The Vanishers (6 page)

Madame Ackermann escorted me to her crawlspace, reached by pulling a metal ladder out of the ceiling of her guest room; I felt, each time I climbed it, as if I were stepping aboard a small commuter plane. The crawlspace was windowless and lit by a thin fluorescent fixture with a seizure-inducing flicker. The walls—some sheetrocked and others not, revealing between the studs a cottony insulation the color of peed-on snow—were lined with cardboard boxes, badly stacked, heavy boxes riding atop lighter boxes that had become accordion-squashed over the years.

The air, overheated and dense with micro-particulates, had, when I inhaled, a felted quality.

In these boxes, Madame Ackermann announced, on that first odd-yeared poorly planetarily configured October day, in no particular order, is my life.

I allowed myself, for about five minutes, to misinterpret this announcement as a promotion. Madame Ackermann was allowing me—me!—to read her private correspondence, in which there might be a letter from the famed lover who’d inspired the Fenrir appearance, or maybe early drafts of her many parapsychology game-changing books such as
E-mails from the Dead
, in which she detailed the recent rise in technological paranormal occurrences (ephemeral, frequency-based forms of communication being much easier for astral imprints to hijack than manual forms). Perhaps, too, there’d be old journals or a notebook that refuted (or confirmed) the rumors surrounding the source of Professor Yuen’s dislike of Madame Ackermann, a scuffle dating back to their student days when Professor Yuen accused Madame Ackermann of stealing her dissertation idea.

Madame Ackermann, or so I optimistically concluded, kept these incendiary materials in her crawlspace, and I had, after passing an inscrutable series of tests, proved worthy of her confidence. Which furthermore meant she was no longer bent on punishing me for the transgression I’d committed regarding the film safe incident. She was communicating her forgiveness and respect by promoting me to an airless, mausoleum-like space, meant to aggravate my mild claustrophobia and promote future fiberglass-particle-inspired respiratory ailments.

Exactly.

It took me less time than I needed to finish my first capful of septic tea (Madame Ackermann supplied me with a full thermos) to realize that I had been really and truly demoted.

For starters, the boxes in her crawlspace did not contain letters, or photos, or journals, or anything of overt interest to anyone driven by nobly archival rather than creepily prurient aims. In these boxes were bills. Bank statements. Dry-cleaning tickets. Bottles of
expired malaria pills and Benadryl blister packs. Unpaid parking tickets (twenty in one box, all from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all issued within a period of five days). Jury duty notices. Dog-eared linen catalogs. Grocery lists. Unfilled prescriptions. A note written on the back of a pristine scratch-off lottery ticket that said,
apologies I hit your car but I don’t have insurance so instead I am giving you this lottery ticket good luck!

She instructed me to organize the box contents into a kind of chronological life portrait collaged from this paper detritus. I was to match the credit card statement to the parking tickets received during that time period, the prescriptions written, and so forth (this per the request of the curator of ParaPhernalia).

“But what about undated items?” I asked. Meaning, for example, her grocery lists.

“One doesn’t shop for leg of lamb in the summer months,” Madame Ackermann replied.

She left me to my sorting. Did I learn anything unusual about Madame Ackermann during those hours I spent dry-sweating in her crawlspace? I learned that she had, according to her statements, an intense Norma Kamali bathing suit habit; that she rarely bought organic meat and was more familiar than I wished her to be with diet TV dinners; that she desired, but apparently never purchased, an Austrian featherbed; that she visited a general practitioner who prescribed her enemas and dandruff shampoo; that her preferred stationary vehicular violation was the double park; that she tended to drop thirty items simultaneously at the Bon French dry cleaner, located in a mini-mall on the outskirts of East Warwick, and was never required to produce a ticket in order to pick up her clothing.

For seven long afternoons, I puzzled these paper scraps into a chronologically accurate approximation of Madame Ackermann’s existence. These scraps failed to suggest that Madame Ackermann
was a woman of unusual psychic talents. They failed to suggest she was unusual in any way at all.

This experience made me question, as I sorted receipts into piles while drinking capful after venomous capful of septic tea, whether Madame Ackermann was anything more than the averagely constipated, irresponsible, dry-scalped, high-thread-count-sheet-desiring person. There was nothing special about this woman I’d idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired; it was even possible that practically anybody—maybe even I—was more gifted than she.

Which is to explain why, at her forty-third birthday party, I called out “Barcelona chair.” Because I was more eager than ever to prove to the attendees of Madame Ackermann’s party that they had underestimated me.

I was, in a word, stupider.

In the end, nobody in that A-frame save Madame Ackermann understood the import of my calling out “Barcelona chair,” because no one else had caught her torque. When I called out “Barcelona chair” I received, from my professors (who’d all, save Wibley, seen a spider), disapproving glares. By calling out “Barcelona chair” I exposed myself to Madame Ackermann alone.

No, that’s not true.

I also exposed myself to me.

When I called out “Barcelona chair,” the personal toll exacted by my deception, like the image of the chair itself, spun into focus. I was psychically exhausted by the charade of the past months; I wanted Madame Ackermann to know that I had not, from the ten-to-the-seventh-power-multiplied-by-thirty-six-twice options,
accidentally
doodled my way to the correct film safe serial number. As she snored on the Biedermeier sofa beneath her silk eye pillow, she was not enabling me. If anything, I had succeeded despite her.

Even so, I wasn’t prescient enough to avoid stepping into what we later came to understand as Madame Ackermann’s trap. She’d stashed me in her crawlspace like a pound of meat—hidden from view, awaiting petrification. She’d invited me, her demoted, deceitful stenographer, to her forty-third birthday party, and I’d been foolish enough to interpret the overture as a peace offering, when in fact she was bringing me into the killing arena. This was blood sport for her. But first she wanted to be certain that I was the person she suspected me of being.

I was only too happy to oblige.

After catching Madame Ackermann’s yard sale junk for nearly thirty minutes, the professors began to get bored. Professor Blake, unable to secure a martini refill, defaulted to sipping abandoned drinks. “Is it cake time?” whined Professor Hales. Professor Yuen, a recreational harpist, strummed a bookshelf bungee.

“One last throw,” Madame Ackermann begged. “A torque for the road.”

The professors, Yuen included, agreed to humor Madame Ackermann.

I stood on the landing of Madame Ackermann’s staircase, hands gripping the banister, peering over the heads of my professors, ego inflamed by my superior conviction that I was, in so many literal ways, above them all.

Again Madame Ackermann hair-curtained her eyes, locked her chin. She leaned so far forward, shins hovering at a ninety-degree angle, it was as though she’d nail-gunned her Dr. Scholl’s to the floorboards. For the last time that evening, she threw.

This was the throw for which she’d been reserving her energies,
and explained why she’d spent the past half hour lobbing meaningless trash; she’d been building to what was known as a psychic cascade, when a person’s superior abilities have been utilized for silly tasks, thereby causing a surplus of energy to accumulate.

I did not intend to “catch” what Madame Ackermann threw, but to avoid doing so was like trying not to watch a car burn. What tumulted through the air was a wheel of horror (dismembered limbs, splatters of gray matter) that repeated its sequence as it rolled toward me. I clutched the banister.
Dizzy
did not begin to describe how I felt.

The wheel slowed as it came within inches of my face, the images condensing into a compact gory redness.
She threw a bloody egg
, I thought. But no. Spidery fault lines appeared in the egg’s surface as Madame Ackermann’s hairy-eared torque emerged from its chrysalis.

Fenrir.

His oversized wolf jaws parted and I saw, bobbing in the glottal gloom, my own disembodied head.

More distressing still: nobody else saw what I was seeing.

“Sorry, love,” I heard Professor Penry say to Madame Ackermann. “Botched that one.”

“The risk of throwing torques when you’re forty,” said Professor Yuen. “The blank rate is one in three.”

“Cake time,” said Professor Wibley.

In my sensitized state, I could practically
hear
the gloating. My professors thought Madame Ackermann had thrown a blank (i.e., a torque that fails, from the outset, to coalescence into anything more precise than a blob of spinning fog). And she had thrown a blank. An intentional blank. But that wasn’t all. Whereas her first throw of the night had been a straightforward torque—a single throw that appears to most as one thing, but to the skilled few
as its evolved, “second-phase” form—her final throw was a double torque, wherein two unique throws occur in parallel, in this case a blank
and
a spiral (alone a highly advanced maneuver).

At that moment, however, I was too locked inside my own skull to see anything beyond its dome, upon whose surface strobe-lighted an explosion of over-exposed images.

Then my life went dark.

I awoke on Madame Ackermann’s Biedermeier to the clipped sounds of Professor Yuen speaking on her cell phone to the school nurse. I felt as though someone had inserted a hacksaw at my hairline and removed the top of my skull. A foggy substance whisked over my brain, cooling it dangerously, cooling it to the point of hyperthermia; I
sensed
my brain shutting down, and yet in the midst of this psychic twilight I was beset by visions, the last ones I’d have for a while. I stared at the water-stained ceiling above the Biedermeier.
This is what she sees from here
. Madame Ackermann, poor dear, looked at her ceiling and saw only a ceiling. A hilarious idea intruded on my delusional state, one destabilized, still, by the peripheral darts of jaws and teeth
—someday I’ll take her place
.

Then I heard a horrible noise, like someone mortar-and-pestling shards of glass. I turned my head. Madame Ackermann, I noticed and with some alarm—had I spoken my thoughts aloud?—sat next to me on the Barcelona chair, attention trained on Professor Yuen while one hand rested on my forehead, holding against it an icy dish rag.

She scratched an oval of eczema on her collarbone. The bottom of the oval disappeared into her shirt, presumably connected to the original patch now armoring her entire abdomen and making a play for her face. Her fingers provoked an irritated blush that yielded, as she clawed her way downward, to the sleepy burble of actual blood.

She appeared pursued, even trapped.

Madame Ackermann was scared
.

This unnerved me more than the dizziness, more than the snouts and teeth that continued to buzz my optic nerve, more than the one-by-one extinguishing of my brain cells. What was she scared of? Who was going to help me now?

I groaned.

Madame Ackermann noticed that I was conscious and reset her facial expression, staring at me with what I still stupidly read as concern.

She leaned over me. I thought, for a deranged half second, that she was going to kiss me on the lips.

“You poor thing,” Madame Ackermann whispered, mouth inches from mine, fingers raking her neck. “You look like you’ve seen a wolf.”

The rumor that made the rounds claimed I’d had a seizure at Madame Ackermann’s house, brought on by my attempts to catch as a novice. I’d strained something, or broken something, or disturbed some precious equilibrium by exhorting my brain to perform an activity it was not trained to perform.