The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  I experienced a brain disorientation so intense it was like an upheaval of tectonic plates. I did not need to be told who this artist was.

  But this was hardly the worst of it. Included in the file was Dominique Varga’s mission statement for her current performance art piece, Memorial.

  We are against forgetting the dead. We are against recovery and healing. To “heal” is to entomb, forever, the sickness. To that end we are bringing the dead back, not to haunt, but to remind us that we are always in the presence of their absence. Because when are we most aware of missing someone—when they are not with us, or when they are?

  I experienced her words like the over-and-over falling of a dull ax against the exterior of my mundane egg. At first my shell resisted, but soon a powdery indentation appeared that deepened into a crevice and then, as the ax-head penetrated, I felt my eggshell explode into a million crystallized pieces, like a windshield after a body’s been catapulted through it.

  Which is to say: I knew what I was going to find before I flipped to the final page, and not because I was psychic, but because I was no longer blind to what had been right in front of my own eyes.

  On the folder’s inside back cover, someone had taped a grainy telephoto head shot of Borka—I mean, Dominique Varga. She wore a scarf over her head but it did not disguise her so thoroughly that I couldn’t discern, from within its shadows, the beginnings of my mother’s face.

  The Goergen appeared to have aged a decade during my absence; a slab of facade, the shape reminiscent of Munch’s Scream figure, had crumbled off the south wall, exposing a rusted capillary system of rebar.

  I couldn’t say what I was doing here, but I knew that it involved a surgical intervention, it involved blood. I would confront Borka—or rather Varga—and tell her that this was not our deal, we were no longer helping each other, and I’d urge her to take a knife to my mother’s face and slice it off, and if she didn’t, I would do it for her.

  And then what would I do? What would I do? Keep it? Bury it? Drape it over my own? It was her, even if it wasn’t her. I imagined folding that face up tiny and swallowing it like a pill, I imagined that it could make me better, or it could make me sicker, but regardless I was the chosen receptacle, I was the urn, I was a functional neutrality, I no longer mattered.

  These were the kind of deranged thoughts I was thinking.

  I also thought about Irenke, Varga’s daughter, who’d killed herself without a note. This, apparently, was where the hotel room key was meant to lead me. How does it feel? I wanted to ask Varga. How does it feel not to know why? But is it any mystery? I can tell you without ever visiting that room. She did it because of you. I’d kill myself too if you were my mother.

  Gutenberg Square was oddly empty of both snappers and nodders. On the pavers someone had traced with yellow paint the shape of a fallen body, its arms raised overhead as though slain in the act of making a snow angel.

  I shivered. I hated this square, which wasn’t even a square; it was a circle, or more of an oval, and it had tricked me to underworlds I had no further need to explore.

  Before I could cross the street, a white van pulled up. Two suited men walked inside; seconds later they escorted Varga from the Goergen, head shrouded beneath an overcoat.

  The van drove away. No sirens, no pomp. It might have been the very casual kidnapping of a person nobody would miss.

  This was exactly what it was.

  The van turned the corner and I experienced the same stretching and snapping sensation as when the wolf had retreated into the woods.

  But this was different. I did not turn around to search for her, and I did not experience an emptiness when she was gone. I experienced a release, a blessed absence of pressure, as though a tumor that had been pushing on my diaphragm had been removed.

  I never, never wanted to see that woman again.

  Also—I was done. I experienced this conviction as a measurable drop in blood pressure; this certainty I could have physiologically recorded, if I’d had the tools. I was going home. Wherever that was. I would begin my search by a process of elimination. Home was not here.

  I was leaving.

  As I readied myself to walk back to my hotel, pack my bags, take a taxi to the airport, fly as far away from this place as possible, a limousine stopped in front of the Goergen. This struck me as odd; most guests did not travel by limousine because a limousine was a snapper magnet. The driver discharged his passenger, a woman. She turned in my direction and gave the square a quick once-over. I hit the pavers; I felt her gaze move above me like the slow-motion trajectory of bullets, a murderous optical sweep of the area.

  Madame Ackermann.

  I panicked. She found me. But then I remembered, with a brief, bitter chuckle, that she’d been tracking Varga, too; she’d discovered, as Colophon had discovered, that Varga was at the Goergen.

  She was not here for me.

  Unfortunately for her, I was all she’d find.

  So sorry, Madame Ackermann, I imagined saying to her. You just missed her.

  I fantasized our confrontation scene, one that might take place in the dining hall over liver tea. I imagined telling her what a shitty psychic she was, slower even than an undistinguished academic when it came to locating her research prey. But nor was that her most notable failure. In her capacity as a psychic attacker, she’d really been outdone. She thought she could haunt me with a stupid e-mail attachment of my “mother”; did it ever occur to her to bring her back to life?

  Compared to Dominique Varga, I imagined saying to her, you’re an unimaginative bully.

  I remained on the pavers, hands in a push-up position, ready to launch if I heard her approach. A pointless plan; what good had running away ever done? I’d run a quarter of the way around the world, and here she was, and here I was, and here we were, and somehow, even though she sucked at psychic attacks, she remained to blame for my life’s every crappy turn. Fair or not, I fingered her as the reason it had become a black hole, where nothing proved tangential, where everything, to a cruelly comical degree, mattered.

  As I raised myself off the cobbles, I noticed that I’d been lying face down inside the expired person outline. This seemed less creepy than apt. As far as Madame Ackermann was concerned, I was about to rise from the dead.

  The concierge was not pleased to see me.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve returned to settle your bill,” he said.

  “My bill was covered,” I said.

  He handed me an invoice. “The Internet costs extra,” he said. “Also your friend left you something. We charge a storage fee.”

  He handed me a manila envelope marked by Borka’s handwriting.

  I refused to take it from him.

  He rattled it impatiently.

  I took it. Inside was something small, something hard; maybe, I thought, it was her fucking heart.

  “I need to talk to her,” I whispered.

  “Regrettably, ‘Borka’ is no longer with us,” the concierge said.

  “Not Borka,” I said. No, no, not her. I was unmoored, a balloon adrift and about to burst into flames. Who did I need to talk to? What was I doing here?

  “The woman from the limousine,” I said.

  “I’m not at liberty to talk about our guests,” he repeated.

  “She’s no guest,” I said. “She’s my attacker. Call security and tell them the Goergen’s been compromised.”

  He rang a tiny bell. A pair of bellhops, or maybe they were orderlies, stepped from behind a pillar.

  “This woman is no longer with us,” he said to them. “Please escort her to the outside.”

  “What?” I said.

  The head-bandaged women in the lobby held their playing cards higher in order to more invisibly observe me.

  I appealed to their sense of paranoia and elitism.

  “The woman who’s been attacking me is here,” I informed them. “She’s posing as a guest. This is an unacceptable security breach.”


  A woman in a sequined turban approached. I recognized her. She was some Hungarian variety of countess.

  “Is it true what she’s saying?” she asked the concierge.

  “There is no knowing the truth from this person,” he said.

  “It’s the truth,” I said.

  The countess spoke German to the orderlies, who retreated into the shadows.

  “Let’s get you some tea,” she said.

  She gestured me toward a club chair. “You are Borka’s friend,” she said. “Or whatever her name is.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to this.

  “Of course I suspected she was not Borka all along,” the countess said. “I knew the real Borka when we were girls. We called her Potato. The real Borka was always struggling with her waistline.”

  “Do you know where she went?” I asked.

  “I’m sure she’s just dead,” the countess said. “She was not a very original girl.”

  “I meant the woman who was pretending to be Borka,” I said.

  “The police took her away,” the countess said. “And what about all that money? She inherited millions. I wonder what will happen to it now.”

  I thought, but didn’t say, that she probably didn’t have much money left after bankrolling all of those surgeries.

  “And what she was doing to her own face,” the countess said. “Some people have no taste.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty tasteless to want to look like somebody’s dead mother.”

  “Why choose to be a person so ugly?” the countess asked.

  I started to correct her—Borka didn’t look anything like my mother, some varieties of ugly are innate to the host, you cannot excise them with a scalpel—but I did not bother. Who knew what varieties of ugly were innate to my mother? Maybe Borka’s new face was unflinchingly apt.

  The countess peered around for a new conversation to join, as though we’d been chatting at a cocktail party and tapped our single vein of common interest.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind me, “but is this chair free?”

  I froze.

  Her voice was both unmistakable and unrecognizable. The girlish rasp had hoarsened, her voice box clogged with wet lint. Also it had none of the sonorousness I remembered; instead it was flat, toneless, generic, like a voicemail’s mechanical beep.

  I turned to confirm that it was her. It was. And yet—it wasn’t.

  Madame Ackermann lowered herself into the club chair. She set a teacup and saucer on a nearby side table, the porcelain rattling, the acoustics of the lobby seizing upon the noise and amplifying it to the decibel level of an alarm.

  “So sorry,” Madame Ackermann whispered to her more immediate neighbors.

  She removed a pair of foam plugs from her robe pocket and screwed them into her ear canals.

  Afflictions, many of them, had befallen her. The limp, the robotic voice, the sound sensitivity, yes, but her aura, too, pulsed a damaged Morse. Her face had lost its youthful puff and sunk into dusky channels, her eyes obscured beneath lids so thick they looked blistered.

  For a moment I forgot that this woman was attacking me. That this woman was responsible for ruining a year and a half of my life, that she was petty and jealous and deserved to have every ounce of marrow sucked from her bones by a hummingbird.

  Even so, a violent wave of need surged through me. A need to hit her. A need to pull her hair, tear her face to pieces with my teeth. A need to kiss her.

  I stood. To present myself to her, to deliver my accusations, to proclaim to her, as if it needed proclaiming: you lost. But as I did so, the envelope fell from my lap. In Varga’s understandable haste, she hadn’t sealed it; the short drop to the tile floor jogged the contents loose.

  It was an engagement ring. I knew in an instant whose. The setting was blandly traditional and the diamond minuscule, a blink-and-you’d-miss-it shard of carbon, the most lavish thing my father, then an assistant adjunct professor in geology, could afford with his negligible savings.

  It was pretty, demure, nothing my mother would ever wear, and hadn’t.

  Inside the envelope was a note from Varga.

  I was trying to help.

  I fisted the note into a sharp star. I threw it under my chair and retrieved the ring, I cupped it in my palm and waited to receive from it a transmission, bell clear, turquoise in color, a cool swim of talking. But it told me nothing. As an object it was not so much hostile as expired.

  But I tried. I did try. I am not, I imagined saying to Varga, too scared to try. I gripped the ring, that indifferent loop, that metal homage to an eternal, round nothingness. The vise-contraction of my fists shot my blood against the current, reversed it up my arm, backwashed it into my heart.

  It was pointless. It was as pointless as trying to force a confession from a corpse.

  Then the Goergen’s walls made a move on me. The ceiling descended, as did the perversity, the absurd and fucked-up illness of my situation. I turned to Madame Ackermann, obliviously mouth-reading a pamphlet.

  Inside, something broke. Because the truth was this: I was so, so happy to see her.

  Our sick irony, or maybe it was our marvelous one: no one cared about me more than she did. If she was my mother substitute, fine. Better her than Borka. Or rather Varga. Better to be hated by her than to be loved by a monster. I wanted more than anything to hide my head in Madame Ackermann’s lap and sob for days. I would beg her to forgive my pettiness, my hubris, my disrespect. She could even keep attacking me for all I cared.

  I wanted, more than anything right now, not to be alone.

  “Madame Ackermann,” I said. “Madame Ackerman. It’s Julia.”

  She couldn’t hear me through her earplugs.

  “Madame Ackermann,” I yelled, probably crying now. “Please. It’s Julia.”

  From the corner of my eye I noticed two orderlies and a doctor. They held the edges of what appeared to be a white matador’s cape.

  The concierge smiled at me, quite pleased with what he took to be the imminent resolution, in his favor, of the situation.

  “Julia,” said the doctor, his concerned tone telegraphing his secret take: mentally, I’d gone rogue.

  “How have you been feeling?” he asked. “I hear you’re out of sorts.”

  “If she would talk to me,” I said, pointing to Madame Ackermann, “I wouldn’t be out of sorts. I’d be in full command of my sorts, if she would talk to me.”

  He sighed.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I said. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I’d done wrong; but I knew in my bones that I’d done it.

  “So I understand,” he said.

  “I’m glad you understand,” I said, “because then maybe you can make me understand.”

  The orderlies grabbed me. I stared at the countess shuffling cards in her lap.

  She’d drugged my tea, that witch. She’d drugged my tea and then she’d faked an interest in me so that the drug would have time to take effect.

  The orderlies fastened the straitjacket around my torso. They handled me roughly, so roughly that one of them knocked my mother’s ring from my hand. It landed on the floor with a glassy clink (The dead bell, The dead bell, Somebody’s done for) and slid toward a drain I had never noticed in the lobby floor, a drain identical to the drain I remembered from my dream, one that created in the tiled plane a gentle depression, like a nascent sinkhole tugging on the earth.

  The ring tipped over the edge, its vanishing soundless.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  I laughed. And laughed and laughed, until it sounded as though I was yelling at someone. Maybe I was.

  My commotion must have achieved a frequency that even earplugs couldn’t impede. Madame Ackermann turned her head. She stared at me. She trembled as though hypothermic.

  “You,” she said to me. She pointed a shaking finger. She clutched her stomach and made helpless, wheezing noises.

  The doctor attempted to help M
adame Ackermann into her chair, but Madame Ackermann stiffened and refused to sit.

  “No,” she said. She struggled back to standing. Doing so required that she grasp the doctor around the neck and press her cheek against his breastbone.

  “Take deep, slow breaths,” the doctor said.

  “That woman,” Madame Ackermann whispered. She refused to say my name. “That woman is attacking me.”

  “What?” I attempted to say. “No. That’s not true.”

  It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true.

  “This sort of stimulation isn’t recommended,” the doctor said. “We’ll soon have this situation under control. In the meantime, I’ve sent for a massage therapist.”

  “A massage therapist,” Madame Ackermann said. The bitterness of her tone made the doctor recoil. “You think I need a massage therapist? What I need is a gun.”

  “It’s important to remember,” the doctor said, “that those who commit murder are not making smart choices.”

  She spat at him, a weak ejection of stringy droplets.

  “Murder,” Madame Ackermann said, mouth skinny and wet, a mouth I could never imagine wanting to kiss. “As if I’d waste my energy killing her.”

  She attacked her face with her fists. She swung like a girl, all her effort channeled into her flailing neck and head so that it appeared as though she were dodging her own blows.

  Then Madame Ackermann wet herself. The urine trickled down her leg and over her fleece slipper, pooling on the tiles. The bandaged women vacated the lobby, all mean whispers. Madame Ackermann’s feminine hold over the doctor and the orderlies, such as it was, evaporated.

  The puddle broke toward me like a slow-motion current traveling from a flipped switch to an electric chair. Somebody’s done for.

  The orderlies fumbled nervously with the belts near my face.

  “Are you worried I’m going to bite you?” I said. Although I think my words were no longer clear.

  “I am my mother’s daughter,” I warned, as they cinched me in. “You should be worried. You should be very, very worried. I am a bad person, you see.”