I noticed, too, what Madame Ackermann had been scratching—an angry patch of eczema the size of a quarter, high on her rib cage. Unlike rashes on the wane, this one bulged at its borders. Its rampaging had just begun.
The poor woman, I thought. Her psychic blockage had taken its toll. Her face was savaged by stress—the puppet folds straddling her mouth deeper, her eyelids the dark turquoise color of those just-beneath-the-skin wrist veins. She really did look kind of dead. I angled a cheek a millimeter from her mouth to test if she was breathing. Her tea exhalations condensed on my skin, hot, cold, hot, cold.
She was alive. Sort of. Maybe, I thought, I should put her out of her misery. Finish the drawn-out job that age, or mental weakness, had just begun. Nothing but more failure awaited her. I turned my head and put my mouth atop her mouth. To inhale her life force, I told myself. To thieve the last spark of vitality from her. I kissed her. Her mouth spasmed beneath mine—kissing me back? Or maybe
struggling for air. Whatever she needed, whatever she possessed, I blocked it, I stole it. I pressed downward until I could feel, beneath her lips, her teeth, her skull.
Outside, the neighbor’s schnauzer freaked at a passing car. I guiltily resumed my position in the Barcelona chair and hid the pond drawing in my pocket. Madame Ackermann opened her eyes and I said,
Congratulations
. I “read” to her the story of her trip to the Tour Zamansky as she palpated her bottom lip with a finger. Then I showed her the serial number.
She was relieved. I was relieved.
Madame Ackermann and I broke for coffee, she e-mailed the serial number to Colophon Martin, and that, for the time being, was that.
Then, a week or two later, I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s A-frame to find Madame Ackermann in a very weird mood.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing to the Wegman rope chair by her fireplace.
I sat.
I was in some kind of trouble; she’d possibly discovered that I had, while she was asleep, kissed her.
But instead Madame Ackermann asked me if I knew who she’d met for breakfast that morning. I said that I had no idea, a claim Madame Ackermann met with very apparent dubiousness.
Madame Ackermann informed me that Colophon Martin had flown over from France because he’d found the missing film reel in the film safe stamped with the serial number 3258432-TR and was so astonished that he wanted to interview her about her regression process.
“That’s wonderful news,” I said.
Madame Ackermann lit a cigarette. Her lower face crinkled meanly around the filter when she inhaled.
She explained the situation further.
The reason Colophon was so interested in her regression process was because the serial number, which
did
correspond to the film safe in which Colophon discovered the missing film reel,
did not
correspond to the film safe once owned by the Leni Riefenstahl of France.
The film safe in which the reel was located had belonged, Madame Ackermann continued, at least according to auction house records, to the estate of a man known as Cortez—an anti-fascist painter with whom, it had been rumored though never proven, the Leni Riefenstahl of France had had an affair.
“Colophon Martin believes that she met Cortez at a gallery opening, after which they fell in love and plotted a performance art piece,” she said. “Which would mean that, when she accepted the commission from Jean-Marie Le Pen to direct a fascist propaganda film, she did so as an artistically subversive act.”
In short, the discovery of the missing film reel paled beside the discovery that the Leni Riefenstahl of France had known, and possibly collaborated and/or slept with, the painter Cortez.
“Very intriguing,” I said.
“
Very
intriguing,” Madame Ackermann agreed, left leg viper-coiled around the right. Her eyes probed, with subdermal intensity, my face.
“But what I’m wondering, Julia,” she said, “is how I found the correct serial number, as you claimed I did, on the bottom of a safe in Room 315 of the Tour Zamansky.”
I saw, then, what this was about. She didn’t care whether or not the Leni Riefenstahl of France had collaborated/slept with this Cortez person. She only cared to know how she’d found the correct film number on the bottom of a safe that was not the correct film safe, because the correct film safe belonged to somebody else.
“You described to me her office in the Tour Zamansky,” Madame Ackermann said, reviewing the transcript I’d provided.
“You described it,” I lied. “I just wrote it down.”
Then I asked Madame Ackermann if it were possible that the Leni Riefenstahl of France kept two safes in her office.
Madame Ackermann did not concede this possibility. I blundered forth.
Madame Ackermann, I posited, when she’d regressed to the Tour Zamansky, hadn’t noticed the two film safes, but luckily she’d reported to me the serial number from the correct film safe.
Again: no response from Madame Ackermann.
“Meaning,” I said, “if the Leni Riefenstahl of France and this Cortez person became lovers and collaborators, isn’t it likely that she eventually gave him her extra film safe, in which she’d left one of her film reels?”
Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me. She smoothed the wrinkles on her black silk pants.
“There’s a popular saying among non-occultists,” said Madame Ackermann, dry palms hissing over the silk. “Anything is possible.”
At our next meeting, we did not talk about the film safe incident. Madame Ackermann claimed to be too bothered by allergies to regress; she suggested my time might be better spent replacing the bungees in her built-ins. The following week, she handed me a three-ring binder and a glue stick, and directed me to a drawer of her review clippings. We settled into a “strictly professional work relationship,” rife with all the tensions and incrementally building resentments that phrase implies. Madame Ackermann, without officially demoting me, employed me like any old intern, sending me to town to xerox recipes from a cookbook on loan from Professor Penry, or to deliver receipts to a tax accountant at her offices located on a literal mountaintop.
One day she tasked me to clean her family photos with an herbal disinfectant that she sprayed obsessively on light switches and doorknobs. Madame Ackermann stood behind me as I was wiping a photograph of her mother holding a baby, presumably her.
“Whatever could have possessed her,” she said, staring at her own swaddled image, “to do such a thing?”
“Her?” I said. “What did she do?”
I scrutinized Madame Ackermann’s mother (a sweet Viennese woman—I’d met her once) whose young face resembled a blurrier version of Madame Ackermann’s. Even then she was no match for her own daughter, an ominous, night-haired squib equipped, at that negligible age, with an untamed laser glare seemingly capable of setting her own blankets ablaze.
“My mother used to say,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that she’d rather die than miss a single day of my life.”
I waited for her to laugh. She did not laugh. Perhaps, I thought, this was a famous Austrian saying that, translated word-for-word, became a cannabalistic koan.
Madame Ackermann flapped her starfish eyes at me. They gleamed with a liquid substance I would never mistake for tears.
I understood, then, what she was referring to. We’d never spoken about my mother’s suicide, but she’d had access to the medical interviews I’d undergone prior to matriculation at the Workshop, the results of which claimed I suffered from a physiological and psychological syndrome called febrile disconnection or “pure motherlessness”—and described how, from nearly birth, I had compensated for this lack by developing alternate ways of linking my internal world with my outside one.
Madame Ackermann grasped my wrist. We were about to have the exchange I’d had with so many teachers and mothers of friends, the squirmy upshot of which was this:
you poor dear
.
Except, of course, we weren’t.
“Poor Julia, you must believe that you’re innately unlovable,” Madame Ackermann said. “No wonder you need so much from me.”
I pulled my wrist away.
“Also, you’re handicapped by guilt,” she said.
“Me?”
“You shouldn’t be so ashamed,” she persisted. “No one blames you for hating her because she abandoned you.”
“I don’t hate her,” I said.
Madame Ackermann kinked a dubious brow.
“You can’t hate a person you never knew,” I said.
“Plenty of people hate complete strangers,” she said.
“I guess I lack imagination,” I said.
“And whose fault is that?” she retorted, possibly implying that my mother, by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills when I was a month old, and dying alone in the middle of the day in her bedroom, had also lacked imagination. Suicide by pills was
such a cliché
, or so the whispering wives of my father’s friends would claim, women whom I’d eavesdropped upon (really eavesdropped upon) at the barbecues and the picnics to which we were invited throughout my childhood. I’d wanted to ask them: What, to their minds, counted as a less clichéd way to kill oneself? Was hanging oneself also clichéd? Was it a cliché to fill one’s pocket with stones and walk into a river? Was it a cliché to shoot oneself through the mouth, or hurl oneself into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, or take an overdose of hemlock, or douse oneself in gasoline and strike a match? Or was the act of suicide itself a cliché? Regardless, I had to wonder how much, when deciding to kill oneself, matters of originality came to bear.
“It can’t help the situation,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that I look so much like her.”
Then Madame Ackermann drifted off to her study, as if we’d
been discussing nothing more fraught than her upcoming dermatologist appointment (the eczema on her rib cage had begun its march north).
I sprayed and wiped and sprayed and wiped. I emptied an entire bottle onto that picture frame, trying to disinfect it. To my knowledge, Madame Ackermann had never seen a photograph of my mother, thus how could she have known how much she resembled her? Which suggested that, perhaps while considering my stenographer application last spring, Madame Ackermann had done a psychic background check on me. Perhaps she’d been places I had never been. Perhaps she’d visited my mother. This made me feel betrayed, violated, spied upon, the expected reactions. But it also made me feel humiliated, as though I’d been beaten at a game at which I should have been uniquely positioned to excel. Because, despite my supposed gifts, I had never visited my own mother. She had never allowed it.
The first time I’d tried and failed I was nine; I’d taken a photograph of her to a carnival psychic, who ignored the photo and insisted instead on reading my tarot cards. Outside the psychic’s tent a barometric vise squeezed the air, the pressure creating a tear in the atmosphere above us, from which issued a chilly black exhalation. The carnival psychic, her hand atop the tarot deck, began to perspire; though a fake, she was not numb to dark warnings. I think we both knew, before she flipped the card, that it would be the Fool, cautioning me not to take the imprudent path.
For a year or so, I had not taken the imprudent path. I decided that I would not force myself upon my mother. She would have to visit me first.
But she hadn’t visited me. Not on my birthday, not on her birthday, not on her death day, not on Halloween or Easter or Christmas, not even on those plain old Tuesdays or Mondays when the
hectopascals, which I measured religiously with a meteorologist’s digital barometer, indicated an atmospheric pressure so low, so hospitable to astral invasions, that even we heavy cow humans, with a minimum of struggle, might hope to pierce the membrane that separated alive from dead and turn like clouds above the world. On the days when the pressure was unfriendly to her kind and maniacally high, I’d still been attuned, I’d still been open, I’d still been willing to see her—as I’ve heard even the least psychically inclined mourners can sometimes see their dead—in the wind or in the polygraph chittering of tree branches. I’d searched for her in the bottoms of teacups and under the bed in which she’d died, the only grave she’d been afforded because her body had been burned, her ashes scattered on a mountain that was always cold when we visited. I had looked into the backyard brush fires my father fed with things a husband should not burn. But I had never found her. She had not wanted to be found. And if I had gone to the Workshop to sharpen my finding abilities so that I could track this most reluctant woman—so what? Sillier reasons drive people to read the air.
That night I confided the Madame Ackermann situation to a Mortgage Payment named Stan. Stan had never understood why I had been chosen to rise from the bottom of the initiate heap; he was relieved to see order restored. I allowed him his moment of delight. Then I asked him what I should do.
“Break up with her,” Stan said.
“I’m not
dating
her,” I said.
“Quit,” he said. “Whatever.”
I told him I couldn’t quit. No one had ever “quit” Madame Ackermann.
“Exactly,” Stan said.
Thus I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house the next morning, my letter of resignation in my pocket, my thigh muscles shaky after a night of fucking Stan.
She greeted me with her old quasi-conspiratorial warmth. She’d intuited my intentions, I later came to think, hours before I arrived.
“Good morning, Julia,” she said. “Something
exquisite
has come up.”
We sat in her kitchen alcove. We drank septic tea.
Certain odd-yeared Octobers, she explained, wanding honey over my mug without asking if I took honey, were famously poor months to attempt regressions (something, she offered, having to do with di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations; I later googled the phrase “di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations” and got zero results), which explained why she’d had me doing such drab tasks; but now, she said, I could assist her with an exciting archiving project. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University had purchased her private papers; the curator of the university’s museum needed an archival installment for an upcoming exhibition of the university’s holdings called ParaPhernalia.