The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  Two seconds later, it started to rain.

  We hustled the last partial kilometer, the path concluding at a large granite bowl that swooped between two peaks. A small, gunmetal lake at its center glistened like a clogged drain. As we neared the front door of the sister spa, located on the lake’s edge, I clocked that it was not an active spa at all but a scenic Alpine ruin. The windows had been de-glassed. What remained of the roof was upholstered in yellow lichen.

  Near a giant stone hearth we found a pile of logs, with which Alwyn’s stepfather built a little tepee in the fireplace.

  He pulled a matchbook from his shorts and set the wood ablaze.

  “So tell me more about this treatment you’re getting,” he said.

  I considered running with my original lie—this was the treatment, what kind of preconception buster is better than this, to send a person to a spa that is not a working spa—but decided instead to come clean.

  “I know your stepdaughter,” I said.

  He grunted.

  “Given my experience, that strikes me as impossible,” he said.

  “Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough,” I said.

  This was an accusation he’d heard before.

  “She’s a troubled one,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “Me, I see only the manifestation of her demonic animus.”

  “Because she slept with Kluge?” I said.

  He did not seem surprised that I should know about Kluge.

  “Kluge and my wife were involved years ago. Alwyn is very competitive with her mother. Ergo, she slept with her mother’s former lover.”

  “You make it sound so logical,” I said.

  “I once believed it was logical,” he said. “I once believed that Alwyn’s father had molested her as a young girl, and that this had created a sexually competitive relationship between the daughter and the mother, with unhappy results for both.”

  “You don’t believe that now?” I asked.

  He poked at the fire.

  “People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn’t any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it’s because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?”

  I shivered in my wet dress. He removed his sweater—also wet—and wrapped the arms around my shoulders.

  But problems don’t arise from nothing, I thought. This man, this professional interpreter of the source codes of neuroses, was blind to the contributions Alwyn’s mother had made to the emotional construction of Alwyn. Though I was primed, via my Workshop courses, to mock and reject psychological causality, in Alwyn’s case, such causality seemed inescapably apt. After spending a matter of weeks with Alwyn and a mere ten minutes with her mother, theirs struck me as a behavioral muddle with a tragically easy explanation—Alwyn’s mother could not square her identity as a sexualized woman with that of being a mother, thus her neglected daughter’s sole option was to de-daughterize herself by becoming a sexualized woman, and subsequently a competitor worthy of her mother’s attention.

  I inspected Alwyn’s stepdad, his new hiking boots, his expensive watch. Maybe this variety of blindness was his husbandly mandate; maybe, like my father, it was not his role to understand his remote wife, or to act as her spokesperson to her offspring. Still, it seemed undeniably evident that his wife had played a role in Alwyn’s Alwyn-ness in that she’d refused to play a role. She’d been an emotional absence, a neglectful null.

  I corrected my original thinking. Indeed, problems do arise from nothing, arguably the most vicious ones do.

  We have a lot in common, you and I.

  It turned out that Alwyn and I did.

  Alwyn’s stepfather and I stared into the fire. He was a nice man, not just because he’d given me his sweater, or because he reminded me of my own dad in a way, a man who interpreted his “protector” role as an internal affair. He was not protecting his family members from outside threats; he was protecting them from each other.

  “My mother killed herself when I was a month old,” I said.

  He took this in professional stride.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “There’s no need to be sorry,” I said. “That’s why I don’t tell people.”

  He asked for the details: I told him that she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills while I’d been napping in the next room. The fact that she’d killed herself in such close proximity to me was often cited by our town gossips as proof of her derangement: What kind of person could have killed herself with her infant so nearby?

  But why? I’d always wanted to ask. Was death contagious? Did it release a toxin into the air? Why did I need to be protected from her, from it? Because wasn’t it more caring for her to die with me asleep in the next room? Wasn’t this the more compelling expression of maternal love, of her inability to be apart from me, even as she guaranteed that she would forever be apart from me? I preferred to route my understanding of the situation through Sylvia Plath’s children, for whom plates of toast had been left and an insulating towel wedged beneath the bedroom door while their mother went about her business in the kitchen below, these details meant to signal to them, when they awoke, both her maternal commitment and her level of pitiable derangement, also the sad ways that a mother’s love can be amplified or reduced to acts both monumentally considerate and monumentally selfish. A towel. An oven. A plate of toast.

  “She must have been suffering from postpartum psychosis,” he said.

  “So it’s my fault,” I joked.

  “I’m sure you’ve spent a great portion of your life wondering if it was,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. But not in a way that I take personally, if that makes any sense.”

  “Maybe she believed she’d do more harm to you alive than dead,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. She was a bad person, you see. Maybe she understood herself as a form of human contagion. Thus she eradicated herself, and my father helped, via his periodic small disclosures, to regularly inoculate me against any trace remnants of her unique disease, in hopes that I would not catch it.

  “Whatever the reason,” I said, “she did what she thought was necessary, despite the hideous personal cost. Thus I refuse to experience her absence as some great tragedy I must spend my life overcoming.”

  Alwyn’s stepfather examined me dubiously.

  “I’d like to think,” he said, “despite any polite hopes that my daughters—I have two from a previous marriage—” he clarified, “could live happy lives without me, that my death would also, in some irreparable way, ruin them.”

  “How candid,” I said.

  “I thought that’s what we were being,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “In the interests of candor, let me ask you this: why haven’t you or your wife seen Alwyn’s vanishing film?”

  He squinted at me.

  “Is that what she’s calling it?” he said.

  “You might find it therapeutic,” I said.

  “Might I,” he said. “Somehow I can’t imagine that watching one’s stepdaughter engage in pornographic acts with strangers qualifies as therapeutic under any circumstance.”

  “You have the wrong idea,” I said. I guessed he’d seen one of Alwyn’s porn homages to Varga.

  “I don’t think I have,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be in a hotel room on a business trip, and to be flipping through the television channels, and to stumble across a film of your stepdaughter, from whom you’ve heard not a single word in a year, performing fellatio? Although perform isn’t the right word. Being penetrated, via the mouth, while she lies there unmoving. I watched long enough to determine that she wasn’t dead.”

  (A sidebar me was impressed that Alwyn’s work had been so widely distributed; these porn films were not just “hobbies.”)

  “In her defense,” I said, “she saw these films as art.”

  His eyes wa
tered. He poked at the fire.

  “When Alwyn deigned to contact us, it was to invite us to a screening of another of these repugnant films. For the sake of our mental health, I counseled my wife to refuse to be an audience to Alwyn’s narcissistic theatricality. She believes her daughter made a heartfelt confessional film. She has no idea.”

  She did make a heartfelt confessional film, I almost said. But I didn’t. I had no idea what kind of vanishing film Alwyn had made. Maybe hers was as stiff and unrevealing as mine had been—an attempt to explain what was not explainable or forgivable. Would her mother and stepfather have learned any more about her by watching it? Maybe not. Maybe the porn films she’d made were the more accidentally revealing documents.

  “If that’s how you felt,” I said, “then why did you hire the detective?”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “You and your wife hired a detective. And yet it seems you have no interest in finding her.”

  This, for whatever reason, stunned him.

  “She told you we’d hired a detective?” he said.

  I confirmed this; meanwhile, a heavy dread settled in my gut.

  “Well,” her stepfather said hoarsely. “I’d find that lie comical if it weren’t so utterly heartrending.”

  He cleared his throat, scrubbed his cheek with his knuckles.

  There was nothing left for us to say.

  He handed me a coal hod and asked me to fill it with dirt so he could smother the fire.

  Outside, the rain had thinned to a mist. I turned my face upward, allowing the moisture to settle on my skin. My hands jittered, my stomach adrenaline-queasy. I recalled Alwyn’s professed envy over the fact that someone hated me enough to attack me. Hate, she’d said, is a form of emotional attachment. How had I missed that Alwyn had been lying to me about the detective, how had I missed that she was maybe really suffering? She’d vanished herself, after all. She’d been suicidal, once. It was my error not to understand: anyone can find themselves on the brink. Anyone can wake up one morning and decide against living. Every single day, the very healthiest among us might be seen to have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

  The ground swamped and sagged under my feet. I’d eaten something that didn’t agree with me for breakfast, I thought. I was dehydrated. But then the post-quarantine side effects Mike warned me about—the reason he’d recommended a gradual reentry—started to take hold. Or at least that seemed the most logical explanation for what happened next. Sounds torqued and amplified—each leaf rustle and twig skitter a sonic boom. Each millibar of dropping air pressure a thunderclap. I heard a horrible sandpapery grating I could not place, but which seemed to occur every time I blinked. I experienced a vertigo so intense it was as though I had been gutted by a suction nozzle.

  Then everything went quiet.

  Even I went quiet. Quiet in the head, quiet in the nerve endings. Snowstorm quiet.

  And I felt the presence. I was not alone. It’s impossible to describe this sensation to those who are numb to such things, but there’s an involuntary quality to certain experiences, like the skin tingling that precedes vomiting. You can’t help but feel.

  When I opened my eyes, the wolf stood about six feet from me. It looked more or less like the pictures I’d seen of wolves, save this one seemed shorter and more compact, almost dog-like. It gripped the ground with four giant paws, its fur quilled along its spine as though it had just emerged from the lake.

  We stood there, the wolf and I. I kept my gaze on the ground, angled so that it appeared in my peripheral vision. I did not want to die surprised.

  Staring at the wolf this way, however, I noticed that it was surrounded by a spiraling nimbus, one that coagulated for the span of an eye blink into the astral imprint of a black-haired woman.

  Madame Ackermann.

  I should have been terrified. I wasn’t. I was pissed. Her appearance registered as a physical space violation, as “unfair,” even though psychic attacks, to my knowledge, had no rules of engagement, there were no Geneva Convention guidelines to humanely shape one person’s cruelty toward another. Fine to kill me from the inside. But a wolf, an actual wolf, struck me as beyond the pale.

  The wolf growled. It took two steps closer. It growled again.

  “Go the fuck away,” I yelled. “Go the fuck away, leave me the fuck alone.”

  The wolf pawed at the ground so viciously I heard the thick canvas sound of its footpads tearing.

  “Leave me alone,” I said, holding my ground. “Leave me alone, you bitch.”

  The wolf lurched—it intended to remove a chunk of my throat, I thought—but no. It bowed its head to the ground and made horrible noises, roiling gags that threatened to bring up an organ.

  Jesus, I thought, watching it convulse. This was no monster; this was barely more than a plain animal, shivering in the astringent wind that, once freed from the toothy firs, gusted unobstructed across the stone.

  To think I’ve been afraid of this, I thought. To think I’ve been afraid of you.

  The astral swirl of Madame Ackermann was barely visible now, her hair dissipating into the air like smoke from an extinguished fire.

  I reached out to touch its fur—whatever “it” was. Not to pet it, not to comfort it. Just to ascertain to what degree it was really there.

  But the wolf backed away, reversing a few frightened paces. We stared at each other. The eyes—it would be wrong to say that I recognized them, more accurate to say that I recognized something in them. A flash of myself, a trapped and desperate filament of me.

  I reached toward it again.

  “Come here,” I said.

  The wolf seemed caught between instincts, uncertain whether or not to flee.

  “Come,” I repeated. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I’d like to think I meant it.

  “What’s happening out here?” said Alwyn’s stepfather, exiting the ruin.

  He saw the wolf. He froze.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  He grabbed a crutch-length walking stick, whittled by a bored hiker and abandoned beside the doorway. He wielded it like a lance.

  “Gehen Sie zuruck zu ihrem holz!” he yelled. He jabbed the stick toward the wolf’s muzzle.

  “Careful!” I said. “It’s sick.”

  The wolf reared back on its hind legs.

  “Zuruck zu ihrem holz!” Alwyn’s stepfather yelled again.

  The wolf turned, its body rolling over its ribs with a serpentine smoothness, and disappeared into the woods.

  I experienced a tugging sensation in my chest; then a snapping, a sharp elastic recoil, followed by a dull pain.

  I knelt on the granite. Tiny puddles of blood marked the wolf’s departure. I touched a wet, oblong spatter. The ache behind my ribs sped to a state of fibrillation, a symptom taking flight.

  The ache subsided. And then I felt emptier than ever.

  “My God,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “How long was it standing there?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  He helped me up. As we started back down the mountain, I repeatedly swung my eyes backward. I wanted to see the wolf again.

  “So,” I said. “What would Jung say?”

  “Jung?”

  “About the wolf.”

  “Often the self is represented as a helpful animal,” he said. “But I imagine Jung would say you were lucky not to be killed.”

  “By my own subconscious?”

  I glanced behind us. Nothing followed us but wind.

  “Wolves,” he muttered. “Wolves are the footmen of the weak.”

  At the spa we were greeted with disbelief.

  “There are no wolves in Breganz-Belken,” said the man who’d driven me from the train. He was, or so I guessed, the closest thing the spa had to a security guard.

  Alwyn’s stepfather assured the man that we’d indeed seen a wolf.

  “How big?” the man asked.

  We estimated the size with our hands.


  “As I said, we do not have wolves in Breganz-Belken,” he said. “The altitude is too much for them.”

  I asked him about the wolf sounds that were piped into my room. Certainly this suggested that wolves were native to the area?

  “Those are not wolves,” he said. “Those are lynxes.”

  “It was sick,” I said.

  “Rabies,” said the man. “Only a wolf that had lost its mind would come to Breganz-Belken.”

  He regarded me meaningfully. I guessed that he’d been apprised of my schizophrenia diagnosis.

  The man issued German orders to an underling with acne so severe it would seem grounds for firing.

  The underling unlocked a nearby broom closet. He removed from it a long rifle.

  The woman with the pearlized skin found me by the windows, watching the underling hike up-mountain with his gun.

  “Do you believe I saw a wolf?” I asked her.

  “As opposed to a lynx?” she asked.

  “No, I mean … the exposure to energy frequencies after leaving the spa, I was wondering if maybe the wolf wasn’t an actual wolf.”

  “You think it was a mirage,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, though the phrase in my head was visible thought forms. I recalled a comment Alwyn’s mother had made: your worst self loosed upon the world.

  Had this wolf come for me or from me? I’d assumed the wolf was connected to Madame Ackermann; now I wasn’t so sure.

  “But Herr Schweitzer, he saw the wolf as well,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Your friend,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. I’d never learned Alwyn’s stepfather’s name.

  “Herr Schweitzer is not enrolled in the same therapy,” she said. “So I would think that your wolf was a wolf.”

  “Except that there are no wolves at this altitude,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “it would be more true to say that there are not a lot of wolves at this altitude. We wouldn’t want to discourage the hikers.”

  She withdrew some papers from her briefcase.