Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

During the meeting prior to my first planned deception, I set the stage for her success. I woke her from her nap (she was snoring) in a false panic. She’d ceased breathing, I said. She’d turned gray, I said. I’d thought she was dead, I said.

Madame Ackermann ordered me to get the blood pressure cuff she kept in her desk drawer. She was so pleased with my reading (I divided her actual numbers in half) that she invited me to stay for coffee.

When we met the next day, I allowed Madame Ackermann to nap without interruption. I wandered around her house; I snooped. I discovered that she kept nothing in her refrigerator but olives, kefir, and an uncorked, half-drunk bottle of Vouvray. That her cupboards housed stacks of melamine dinner plates and a few foggy plastic bags of bulk nuts. That atop her bathroom toilet tank she kept a catalog that sold overpriced sheets in shades of whites named qualia and bastille .

I returned to her study, but instead of sitting in the Barcelona chair I sat in Madame Ackermann’s Knoll desk chair, an original Charles Pollock design upholstered in royal blue wool and much more comfortable than the Barcelona chair. I flipped on her antique desktop computer that made hideous gear-grinding noises as it booted up. First I read the newspaper. Then I checked her search history. I was unsurprised to learn she’d been researching a procedure wherein a metal plate is inserted between the two lobes of the brain in order to prevent a condition called bilateral contamination . Typically recommended for psychics twice her age, the procedure was described on this particular site as a “facelift for the mind.”

Then I unsheathed the Düsseldorf pen and began to write.

Madame Ackermann, when she gave me this pen, told me that its creator, before he turned his brilliance to writing utensils, was an unacknowledged pioneer in parabolic ski design. His pens were called “hypnosis tools for the hand.” The mind, she said, is freer to wander if it’s not attached to the mechanics of transcription.

I didn’t have an exact story in mind for Madame Ackermann’s regression, so I began by writing about a house by a lake that looked quite a bit like a lake house in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where I’d vacationed as a teenager with my father and then-new stepmother, Blanche. I described the path through the woods that led to the dock, though as I described this path I understood that it wasn’t going to lead me to the dock. And it did not. I emerged from the woods at the end of the hallway of an apartment building to see a young woman knocking on a door. An older woman in a sailor-striped shirt, her face out of focus, let the young woman into the apartment. She unbuttoned the younger woman’s coat, she positioned her against the bedroom window and handed her a video camera before closing the drapes around her, but not so tightly that the camera’s lens could not film the room through the fabric gap. A key turned in the door and a young man entered. He stared at the older woman with a look of revulsion and intimidation as, without speaking to her, he undressed. The woman pushed him onto the bed with a veined hand and said, before she violently kissed him, Who’s pitiful now?

The pen, as promised, had a seductive snaking motion that required little effort, forming words that were mine though I could claim no real attachment to them.

I was still writing when Madame Ackermann began to stir.

When I read the story back to her, it was as if I, too, were encountering it for the first time. I told her about the hallway, the young woman, the young man.

“And there was an older woman,” I said. “But you couldn’t see her face.”

“Then how did I know she was older?” she asked.

“You said her hands looked as though they’d spent a lot of time squeezing other people’s necks,” I said, recalling how they’d appeared to me.

And so our meetings normalized. Madame Ackermann was thrilled by her living-dead trances. I was thrilled that Madame Ackermann had renewed faith in me, and thus dedicated very little thought as to why my deceptions were so easy. I had found a way to be enabled by Madame Ackermann’s psychically powerful presence, or this is what I told myself, and thus our relationship proceeded as I’d always imagined it might — me the worshipful initiate, she the skilled mentor.

Except, of course, we were neither of these.

Here was the day in early October when things began to go wrong.

I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house to find her in a manic frenzy. Her feet were bare, her hair plumed from a Pucci scarf knotted on the top of her head, her eyes raccooned by day-old mascara.

“Julia,” she said, tumbling her hands as though she were plotting an underling’s demise (she’d had a case of dry skin she couldn’t eradicate; she was forever rubbing Vaseline into her palms), “we must get to work instantly .” She claimed that we needed by that afternoon to procure the serial number stamped on the bottom of the film safe formerly belonging to the Leni Riefenstahl of France.

I sat in the Barcelona chair. Outside I could hear the witchy baying of coyotes that I’d mistaken, when I first arrived in East Warwick, for wolves.

Madame Ackermann handed me a mug of lapsong. She blended her own and the result was, in my opinion, a fair approximation of septic effluent. She arranged herself on the Biedermeier and within five minutes was asleep, a filament of drool catching the gray New Hampshire light through her study windows, making her look as though she were seeping mercury from the mouth. She clutched in her hand a scrap of paper, like a boarding pass, with her intended destination: Paris Institute of Geophysics. Room 315 Tour Zamansky.

I switched from the Barcelona to the Pollock — not to write, but to google. I ascertained, via a crazed collector’s website, that the best film safes were produced in France; I guessed the Leni Riefenstahl of France would be partial to French film safes, and, given her fascist leanings, she’d have chosen a safe produced by the best of the French film safe manufacturers, a company called Le Polinaire. Le Polinaire, I learned, marked their safes with a seven-digit serial number hyphenated and concluding with two letters — for example, 1234567-AA.

I’d never been gifted at probability calculations, but I estimated that my chances of guessing the correct safe number were in the vicinity of ten to the seventh power multiplied by thirty-six twice, or something equivalently shitty.

I returned to the Barcelona chair. I stared at Madame Ackermann, snoring. Regress , I urged her. Paris Institute of Geophysics, Room 315 Tour Zamansky. Tell me the serial number on the bottom of the film safe .

Madame Ackermann stirred. She mumbled.

“What did you say?” I asked her.

“Fifteen,” she said.

Useless Madame Ackermann.

I retreated to her kitchen; I slugged kefir from the bottle. On her refrigerator she’d magneted the free calendar delivered by the local heating oil supplier, each page featuring a photograph of a month-appropriate New England scene. Madame Ackermann’s calendar was correctly turned to the October page and its picturesque snapshot of a pond papered over by bright red leaves, an image that didn’t make you think of lots and lots of blood only if you refused to stare at it for very long.

Returning to her study I sat in the Pollock chair and began to write — not words, but a series of tight wavy lines, a block of EKG squiggles. I continued to let the pen skate around the page, watching as Madame Ackermann slipped a hand under her blouse to scratch her rib cage.