Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

I denied him authorization.

“I’d like to take my original with me,” I said.

Kincaid shook his head.

“Not possible,” he said. “You signed a contract stating that the original belongs to TK Ltd. But you can stipulate when it can and cannot be seen, of course. We’re not total monsters.”

From Cincinnati I flew to Boston; my father met me at the airport to drive me back to Monmouth, where I planned to spend the spring and probably, too, the summer.

We didn’t talk about my vanishing or my unvanishing. Mostly we talked about quartzite, and I asked him what he knew about an electrobiologist named Dr. Kluge, because it was one of those moments, so rare in our relationship, when my paranormal life intersected with his scientific one. He lectured while I fiddled with the radio. This was a familiar configuration for us, one that had always worked — him driving, me in the passenger seat. We’d always had our best conversations in the car because it allowed us to be in close physical proximity without his ever needing to look at me.

After seeing the photo of Varga’s half-finished surgery, I better understood the daily haunting I enacted on my father with my face.

A few weeks after arriving in Monmouth, I received an e-mail from Maurice, my former Workshop colleague who’d not once, while I’d been sick, bothered to contact me. The breezy tone of his e-mail tipped me off. The font twanged on my screen with envy and curiosity.

Got the yen to reconnect , Maurice wrote. Wondering what you’ve been up to .

A day or so later I received an e-mail from Maurice’s Workshop confidante Rebecca, never a friend.

Glad to hear your health has improved , she wrote. Need your address so I can invite you to my wedding .

She was orchestrating a viewing for my old classmates, I thought. Their idolatry of Madame Ackermann didn’t trump their need to inspect the person who’d proven to be the most powerful psychic of all, if the rumors of my destroying our mentor were to be believed. How did she do it?

For all of these people, I constructed a fake auto-response message.

If you’re receiving this message , I wrote, it means that the person you’re trying to contact is no longer at this address. Of course there’s always the possibility that the person you’re trying to contact remains at this address, but does not wish to be in contact with you. Additionally, it’s possible that this address has been compromised, and in the amount of time required for you to read to this point, a virus has been downloaded to your computer. Among other forms of havoc, this virus will send all the flame mails you’ve saved in your “drafts” file, the ones you wisely thought better of sending but couldn’t bring yourself to delete, because the anger is still so real .

In August, the letter arrived from Professor Yuen offering me a job.

Over dinner that night (grilled andouille and grilled bread and grilled radicchio — my father and Blanche prided themselves on never once, during the summer months, turning on their stove), I told them I was returning to the Workshop.

“To take a job,” I said.

“A job,” said my father. The fact that the Workshop would hire me confirmed its unceasing commitment to charlatanism.

“It’s a three-year lectureship,” I said. “Renewable.”

“Why?” Blanche asked.

“Because if I do a good job, they’d like the option of keeping me.”

“No,” said Blanche.

“What she means is,” my father said, “why did they hire you?”

“Because you don’t even have a terminal degree,” Blanche added. Blanche was bothered by incomplete degrees and any other endeavor embarked upon and abandoned. She always finished the movies she checked out of the library, even if she hated them. Experiences needed to be sealed up by credit sequences, commencement speeches, death. Closure was her thing, though she viewed it less as a vehicle for acceptance and recovery than as a matter of hygiene.

My father sawed at his radicchio.

“I would think that your health problems would make it difficult for you to commit to a three-year position,” Blanche said.

My father cut his radicchio into smaller and smaller pieces until he’d reduced it to a purpled mush.

He pushed his plate away.

Blanche hadn’t put scare quotes around “health problems,” nor did she need to.

“Sometimes one can resolve the unresolvable by accepting it as unresolvable,” I said.

“Hmmm,” Blanche said.

“Meaning it only registers to the brain as unresolvable if your brain is trying to resolve it,” I clarified.

“So you’re not looking to get better,” my father said.

“I am better,” I said.

Since leaving the Goergen, I told them, I’d been asymptomatic.

This was true.

Dinner wound up in the usual manner. My father smoked a pipe on the rattan chair with the giant circular back that rose behind his head like a woven-reed thought bubble. Blanche and I did the dishes and listened to a radio show, on which a curvy actress was interviewed about how it felt to be fat, at least compared to other actresses.

We said good night. We went to bed.

Before I drifted into sleep — sleeping was no longer a problem — I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable: that Madame Ackermann had never been attacking me. But this possibility I let seep into my mind for just a second or two. To release Madame from the blame I’d assigned to her only put me at the mercy of a greater and scarier unknown. What had made me sick?

Maybe Madame Ackermann was innocent, I thought, as sleep closed in. Maybe she was. But of one thing I was fairly certain: I had never intended to attack her.

“This will be your office,” Professor Yuen said. The walls stank of paint. Without Madame Ackermann’s posters — of the chairs from the Vitra Design Museum, of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (which featured a woman splayed on a fainting couch, a troll-like incubus hunched on her chest) — the room reminded me of an operating room, all brightness and anti-bacterial smells. “We’d prefer if you didn’t tack things to the walls,” Professor Yuen said. “Certain previous occupants were very disobedient when it came to this rule.”

Professor Yuen excused herself to a meeting; she’d be back in an hour, she said, to pick me up for lunch. She was itching to bring me to a new Japanese restaurant, located in a renovated mill that hung over the banks of a river.

“Rural sushi,” she said, without a flicker of humor, “is no longer an oxymoron.”

I closed my office door. The paint stink, bell-jarred, intensified. From my window I watched Professor Yuen exit the building and hurry down the walkway to her pumpkin-colored Saab. We’d become friends of a sort. Buddies who respected an implied boss — employee hierarchy (she took pains to remind me) as we did banal domestic errands together. She’d driven me to the nearby bigger town, the one with the strip mall, and helped me pick fabric for curtains I’d never sew, and new bedding for Professor Penry’s futon at an overstock store that sold discounted sheets, cashews, and pool noodles. She’d requested that I sit by her during the first faculty meeting — because, she implied, the faculty needed to see that she supported me as a new hire, despite my controversial situation. She was assuming the valiant role as my protector. For this, she made clear, I owed her. But soon this gambit revealed itself as a sham, a cover-up of her real motives, as well as a distortion of her actual understanding of the constellated relationship between me, her, the faculty. By befriending me she was taking a stance against Madame Ackermann, thereby challenging those who might seek to defend her, or argue that she should, upon her release from whatever secret asylum she’d been committed to, return. She was locating herself on the side, or so she believed, of true power. I was the muscle. I was the one not to be messed with.