Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“So I understand,” he said.

“I’m glad you understand,” I said, “because then maybe you can make me understand.”

The orderlies grabbed me. I stared at the countess shuffling cards in her lap.

She’d drugged my tea, that witch. She’d drugged my tea and then she’d faked an interest in me so that the drug would have time to take effect.

The orderlies fastened the straitjacket around my torso. They handled me roughly, so roughly that one of them knocked my mother’s ring from my hand. It landed on the floor with a glassy clink ( The dead bell, The dead bell, Somebody’s done for ) and slid toward a drain I had never noticed in the lobby floor, a drain identical to the drain I remembered from my dream, one that created in the tiled plane a gentle depression, like a nascent sinkhole tugging on the earth.

The ring tipped over the edge, its vanishing soundless.

I couldn’t help myself.

I laughed. And laughed and laughed, until it sounded as though I was yelling at someone. Maybe I was.

My commotion must have achieved a frequency that even earplugs couldn’t impede. Madame Ackermann turned her head. She stared at me. She trembled as though hypothermic.

“ You ,” she said to me. She pointed a shaking finger. She clutched her stomach and made helpless, wheezing noises.

The doctor attempted to help Madame Ackermann into her chair, but Madame Ackermann stiffened and refused to sit.

“No,” she said. She struggled back to standing. Doing so required that she grasp the doctor around the neck and press her cheek against his breastbone.

“Take deep, slow breaths,” the doctor said.

“That woman,” Madame Ackermann whispered. She refused to say my name. “That woman is attacking me.”

“What?” I attempted to say. “No. That’s not true.”

It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true.

“This sort of stimulation isn’t recommended,” the doctor said. “We’ll soon have this situation under control. In the meantime, I’ve sent for a massage therapist.”

“A massage therapist,” Madame Ackermann said. The bitterness of her tone made the doctor recoil. “You think I need a massage therapist? What I need is a gun.”

“It’s important to remember,” the doctor said, “that those who commit murder are not making smart choices.”

She spat at him, a weak ejection of stringy droplets.

“ Murder ,” Madame Ackermann said, mouth skinny and wet, a mouth I could never imagine wanting to kiss. “As if I’d waste my energy killing her.”

She attacked her face with her fists. She swung like a girl, all her effort channeled into her flailing neck and head so that it appeared as though she were dodging her own blows.

Then Madame Ackermann wet herself. The urine trickled down her leg and over her fleece slipper, pooling on the tiles. The bandaged women vacated the lobby, all mean whispers. Madame Ackermann’s feminine hold over the doctor and the orderlies, such as it was, evaporated.

The puddle broke toward me like a slow-motion current traveling from a flipped switch to an electric chair. Somebody’s done for .

The orderlies fumbled nervously with the belts near my face.

“Are you worried I’m going to bite you?” I said. Although I think my words were no longer clear.

“I am my mother’s daughter,” I warned, as they cinched me in. “You should be worried. You should be very, very worried. I am a bad person, you see.”

I heard the rasping sobs of Madame Ackermann as she, too, was stuffed into a straitjacket.

I continued to track the urine’s progress, now less than a foot away and closing in.

In my head I began a mantra that I hoped Madame Ackermann could hear. Stop , I begged. Please please please stop . Soon this simplified to Please .

I repeated it over and over until I didn’t recognize the word anymore.

Please please please please .

I thought the word so loudly I could hear it.

I peered up from the rivulet long enough to catch a glimpse of Madame Ackermann, hair curtaining her face in snotty ropes, the two of us a pair of ruined, straitjacketed twins.

Please please please continued the mantra, uttered by a voice so pathetic and stripped of dignity I was ashamed that it belonged to me.

And it didn’t.

“Please, stop,” Madame Ackermann begged as the orderlies dragged her past me. “Please,” she said beseechingly, as though I were a person capable of saving anyone.

We decided it would be in poor taste for me to rent Madame Ackermann’s vacant A-frame.

“We don’t want people to talk any more than they’re already going to,” said Professor Yuen.

Plus the A-frame was on the market, had been on the market for months. “You wouldn’t want them to sell it out from under you,” said Professor Yuen, though we both knew it was unlikely that the A-frame would sell, given what had happened to Madame Ackermann. Too many people in East Warwick were sensitive to bad psychic residue, especially in matters of real estate.

Instead I subleased a small apartment on East Warwick’s three-block-long stretch of student-oriented commerce. Located above a store that specialized in flannel nightgowns and henna kits, the apartment belonged to Professor Blake, now on semi-permanent sabbatical at a drying-out facility in Kansas. Sparsely furnished with a feeble kitchen but featuring a well-equipped bar conveyed, for no additional fee, to the subsequent tenant, the place proved great for parties, even though the bathroom was a literal closet, privatized by an accordioned rubber curtain that slid back and forth on stuttering runners.

I arrived in East Warwick with very few belongings. What clothes I had filled two of the five drawers in Professor Blake’s dresser. I online-shopped for basics in neutral shades like groat and topsoil . I purchased a lamb’s-wool coat at a vintage store. Winter in New Hampshire was always coming.

While it was never explained to me why I’d been offered a three-year lectureship at the Workshop, compared to the other mysteries of the world, this one didn’t haunt me much. The letter from Professor Yuen, by the time it reached me at my father’s house in New Hampshire, had been forwarded three times. “We have an opening for a three-year renewable lectureship,” her letter read. “I think you’d be perfect for the position.”

The letter confirmed that the rumor of my psychically attacking Madame Ackermann had not remained limited to the staff at the Cincinnati headquarters of TK Ltd.

“You’re the Julia,” my TK Ltd. counselor said when he accepted the paperwork I’d filled out to officially unvanish myself.

WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR VANISHING FILM TO REMAIN AVAILABLE FOR VIEWERS?

I checked the NO box.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE A COMPANION FILM EXPLAINING YOUR REASONS FOR UNVANISHING?

I checked the NO box.

“I’m a Julia,” I replied, accepting the safety deposit box. Inside was my driver’s license, a set of keys to my New York apartment, three silver sticks of gum that had dissolved, coating the drawer with a membranous goo.

“You messed that Madame Ackermann person up,” he said. “You should watch her vanishing film.”

En route to the bursar’s office, I was stopped by a man wearing a pair of elbow-length leather gloves. He introduced himself as Timothy Kincaid. He shook my hand overzealously.

I flinched.

“Bah,” Kincaid said. “You can stop with the delicate act. But you sure had me fooled. Any chance you’ll authorize me to screen your film for training purposes? We need to be able to spot sleepers like you.”