The Vanishers (31 page)

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 Madame 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.”

I heard the rasping sobs of Madame Ackermann as she, too, was stuffed into a straitjacket.

I continued to track the urine’s progress, now less than a foot away and closing in.

In my head I began a mantra that I hoped Madame Ackermann could hear.
Stop
, I begged.
Please please please stop
. Soon this simplified to
Please
.

I repeated it over and over until I didn’t recognize the word anymore.

Please please please please
.

I thought the word so loudly I could hear it.

I peered up from the rivulet long enough to catch a glimpse of Madame Ackermann, hair curtaining her face in snotty ropes, the two of us a pair of ruined, straitjacketed twins.

Please please please
continued the mantra, uttered by a voice so pathetic and stripped of dignity I was ashamed that it belonged to me.

And it didn’t.

“Please, stop,” Madame Ackermann begged as the orderlies dragged her past me. “Please,” she said beseechingly, as though I were a person capable of saving anyone.

We
decided it would be in poor taste for me to rent Madame Ackermann’s vacant A-frame.

“We don’t want people to talk any more than they’re already going to,” said Professor Yuen.

Plus the A-frame was on the market, had been on the market for months. “You wouldn’t want them to sell it out from under you,” said Professor Yuen, though we both knew it was unlikely that the A-frame would sell, given what had happened to Madame Ackermann. Too many people in East Warwick were sensitive to bad psychic residue, especially in matters of real estate.

Instead I subleased a small apartment on East Warwick’s three-block-long stretch of student-oriented commerce. Located above a store that specialized in flannel nightgowns and henna kits, the apartment belonged to Professor Blake, now on semi-permanent sabbatical at a drying-out facility in Kansas. Sparsely furnished with a feeble kitchen but featuring a well-equipped bar conveyed, for no additional fee, to the subsequent tenant, the place proved great for parties, even though the bathroom was a literal closet, privatized by an accordioned rubber curtain that slid back and forth on stuttering runners.