Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me. She smoothed the wrinkles on her black silk pants.

“There’s a popular saying among non-occultists,” said Madame Ackermann, dry palms hissing over the silk. “Anything is possible.”

At our next meeting, we did not talk about the film safe incident. Madame Ackermann claimed to be too bothered by allergies to regress; she suggested my time might be better spent replacing the bungees in her built-ins. The following week, she handed me a three-ring binder and a glue stick, and directed me to a drawer of her review clippings. We settled into a “strictly professional work relationship,” rife with all the tensions and incrementally building resentments that phrase implies. Madame Ackermann, without officially demoting me, employed me like any old intern, sending me to town to xerox recipes from a cookbook on loan from Professor Penry, or to deliver receipts to a tax accountant at her offices located on a literal mountaintop.

One day she tasked me to clean her family photos with an herbal disinfectant that she sprayed obsessively on light switches and doorknobs. Madame Ackermann stood behind me as I was wiping a photograph of her mother holding a baby, presumably her.

“Whatever could have possessed her,” she said, staring at her own swaddled image, “to do such a thing?”

“Her?” I said. “What did she do?”

I scrutinized Madame Ackermann’s mother (a sweet Viennese woman — I’d met her once) whose young face resembled a blurrier version of Madame Ackermann’s. Even then she was no match for her own daughter, an ominous, night-haired squib equipped, at that negligible age, with an untamed laser glare seemingly capable of setting her own blankets ablaze.

“My mother used to say,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that she’d rather die than miss a single day of my life.”

I waited for her to laugh. She did not laugh. Perhaps, I thought, this was a famous Austrian saying that, translated word-for-word, became a cannabalistic koan.

Madame Ackermann flapped her starfish eyes at me. They gleamed with a liquid substance I would never mistake for tears.

I understood, then, what she was referring to. We’d never spoken about my mother’s suicide, but she’d had access to the medical interviews I’d undergone prior to matriculation at the Workshop, the results of which claimed I suffered from a physiological and psychological syndrome called febrile disconnection or “pure motherlessness”—and described how, from nearly birth, I had compensated for this lack by developing alternate ways of linking my internal world with my outside one.

Madame Ackermann grasped my wrist. We were about to have the exchange I’d had with so many teachers and mothers of friends, the squirmy upshot of which was this: you poor dear .

Except, of course, we weren’t.

“Poor Julia, you must believe that you’re innately unlovable,” Madame Ackermann said. “No wonder you need so much from me.”

I pulled my wrist away.

“Also, you’re handicapped by guilt,” she said.

“Me?”

“You shouldn’t be so ashamed,” she persisted. “No one blames you for hating her because she abandoned you.”

“I don’t hate her,” I said.

Madame Ackermann kinked a dubious brow.

“You can’t hate a person you never knew,” I said.

“Plenty of people hate complete strangers,” she said.

“I guess I lack imagination,” I said.

“And whose fault is that?” she retorted, possibly implying that my mother, by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills when I was a month old, and dying alone in the middle of the day in her bedroom, had also lacked imagination. Suicide by pills was such a cliché , or so the whispering wives of my father’s friends would claim, women whom I’d eavesdropped upon (really eavesdropped upon) at the barbecues and the picnics to which we were invited throughout my childhood. I’d wanted to ask them: What, to their minds, counted as a less clichéd way to kill oneself? Was hanging oneself also clichéd? Was it a cliché to fill one’s pocket with stones and walk into a river? Was it a cliché to shoot oneself through the mouth, or hurl oneself into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, or take an overdose of hemlock, or douse oneself in gasoline and strike a match? Or was the act of suicide itself a cliché? Regardless, I had to wonder how much, when deciding to kill oneself, matters of originality came to bear.

“It can’t help the situation,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that I look so much like her.”

Then Madame Ackermann drifted off to her study, as if we’d been discussing nothing more fraught than her upcoming dermatologist appointment (the eczema on her rib cage had begun its march north).

I sprayed and wiped and sprayed and wiped. I emptied an entire bottle onto that picture frame, trying to disinfect it. To my knowledge, Madame Ackermann had never seen a photograph of my mother, thus how could she have known how much she resembled her? Which suggested that, perhaps while considering my stenographer application last spring, Madame Ackermann had done a psychic background check on me. Perhaps she’d been places I had never been. Perhaps she’d visited my mother. This made me feel betrayed, violated, spied upon, the expected reactions. But it also made me feel humiliated, as though I’d been beaten at a game at which I should have been uniquely positioned to excel. Because, despite my supposed gifts, I had never visited my own mother. She had never allowed it.

The first time I’d tried and failed I was nine; I’d taken a photograph of her to a carnival psychic, who ignored the photo and insisted instead on reading my tarot cards. Outside the psychic’s tent a barometric vise squeezed the air, the pressure creating a tear in the atmosphere above us, from which issued a chilly black exhalation. The carnival psychic, her hand atop the tarot deck, began to perspire; though a fake, she was not numb to dark warnings. I think we both knew, before she flipped the card, that it would be the Fool, cautioning me not to take the imprudent path.

For a year or so, I had not taken the imprudent path. I decided that I would not force myself upon my mother. She would have to visit me first.

But she hadn’t visited me. Not on my birthday, not on her birthday, not on her death day, not on Halloween or Easter or Christmas, not even on those plain old Tuesdays or Mondays when the hectopascals, which I measured religiously with a meteorologist’s digital barometer, indicated an atmospheric pressure so low, so hospitable to astral invasions, that even we heavy cow humans, with a minimum of struggle, might hope to pierce the membrane that separated alive from dead and turn like clouds above the world. On the days when the pressure was unfriendly to her kind and maniacally high, I’d still been attuned, I’d still been open, I’d still been willing to see her — as I’ve heard even the least psychically inclined mourners can sometimes see their dead — in the wind or in the polygraph chittering of tree branches. I’d searched for her in the bottoms of teacups and under the bed in which she’d died, the only grave she’d been afforded because her body had been burned, her ashes scattered on a mountain that was always cold when we visited. I had looked into the backyard brush fires my father fed with things a husband should not burn. But I had never found her. She had not wanted to be found. And if I had gone to the Workshop to sharpen my finding abilities so that I could track this most reluctant woman — so what? Sillier reasons drive people to read the air.

That night I confided the Madame Ackermann situation to a Mortgage Payment named Stan. Stan had never understood why I had been chosen to rise from the bottom of the initiate heap; he was relieved to see order restored. I allowed him his moment of delight. Then I asked him what I should do.