Not that we, or I, had made any progress.
I met Alwyn in the lobby where, a mere five minutes after walking through the front door, she was already in a fight.
“Cell phones are discouraged,” the concierge said. “If you do not give me your phone, I cannot give you your room key.”
“Just to be clear,” she said. “You’re not discouraging me. You’re forbidding me.”
“I forbid nothing,” he said. “You are free to sleep in the square with your precious phone.”
“But I’m not one of them,” she said, gesturing toward the club chairs occupied by surgical patients in bandages, psychic attack victims overcome by tics and rashes. “Tell him,” she appealed to me.
“She’s not one of us,” I said.
“How can I say this as a compliment,” said the concierge. “You will not always be a young or unloved girl.”
Alwyn grudgingly relinquished her phone.
“What a puffin-stuff,” she said, after procuring her key. “Walk me to the elevator.”
She handed me her heaviest bag. She’d changed her hair while on her brief vacation in Paris, coloring it burgundy and snipping tiny bangs. She’d traded her sloppy cardigans for a collarless tweed jacket with expensively frayed cuffs and hems; around her neck she’d pinned a scarf patterned by miniature equestrian hardware, stirrups and bits.
Alwyn noticed me noticing her, and in return took my quick measure—my wool robe, my boiled-wool slippers, both presents from Blanche one Christmas when she’d themed all her gifts around the support of a local sheep cooperative.
“You look so convalescent après-ski,” she said critically. “I got here just in time.”
“I’ve been taking my healing very seriously,” I assured her.
“No,” she said. “I mean I got here just in time.”
We slalomed her bags between lobby columns, past a quadrant of club chairs occupied by postsurgical patients in headscarves, cards fanned before their bruised faces, legs slung to the side as though riding horses through a copse of spectral trees.
Alwyn babbled, at an indiscreet decibel level that triggered the lobby’s rat-a-tat acoustics, about the detective her mother and stepfather had hired, and how this detective had tracked her to Paris.
“My old prep school roommate, who lives in the Marais, started receiving phone calls from a man inquiring about me. Where was I staying in Paris? What were my travel plans? Fortunately, I told her I was headed to Sofia. Once a deceitful gossip, always a deceitful gossip. How are things with you?”
I told her about the Goergen’s discouragement against sharing personal information.
“Anything you divulge could be used against you,” I said, quoting the book of discouragements chained to the underside of my bedside table. “The less the other guests know about you, the fewer opportunities exist for them to collude, even unwittingly, with your attacker.”
“Hmmm,” Alwyn said.
“It’s kind of a relief,” I said.
“What is?” Alwyn said.
“Not having to be curious about other people.”
Alwyn smirked.
“What?” I feigned. Because I knew what. Alwyn had made it her conversational goal, for the duration of our nine-hour flight to Paris (at which point I’d continued alone to Vienna), to prod me for details about my mother’s life, of which I could provide, in her opinion, pathetically few, except that she’d grown up in a ragtag corner of Connecticut as the only child of a widowed father who’d never remarried and died of lung cancer when she was twenty-three; she’d been allergic to mohair and developed francophone pretensions as a means of armoring herself against the deleterious effects of her lower-middle-class upbringing; she’d resented her honeymoon to a buggy coast of Canada and hated the leather couches my father had inherited from an uncle and refused, because they were basically new, to exchange for something “classier”; she always took the bigger steak and became wickedly depressed when forced to sleep in houses less than one hundred years old; and while living in Monmouth she’d never had a close female friend or a decent winter coat or any sense of social reciprocity, all of which led the people of Monmouth to believe that she thought she was better than them.
It is possible she was.
Also she wore her long, black hair like Madame Ackermann’s, parted in the middle, the ends narrowing to a point on her back like a damp paintbrush.
I did not tell Alwyn that, while apprenticing with a metalsmith in Paris, she’d sold her work to Dominique Varga, nor did I mention that she’d lost her engagement ring and married my father because he was good medicine. It did not, at this point, strike me as any of Alwyn’s business.
We waited for the elevator to grind up from the basement.
“But with your abilities,” Alwyn said, “how could you refrain?”
“Refrain from what?” I said.
“Knowing things,” she said, returning to her plane fixation. “It’s like you have unlimited access to the Facebook profiles of anyone who ever lived.”
“Parapsychologists never use social networks,” I said. “They’re a boon for psychic attackers. For self-protective purposes, we confine ourselves to e-mail.”
Then I tried to explain what I saw as a matter of respecting, psychically and otherwise, a person’s privacy, in particular my mother’s.
“I don’t go where I’m not invited,” I said.
“She forfeited her rights to privacy when she killed herself without leaving a note.”
“Interesting theory,” I said.
“I’m here to help,” she said as she stepped into the elevator. “By the way, I spoke with your psychic attack counselor last week on the phone.”
“My who?” I said. I held the elevator door open.
“Her name is Marta. Your first meeting with her is tomorrow.”
“Oh,” I said, miffed that Alwyn would have spoken to this counselor before I did.
“Marta said we have to assume that you’ve made yourself vulnerable to Madame Ackermann’s attack.”
“Because I deceived her?” I said.
“Everyone has vulnerabilities, everyone has a weak spot. It’s my job to help you locate those weaknesses. These portals. The opening via which Madame Ackermann got to you.”
“Too bad there’s not an MRI for that kind of thing,” I said.
Alwyn sighed testily.
“I thought you said you were taking this seriously,” she said.
“I am,” I assured her.
“Are you?” she said. “Ask yourself that. Ask yourself right now.”
I removed my hand from the elevator door.
“Your sad life,” she intoned, as the door pinched her from view, “when will you stare it in the face?”
I walked to my room beset by claustrophobia, the slurry of my slippers against the floor tiles echoing off the ceiling in a gossipy swirl. I stopped in front of an unclean window.
You, I said to the reflection. When will you stare your sad life in the face?
I pointed at her. She pointed at me. We stood, accused.
Then we shared a laugh that the acoustically hyperactive hallway magnified and sheared to a sharp bark, the kind that a dog emits when his tail is stepped upon, half blaming outrage, half hurt surprise.
En route to my room, I swung back through the lobby to check my e-mail. Though the Goergen discouraged computers and cellular devices, the concierge kept a terminal in his office that, depending on his mood, he allowed guests to use. Fortunately, he’d expended his daily ire quota on Alwyn; he waved me through.
I checked my e-mail even though, per the TK Ltd. vanishing protocols—which required me to dispose of all vestiges of my former self, including the online vestiges—I’d ditched my old account and opened, via TK Ltd., a secure one for the purposes of communicating with my vanishing coordinator in Cincinnati, and with Colophon, who was in Paris.
Colophon’s plan, while Alwyn and I were at the Goergen, was this: He’d
obtain objects that had once belonged to Varga in hopes that I might, once cured, be able to psychometrize them. Psychometry—“mastering the hostile object”—was one of the few areas of Workshop study I’d proven good at. We’d learned, in Professor Penry’s seminar, how a flow of electrons moves between people and the things they touch, creating an electromagnetic imprint, a greasy emotional coating you could read like a piece of microfiche. During the midterm exam, I’d been the only initiate to identify a thimble as belonging to a woman whose finger had once touched the mouth of the Mona Lisa.
But no word from Colophon. The only e-mail I’d received was from aconcernedfriend; Madame Ackermann, despite TK Ltd.’s boasted-about firewalls, had somehow tracked me down.
I stared at her attachment, the tiny canted paperclip visibly throbbing. I considered opening it, even though it was against the discouragements to do so (“Refuse any communication with your attacker while in residence; this includes postcards, e-mails, care packages, etc.”).
I slid her e-mail into the trash.
Then I stared at my empty inbox, a rectangular void that finalized what had been under way for a year—I’d been forgotten by everyone.
Vanishing, in other words, proved a redundancy for me. As far as most people were concerned, I was already gone.
I did, however, feel pretty fucking guilty about vanishing on my father and Blanche; Blanche, over sushi that night in New York, had expressed her clear disapproval of both the act and the films, and my father, well, he’d already endured his fair share of sudden human absences. As I’d tried to explain in my film (which, so far, neither of them had seen—we received an e-mail from TK Ltd. whenever a visitor “checked out” our film), I viewed vanishing as an extreme medical necessity, akin to a form of radiation in which a partial killing takes place in order to promote a healing.
I promised to be in touch when I was better.
I was pretty certain this was not a lie.
Back in my room I lay on my bed, two skinny mattresses bridged by a length of V-shaped foam, and failed to sleep. In addition to my passport and cell phone, I’d surrendered to the concierge all of my pill bottles. Without my Nembutal, night was an ice age of unmoving time spent staring at the wolf, or trying to fall asleep with my lids open, eyeballs drying in the dark. Things glowed in my room that shouldn’t: the light switch in the bathroom; the face of the alarm clock. I closed the bathroom door and shut the clock in the armoire. I heard clicking noises outside my window coming from Gutenberg Square, the little-bird-skull-popping sounds of the paparazzi snapping photos, I thought, until I realized it was my clock, echoing from inside the armoire, louder now that I’d enclosed it in a smaller space.
The first of my daily meetings with Marta, my psychic attack counselor, occurred, as scheduled, one week following my arrival.
After breakfast, Borka offered to escort me to Marta’s office, stashed in a distant wing of the Goergen and impossible to locate the first time without a guide.
Borka said, “Whenever you are late, Marta will ask you, ‘Why were you late?’ To which you should respond, ‘Why do you not want to be found?’ ”
We exited the elevator on the Goergen’s gloomy topmost floor, the one obscured behind the building’s mansard roof, its darkness moderately relieved by the high-up circular windows, each one permitting a beam of light to bore through the moted air. These many dull moons marked our travel, and made me feel, as we scuffed our slippers over the tiles, as though we were midnight skaters following a river of dusty ice.
I asked Borka why a plastic surgery patient such as herself should be meeting with a psychic attack counselor. She explained that due to her surgical history—she’d undergone extensive facial reconstruction decades ago, following a bad car accident—she had been deemed worthy of psychological evaluation.
“But the windshield did not ruin my face quite so much as the doctor who fixed it,” she said.
I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was true that hers was not a face that anyone would pay for. This explained why she always wore a hood-like headscarf even though she’d yet to have any procedures or suffer any discoloration or swelling that required, per the Goergen’s unspoken dress codes, polite obscuring. Her face, uncut, was a weapon.
“Now I want to right the wrongs that were done to me,” she griped. “And this indicates that I am insane.”
“You want to be yourself again,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “For what it’s costing, there are far more worthy people to be.”
As we walked down a hallway that narrowed as we progressed toward its endpoint, Borka inquired about my attack.
I knew it was against the discouragements to tell her, but Borka was a harmless old lady and not the sort to hurt anyone. We were friends. Despite my experience with Madame Ackermann and my instinctual resistance to Alwyn, I was not so spiritually wrecked that I’d come to distrust all people.
I related to her a basic version of the events that had landed me in the Goergen.
“So you are like Eve in All About Eve,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I am like Dumbo in Dumbo.”
I told her that I was looking for a Hungarian artist.
“Dominique Varga,” I said. “Maybe you know her work.”
Borka’s body recoiled minutely, as though she’d inhaled a sharp odor; otherwise, she appeared not to have heard me.
She asked me where I’d grown up, what my full name was.
“Severn,” she said. She practically chewed this information. “That is an aristocratic-sounding name.”
“I think, like most aristocratic-sounding names, it used to be Slevovitz,” I said. “Or Severnsky. Or Sevethanopopakis.”
My father, I told her, was born to murky people—the only child of parents whom I remembered best for serving me sandwiches filled with a paste of ground bologna, mayonnaise, and pickles, a combination that suggested either high American Waspiness or one of its many immigrant opposites.
“And your father? What does he do?”
“He’s a geologist obsessed with sinkholes,” I said.
“Here we call them drains,” she said, unimpressed.
“No … well …” I said.
I explained to her about sinkholes.
“They may be formed gradually or suddenly,” I said. “But the sudden ones swallow cars, buildings, sometimes people. My father studies sinkholes caused by human activity, namely industrially produced waste.”
Her stare grew keener.
“And your mother?” she said.
“My mother is dead,” I said.
I expected her expression to stall in that gear of generic pity I’d come to so detest, and tried never to inspire.
But it didn’t.
“No wonder your father is obsessed with holes caused by people,” she said.
We arrived at Marta’s office. The top half of her door was windowed by nubbled glass; on the other side, a dark shape bent and straightened, as though stretching before a hike.
“Put in a good word for me,” Borka said. She scampered down the hallway as though scared of being spotted by Marta in my company.
Marta, a woman with Hunnishly high cheekbones and turquoise bifocals, did not shake my hand when I entered her office, gesturing me instead toward a tweeded loveseat.
Marta riffled through some documents in a desk drawer before sitting across from me in a matching armchair. She wore a patent belt high on her waist that forced her stomach outward and created a convenient podium on which to rest a manila file with my name (“Severn, Julia”) written on the tab.
I recognized the Workshop insignia atop what appeared to be my school transcript.
“It is not specified by the discouragements,” said Marta, “but in the same way that prayer is discouraged, so are regressions or any kind of psychic foray, unless supervised by me.”
She asked me to explain my attack situation.
“In your own words,” she said, as though sh
e’d already heard my story from someone else, probably Alwyn.
I told her about Madame Ackermann, my stenographer demotion, Colophon Martin, and so on.
“You’ve had sex with this Mr. Martin,” Marta said.
“No,” I said.
“In your own words, please.”
“No,” I said. What had Alwyn been telling her?
“It’s apparent to me that she’s enacting some kind of revenge on you,” said Marta.
“Alwyn?” I said.
“Madame Ackermann,” she said. “A revenge driven by the fact that you rejected her as a mother substitute. But your rejection did not stop her from acting ‘motherly’ toward you, and resenting the fact that her powers were on the wane at the precise moment that yours were on the upswing. And by powers,” Marta explained, “I mean her sexual attractiveness and her potency as a mystic, the mutual degenerations of which, alas, tend to coincide.”
Marta played with the bridge of her bifocals, sliding them up-down, up-down, and staring alternately at my file and then at me, as though, of the two, I was the one refusing to appear plausibly 3-D to her.
Madame Ackermann, I informed Marta, had no shortage of willing sexual partners.
“Everyone wants to have sex with her,” I said, unclear why I was so determined to defend her on this point, but it did seem a kind of blasphemy to deny Madame Ackermann, even to this woman who would never meet her, her epic allure.
Then I explained the significance, by way of debunking Marta’s occult mastery decline theory, of the double torque Madame Ackermann threw at her forty-third birthday party.
“Hmmm,” Marta said. “Perhaps this Madame Ackermann is a psychic vampire. Perhaps she siphoned your energies in order to attack you.”
“Meaning I attacked myself?” I asked. Marta made it sound as though I suffered from a psychic autoimmune disorder.
She recommended I do some reading on the subject in the Goergen’s library.
“We’ve scheduled a renowned psychic vampire expert to give a presentation here in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll remind you to attend.”
She slid my file into her desk drawer and announced that it was time for us to perform an exercise called Mundane Egg.
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