. That this woman was responsible for ruining a year and a half of my life, that she was petty and jealous and deserved to have every ounce of marrow sucked from her bones by a hummingbird.

Even so, a violent wave of need surged through me. A need to hit her. A need to pull her hair, tear her face to pieces with my teeth. A need to kiss her.

I stood. To present myself to her, to deliver my accusations, to proclaim to her, as if it needed proclaiming: you lost . But as I did so, the envelope fell from my lap. In Varga’s understandable haste, she hadn’t sealed it; the short drop to the tile floor jogged the contents loose.

It was an engagement ring. I knew in an instant whose. The setting was blandly traditional and the diamond minuscule, a blink-and-you’d-miss-it shard of carbon, the most lavish thing my father, then an assistant adjunct professor in geology, could afford with his negligible savings.

It was pretty, demure, nothing my mother would ever wear, and hadn’t.

Inside the envelope was a note from Varga.

I was trying to help .

I fisted the note into a sharp star. I threw it under my chair and retrieved the ring, I cupped it in my palm and waited to receive from it a transmission, bell clear, turquoise in color, a cool swim of talking. But it told me nothing. As an object it was not so much hostile as expired.

But I tried. I did try. I am not , I imagined saying to Varga, too scared to try . I gripped the ring, that indifferent loop, that metal homage to an eternal, round nothingness. The vise-contraction of my fists shot my blood against the current, reversed it up my arm, backwashed it into my heart.

It was pointless. It was as pointless as trying to force a confession from a corpse.

Then the Goergen’s walls made a move on me. The ceiling descended, as did the perversity, the absurd and fucked-up illness of my situation. I turned to Madame Ackermann, obliviously mouth-reading a pamphlet.

Inside, something broke. Because the truth was this: I was so, so happy to see her.

Our sick irony, or maybe it was our marvelous one: no one cared about me more than she did. If she was my mother substitute, fine. Better her than Borka. Or rather Varga. Better to be hated by her than to be loved by a monster. I wanted more than anything to hide my head in Madame Ackermann’s lap and sob for days. I would beg her to forgive my pettiness, my hubris, my disrespect. She could even keep attacking me for all I cared.

I wanted, more than anything right now, not to be alone.

“Madame Ackermann,” I said. “Madame Ackerman. It’s Julia.”

She couldn’t hear me through her earplugs.

“ Madame Ackermann ,” I yelled, probably crying now. “Please. It’s Julia.”

From the corner of my eye I noticed two orderlies and a doctor. They held the edges of what appeared to be a white matador’s cape.

The concierge smiled at me, quite pleased with what he took to be the imminent resolution, in his favor, of the situation.

“Julia,” said the doctor, his concerned tone telegraphing his secret take: mentally, I’d gone rogue.

“How have you been feeling?” he asked. “I hear you’re out of sorts.”

“If she would talk to me,” I said, pointing to Madame Ackermann, “I wouldn’t be out of sorts. I’d be in full command of my sorts, if she would talk to me.”

He sighed.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I said. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I’d done wrong; but I knew in my bones that I’d done it.