Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Break up with her,” Stan said.

“I’m not dating her,” I said.

“Quit,” he said. “Whatever.”

I told him I couldn’t quit. No one had ever “quit” Madame Ackermann.

“Exactly,” Stan said.

Thus I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house the next morning, my letter of resignation in my pocket, my thigh muscles shaky after a night of fucking Stan.

She greeted me with her old quasi-conspiratorial warmth. She’d intuited my intentions, I later came to think, hours before I arrived.

“Good morning, Julia,” she said. “Something exquisite has come up.”

We sat in her kitchen alcove. We drank septic tea.

Certain odd-yeared Octobers, she explained, wanding honey over my mug without asking if I took honey, were famously poor months to attempt regressions (something, she offered, having to do with di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations; I later googled the phrase “di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations” and got zero results), which explained why she’d had me doing such drab tasks; but now, she said, I could assist her with an exciting archiving project. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University had purchased her private papers; the curator of the university’s museum needed an archival installment for an upcoming exhibition of the university’s holdings called ParaPhernalia.

Madame Ackermann escorted me to her crawlspace, reached by pulling a metal ladder out of the ceiling of her guest room; I felt, each time I climbed it, as if I were stepping aboard a small commuter plane. The crawlspace was windowless and lit by a thin fluorescent fixture with a seizure-inducing flicker. The walls — some sheetrocked and others not, revealing between the studs a cottony insulation the color of peed-on snow — were lined with cardboard boxes, badly stacked, heavy boxes riding atop lighter boxes that had become accordion-squashed over the years.

The air, overheated and dense with micro-particulates, had, when I inhaled, a felted quality.

In these boxes, Madame Ackermann announced, on that first odd-yeared poorly planetarily configured October day, in no particular order, is my life.

I allowed myself, for about five minutes, to misinterpret this announcement as a promotion. Madame Ackermann was allowing me — me! — to read her private correspondence, in which there might be a letter from the famed lover who’d inspired the Fenrir appearance, or maybe early drafts of her many parapsychology game-changing books such as E-mails from the Dead , in which she detailed the recent rise in technological paranormal occurrences (ephemeral, frequency-based forms of communication being much easier for astral imprints to hijack than manual forms). Perhaps, too, there’d be old journals or a notebook that refuted (or confirmed) the rumors surrounding the source of Professor Yuen’s dislike of Madame Ackermann, a scuffle dating back to their student days when Professor Yuen accused Madame Ackermann of stealing her dissertation idea.

Madame Ackermann, or so I optimistically concluded, kept these incendiary materials in her crawlspace, and I had, after passing an inscrutable series of tests, proved worthy of her confidence. Which furthermore meant she was no longer bent on punishing me for the transgression I’d committed regarding the film safe incident. She was communicating her forgiveness and respect by promoting me to an airless, mausoleum-like space, meant to aggravate my mild claustrophobia and promote future fiberglass-particle-inspired respiratory ailments.

Exactly.

It took me less time than I needed to finish my first capful of septic tea (Madame Ackermann supplied me with a full thermos) to realize that I had been really and truly demoted.

For starters, the boxes in her crawlspace did not contain letters, or photos, or journals, or anything of overt interest to anyone driven by nobly archival rather than creepily prurient aims. In these boxes were bills. Bank statements. Dry-cleaning tickets. Bottles of expired malaria pills and Benadryl blister packs. Unpaid parking tickets (twenty in one box, all from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all issued within a period of five days). Jury duty notices. Dog-eared linen catalogs. Grocery lists. Unfilled prescriptions. A note written on the back of a pristine scratch-off lottery ticket that said, apologies I hit your car but I don’t have insurance so instead I am giving you this lottery ticket good luck!

She instructed me to organize the box contents into a kind of chronological life portrait collaged from this paper detritus. I was to match the credit card statement to the parking tickets received during that time period, the prescriptions written, and so forth (this per the request of the curator of ParaPhernalia).

“But what about undated items?” I asked. Meaning, for example, her grocery lists.

“One doesn’t shop for leg of lamb in the summer months,” Madame Ackermann replied.

She left me to my sorting. Did I learn anything unusual about Madame Ackermann during those hours I spent dry-sweating in her crawlspace? I learned that she had, according to her statements, an intense Norma Kamali bathing suit habit; that she rarely bought organic meat and was more familiar than I wished her to be with diet TV dinners; that she desired, but apparently never purchased, an Austrian featherbed; that she visited a general practitioner who prescribed her enemas and dandruff shampoo; that her preferred stationary vehicular violation was the double park; that she tended to drop thirty items simultaneously at the Bon French dry cleaner, located in a mini-mall on the outskirts of East Warwick, and was never required to produce a ticket in order to pick up her clothing.

For seven long afternoons, I puzzled these paper scraps into a chronologically accurate approximation of Madame Ackermann’s existence. These scraps failed to suggest that Madame Ackermann was a woman of unusual psychic talents. They failed to suggest she was unusual in any way at all.

This experience made me question, as I sorted receipts into piles while drinking capful after venomous capful of septic tea, whether Madame Ackermann was anything more than the averagely constipated, irresponsible, dry-scalped, high-thread-count-sheet-desiring person. There was nothing special about this woman I’d idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired; it was even possible that practically anybody — maybe even I — was more gifted than she.

Which is to explain why, at her forty-third birthday party, I called out “Barcelona chair.” Because I was more eager than ever to prove to the attendees of Madame Ackermann’s party that they had underestimated me.

I was, in a word, stupider.

In the end, nobody in that A-frame save Madame Ackermann understood the import of my calling out “Barcelona chair,” because no one else had caught her torque. When I called out “Barcelona chair” I received, from my professors (who’d all, save Wibley, seen a spider), disapproving glares. By calling out “Barcelona chair” I exposed myself to Madame Ackermann alone.

No, that’s not true.

I also exposed myself to me.

When I called out “Barcelona chair,” the personal toll exacted by my deception, like the image of the chair itself, spun into focus. I was psychically exhausted by the charade of the past months; I wanted Madame Ackermann to know that I had not, from the ten-to-the-seventh-power-multiplied-by-thirty-six-twice options, accidentally doodled my way to the correct film safe serial number. As she snored on the Biedermeier sofa beneath her silk eye pillow, she was not enabling me. If anything, I had succeeded despite her.

Even so, I wasn’t prescient enough to avoid stepping into what we later came to understand as Madame Ackermann’s trap. She’d stashed me in her crawlspace like a pound of meat — hidden from view, awaiting petrification. She’d invited me, her demoted, deceitful stenographer, to her forty-third birthday party, and I’d been foolish enough to interpret the overture as a peace offering, when in fact she was bringing me into the killing arena. This was blood sport for her. But first she wanted to be certain that I was the person she suspected me of being.