Heidi Julavits: The Vanishers

Time passed. I tried to imagine the Tour Zamansky, a building I figured would be Gothic, constructed of bluestone and varicosed by dead ivy. I climbed a staircase, I entered a door, I sat on a leather couch, positioned across from a mirror that leaned against a wall of bookshelves. And here’s where I started to see things that surprised me. For example, the couch on which I sat appeared in the mirror, but I did not. Where I should have been I saw a hypnotically flickering bright spot, like a tear in an old film print. Numbers flashed in that gap where my face should have been; so did a dismembered hand.

In her laundry room, Madame Ackermann’s drier alarm goose-honked the end of its cycle, and the Tour Zamansky, such as it dimly existed for me, disappeared. I checked my watch; I was surprised to note that an hour had passed.

Madame Ackermann slept on.

My calves ached. I lay on the floor and did some runner’s stretches. I returned to the desk.

I stared at my notepad.

During my visualization of the Tour Zamansky, I had somehow drawn that heating oil calendar pond covered in leaves, each leaf a puzzle piece interlocking with its neighbors. I squinted at the drawing, the outlines of the leaves blurring when I did so and almost hieroglyphing into meaning.

But when I viewed the drawing peripherally — a trick we’d studied first semester, peripheral vision forcing a bend in the optic nerve, and explaining what the less scientifically minded referred to as the power of the third eye — I saw that something extra, or that something else, and I saw it as clearly as if I were staring at a license plate: 3258432-TR.

On a clean piece of paper I wrote this down, and preceded it by a detailed and hopefully convincing description of Room 315 right down to an ashtray I hadn’t seen overflowing with olive pits.

I stood over Madame Ackermann, still sleeping, still scratching herself. She’d pushed her blouse up to expose her stomach and the boundary lace of her bra. Her ribs jutted vulnerably upward, causing the skin to drop toward her bellybutton before rising again on either side to upholster the prows of her hipbones.

I hovered my hand over her bellybutton; I absorbed, through my palm, her ambient heat. Madame Ackermann had decided against having children, she’d told me, because she couldn’t bear to part with her stomach. At the time this had struck me as an excessively vain preoccupation, even for her. But observing her stomach now, radiating a trapped solar glow like a desert dune, I had to agree that it was worth whatever human sacrifices she’d made to preserve it.

I noticed, too, what Madame Ackermann had been scratching — an angry patch of eczema the size of a quarter, high on her rib cage. Unlike rashes on the wane, this one bulged at its borders. Its rampaging had just begun.

The poor woman, I thought. Her psychic blockage had taken its toll. Her face was savaged by stress — the puppet folds straddling her mouth deeper, her eyelids the dark turquoise color of those just-beneath-the-skin wrist veins. She really did look kind of dead. I angled a cheek a millimeter from her mouth to test if she was breathing. Her tea exhalations condensed on my skin, hot, cold, hot, cold.

She was alive. Sort of. Maybe, I thought, I should put her out of her misery. Finish the drawn-out job that age, or mental weakness, had just begun. Nothing but more failure awaited her. I turned my head and put my mouth atop her mouth. To inhale her life force, I told myself. To thieve the last spark of vitality from her. I kissed her. Her mouth spasmed beneath mine — kissing me back? Or maybe struggling for air. Whatever she needed, whatever she possessed, I blocked it, I stole it. I pressed downward until I could feel, beneath her lips, her teeth, her skull.

Outside, the neighbor’s schnauzer freaked at a passing car. I guiltily resumed my position in the Barcelona chair and hid the pond drawing in my pocket. Madame Ackermann opened her eyes and I said, Congratulations . I “read” to her the story of her trip to the Tour Zamansky as she palpated her bottom lip with a finger. Then I showed her the serial number.

She was relieved. I was relieved.

Madame Ackermann and I broke for coffee, she e-mailed the serial number to Colophon Martin, and that, for the time being, was that.

Then, a week or two later, I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s A-frame to find Madame Ackermann in a very weird mood.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to the Wegman rope chair by her fireplace.

I sat.

I was in some kind of trouble; she’d possibly discovered that I had, while she was asleep, kissed her.

But instead Madame Ackermann asked me if I knew who she’d met for breakfast that morning. I said that I had no idea, a claim Madame Ackermann met with very apparent dubiousness.

Madame Ackermann informed me that Colophon Martin had flown over from France because he’d found the missing film reel in the film safe stamped with the serial number 3258432-TR and was so astonished that he wanted to interview her about her regression process.

“That’s wonderful news,” I said.

Madame Ackermann lit a cigarette. Her lower face crinkled meanly around the filter when she inhaled.

She explained the situation further.

The reason Colophon was so interested in her regression process was because the serial number, which did correspond to the film safe in which Colophon discovered the missing film reel, did not correspond to the film safe once owned by the Leni Riefenstahl of France.

The film safe in which the reel was located had belonged, Madame Ackermann continued, at least according to auction house records, to the estate of a man known as Cortez — an anti-fascist painter with whom, it had been rumored though never proven, the Leni Riefenstahl of France had had an affair.

“Colophon Martin believes that she met Cortez at a gallery opening, after which they fell in love and plotted a performance art piece,” she said. “Which would mean that, when she accepted the commission from Jean-Marie Le Pen to direct a fascist propaganda film, she did so as an artistically subversive act.”

In short, the discovery of the missing film reel paled beside the discovery that the Leni Riefenstahl of France had known, and possibly collaborated and/or slept with, the painter Cortez.

“Very intriguing,” I said.

“ Very intriguing,” Madame Ackermann agreed, left leg viper-coiled around the right. Her eyes probed, with subdermal intensity, my face.

“But what I’m wondering, Julia,” she said, “is how I found the correct serial number, as you claimed I did, on the bottom of a safe in Room 315 of the Tour Zamansky.”

I saw, then, what this was about. She didn’t care whether or not the Leni Riefenstahl of France had collaborated/slept with this Cortez person. She only cared to know how she’d found the correct film number on the bottom of a safe that was not the correct film safe, because the correct film safe belonged to somebody else.

“You described to me her office in the Tour Zamansky,” Madame Ackermann said, reviewing the transcript I’d provided.

“You described it,” I lied. “I just wrote it down.”

Then I asked Madame Ackermann if it were possible that the Leni Riefenstahl of France kept two safes in her office.

Madame Ackermann did not concede this possibility. I blundered forth.

Madame Ackermann, I posited, when she’d regressed to the Tour Zamansky, hadn’t noticed the two film safes, but luckily she’d reported to me the serial number from the correct film safe.

Again: no response from Madame Ackermann.

“Meaning,” I said, “if the Leni Riefenstahl of France and this Cortez person became lovers and collaborators, isn’t it likely that she eventually gave him her extra film safe, in which she’d left one of her film reels?”