The Vanishers (17 page)

“She still hasn’t flown to Cincinnati to see my film,” Alwyn said. “Has she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Has she?”

Alwyn scrutinized me.

“Just testing,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were obeying the rules. No psychic activity.”

That wasn’t the only reason she’d asked. She was deeply bothered by her mother’s and stepfather’s failure to see her vanishing film. (I wanted to assure her: on this front we did have something in common.) I recalled the crying woman at the Regnor panel and her comment about library books that remained unread for decades. Alwyn and I, by committing our absences to film, had become objects whose neglect could be quantified.

“You’re lucky you’re being attacked,” Alwyn sulked. “Someone cares a lot about you.”

“Your mother cares about you,” I said. “She hired a detective.”

“Mmmm.”

“She probably wants to make sure that you’re not in any trouble or danger,” I said.

Alwyn laughed.

“If you’d had a mother,” she said, “you’d understand what a forgiving interpretation of motive that is.”

“I had a mother,” I said. “But I was spared the rite of passage of hating her.”

“Which is exactly your problem,” Alwyn said.

“Maybe more of a matter of inexperience than a problem,” I said.

“Hate is a form of emotional attachment,” she said. “You’re denying yourself the only maternal bond available to you. This is your weakness, in my opinion. This is why you’re being attacked.”

“Because I don’t hate my mother?” I said.

“Like it’s so outlandish,” Alwyn said. “What kind of woman would kill herself when she had a month-old baby? I’m sorry, but that’s monstrous.”

I picked up my liver tea. I drank what, for me, counted as a lethal dose.

“It’s not monstrous,” I said. “It’s fucking tragic.”

“I suppose you’re one of those people who feel worse for Sylvia Plath than for her two children,” she said.

This was true.

“I don’t understand how a woman could do such a thing,” Alwyn said. “I don’t understand it at all.”

“Maybe that’s
your
problem,” I said coldly. “Thinking it can be understood.”

Two weeks after my arrival at the Goergen, I received irrefutable proof that I was getting better. Or maybe it was proof that the pills I’d been taking in New York had been cleansed from my system thanks to the liver tea and the colonics to which I’d been subjected, and the bookbinding hobby I’d picked up, maybe too the Mundane Egg visualizations I did every day with Marta, even though I always left her office feeling dirty and ashamed.

Regardless of the cause, after more than a year of psychic blindness, I was able again to see.

On my fourteenth night at the Goergen, Helena, a plastic surgery patient from Budapest, blustered into the dining hall.

“My engagement ring is gone!” she announced. Her left hand spasmed above her head, lacking the ballast of the very large diamond she’d made certain we noticed, rattling the gem against table surfaces when she ate, her hand otherwise seemingly paralyzed by its amazing shackle, the fingers slack, the palm upturned, as though awaiting something—a kiss, a nail.

Perhaps I was reading too much into her. Borka had told me: Helena was not a lucky girl (“girl” employed by Borka as an emotional category—Helena was in her fifties). This engagement would be Helena’s fourth marriage; her previous husbands had left her,
two of them had beaten her. But on the plus side, said Borka, she’d started out as a secretary, and very poor, so at least she’d married her way to money.

“It’s not all ditch water,” Borka said.

An orderly hurried Helena into a chair and urged cold compresses upon her. Helena’s three-day-old face-lift was in the delicate stage; intense emotions were contraindicated. A man in a white suit took notes while the rest of us hovered. Her ring, Helena told us, had been stolen from her locker while she soaked in the thermal baths.

“I’ll post a reward,” Helena said to us, the silently gathered. “To whomever finds the thief, I shall express my gratitude in a manner known as handsome.”

I heard her tell another plastic surgery patient that she’d lost the engagement ring her first husband had given her, too. “Though it was impossible
not
to lose that ring,” Helena confided. “The diamond was the size of a lentil!”

Back at our table, Borka and I gossiped.

“It probably fell down a drain,” I said of the ring. The Goergen featured an unnerving number of drains, not only in the showers or puncturing the walkways between the thermal baths but in rooms usually immune to deluges—mine, for example. I’d found a drain underneath my bed, implying that the room would be hosed out once I left, my various residues cleansed. Maybe the drain was regulation. Who knew. I tried not to think about it. Whenever I lay on my bed, I repeated in my head this sentence:
I am contaminating the scene. I am contaminating the scene
.

“It is for the best that she not marry this man,” Borka said.

“She’s still going to marry him, I’d imagine,” I said.

Borka appeared traumatized by this suggestion.

“She cannot,” she said. “A lost engagement ring means the marriage cannot happen.”

Borka drew a finger across her throat.

“If she marries him she’ll die?” I said.

“Maybe only the living kind of dying,” Borka said. In the Hungarian countryside, she informed me, people believed in the existence of beneficent meddlers who broke up bad marriages before they happened. In ancient times this was accomplished by the destruction of the dowry, for example the disappearance of a herd of livestock.

“But of course it is just a folktale to allow for the theft of jewelry and sheep,” she said.

“My mother lost her engagement ring,” I said.

Borka was unimpressed, much as she’d been when I’d told her that my mother was dead. I’d come to expect such reactions: she was slightly autistic, Borka was, but aware enough to know that she
should
respond differently. As a result, these confessions of mine made her tense; she seemed to register them as a rebuke.

“And she persisted in marrying my father,” I said, trying to apply a happy spin, also to assure her—I expected her to be nobody other than who she was.

“Indeed,” Borka said. “And look what happened to her.”

“Well …” I said.

“When a woman is enchanted by unhappiness, there’s little that anyone, even a beneficent meddler, can do to dissuade her,” she said.

“I thought you said the beneficent meddlers didn’t exist,” I said.

“I said they were probably thieves,” she replied, her tone embittered for reasons I couldn’t connect to the loss of rings.

That night I had a vivid dream.

The locker room could have been any locker room in any former Eastern bloc country—tiled, steam-noisy, the locker doors painted noxious shades of citrus, the vibe vaguely gas-chamberish. A little girl stood naked while a naked woman—her mother, I guessed—dried her back, her breasts and haunches bobbling with the effort.

The mother disappeared to the lavatories; the girl pulled on her sweater, her too-short pants. Beside her, a young woman disrobed with professional efficiency, quick and fluid. At first I did not recognize her—Helena was a blonde now, and thirty-odd years older. She removed her engagement ring, its diamond minuscule, more of a chip than a stone, and placed it in her locker. Without padlocking the door, she, too, disappeared to the lavatories.

Sneaky as a shadow, the young girl slipped her hand into the locker. She posed in front of a long mirror, hand against her cheek, stolen quarry glinting on her finger.

“I” stood behind her.

As in my previous regressions, I did not appear in reflective surfaces. My consciousness was not embodied, though I inflicted on this world my ghostly void. When I stood before the locker room mirror, a white spot in the shape of a person appeared where I should have been, as though someone had taken an eraser to a charcoal drawing, rubbed me out.

The girl’s mother called her. The girl stashed the ring in the shallow coin pocket of her pants, but as she hurried toward her mother’s voice the ring jogged loose and rolled onto the tiles. It carved a wide ellipsis, its orbit narrowing and quickening toward the drain. The girl fell to her knees and, trying to intuit the ring’s trajectory, snatched at the future space it might inhabit. But then she was distracted by something—me, it seemed—and missed her chance to grab the ring before it disappeared through the drain’s vertical slots.

The girl stared at the drain before returning her gaze toward me, as though I were to blame for the ring’s loss, as though I were the thief.

I awoke to my alarm at 6:30 a.m.

I dressed, ate very little breakfast, did Mundane Egg with Marta, ate very little lunch, took the elevator to the basement to
soak in the thermal baths. I’d felt vague all day, my post-dream self like an organ transplant slow to take. I grabbed my towel from the bath attendant. I shakily undressed. I needed, after each slipper removal, to rest on the wooden bench that paralleled the lockers.

Even so, my sense of disequilibrium surged.

I lay on the floor, the tiles against my cheek like hot teeth. At this point, I believe I fell asleep. Again I dreamed, or thought I was dreaming, because again I saw the drain and the ring falling into it, over and over I saw this, I saw the younger Helena, I saw her returning to her locker to discover her ring missing, I saw her telling her fiancé outside a restaurant that she had lost his ring, and I saw him wanting very badly, were it not for the sidewalk spectators, to hit her. I saw all of this except that my eyes were open, and I could hear Borka berating the bath attendant for failing to call a doctor when a doctor was needed.

“But she looks so happy,” the attendant said.

When the doctor arrived he asked me hyper-articulated questions most people could not fail to understand.

“Did you check the drains?” I asked. All I could see, still, was a drain, over which the doctor’s features were superimposed.

The doctor shone a penlight in my pupils.

“Helena’s ring,” I said, “did you check the drains?”

“Of course they checked the drains,” said Borka.

“Can you tell me the date of your menstrual cycle?” asked the doctor.

“All of them?” I asked.

“All of the drains were cleaned yesterday,” the attendant said.

“Just the last cycle,” the doctor said.

I flipped onto my stomach; I crawled across the floor.

“Even a rough estimate,” said the doctor, following me.

I pried the drain’s grate loose with a fingernail.

The string was very long; whoever tied it to the grate’s underside wanted to make sure that a flashlight beam, flashed into the drain, wouldn’t snag Helena’s diamond.

I pulled until the ring flipped onto the tile floor.

I smothered it in my fist.

“Has it been one month?” asked the doctor. “Two?”

“Who did this?” asked Borka, without a touch of curiosity.

“It’s important that I know,” the doctor said.

My body tingled with endorphins. The ring in my hand required no coddling to tell me its tale of future sadness, Helena married to a man who killed her daily.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing the ring away from me. The metal radiated a repulsive sliminess I did not dare absorb. “I haven’t menstruated in over a year.”

That night, we received a memo under our doors.

“Dear Guests,” it read. “Your discretion and relaxation are our utmost treasures. Memory is unnecessary work. To forget is to respect the past, and to enable your pleasant future.”

Soon everyone knew about my role in the recovery of Helena’s ring. I could sense their knowing most forcefully in the lobby, a space unwisely constructed of palissandro bluette marble, a stone touted for its properties of thought amplification. The robed women in the club chairs emanated what I can only compare to a wireless signal that would have measured five full bars; via these frequencies we were bound.

Borka, meanwhile, installed herself as my bodyguard, escorting me to meals, protecting me from the other guests.