Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

This was astonishing. Stunning. Then a boiling, obliterating rage burst from my mouth. The words ricocheted like bullets shot by a person sealed inside a shipping container. Trapped velocity. These words could hurt no one but me. This did not stop me from saying them. Couldn’t she have waited until I reached her bed to fucking die? Was that too much to ask? I was sorry that she’d been so miserable. But I did not accept this as an excuse. She’d had a duty to be interested in me; that alone should have kept her alive, at least until my first Christmas, or until my first day of school, or until my first heartbreak, or until my first bad haircut, or until the first time I had a stomach bug and needed someone to hold my head out of the toilet. I had never blamed her for this failure. Not once. Nor did I blame her for possibly sickening me for over a year, or for my entire life. If I had never properly grieved, was that my fault? I couldn’t miss her because there was no one to miss. Which made me confused, it scrambled my emotional compass, this magnetic craving toward norths that didn’t exist. It was like missing a missing. So the least she could do was wait until I’d reached her bed to die. The least she could do was give me one experience, one, so that I could grieve her — not her absence, her —every single day of my life.

The necklace choked me. It was a drag, an unhealthy attachment. I freed my head from its noose. I threw.

Professor Hales genially chalked my misbehavior up to drunkenness, and asked that I pay for the cost of replacing the giant window, which would run me $2,000. Professor Yuen confiscated the necklace from me as though it were a mace I might use to brain an innocent party guest.

“Keep it,” I said.

“I’ll keep it for you,” she said.

“You can sell it on eBay,” I said. “You can throw it in the fucking river.”

“I think there’s been enough throwing for one evening,” Professor Yuen responded curtly.

That night I went home and put a block on my e-mail account. aconcernedfriend was not and had never been Madame Ackermann. aconcernedfriend was my mother. And I rejected her variety of concern. I did not need her fucking concern. Concern was a bullshit way of caring for a person you couldn’t or wouldn’t love.

I figured my breakdown at Professor Hales’s would mandate a tarnishing of my status in Workshop circles — I was a lunatic — but instead the shattering of Professor Hales’s window was read as further proof of my fiery unpredictability and reinforced my reputation as a person who caused interesting harm.

I was the not-to-be-messed-with genius.

I was the new Madame Ackermann.

This was my victory. This was fate — to become the bad person I apparently, despite the extreme measures taken to prevent my contamination, could not help but become.

In the short term, taking Madame Ackermann’s place was my way of graciously permitting the mistake that had been made, for the time being, in my favor. This lie I cultivated because I preferred it to people knowing that I experienced every day as a solitary hell. If I had come to miss my pain, it was not because I was a masochist or a martyr, but because to be free of pain was to be, in the most soul-vacant way, alone. The reason I preferred pain was nothing that a poetic if inaccurate application of the first law of thermodynamics couldn’t explain. If matter cannot be destroyed, neither can the lack of matter be destroyed, because the lack, over time, becomes matter, it becomes the equivalent of the plaster cast of the interior of an empty room.

A year later, I scrolled through my e-mail inbox — somehow I’d accumulated 3,689 unread messages since I’d returned to East Warwick — and noticed the e-mail from Colophon to which I’d never responded. His yearlong position at the university in Lyon had terminated in the interim, and he hadn’t bothered to send me an update on his whereabouts.

Again I saw the link he’d included. This time I followed it.

IS FAILURE TO GRIEVE A CRIME AGAINST THE DEAD? read the headline of an article published in a London art journal. I examined the accompanying photo of Alwyn and Dominique Varga.

A severe bob fit Alwyn’s skull like a downhill ski-racing helmet. She sat on the arm of Varga’s wingchair, Varga’s hand stilled in the act of smoothing Alwyn’s head, a gesture so familiar it made me — as though I were the one being touched — recoil.

Varga’s face, fortunately, was obscured by shadow.

The article detailed what I’d deduced to be true about Alwyn’s involvement with Varga. Varga had contacted Alwyn after she’d seen Alwyn’s film homages to her own work. Alwyn, as coincidence would have it, was by then assisting a scholar named Colophon Martin who was writing a book about Varga. Varga’d quite liked Colophon’s theories that she’d been “exploiting an ideology,” and so hired Alwyn in order to manipulate the story being written about her from within.

“We decided, however,” Alwyn was quoted as saying, “that the truth would be more fruitfully misleading than yet another lie.”

Alwyn spoke about her undergraduate dissertation — scheduled, with updates, to be published as a book — that promised to show how Varga’s portrayal of female exploitation and passivity (deemed “masochistic” and “viciously retrograde pornography” and “satire without the satire” by her critics) could be construed as an antifeminist message that was, in fact, urgently feminist. Feminists, Alwyn said, had been “killing the mother” or “killing the daughter” for decades in the name of advancement.

“We are the feminists who know,” Alwyn said, “that self-exploitation is the only safe expression of empowerment and love.”

Finally, the article delved into the financial and legal disputes surrounding Varga’s latest project, Memorial . (There was no mention of a woman named Elizabeth Severn. All three of us, apparently, were quite happy to forget about her.) The families of the impersonated had filed a case against the volunteers who’d had their faces reconstructed, demanding that these volunteers be legally required to have their surgeries reversed.

Varga, meanwhile, had, with Alwyn’s help, secured the support of an anonymous patron and hired a criminal attorney to clear her of the death of Borka Erdos — who had, according to Varga’s testimony, died in a car accident “of her own design” on Ibiza in 1980. Now this same attorney had, on Varga’s behalf, filed a countersuit against the families of the impersonated.

Varga, the article claimed, intended to sue them for murdering the dead.

I left my office. It was October again, the leaves bronze again, wood-smoke tannins in the air again. Walking to my apartment, I passed the office of East Warwick’s one real estate agency, Slaven and Slaven, the window papered with listings that obscured the interior from view, as if the office were undergoing a top-secret renovation and would soon be unveiled as a Pilates studio, the first definitive sign: East Warwick was turning into a smugly enlightened yippie hell. The real estate prices seemed to bank on exactly this variety of invader. There was a stone house in the Occum for sale, one that promised a backyard view of an active beaver dam. A contemporary Colonial boasted a stereo mudroom. A dingy ranch on a private mountain awaited its manor rebirth.

None of these houses spoke to me; their prices were beyond my relatively modest income, unless I did as Professor Yuen had suggested I do, namely to sign up with a speaking agent who could, Professor Yuen guaranteed, book me university gigs that would double my annual salary.