Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Because look at what I had done.

I did try once to tell Professor Yuen that she might be mistaken. Over a meal of lame dim sum, I’d tried to hammer a dent in her certainty.

“Funny that I don’t have any memory or knowledge of attacking Madame Ackermann,” I’d said.

Professor Yuen’s eyes hardened like those of a person hearing that a loved one has died in a plane crash, then liquefied again when she remembered, But no, he changed his plans at the last minute, he took the train .

“The most virulent psychic attacks issue from the unconscious,” she said. “Whether ‘you’ intended it or not is immaterial. We are helpless before our lower power. And isn’t it kind of fun,” she said chummily, “to think you’re living a parallel life about which you’re unaware?”

She offered to bring some book by my apartment later that night; she needed me to be as convinced of my covert ruthlessness as she was.

I wasn’t. At least I was pretty sure that I wasn’t. However, the more I attempted to deny my involvement with Madame Ackermann’s misfortune, the more passionately Professor Yuen believed I’d masterminded it all.

So I stopped denying it. Living the lie seemed less aggressively mendacious than failing, by trying, to set the record straight.

Living the lie was not such a bad way to live — especially given the respect I was afforded by those who, in the past, had afforded me so little. When my hire was announced in a Workshop alumni newsletter, I received congratulatory e-mails from Maurice and from Rebecca ( so sorry you missed the wedding ). Professor Janklow invited me to headline a psychic attack conference in Berlin. Professor Hales forgave me for failing to accept his submission to Mundane Egg .

Their attentions made me feel good, but not easy. Each morning I awoke and conducted an examination. Head: no migraine. Torso: no rash. Anus: not fiery. Finally I’d get out of bed — cautiously, in case gravity should prove, as it did in the past, my undoing — and run through a checklist of possible failures.

No.

No.

No.

No.

Then I would get dressed.

At the same time, I was regressing like a champ. Gone were the days of patchy psychic activity, impossible to harness. Simply lying down on my new Florence Knoll bench was all it took to send me off to specific destinations, and for hours. Professor Yuen assigned me a stenographer, a young girl named Sheila, soon forced, due to my prolixity, to wear a brace on her writing wrist. She came to my office every morning smelling of men’s sporty deodorant, an annoying trait I vowed never to comment upon. Save for the basics, we never spoke.

Despite these successes, the key that Varga had given to me still proved psychically useless. It did, however, unlock the actual door to the actual room where Irenke had committed suicide in 1984; I knew because I’d visited 152 West 53rd Street over a long weekend to collect my few possessions from a storage unit. I’d been unsurprised to discover, at that address, the Regnor Hotel. An interview with a gossipy lifer janitor, a man who functioned for the Regnor as its memory morgue, revealed the grimmer specifics of what I’d known to be the facts — that Irenke had checked into the Regnor Hotel on October 24, 1984; that she’d swallowed a lethal combination of whiskey and diazepam; that her belongings, including a heavy pendant necklace, had been shipped, per the instructions detailed in the note she left behind, to her mother in Paris.

So I’d checked into Room 13, I’d taken a nap on the bed. Contrary to what many believe, rooms in which people have killed themselves are often the quietest rooms, unrattled by restless electrons. My mother’s bedroom was a neutral space, a psychic beigeness. I left Room 13 having experienced the same peaceful vacancy. Why Irenke had killed herself remained unknown to me, and just as well. Reasons were for the survivors. They did Irenke no good.

But after my trip to Room 13, Irenke began to let me visit her again in Paris, and pretty soon we’d developed a routine. Every morning we hung out for an hour, like friends meeting for coffee at a local East Warwick café, though Irenke preferred to drink whiskey sours, a bad habit she’d earned the right to enjoy. We had one of those relationships that was organic and easy because we didn’t discuss the unpleasant things, and the refusal to do so was not viewed by either of us as an act of cowardice, nor did we view it as an indication that we were incapable of real intimacy.

Because I’d decided — this kind of hating, this kind of fault-finding, this kind of symbolic matricide, it had to stop. If I’d formed an allegiance with Irenke, it was because I’d decided that to befriend Irenke was to ensure that my mother’s death did not perpetuate more pointless, self-defeating rivalries among women who, in the end, were only killing themselves.

Besides, we had a lot in common, Irenke and I. We were sisters of a sort.

At the Workshop, meanwhile, my classes were a hit. I dated a variety of blue-collar, off-campus men. I even reconnected with my first boyfriend, James, which is to say that I started sleeping with him again, and we thought, for a week or two, that we were doomed to be a couple. But he was a bit of an emotional mess, his own mother having recently died of something prolonged and horrible, the length of which had enabled him to have too many wrenching conversations with her about how she missed both what hadn’t happened to her yet and what had happened to her already with equal vividness. Her dying, she said, made her miss James’s childhood and the childhood of his unborn children in the exact same moment, with the exact same nostalgic intensity, which had rendered her life both timeless and collapsed, an immortality in which she existed forever or a grave into which her past, present, and future disappeared. This sort of talking had undone James, and it also, even when related to me secondhand, for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, undid me. We decided to part ways before we overrode our old good memories of one another with new bad ones.

But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware. I visited a number of physicians in the area, all of whom pronounced me fit as a fiddle . If it had been difficult to convince my former doctors of the medical validity of an illness comprised of many contradictory symptoms, it was even harder to convince these doctors of an illness whose only symptom was a complete absence of symptoms.

I consulted Professor Yuen, who was sympathetic.

“It’s not easy to do what you do,” Professor Yuen said. As far as she was concerned, I was still attacking Madame Ackermann.

She recommended that I visit Patricia Ward.

Patricia Ward lived in a winterized cottage, part of a twenties vacation development called the Occum that included a pond, a shingled club house used for staid second weddings, and a five-hole golf course.

“Patricia Ward,” she said, giving my hand a hard, efficient shake.

Patricia Ward was too tall for her own house, her hyperbolic blond hair near-skimming the rafters as she walked me to her office, a small room off the kitchen that looked out, through multipaned windows, at a tangle of burdock. She wore severe black glasses, jeans, and a shrug made of linen and tie-dyed in a muted way that whispered, “pricey tribal.”

My resistance to Patricia Ward intensified when she led me into her study.

Two black Barcelona chairs faced off over a glass coffee table.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the Barcelona chairs. The leather cricked when my bottom hit it. I winced.