The girl’s mother called her. The girl stashed the ring in the shallow coin pocket of her pants, but as she hurried toward her mother’s voice the ring jogged loose and rolled onto the tiles. It carved a wide ellipsis, its orbit narrowing and quickening toward the drain. The girl fell to her knees and, trying to intuit the ring’s trajectory, snatched at the future space it might inhabit. But then she was distracted by something—me, it seemed—and missed her chance to grab the ring before it disappeared through the drain’s vertical slots.
The girl stared at the drain before returning her gaze toward me, as though I were to blame for the ring’s loss, as though I were the thief.
I awoke to my alarm at 6:30 a.m.
I dressed, ate very little breakfast, did Mundane Egg with Marta, ate very little lunch, took the elevator to the basement to soak in the thermal baths. I’d felt vague all day, my post-dream self like an organ transplant slow to take. I grabbed my towel from the bath attendant. I shakily undressed. I needed, after each slipper removal, to rest on the wooden bench that paralleled the lockers.
Even so, my sense of disequilibrium surged.
I lay on the floor, the tiles against my cheek like hot teeth. At this point, I believe I fell asleep. Again I dreamed, or thought I was dreaming, because again I saw the drain and the ring falling into it, over and over I saw this, I saw the younger Helena, I saw her returning to her locker to discover her ring missing, I saw her telling her fiancé outside a restaurant that she had lost his ring, and I saw him wanting very badly, were it not for the sidewalk spectators, to hit her. I saw all of this except that my eyes were open, and I could hear Borka berating the bath attendant for failing to call a doctor when a doctor was needed.
“But she looks so happy,” the attendant said.
When the doctor arrived he asked me hyper-articulated questions most people could not fail to understand.
“Did you check the drains?” I asked. All I could see, still, was a drain, over which the doctor’s features were superimposed.
The doctor shone a penlight in my pupils.
“Helena’s ring,” I said, “did you check the drains?”
“Of course they checked the drains,” said Borka.
“Can you tell me the date of your menstrual cycle?” asked the doctor.
“All of them?” I asked.
“All of the drains were cleaned yesterday,” the attendant said.
“Just the last cycle,” the doctor said.
I flipped onto my stomach; I crawled across the floor.
“Even a rough estimate,” said the doctor, following me.
I pried the drain’s grate loose with a fingernail.
The string was very long; whoever tied it to the grate’s underside wanted to make sure that a flashlight beam, flashed into the drain, wouldn’t snag Helena’s diamond.
I pulled until the ring flipped onto the tile floor.
I smothered it in my fist.
“Has it been one month?” asked the doctor. “Two?”
“Who did this?” asked Borka, without a touch of curiosity.
“It’s important that I know,” the doctor said.
My body tingled with endorphins. The ring in my hand required no coddling to tell me its tale of future sadness, Helena married to a man who killed her daily.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing the ring away from me. The metal radiated a repulsive sliminess I did not dare absorb. “I haven’t menstruated in over a year.”
That night, we received a memo under our doors.
“Dear Guests,” it read. “Your discretion and relaxation are our utmost treasures. Memory is unnecessary work. To forget is to respect the past, and to enable your pleasant future.”
Soon everyone knew about my role in the recovery of Helena’s ring. I could sense their knowing most forcefully in the lobby, a space unwisely constructed of palissandro bluette marble, a stone touted for its properties of thought amplification. The robed women in the club chairs emanated what I can only compare to a wireless signal that would have measured five full bars; via these frequencies we were bound.
Borka, meanwhile, installed herself as my bodyguard, escorting me to meals, protecting me from the other guests.
“Why did you hide from me the true you?” she said.
“There was nothing to hide,” I assured her. “That part of me was dead.”
“You must have missed yourself,” she said.
“I did at first,” I said. “But then I figured, what’s gone is gone.”
She owl-eyed me weightily.
“I’m sure you have a lot of experience in that area,” she said.
“Me?” I said.
“Because of your mother,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “I never experienced her as missing, though. I was so young, you see, when it happened.”
“When what happened?” Borka asked.
“When she … died,” I said. Borka’s inability to process basic tragedies meant that she might not register the distinction between plain dying and suicide.
“But you have visited her,” she said. “So now you can miss her.”
“I’ve never visited her,” I said. “I’ve never been able to.”
“Because it is beyond your abilities?” she said.
“Because I am not invited,” I said.
Borka’s eyes teared up, though probably I mistook for tears the light from the lobby’s chandelier silvering the ointment she rubbed on her lids, preparing her face for its eventual surgery.
Alwyn, when she caught wind of the ring kerfuffle, acted mad.
“I’m obligated to tell Colophon that you’ve broken the rules,” she said.
Beneath her sternness, however, she seemed oddly energized by my breach.
“But I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It’s because they don’t allow any stupid pills in this place.”
“If you don’t abide by the discouragements, you won’t get better,” she said.
“Evidently I am better,” I said.
“Trust me,” she said. “You aren’t.”
I did try to abide by the discouragements. I did. It wasn’t my fault that soon I was being propositioned in the lobby, the thermal baths, the lavatories. An Austrian woman wanted me to find out whether or not her husband was cheating on her while she recovered from the chin tuck she hadn’t wanted but which he’d given her anyway for her birthday. A French woman kept a journal about her sexual activities with a coworker that she worried her teenage daughter was reading in her absence. A former model wanted to know if the tiny newborn she’d abandoned in the waiting room of a doctor’s office seventeen years ago had found a happy home.
I rebuffed them all. What good had ever come from my abilities? I’d never been able to control them. Always someone suffered; often that someone was me. My good intentions meant nothing. Asleep, I proved powerless to refuse the voyages. I intruded upon a ski chalet where a man with a bald spot dumped spaghetti into a colander while another man with a bald spot massaged his neck. I visited a girl trying on a gaping orange G-string for an audience of three boys. I visited a little grave.
None of these visions were conclusive, or so I told myself. Nor were they even terribly vivid: the colors muddy, the image flickering like a movie screened on a projector with a hair stuck in the lens. They could have been dreams. But nor did I seek to corroborate them as valid regressions. I did not ask the woman with the chin tuck to show me a picture of her husband so that I could cross-reference him with the image of the bald men I kept in my head. I did not ask the French woman if she owned an orange G-string. I did not ask the former model if her tiny baby, when she’d left him in the doctor’s office, was breathing.
Instead I provided answers to their questions with a fortuneteller’s vagueness. You are the current cause of your husband’s sexual fulfillment. You inspire others with your spirit of adventure. Happiness comes to those who are well-rested.
But while I soon became one of
the most popular guests at the Goergen, I remained unimpressed, even disenchanted. My brain was flabby, clumsy, a geriatric detective that farted on the job. Even at my strongest point—at the Workshop, while regressing for Madame Ackermann—my successes were sheer accidents, flailing sword thrusts into the psychic ether.
So I decided—in the interests of reducing the harm I could cause by amateurishly bungling about in such matters—to do some secret exercises. This, I rationalized, was the responsible way to manage what was going to occur despite me.
First I stole a rump roast from the kitchen and stashed it atop my armoire, wrapped in an ammonia-soaked towel to hide the stink from the chambermaids. Three times a day I lay on my bed, arms and feet canted outward in a modified corpse pose, and tried to petrify the roast.
It became for me a little bit like praying.
I did not check my work for a week. When I unwrapped the meat—noting with a surge of hopefulness that I detected no putrifying stink whatsoever—I found a caramel-colored geode, half the size of the original rump and five times the weight. On one flank I’d created a crystallized ulcer that allowed me to see the jeweled interior, like the peephole into a Fabergé egg.
I tried not to be too proud of my work. Pride, Madame Ackermann used to say—not that we ever believed her—is a psychic’s endgame. Still, I had reason to be impressed, at least a little bit. Also, coincidentally or not, my health, for the first time in fourteen months, improved. I suffered no migraines. The eczema on my hands receded. The wolf, when I blinked, was gone.
When Alwyn asked me how I was feeling, I told her, I feel wonderful. My brain tingled as though it were bobbing in carbonated liquid. I viscerally recalled the way I’d felt when I’d been sitting in the Barcelona chair, regressing in order to save Madame Ackermann’s reputation. I’d felt lightweight. I’d felt disembodied. I’d felt fiery and alive. I missed that person—a person eradicated by all the medications I’d been taking in New York, and to what end? My suffering wasn’t minimized, and these cures had killed off the best part of me. The transgressor. The Peeping Tom. The spy.
Two days after I’d unwrapped the rump roast, I skipped lunch and visited, for the first time since I’d discovered Helena’s ring, the baths.
I was alone, everyone else at lunch.
I chose the hottest bath—more of a swimming pool—and eased myself in one step at a time, the water to my shins, now my hips, now my shoulders. I floated on my back. I noticed for the first time that the skylight overhead was nearly identical to the skylight at the Regnor—same beveled corners, same twining snake-or-ivy.
It gave me an exercise idea that I felt, after my petrification success, skilled enough to attempt.
I centered myself beneath the skylight and tried to imagine myself back to the Regnor, a place I’d once been, a place where there’d be a fossilized placeholder for me to slip inside. This was the easiest form of regression because it allowed you to travel along the familiar byways of memory and required you to be no more foreign a person than a past version of yourself. However, risks were involved. We initiates were advised against using our own lives too frequently as practice fodder; revisiting one’s memories could result, over time, in a form of self-erasure.
I gave it a try.
A busier skylight blotted out the Goergen’s plainer one—it was like watching a text written in invisible ink exposed to heat, the hidden letters burning to the foreground. I saw a giant clock, the hour frozen at 2:29 p.m., the second hand poised, spear-like, over the belly of the six. I stared at that second hand. I tried to activate the space, break through the static barrier that froze this moment in time.
No success.
I imagined myself diving into water, but this felt wrong. Water could too easily, and without yielding apparent wreckage, accommodate a foreign object. Once, as Madame Ackermann lay on her futon couch, snoozing through another failed regression, she’d started crying in her sleep.
This is my only legacy, she’d whimpered. I make scars in time.
So I envisioned the barrier as layers of transparent muscle, fat, skin. (I’d been born by cesarean section, my umbilical cord wrapped three times around my neck.) I dove headfirst into the barrier. It stretched, it resisted. I dove a second time and the barrier tore. I heard amplified sounds: the electric buzz of the clock, the crick of a heater vent.
I opened my eyes. This lobby was not the lobby of the Regnor. There was an elevator, but a smaller one. A wall was covered with mirrored tiles that gridded the lobby’s reflection into cocktail-napkin-sized squares of visual information. People in winter coats spoke French.
The elevator disgorged a trio of women, one of whom was crying.
I searched for someone I recognized and found one person. I knew her from somewhere—as Borka might say, she was a big déjà vu for me. I could see her in the gridded reflection, but when I turned, I could not locate her in the lobby. She existed only in the mirror.
I was comically slow to realize that this girl, she was me. Unlike during my previous regressions, I did not register in the mirror as a foggy blank.
I was there. Or rather here—wherever here was. Based on the outfits worn by the lobby loiterers, I guessed here was, temporally speaking, the early eighties.
The elevator opened again. Four women exited, including the actress I’d met at the Regnor’s bar. She was the same age she’d been when I’d encountered her in New York, even though, based on our surroundings, we were now occupying a moment in time preceding that one by twenty or thirty years.
I recalled how the bartender had never acknowledged Irenke, how he’d placed both whiskey sours in front of me as though I were sitting at the bar alone.
From his perspective, maybe I was. Irenke was an astral imprint. Despite the fact that my medications should have blunted such incursions, she’d managed, somehow, to visit me.
Irenke sat on the couch opposite mine. She slung her coat across her lap. She tried to flag a waiter.
“Hey,” I said. “Irenke, right?”
She lit a cigarette, eyed me along the barrel. She didn’t appear to recognize me.
“Julia,” I reminded her. “I don’t mean to bother you—”
“Except that you do bother me,” Irenke interrupted. “Every day.”
“Really?” I said. I had no recollection of this. So far as I knew, I hadn’t seen Irenke since the Regnor.
“Every day like clockwork,” she said.
Her claim unnerved me. It also thrilled me. It suggested that I’d regressed without any knowledge or memory of doing so; I might even be a living-dead trancer. Without a stenographer present, who could say?
Irenke, fingers throttling her cigarette, was evidently in a mood.
“Let’s try this again,” I offered.
“Too late,” she said. “We’ve been overridden. Or overrode. I never was very good at grammar.”
“What do you mean, overridden?” I asked.
“You’re the paranormal expert,” she said. “Ask one of your professors. The past is not past if it is always present. Memory is an act of murder.”
She loosened a buckle on her dress.
“I’m fat,” she complained. “I shouldn’t eat cream soup. Do you know what this is called? A self-belt. Such an ugly term. Sylvia Plath should have written a poem called ‘Self Belt.’ She liked those staccato word punches: Black shoe. Fat black stake. God-ball. The villagers never liked you. Achoo.”
“We spoke about Sylvia Plath the last time we met,” I said. “Or rather, the time I met you in New York.”
She wasn’t, I noticed, wearing her pendant.
“You must have me mistaken for another girl,” she said. “I’ve never been to New York.”
She stood, smoothed her skirt, tossed her empty cigarette packet on the coffee table.
“Be right back,” she said.
A weeping woman strode past Irenke, clipping her elbow. Irenke glared at her.
In my head I recited the final lines o
f “Death & Co.”
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody’s done for.
A waiter appeared.
“Drink for the madame?” he asked in French.
“Whiskey sour,” I said.
“And for the madame’s friend?”
“Make it two,” I said.
Irenke returned before our drinks arrived. She unfoiled a new pack of cigarettes.
Two more weeping women exited the elevator.
“Guess they didn’t get the part,” Irenke said.
“What part?”
“The part of the dead girl,” Irenke said. “There’s a casting call upstairs.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, there’s probably an upside to not getting that role.”
“My mother’s the director,” Irenke said. “I’ve heard she can be very abusive to people who disappoint her. Which is why I’m nervous about auditioning.”
I recalled that Irenke had told me about her mother at the Regnor, how this mother had given her the necklace and called Irenke her “muse.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re a shoo-in.”
“A what?” she said.
“You’re her muse,” I said. “How could she give the role to anyone else?”
Irenke appeared horrified by this suggestion.
“You think a mother should cast her own daughter in a porn film?” she said.
“Your mother directs porn films?” I said.
I knew, then, who this mother was.
Was this why Irenke had visited me—or rather, why I had visited her?
I cased Irenke for proof that she was Dominique Varga’s daughter. I’d only seen Varga once, in Not an Exit; my brain conjured a woman with a jutting, aggressive face, one unwilling to succumb to the victimization of an anonymous hand, even as her motionless body did. Irenke’s face, meanwhile, melted downward, failing to refute the melancholy gravity that pulled at it.
“But she doesn’t know she’s my mother,” Irenke clarified. “I only found out recently myself.”
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