The Vanishers (2 page)

Madame Ackermann greeted me at the door, eyes starfished by mascara, hair a slab of polished obsidian against the puffball white of her sweater, and dropped my birthday present—a warm bottle of Tokay—on a credenza beside the pile of regifted chutneys and spice rubs from her colleagues. Then she led me to her great room, an inverted-V-shaped atrium lined with bookshelves (the books secured by a series of crisscrossing bungee cords), packed with her friends and coworkers, the majority of them men.

In retrospect: I should have found it odd, given she’d presumably forgiven me, that she should refuse to meet my gaze, that she should take the first available opportunity to slough me onto the other guests.

“You know Julia,” she said, shoving me into a trio of professors, all of whom, though I’d studied with each at one point or another, regarded me blankly. “She’s my archivist.”

The trio (Professors Blake, Janklow, and Penry) resumed their discussion of the death of a Workshop professor named Gerald,
their eyebrow hairs antenna-like as they derisively extolled Gerald’s virtues.

“Archivist,” Professor Blake said to me. He pronounced archivist with a judgmental inflection.

“Stenographer,” I clarified, “is the original service she hired me to perform.”

I did not mention the word demotion. I’d been hired as her stenographer, true, but I’d recently been demoted to the position of archivist.

I glanced at Madame Ackermann to see if she’d heard me; I didn’t want to appear to be contradicting her in public, especially now that our relationship was presumably on the mend. She was preoccupied, fortunately, by the sight of Professor Elkin huddling with Professor Yuen behind a kentia palm. Professor Yuen wore her hair in two long braids that narrowed to tips like floppy knives; she spoke to Professor Elkin about a topic that required her to bullet-point the air with an index finger, no doubt something to do with the recent dissolving of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, and whether its failure sounded a death knell for the Workshop’s future prospects as well.

“Ah,” said Professor Janklow. “Stenographer.” He held between his thumb and forefinger a half-eaten shrimp. He eyed the goblet of cocktail sauce on the table beside him, clearly wondering if he could dip his shrimp a second time without being spotted, or calculating the amount of time one must wait to ensure that the same-shrimp dips are no longer seen as consecutive acts, but as two unique events.

“Samuel Beckett was James Joyce’s stenographer,” I said.

“Secretary,” said Professor Janklow.

“Did you ever study with Gerald?” asked Professor Blake. “Before he died, I mean?”

“In fact that’s a myth about Beckett,” said Professor Penry.

“Couldn’t make a martini to save his life,” said Professor Janklow. “Gerald wasn’t a fellow who could grasp the subtler requests such as
whisper of vermouth
.”

“Poor Gerald,” said Madame Ackermann, returning to our fold. I suspected it from her insincere tone: she had slept with the man.

“You, however,” said Professor Janklow, presenting his empty martini glass to Madame Ackermann, “are all subtlety and whispers.”

Madame Ackermann twisted downward on her sweater’s cowl neck to reveal a turquoise filament of bra and a décolletage dotted by pale moles. This gesture was meant to suggest that she was embarrassed by the compliment, while also suggesting that she was not remotely embarrassed by it. No one, least of all me, would deny that Madame Ackermann, even at the dawn of forty-three, was a bewitching, pixie creature,
girlish
the term most often used to describe her mixture of naïveté and wiliness, her middle-parted night hair and Eva Hesse Bavarian élan, her habit, during class, of placing one foot on her chair and resting her chin atop a corduroyed knee. She’d preserved her body, or so it seemed, through sheer force of mind. The suppleness of her gray matter—I’m ashamed to admit that I’d imagined how it would feel to the touch—was reflected in the pearly suppleness of her eyes, her hair, her skin.

We were all of us—the female initiates more than the male ones—in some form of love with her. (The fact that Madame Ackermann so closely resembled my dead mother did not render my obsession with the woman any less complicated.)

And thus we tried, as girls in confused love with women will do, in every superficial way to mimic her. We were rapt apprentices of the twisted cowl neck, the peevish cuticle nibble, the messy, pencil-stabbed chignon. We purchased cardigans in yellowed greens and tarry mascaras, we blended our own teas and sewed them into tiny muslin bags that we steeped in chunky mugs and carried with us to class, our socked feet sliding, like hers, atop the
wooden platforms of our Dr. Scholl’s sandals. We also slept around. We slept with everyone, but only once. We were, we told ourselves in moments when we felt most pathetic and unmoored, not just imitating Madame Ackermann, we were embracing the culture of the Workshop—the disloyalty, the distrust, the refusal to be known for fear of what people might actually come to know about you.

It was a lonely time.

Anna, Madame Ackermann’s housekeeper, struggled to light a fire in the fireplace and was finally assisted by Professor Janklow, who propped his shrimp in a dirty ashtray in order to show Anna the proper tepee-like way to arrange the kindling, the exact pressure to apply to a newspaper ball to achieve the optimal degree of oxygenated scrunch.

Once the fire was lit, Madame Ackermann dimmed the horn chandelier and announced that it was time to tell a story.

“Gosh,” sniped Professor Yuen. “I wonder which story it will be.”

The story—about Madame Ackermann’s seminal psychic experience, and with which we were all familiar—was this.

Madame Ackermann, freshly graduated from the Workshop (summa cum laude, she made sure to mention), decided to decompress via a backpacking trip through southeast Asia with her tragic boyfriend, a rising third-year initiate of no academic distinction whatsoever who abandoned her, without warning or explanation, in a beach hut on the coast of Thailand. She’d told herself, upon discovering him gone, that she’d long ago fallen out of love with this boyfriend, and to prove it slept that afternoon with a local fisherman, drank half a bottle of Mekong whiskey, and stumbled into bed alone, only to awake two hours later to see, at the foot of her bed, a milky shimmer. But then this specter grew bones before her
eyes. Its skeleton rulered the air with wet, gray notches; it thickened with muscle and then bound itself in an opalescent casing from which sprouted a steely fur. Two eyeballs emerged above a snout that cracked apart to display a prehistoric maw of teeth, row upon row of enamel sawblades to which it appeared the pinking shears of a vicious evolution had been applied.

Fenrir
. Madame Ackermann identified the specter immediately: her boyfriend had forgotten his beach read, a book of Norse mythology called the
Poetic Edda
, and Madame Ackermann had, before falling asleep, finished the stanza in which an old woman living in a forest had
bred there broods of Fenrir. There will come from them all one of that number to be a moon-snatcher in troll’s skin
.

At first, Madame Ackermann said, she believed this mythical Norse wolf monster had been sent to attack her by her boyfriend, a man prone to territorial jealousy even toward women he’d discarded, a man who would “ultimately prove not untalented in the psychic arts,” this assessment based on the fact that he would, by his late twenties, become a successful real estate speculator on the Iberian peninsula.

But then Madame Ackermann saw, connecting her to Fenrir, a kinked, reptilian umbilical, a viscous mirage through which she could slice her hands but which she could not, no matter how she thrashed, sever. Despite her Mekong whiskey fugue, she understood: this monster had not been sent by the boyfriend. It had initiated from her. It was, she claimed, the literal embodiment of her humiliated, heartsick rage.

Then the wolf—her wolf—attacked her.

I tried to kill myself
, she was known to claim.
I was the victim of my own worst self, loosed upon the world
.

As Fenrir closed its giant jaws around her chest—she would show, as proof of this attempt to puncture her heart, the moles
flecking her chest, each of them, she claimed, an indelible astral tooth mark—she lost consciousness. When she awoke she discovered a pile of pitted black rocks on her hut’s threshold, byproducts of her psychic eruption. (These she employed as bookends on her office shelf. I had held them in my hands; they were weightless, as though made of malt.)

And so. While I had never before attended one of Madame Ackermann’s birthday parties, I had nonetheless heard the Fenrir story numerous times since I’d matriculated at the Workshop the previous fall. I’d first heard it during the opening lecture of Madame Ackermann’s Basics seminar, the details of which we’d slavishly recorded in our notebooks; she’d repeated the Fenrir story during my one-on-one student conference, presenting it as a secret she’d chosen to share only with me. She’d told it to me last April, when she interviewed me for the stenographer position, again in May when she called to officially offer me the position, and most recently when we were sorting through storage boxes in her A-frame’s crawlspace. One couldn’t study with Madame Ackermann, and become her protégée, and then her stenographer, and then her archivist, without coming to know the Fenrir story as familiarly as one’s own personal memory of a vindictive family pet.

I was not alone. As Madame Ackermann described the rat droppings she’d found on her beach-hut pillowcase before falling into her drunken slumber, the party guests, Professor Yuen in particular, projected an air of jealous boredom.

I was bored but not jealous; rather than listening to Madame Ackermann, I leafed through the new paperback edition of her latest book,
E-mails from the Dead
. Because while the Fenrir story was told to emphasize to us, her students, and to these birthday guests, her colleagues, her potency as a master of the paranormal—few people, it was true, had the ability to create “visible thought
forms”—I had come, over the unsettled course of my relationship with Madame Ackermann, to understand its meaning differently. As much as it destroyed me to admit it, the Fenrir story was not about the dawning of her powers; rather, it represented the youthful apex of her career, to which she now, in her gloaming hours, desperately clung.

As her stenographer, I’d gained unwanted firsthand knowledge of Madame Ackermann’s troubles. My job, as Madame Ackermann had described it when she’d hired me, was thus: beginning the first week of August, I would join her in her home office and sit in a chair across from the Biedermeier sofa where she reclined, eyes blinded beneath a silk pillow. Since she’d inherited a
not insignificant
collection of mid-century modern furniture from her father, she informed me, I’d have the honor of sitting in his favorite Barcelona chair.

At the time—sitting in a Workshop-issue molded bucket chair in her office, one that reminded me, in its shape and its color, of an institutional bed pan—her father’s Barcelona chair sounded really delightful, its name inspiring visions of Picasso trailing a parasol-wielding Dora Maar along the sand, of salt-stained canvas awnings, of bottles of lukewarm cava and abandoned espadrilles.

Then, on my first official day as Madame Ackermann’s stenographer, I saw the actual chair. Despite its beachy rock-skip of a name, my first thought was,
Oh
, that
chair
. I’d seen it in movies and on TV, usually in thuggish pairs, usually in the offices of slickly evil corporations or the living rooms of loveless career couples.

While Madame Ackermann brewed tea, I took wary stock of my Barcelona chair. Its frame looked like two swords locked in
a fencing parry, the inside edges made safe for human repose by a pair of quilted black leather slabs. When I later mentioned my guarded impression to Miranda, she laughingly referred to the chair as the “Blowjob Chair,” because her older brother, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, kept one in
his
office for the following reason—given the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive.