The Vanishers (11 page)

The next morning I had a message from the Belgian-Iraqi woman, informing me that the Showroom was closed for cleaning.

I spent the balance of the day on my couch thinking about my mother and Dominique Varga.
What a crazy coincidence!
Blanche had said, as she, the lone conversationalist by that point, recounted to my father and me the highlights of our own evening while we shared a cab uptown. This coincidence must signify something important (not that she believed in such things, she insisted, but regardless)—this new job of mine, she said, could prove very meaningful to me.

“You can’t deny that it’s a crazy coincidence,” Blanche repeated.

My father and I exchanged a baleful glance. Before my illness, this was another of my so-called abilities, what my father chose to see as an aptitude for engineering credulity-straining twists of fate. When I was ten he’d taken me to Hong Kong for a geology conference, and we’d met a photographer on the plane who told us about his assignment to track a nomadic eco-terrorist through “China” (he refused to be more specific), and since we, too, were headed to China—we planned to explore the caves in the Guilin karst region, those ulcers formed by salt water percolating through the limestone over a period of time measured by glaciers—we made plans to
have dinner with the photographer in Hong Kong the next day, but the photographer never showed at the restaurant (we later learned he’d gotten food poisoning). Two weeks later my father and I flew to the tiny airport in Guilin, we took a four-hour boat trip down a river and then, when the river became too shallow, a flat-bottomed canoe, and as we approached the dock to our tiny stilted guesthouse we saw, standing at the end of the float, snapping photos of the birdless twilight sky, the photographer.

Coincidence, of course. But after a while you can begin to feel stalked by coincidence, or as though you can manipulate the world by expressing a narrative desire—this thread is loose, this thread inconclusive. It must be doubled back upon, it must recur. You can start to suspect, as I suspected, that I provided a gravitational center to which all lost people, past and present, were invisibly tethered, to which they were drawn. I know this sounds like the most profound sort of egoism. I don’t know how to make it sound otherwise.

But while I wanted to disregard Blanche’s exhortations to, as she put it, nurture life’s random alignments, I had to admit that I, too, was piqued by the fact that Varga had known my mother, and that, despite having at my disposal a few new data points, my mother had become (if this were even possible) more of an unknown to me. The longer I turned these new facts in the cement mixer of my mind, the more I failed to spin from her vexing particulates a substance that could harden without trapping, within its interior, a billion weakening voids. What was this resistance she lacked, what were these bad ideas? I could not synchronize the woman who’d married my sinkhole-obsessed dad with the woman who had lived in Paris, pawned ugly jewelry on the street, and hung out with artistic pornographers. If my dead mother refused to visit me, perhaps I could visit Varga, wrest from her the account I would never get from my father, who hadn’t been in Paris with her anyway.

For this reason, I met Alwyn and Colophon at the Regnor. If
he wanted me for his “Varga project,” whatever that entailed, well, I could only assume our mutual goals would coincide, and I could quit my job at the showroom.

Though I wasn’t due at the Regnor’s bar until 6 p.m., I decided to go early and check out one of the Lost Film Conference panels. Alwyn had recommended “The End of Scarcity” since it was being moderated by Lydia, owner of the tweed coat.

The Regnor’s lobby was empty save for a lone weeper crying into the handset of the lobby’s busted courtesy phone, a sight that made me think, not wrongly, of me on my red phone in the showroom, a person speaking in public to the disconnected air.

I took the elevator to the third floor. Save for the flapping crepe paper sounds emitted by the floor vents, the hallways of the Regnor were silent, as though the building were host to a Zen meditation retreat rather than a film conference. I’d hoped that the door to Room 337 might be open to latecomers. It was not. I contemplated the door’s faux-wood paint job, wondering if I should knock or just enter.

I knocked.

The door opened; a person hushed me inside. People sat cross-legged on the bed and on the floor or stood against the wall; the four panelists occupied folding chairs pushed against the drapes, which were drawn.

One panelist, a sexpot in fishnets and ankle boots, eyed my awkward attempts to puzzle myself against a wall blank. She, possibly Lydia, announced that, prior to the panel, she planned to screen a few vanishing films rated “inspirational” by focus groups.

She killed the lights and, using a remote, thrummed up the room’s TV.

Each vanishing film began the same way: a black screen with a white identification number that cut to a person standing before a
fake backdrop—of the Tokyo skyline, or of the Matterhorn, or of a Mars-scape roamed by mustangs.

A woman in her thirties, identified as 3298732-MU (backdrop: file closet interior), read an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) before reciting, for the remaining four minutes, the sentence “I thought that I could love you.”

The blandly pretty 7865456-BK (backdrop: rain ticking down a window screen) told stories about her childhood summer lake vacations in Minnesota. All of the people in her stories came off as charming and decent, her parents and siblings, her cousins and grandparents, even the stepfather who, she maintained, had molested her when she was twelve, but not without her permission.

A twenty-something man with a chapped upper lip, 8764533-WE, told a story about himself in the third person when he was babysitting the neighbors’ two-year-old son. The neighbor’s son was prone to running into the road, and so he’d decided to strap the boy into a plastic toboggan on the lawn, but then the family’s dog ran into the path of an oncoming car, and the car, in order to avoid the dog, swerved onto the lawn and crushed the boy, who was strapped into the toboggan and unable to save himself.

“But the truth was that the man had never liked that kid,” he said of himself. “He’d even, on occasion, wished him dead.”

We watched three more films, the most squirmy-making an homage to Buñuel’s
Un Chien Andalou
, in which a man slit open a cow’s eye with a razor blade while speaking dispassionately about the pains of his dyslexic childhood.

The films ended, the TV screen cataracted by a brilliant block of cobalt. The room shifted as the people readied themselves again to be seen. Possibly-Lydia cued the lights.

A hippie panelist with Asian coin earrings opened the discussion by raising the issue of scarcity. Was scarcity scarcer than ever?

“My specific question,” she said, “is whether or not reproductions—of paintings, of people, but specifically I suppose I’m speaking about these films—create scarcity or negate it.”

“But we’re not talking reproductions,” countered a panelist who resembled, with her asymmetrical bob, a brunette Cyndi Lauper. “It’s not as though TK Ltd. is a wax museum. These are testimonies. These are not substitutes for actual people. You cannot touch them or hug them or fail to be hugged back.”

I struggled to focus my attention, finding it difficult to hear the panelists speaking over the voices of the vanished people, their testimonies echo-calling to one another in my head, their individual explanations weaving together to form a suffocating textile through which I found it hard to breathe. A sharpness, like an exercise cramp, cinched the underside of my diaphragm.
Would you rather your mother be dead than alive and living somewhere else?

My answer was ugly and unequivocal. Given the choice, I’d prefer her dead. To kill yourself was to say to your family members,
I can no longer live with myself
. To vanish was to say,
I can no longer live with you
.

“But you can’t deny,” Cyndi Lauper said, “that a wax museum carries a heavy death implication due to the embalmed quality attending even the best reproductions. Did you know that many so-called wax artists learn their tricks by apprenticing for morticians?”

The mention of “morticians” elicited a mousy sob from a woman on the bed.

Possibly-Lydia checked her bracelet watch—its loose chain necessitated a few staccato wrist rolls to bring the face into view—and said it was time to take questions from the audience.

“I found it interesting that you should raise the topic of wax museums,” said a man in suede. “Scarcity could be viewed as a
romantic way to refer to manufactured celebrity. We can’t care about a person unless they’re famous. So you could accuse the people who made these films, and the people who control their distribution, of manufacturing fame for profit.”

“Not to mention emotional profit,” said a woman in a head kerchief. “All those traumatized ‘survivors.’ The collateral gains reaped by the psychiatric industry shouldn’t be underestimated.”

“I don’t understand,” said the hippie panelist. “Are you implying that the psychiatric industry is in cahoots with TK Ltd.?”

“The world of commerce is a web of interconnected extortionists,” the kerchief woman said.

A woman wearing an ethnic sweater-coat asked a question about something called “re-performance”; a theater group had secured the rights, from TK Ltd., to “re-perform” a handful of vanishing films. This had led to quite a bit of heated arguing at an earlier panel, said the sweater-coat woman.

“I was Vito Acconci’s studio assistant in the seventies,” she said. “When asked to re-perform
Seed Bed
, he responded, ‘If a performance is teachable and repeatable, how does it differ from theater? How are the participants not actors?’ ”

“You raise an interesting point about acting our own memories out of existence,” said Possibly-Lydia.

“It’s been estimated,” said the hippie panelist, “that seventy-five percent of the people who vanish suffer from Acquired Situational Narcissism, a syndrome that afflicts ninety-two percent of real celebrities.”

“But what kind of celebrity are we talking about here?” asked Cyndi Lauper. “How many people see these films? The more films that exist, meaning the more successful a venture TK Ltd. is, the greater the chance that a film will remain unwatched—assuming it’s not ‘re-performed’ by some low-rent theater company. Is that fame, or is that the cruelest definition of obscurity?”

“It makes me think,” said the woman who’d been crying on the bed, “of library books. I always look at the due dates stamped on the back. Sometimes, between readers, whole decades pass.”

The woman in the sweater-coat asked if TK Ltd. had anything to do with the recent rash of “surgical impersonations” she’d read about in the papers.

“People who died tragically and often young,” she explained to the room at large, “and suddenly a stranger shows up at the family’s house, a stranger who’s had his or her face surgically altered to look like the face of the dead person.”

“Strangers can be so perceptive,” said the formerly crying woman.

“TK Ltd. has nothing to do with those ‘impersonations,’ ” the probable lesbian asserted. “Also, there’s no proof that these impersonations have occurred. Most of the witnesses were severely damaged by the loss of their original loved one. Most had spent time in mental institutions.”

I raised my hand, wanting to ask if these impersonators weren’t impersonators at all, if perhaps they were restless astral imprints (a common byproduct of an accidental or a young death), returned to deal with unfinished business. But no one called on me, and it was just as well, in part because, though I publicly endorsed the theory of the young and unhappy dead, privately I’d chosen to believe that certain people might find great solace in being deceased.

Possibly-Lydia wrist-rolled her watch into view again and announced that the panel was over; she reminded people that her books were for sale in the lobby, where there would also be a cocktail reception in half an hour.

The room’s population surged toward the exit. I found myself crushed against the wall, butted by backpacks and messenger bags. I allowed myself to be pushed down the hallway and into the elevator, our collective cozy mood calcifying under the brighter scrutiny
of fluorescents. We mass-flowed into the lobby and paused by the revolving door to furtively unball scarves from coat sleeves, produce gloves from hats, as though we’d all emerged from a hotel room in which we’d conducted a love affair, and now every innocuous act was tainted by embarrassment and regret.

My kneecaps bleated; I searched for a place to sit but all of the sofas and chairs were occupied by weepers. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the garish blinking on the underside of my lids. I, too, felt embarrassed, or regretful, on the verge of dissolve. Perhaps it was the repeated (if unintentional) bumping of bags against my body, which reminded me of certain massages I’d received from physical therapists who communicated, via their cold hands and blunt, stabbing gestures, that they believed me to be a psychosomatic faker who drained from their fingertips all traces of goodwill, leaving them face-to-face with their own empathic shortfalls as healers. Or perhaps it was the crying woman’s mention of the unread library books, because truly there was nothing sadder, except a gift that a person has hand made for you, a scarf or a poncho, that, try as you might, you cannot ever see your way into wearing. This is when the cold indifference of the world envelops you, and makes you feel invigorated by emotion but also acutely alone. These moments of heartbreak for unwanted scarves and unread books can reveal to you, more than the inattention of any long dead mother, what it is to be alive.