The Vanishers (16 page)

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 she’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.

“Many people have fissures or holes in their eggshells,” Marta said, “that allow the foreign entities to invade.”

She instructed me to lie on her sofa and visualize my eggshell.

“Now imagine it’s thicker,” she said.

Marta asked me to inspect my shell for cracks or holes. I imagined running my hands over the bony smoothness until I found an irregularity—a tiny checkmark-shaped fissure.

Marta instructed me to patch it.

“We’ll do this exercise every session,” Marta said. She warned
that I’d find new holes to patch as my abilities for espying imperfections in my shell grew sharper.

“In order to get better I must become more skilled at detecting how I’m sicker?” I said.

“If that’s how you need to see it,” Marta said. “Regardless, you cannot take these exercises lightly. I don’t want you to make poor choices.”

“Choices,” I said.

“I want you to channel your energy inward, not outward,” she said. “I stress to my psychic attack patients—revenge is not a compelling therapeutic goal.”

“Revenge is a very compelling therapeutic goal,” I said. “It’s just not a very noble one.”

“For a woman of your exceptional abilities, these exercises are far more dangerous,” she cautioned. “What you do when you leave here is your business. But while you are in my care, I cannot assist you with your … unconscious warfare.”

I promised Marta to engage in no unconscious warfare. In good faith, I promised her this. I was innocent, at the time, of the lengths to which my unconscious would go to mock my inability to know my own warfare intentions.

On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn.

“Hey,” I said.

Alwyn didn’t recognize me at first, her eyes glancing off me with chilling indifference.

“Oh,” she said, catching herself. “Hi.”

Her smile unnerved me. I knew, now, what casually stony person hid beneath.

I followed her to the concierge’s desk. En route she caught me
up on what she’d learned about Madame Ackermann’s movements. She’d been to a spa in New Mexico.

She also told me, displaying a recent
New York Times
article, that Madame Ackermann had been in the news in conjunction with the surgical impersonators case I’d first heard about at the Regnor panel. There’d been a sharp rise in reports of surgical impersonator sightings (i.e., people refashioning their faces to look like people who had died) in and around New York City, prompting a Manhattan criminologist to speculate that these impersonators were part of a terrorist group engaging in civilian psychological warfare. A number of notable American psychics, including Madame Ackermann, had become interested in the case—they assumed these impersonators to be astral imprints whose sudden abundance suggested there’d been a meaningful “rupture” in the astral membrane.

Hilariously, Alwyn said, the psychics had positioned themselves on the side of reason; Madame Ackermann was even quoted in the
Times
article as saying that a band of surgical impersonators acting at the behest of (and funded by) a terrorist leader was, comparatively speaking, “an unlikely scenario.”

I noticed Borka across the lobby, reading a butcher-papered book. She waved to me. I waved back.

“Who is that woman?” Alwyn asked.

“She’s skin-care royalty,” I said.

“Really,” Alwyn said.

“Her name means bedbug,” I said. Then I started to correct myself—her name didn’t mean bedbug—but I’d already forgotten what it was that it meant.

“She more resembles a praying mantis, don’t you think?” Alwyn said.

“I guess,” I said.

“She’s astonishingly ugly,” Alwyn said. “I hope she finds a better face soon. Don’t you?”

“I like her,” I said.

I was, I’d noticed, one of the few. Borka did not socialize with the other plastic surgery patients—the baronessas and the wives of import moguls, the members of the varied Austro-Hungarian aristocracies with whom she, in the outside world, presumably mingled. Whenever she passed the card-playing quartets in the lobby, mean whispers fizzed in her wake.

For some reason, however, Borka made me feel at home. Also she taxonomized humans using inscrutable animal metaphors that never failed to amuse me. People she didn’t like were half-dachshunds, people she did like—for example, me—were beetles.

Alwyn suggested I join her for tea in the dining hall. I agreed, even though I was made nauseous by the tea they served between meals, called liver tea because it detoxified the liver, the organ most weakened by psychic attacks.

“So,” Alwyn asked, “how’s the work?”

I assumed she meant my first session with Marta. The airiness of her tone renewed my paranoia that she’d shared with Marta inaccurate information about me.

“It’s fine,” I said. “But I’m a little curious … I’m concerned … what I mean is, I’m wondering what it is that you tell Marta.”

Alwyn regarded me, bemused.

“How can I say this,” Alwyn said, “so that you don’t take this the wrong way.”

“By wondering if I’ll take something the wrong way,” I said, “you’re guaranteeing that I won’t.”

“You’re the last person to be trusted to portray an accurate version of yourself,” she said.

“You, meanwhile, are the first person Marta should trust,” I said.

Alwyn stopped mid-stride.

“I’ve never told her anything you wouldn’t eventually have told her,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“OK,” she said, as though the matter were settled.

“But,” I said, “I’m a little concerned that you might tell her something that I would never tell her because I don’t believe it to be true.”

“Such as?” she said.

“Such as the ridiculous theory that Madame Ackermann wanted me to use her as a mother substitute.”

“Only you would find that theory ridiculous,” Alwyn said. “Madame Ackermann is a medium. A person through whom dead people speak.”

“Believe me,” I muttered. “When I was with her, no one was speaking through that woman.”

I circled back to my original worry.

“But you didn’t tell Marta I had sex with Colophon.”

Alwyn pulled at her little bangs as if they were a furled shade she might draw down over her face.

“What?” she said.

I repeated my question.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Have sex with Colophon? Or tell Marta that I did?”

“Please,” she said. “I know you’re way smarter than to do that.”

Alwyn returned to walking, briskly this time. I marveled at how she was able to project a blanket of certainty over a conversation that was pure jumble, stunning her listeners into shamed muteness. I didn’t dare press her to elaborate on what I’d failed to understand, even though a few crucial logic steps were missing from our exchange, steps wherein actually useful information might reside.

The dining hall was empty. We tapped the hot urns, filled our cups with liver tea.

“I know I keep saying this,” Alwyn said, “but we really do have a lot in common.”

She proceeded to recount in dull detail the gist of a paper published by the
Journal of Mental Science
in the mid-seventies, one that established a telepathic link between mothers and babies, and proved that babies in orphanages—separated from their mothers and deprived of their first, and most intense, human bond—were forced to search further and further afield for this connection.

“Those babies were twice as likely, by the age of three, to exhibit psychic predilections,” she said. “Would you say that’s when your abilities first appeared?”

“I can’t remember,” I said.

“What I don’t get is why I didn’t develop any psychic abilities,” she said. “My mother might as well have been dead for all I saw of her when I was little. Part of me suspects she must have read
that
article; she’s so competitive, she probably spent just enough time with me to make sure I wouldn’t develop powers that she hadn’t developed herself.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. It sounded totally insane.

“My stepfather told me she tried to abort me.”

“Recently?”

“She denied it when I confronted her. I’d deny it if I were her. It’s curious, though, right? I mean obviously
I’m
curious. Why did she want to abort me? Maybe she did have some kind of … power. Maybe she knew I’d grow up to disappoint her more than she disappointed herself.”

“I thought she was an internationally famous shampoo model,” I said.

“You say that so dismissively. She had iconic hair.”

“I’m marveling at the inadequacy of the phrase,” I said.

“Because it was a hair campaign her face was barely visible, thus people assumed she was an unattractive woman whose unattractiveness a skilled photographer was forced to obscure. Passersby on the street would say, ‘You’re the Breck Girl!’ And then, ‘But you’re so pretty.’ She was a famous model, and yet she spent her life convincing others she had a face that didn’t need hiding.”

“That is kind of tragic,” I conceded.

Alwyn pulled a tabloid magazine from her bookbag.

“Odd that you should be asking so much about my mother today,” she said.

She showed me a photo of a woman in an ivory ski ensemble standing in front of a gondola at Gstaad, her hair a blue-ish auburn that winged to the sides as though attached to wires.

“That’s her?” I said. “You’re prettier. Not that it’s a competition or anything,” I hastened to add. But it was true. Alwyn’s beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she’d had, or how much water she’d drunk, or how many people she’d annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.

“She doesn’t look like a woman whose daughter has vanished,” Alwyn said. “Though what that would look like, I can’t say. I only know it’s not that.”

She finger-jabbed the page, creasing her mother backward at the knees.