The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  “And now he’s lost his foot,” my father said of his colleague.

  “Insane,” I said.

  “Which could be good for him,” my father said. “A disruption to the given system.”

  I indulged a mental eye roll. “A disruption to the given system” was a well-worn phrase of my father’s, his way of cauterizing any conversation or situation that risked devolving into an emotionally messy bleed-out.

  “At any rate, keep a lookout for that candida article. You should have received it last week.”

  “It could be a while,” I said. “My mailman’s an alcoholic.”

  This initiated a different sort of silence from my father, a disapproving silence. My internist had forbidden any type of psychic activity, and had gone so far as to prescribe an anti-seizure medication that cut all psychic radio signals, making it impossible to disobey his orders even if I’d wanted to.

  “He stinks of gin and has a clown nose,” I said. “Even you would know he was a drunk.”

  Alwyn, I noticed, was resting her head miserably on the pastry display case. I thought, the weight of the world. I thought, the girl with two lonely, decontaminated brains. Then I remembered: she was hurt.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll see you at the restaurant.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Very good,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  Good-bye, I started to say.

  Instead I said: “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “We’ll talk then,” he said.

  “Then we’ll talk,” I said.

  I snapped our connection to a close, but an aftershock remained. From within my phone’s fake metal shell I sensed the weakening pulse of the many words we never found we much needed, once confronted with each other’s actual faces, to say.

  The Regnor was located on the kind of generic Manhattan block that vanishes the moment you leave it. We passed a dry cleaner and a florist and a butcher with signs that read DRY CLEANER and FLORIST and BUTCHER. I paused to stare at the unpetrified roasts in the butcher’s window, their wet surfaces appearing, in the mute December daylight, shellacked.

  Once inside the Regnor’s lobby, Alwyn dropped onto a velvet deco couch, its nap balded to the backing fabric in certain popular butt- and head-resting places. Overhead, the lobby was degloomed by a stained-glass skylight that might have portrayed an image of twining ivy, though the ivy might have been snakes. I positioned myself on an armchair so that I couldn’t see my reflection in the giant mirror on the opposite wall. My face—meds-bloated and, due to the recent onset of Bell’s palsy, afflicted by a droopy right eyelid—remained a surprise I could not avoid inspecting.

  Alwyn set her coffees on the table, unbuttoned the HELLO LYDIA coat, and lay back, her head notching into one of the upholstery’s denuded spaces.

  “My skull’s killing me,” she said.

  I reached into my bag’s inner pocket and withdrew a handful of plastic pharmacy bottles.

  I shook three painkillers into my palm.

  “Pick one,” I said.

  Alwyn chose a pink Darvocet and washed it down with a swig of cappuccino. I followed with six different pills. These I swallowed dry. Caffeine was contraindicated for thirteen of my twenty-three medications; plus I was a practiced pill taker now, my esophagus an inflatable airplane slide. Nor did I mind that these medications caused my psychic abilities to disappear. Shorting out a streetlamp by walking beneath it seemed as impossible to me now as extinguishing, by walking beneath it, the sun.

  “So this is where the textile conference is being held?” I said.

  “What textile conference?” Alwyn said.

  “Aren’t you here for a textile conference?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “A film conference.”

  “Ah,” I said, wondering where I had come up with the idea of the textile conference. This was not unusual for me these days, to fail to make proper inquiries of people, to stopper their blanks with my uninformed filler. In the past, I hadn’t needed to ask. “What kind of film conference?”

  “A lost film conference,” she said.

  “Ah,” I said again. “The films were lost?”

  “ ‘Lost’ refers to the people in the films,” she said. “Though it’s slightly more complicated than that.”

  I nodded as if I understood. She dug into the pocket of the HELLO LYDIA coat and withdrew an enameled cigarette case that she, or more likely Lydia, used to store breath mints.

  “So,” she said, “what’s up with all the medication?”

  “I’m living the dream,” I said. “Bewildered girl in her mid-twenties moves to the big city, works a crappy, unrewarding job, and dulls her existential disorientation with drugs.”

  “These are recreational,” she said. “You’re not sick anymore.”

  My eyelid spasmed.

  “I heard you’d been sick for a long time,” she said.

  Behind her, the lobby elevator disgorged a trio of ashen people. One of them was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

  “Thirteen and a half months,” she said.

  “Since we’ve met?”

  “Since you became sick.”

  I did some creaky arithmetic.

  “That’s more or less correct,” I said.

  “More or less since the twenty-fifth of October, two Octobers ago.”

  “More or less exactly,” I said, getting nervous. Who the hell was this person?

  Alwyn leaned closer.

  “I say this as a friend,” she said. “There’s nothing you could tell me about yourself that we don’t already know.”

  We, I thought. Then, Ah. Alwyn was a Workshop person; maybe, it occurred to me, and not without a little bit of envy and indignation, she was Madame Ackermann’s new stenographer. Or maybe she’d been sent here by Professor Yuen to check on me, less because Professor Yuen cared, more because she needed, from an administrative perspective, to discover whether or not I “merited” another semester’s medical leave. (“The student must prove,” she’d written in an e-mail, roboticized by her trademark form-letter-speak, “by submitting a T-76 form, filled out by a physician, an ongoing medical condition, or take a leave of absence and pay $1,000 per semester to hold his or her spot until that future point when he or she is medically sanctioned to return.”)

  “But you’re not my friend,” I said.

  Alwyn considered this.

  “True,” she conceded, flopping back against the couch. “But I will be.”

  I registered this as a threat.

  OK, I thought, bored enough by my life to find her coyness intriguing. I’ll play your game.

  “Could I have a mint?” I asked.

  I recognized her now, or at least I thought I did. She was Stan’s cousin; she’d visited him a few falls ago as a Workshop prospective.

  That Madame Ackermann or any of my old friends at the Workshop were gossiping about me struck me as the height of insensitivity, especially when not a single one of them (save Professor Yuen) had bothered to shoot me so much as an e-mail to see how I was doing. The only person who wrote to me was aconcernedfriend; the e-mails themselves had no content, but they always included the same video attachment of swirling fog, through which I could see a woman on a bed.

  But my indignation ebbed, replaced by a far more pathetic response. People at the Workshop were talking about me, Madame Ackermann was talking about me, ergo—I still mattered.

  Alwyn offered the cigarette case. I accepted a mint. I suctioned quick craters in the surface.

  “So,” I said. “You must be a first-year Initiate.”

  “I’m no longer at the Workshop,” she said. “According to Madame Ackermann, I wasn’t ‘initiate material.’ ”

  “You were never her stenographer?” I said.

  “I was a Mortgage Payment,” she said.

  She appeared more bothered by this failure than she cared to
let on.

  She gestured to a porter.

  “Could I get a sherry, please?” she asked.

  The porter nodded. He peered at me.

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” I said.

  “Nothing?” Alwyn asked.

  “Maybe a seltzer,” I said.

  “We have a lot in common, more than just our rejection by Madame Ackermann,” Alwyn said, and then proceeded to describe a life with which mine shared nothing in common (including “rejection by Madame Ackermann”—I didn’t have the energy to parse the distinctions between her and me on this matter; I had never been a Mortgage Payment). She’d grown up in Scarsdale and gone to boarding school in Switzerland, her mother had once been a famous shampoo model known as “the Breck Girl,” her father died when she was thirteen, after which her mother had a series of boyfriends before marrying a Jungian psychotherapist and moving to Berne. Before her brief stint at the Workshop, Alwyn had been a Women’s Studies major at Bryn Mawr, where she’d written her thesis on passivity as a form of feminist protest in the films of Dominique Varga.

  She stared at me as though I were meant to glean some extra significance from this information.

  “Dominique Varga,” she repeated.

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  “Dominique Varga is the Leni Riefenstahl of France,” Alwyn said. “The woman whose office you visited when you were Madame Ackermann’s stenographer.”

  My eyelid spasmed again and refused, this time, to stop. I associated the Leni Riefenstahl of France with my Autumn of Deception, which was, I believed at that point, to blame for my sickness. Chronic fraudulence, and endeavoring to do things beyond my abilities, had destroyed my immune system—in the words of one internist, I’d zapped my motherboard.

  I put a finger over my eyelid; I pushed. I often had the sense that my symptoms were insects, and to eradicate them was to cause a mess of little deaths.

  “You mean Madame Ackermann visited her office,” I corrected her. “I wrote down what she told me.”

  Alwyn smirked.

  “Right, well,” she said. “I’m sure it’s hard to tell who did what. I imagine you must have lost your sense of self while working for such a visionary. In an exciting way, I mean.”

  A waiter arrived with the sherry and the seltzer. Alwyn signed the check and held out her glass.

  “To Dominique Varga,” Alwyn said.

  I clinked her glass warily. My seltzer was flat. As with all previously carbonated liquids, the departed air made the remaining liquid seem heavier than regular liquid, like a saline syrup.

  “Varga’s best known for her political propaganda,” Alwyn said, “but I’m more interested in her porn films. As part of my college thesis, I remade a few of them.”

  “You made porn films?”

  “And starred in them.”

  “Huh,” I said. I suspected that I was being baited, but couldn’t divine what with or for what purpose. “Did you lose your sense of self in an exciting way?”

  She squinted at the skylight.

  “You sound like Colophon,” she said.

  “Colophon?” I said.

  “Even though we work together we’ve never seen eye to eye, ideologically speaking, on Varga’s porn.”

  “Colophon Martin?” I said. I repeated his name in my head, though with far less composure.

  “I’d call him to come meet us but the lobby’s courtesy phone is busted,” she said. “And there’s no cell reception in here.”

  “No, really,” I assured her. “That’s fine.”

  The elevator dinged. Seven people emerged. Three of them were crying.

  This encounter was now officially freaking me out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Alwyn. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the person who’s here to help you,” she said.

  She stared at my hands, oven-mitted by eczema. I slid them beneath my thighs.

  “Contrary to how it might appear,” I said, “I don’t need your help.”

  “Trust me,” Alwyn said. “You do. Colophon will explain everything. He’s excited to collaborate with you on his Varga project.”

  “What Varga project?” I said.

  “I should also tell you that I’ve slept with him,” she said.

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” I said.

  “Just a little pro forma full disclosure,” she said. “If you learn later that he and I slept together it would make the previous months that you and I worked with each other seem like a prolonged period of betrayal.”

  “I already have a job,” I said. I clutched the padded arms of my chair; I squeezed them so hard I touched its underlying skeleton. This mortal chair, I thought. “A position. I’m sorry. What are you offering me?”

  “I can’t disclose the details,” she said, “because Colophon is a control nut and insists on telling you himself. Also,” she continued, “I suppose, if I were to be honest, I’m in a not-so-direct way warning you not to sleep with Colophon. According to my Jungian stepfather I’m pathologically territorial and view all females as competition, even for people or things I no longer want.”

  A woman emerged from the elevator sobbing quietly, her dignified sorrow amplified to hysterics by the lobby’s acoustics.

  Alwyn squeezed her temples between a thumb and forefinger.

  “Could you help me up to my room?” she said. “I need to lie down.”

  I started to refuse. I had done for Alwyn what any sick stranger owed another sick stranger, and now I could go home. I imagined exiting the Regnor and walking past the shellacked roasts in the butcher’s window, free from whatever complications a further relationship with Alwyn and Colophon Martin and a “project” concerning Dominique Varga would doubtless guarantee, until I remembered the tedious existence, momentarily upset by this woman and her engineered accident, my leaving would force me to resume. The return to my low-ceilinged apartment, the ceaseless strobe lights on the backs of my eyes, the steroid creams that smelled like mildewed bath towels, the friendlessness I’d cultivated as a means of limiting my social shame to a circle of one, the pill routine, the stupid job, the loneliness, the fact that my life, at twenty-six, had already notched onto a joyless track, the only derailment option one I would never, given my family history, consider.

  I caught an inadvertent glimpse of someone in the lobby mirror; I mistook that someone, me, for a frightened old lady, tensely palpating the chair in which she sat, appearing like an Alzheimer’s victim who’s emerged from a sundowner fugue with even less of an idea than usual who or where she is.

  A disruption to the given system.

  Even knowing what I know now, I cannot blame myself for making what would reveal itself to be a very poor decision.

  I stayed.

  Alwyn’s room smelled of frequently vacuumed carpets. While I poured the cappuccinos into a water pitcher and removed the contents of the minibar in order to chill it, she lay on the sofa and told me about Colophon’s involvement with the Lost Film Conference.

  “I thought he was a control nut,” I said of Colophon.

  “He trusts me with his backstory,” she said. “I’m his authorized context provider.”

  “That’s your job title?”

  “Job title would imply I was paid,” she said.

  “I guess that’s why he had sex with you,” I said. “As a form of compensation.”

  She smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth.

  “I like you,” she said. She seemed more impressed with herself for liking me than with for me being likable.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I don’t tend to get along with women.”

  Reclining on the sofa with a can of minibar beer pressed against her forehead, Alwyn told me how, while researching his book on Dominique Varga, Colophon had become acquainted with a man named Timothy Kincaid, a billionaire Cincinnati businessman plagued by Howard Hughes-ish behavioral oddities who was, more notably, the biggest privat
e collector of Varga’s films. Though Kincaid initially refused to share with Colophon his Varga collection, he’d been impressed by Colophon’s résumé and hired him to help his company, TK Ltd., archive the film holdings generated by Kincaid’s pet project, a suicide prevention service called vanish.org.

  Best I could ascertain from Alwyn’s description of it, vanish.org functioned as a type of witness protection program for people who weren’t in danger of being killed by anyone but themselves.

  “Kincaid studied the negative psychological effects of what he called ‘disambiguation,’ ” Alwyn explained, “meaning the supposed clarity that follows the removal of ambiguity, which is the counterproductive goal of so much talk therapy these days.”

  “Disambiguation?” I said. My stepmother Blanche was an occasional disambiguator on Wikipedia; when she wasn’t tamping her manias on the potting wheel, she was disambiguating a Wikipedia page on rice.

  “Clarity, it turns out, is a death sentence,” Alwyn said. “Kincaid decided that by introducing patients to ‘reambiguation,’ i.e., by removing a person from his or her ambiguity-free, suicide-provoking context, he could offer them a viable suicide alternative.”

  “How does a person reambiguate?” I asked.

  “Kincaid prefers to call it vanishing,” Alwyn said.

  “How does a person vanish?” I said.

  “They leave and never go home,” she said. “It’s a very simple process.”

  When Kincaid started the service, Alwyn said, each family received a detailed personal letter explaining the loved one’s reasons for vanishing. Unfortunately these letters were often mistaken for suicide notes, which led to confusion with the police and the morgues.

  “They might as well be suicide notes,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “To the survivors,” I said, “they amount to the same thing.”

  “Technically there are no survivors,” Alwyn corrected. “Nobody died.”

  “To the family members, then,” I said. “These films are essentially suicide notes.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “So you’re saying you see no difference between your mother being dead and your mother being alive and living somewhere else?”

  I stared at her. When she claimed that she and Colophon knew everything about me, she meant it.