Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

You’re in demand, Professor Yuen assured me.

Maybe it would be worth it. I imagined spending my nights in university Sheratons, brewing single-serve coffee and amassing a collection of tiny mouthwashes because I liked the turquoise color, pay-per-viewing rom-coms until dawn, suffering the rapidly alternating traveler states of ravenous hunger and, after enjoying a free Continental breakfast of precut melon cubes and shrink-wrapped Danishes, queasy disgust. On the plus side, I would look forward to returning home, even if I still lived in Professor Blake’s sublet with the closet-shower and the smell of old cat litter that wafted, on mysterious occasion, from the floorboards near the kitchen sink. My windowless lofted bedroom, the dark alcove furnished by a small desk and a poster of Dürer’s woodcut, Melencolia I , would seem — in comparison to my hypothetical Sheraton room, papered the bronze of a bad tie — the pinnacle of tastefulness and airiness and light. I would enjoy East Warwick more if I were forced to leave it. And I could make enough money, perhaps, to sublet Professor Blake’s apartment back to the undiscerning student population from which it had been wrested, and buy myself a proper house.

Three-year lectureship. Renewable. Workshop code for: unless you molest an initiate (and even if you do), you’re a lifer.

I decided to embrace it, my lifer life.

Inside, Mrs. Slaven greeted me. I knew her in the same limited way that I knew most of the locals — a familiar face enhanced by a gossip brushstroke, the equivalent of a photo caption or a gravestone epigraph. Mrs. Slaven was a woman of inscrutable peerage, her Hepburnesque bearing suggesting blood relation to the minor robber barons who’d built country houses in the area at the beginning of the last century, and whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with the dwindling familial spoils, settled around East Warwick to eke out a year-round life of parsimonious leisure.

But complicating this read was her accent, a local New Hampshire variant with hot-potato vowels and barely hit consonants, diaphragm spasms that sounded like the grunts of a person being punched. It wouldn’t be paranoid to suspect that the locals intensified their accents when speaking to us, such that they ever did, underscoring the fact that we did not share so much as a common language. That we were the locals’ source of income did not increase their desire to make us feel welcome in their town or in their stores. For this failure to sweeten their demeanors for the sake of money, we heartily respected them. For this respect they respected us. It was a tenuous social means of constructing a town, but it worked.

As per the East Warwick codes governing such interactions, Mrs. Slaven treated me, when I entered her office, as an intruder whom she refused to acknowledge. She busied herself with the unhurried completion of an envelope-stuffing, addressing and stamping task.

After five minutes, she took grudging note of me.

“It’s my lunch hour,” she said.

“I can come back,” I said.

She ignored my offer. She gestured toward a black-lacquered university chair of the physically punishing sort my father owned in triplicate, each with a different gold seal on the narrow backrest, one for every school attended. The seat was slippery and the butt indentation too deep and wide for most butts; plus the seat was canted so that the sitter slid backward until her vertebrae rolled against the spindles and the seat’s sharp edge dug uncomfortably into the tendons of her popliteal folds. If there was a chair more hostile than the Barcelona chair, it was the university chair.

I sat.

Mrs. Slaven clicked around on her computer. In a back room, a printer exhaled.

She disappeared and returned with a pile of listings.

“You won’t like this place,” she said, handing me the topmost listing, for a modestly priced cape. “Built as a summer house, you’ll never be able to heat it.”

“OK,” I said, setting it aside.

“This place might kill you,” she said, handing me a log cabin contemporary. “There’s a mold problem that will cost thousands of dollars to eradicate.”

She showed me a few other places that, she announced before handing me the listing, I wouldn’t like.

“Well.” She glared at me as though I were the hard-to-please one. “Why don’t you tell me what you do want.”

I stared at her blankly. I wondered how she could ask me this question. I wanted what everybody who walked through her doors wanted. I wanted a home.

Above her computer she’d tacked a calendar, the one given for free by the heating oil company to its customers, the one once magneted to Madame Ackermann’s fridge. They used the same photos every year, switching out the numbered grids below. I experienced for the October photo — of the pond papered shut by red leaves — the muted fondness I felt for a childhood cup, lost for decades in the back of a cupboard. As I stared at the leaves they broke apart and shifted like ice floes. Through those peepholes I could spy the pond beneath, filled not with water but a familiar swirling whiteness.

I saw her. My mother floated in that foggy ether, suspended in a netherworld that was as safe for her as it was empty. I realized: I’d missed her e-mails. She’d sent me that attachment, again and again and again she’d sent it to me, not as an explanation, not as her version of a vanishing film, not because she wanted me to understand why, when she’d been at that crossroads between living and not, she’d opted for not. She wasn’t making excuses. She wanted me to be with her at that darkest moment in her life. She wanted not to be alone.

I waved to her as the leaves notched back together, sealing her under the red. Connected by blood, divided by blood. She was my blood. She was my mother. I’d missed her. She’d tried to keep me safe from the pain of her, she’d tried but she had failed. I’d been, from the day I was born, contaminated. She was, even if she wasn’t, entirely to blame for me. I was her bodily fault. But I bet, if pressed to choose, she wouldn’t have wanted our relationship, insomuch as it existed, to be any other way. Not because she was a bad person. Because she was a person. Because who doesn’t want to be blamed by the people she loves, or might have loved? Blame is the cord you can never sever, the viscous umbilical you can swipe at with your hands, but there it will always ghostily hover, connecting you to monsters exactly as pitiful and needy and flawed as yourself. People can vanish or even die, but the blame keeps them present and alive. To be forgiven is to be released into the ether, untethered and alone.

I vowed: I would never forgive her.

I hauled myself out of the university chair. I lay on Mrs. Slaven’s couch. I instructed her to take notes.

I described to her what I wanted. A seventies-era A-frame home drastically reduced in price and uninhabited for over a year, formerly owned by a beautiful, sexually promiscuous woman and filled with the residue of a once-fantastic life such as might provide a sort of psychic compost for the next owner, namely me, a person who’d lived in pasts that didn’t belong to her and forfeited to feminist pornographer filmmaker performance artists the one that did, a person whose soul was so encrypted by pain that she had come to miss it with an intensity that had mutated into pain (this absence of pain registering as pain), and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.