The Vanishers (3 page)

In my capacity as stenographer, I sat in the Barcelona chair five mornings a week—knees splayed, a mug of tea on the floor—while Madame Ackermann projected her consciousness at will, to any human, alive or dead, occupying any space or time, while I recorded, on a notepad, every word that she said.

Unfortunately, Madame Ackermann did not tend to do much more than plain sleep in my presence.

She was, in a word, blocked.

This alarmed me more than it alarmed Madame Ackermann, who chalked up her troubles to our mutual adjustment period. Miranda, when I discreetly inquired about her first weeks working with Madame Ackermann, claimed that Madame Ackermann had been at the height of her powers when she, Miranda, sat in the Barcelona chair, scribbling on pads of ghost-grid paper with a special automatic writing pen made in Düsseldorf. Miranda was happy enough to corroborate my worry that I was the problem, that I was the equivalent of an electrical short, impeding the crucial energy flow required between regressor and stenographer.

Following one month of failed regressions, however, Madame Ackermann turned her frustration on me. What did you eat this morning? Nothing containing garlic, I hope? Did you dream about buzzards or poppies? Are there stones in your pocket that might contain traces of quartz?

Prior to our meetings, Madame Ackermann began sealing herself
inside her Faraday cage, a copper cubicle in her basement that blocked all electromagnetic waves, radio frequencies, and wireless signals and was, for psychics, like being forced into a coma. She’d eat her steel-cut oats and read the morning paper in her Faraday, hoping to rest her mind before our sessions.

This ritual made no difference.

Soon she began grousing about innocuous behaviors of mine. I made too much noise in the Barcelona chair, which had a tendency to creak in that fleshy high-pitched way peculiar to Barcelona chairs. My breathing was erratic, distracting. My ecological laundry detergent smelled of rhubarb. I switched detergents, I sat with perfect stillness in the Barcelona chair, I counted each inhale and exhale (five counts in, eight counts out), to achieve absolute breathing regularity. Still Madame Ackermann could not regress. Instead she fell asleep. She’d wake up an hour later and ask me to read back to her, in its entirety, the nothing that she’d reported from her journey.

Compounding her frustration was this: Madame Ackermann had been hired, while on a summer vacation to the Hebrides, by a French film studies academic who’d been staying at her hotel, a man named Colophon Martin, to perform a freelance regression.

Colophon needed her help to find the missing second reel of a propaganda film commissioned by fascist politician and founder of the French
Front National
Jean-Marie Le Pen. This film had been shot by an artist Madame Ackermann referred to as the Leni Riefenstahl of France (I was not, at this point, aware that she possessed any other name), a woman who’d disappeared in 1984 and was presumed dead. Colophon asked Madame Ackermann if she might, during one of her regressions, find her way to the Leni Riefenstahl of France’s office at the Paris Institute of Geophysics and take note of the serial number stamped on the underside of her film safe. The missing reel, his research had led him to conclude (he was writing
a book about this Leni Riefenstahl of France), remained inside that film safe, and that film safe belonged to one of five possible collectors of old film safes, none of whom would cop to possessing the missing reel, because they hoped to sell it to a private collector for a great deal of money. However, if he could get the precise number of the film safe he could check it against the auction house records and file for government repossession under some French law that protected treasures of national cultural significance.

So Madame Ackermann had agreed to regress herself to Paris between the years of 1983 and 1984, when the Leni Riefenstahl of France was employed by this geophysics institute, and e-mail Colophon with the number of the film safe.

But by the middle of September, no successful regressions to Paris had been achieved. Also by the middle of September, Madame Ackermann’s attitude toward me, as witness to or cause of her troubles, had brittled considerably.

What choice did I have? I knew what happened to the students Madame Ackermann disliked, and I was becoming one of those students. That I should have been selected as her protégée, the ultimate Initiate of Promise, came as a surprise to no one in the Workshop more than me; even though I’d started school as one of the most heralded Initiates of Promise (my entrance exam scores placed me at the top of my class), my mind had responded poorly to training. I’d proven slow to grasp even the most basic concepts in her Basics seminar (constructive triangulation, for example; wavelike vs. particle-like operations of consciousness, for example), and I’d failed to be regressed during her office hours. And yet, over Franz, who had been regressed ten times (once without Madame Ackermann’s assistance), over Maurice, who was descended from the famous Moriarty, over Rebecca, whose automatic writing samples were, according to Madame Ackermann,
stained-glass windows unto the astral abyss
, I had been chosen. By my idol, one of parapsychological
scholarship’s most renowned stars, a woman who’d been awarded, at the age of twenty-eight, the occult equivalent of a MacArthur and who heart-scramblingly resembled—with her black veil of hair and winking, shards-of-mica eyes that suggested a smile was forthcoming even when it never was—an enigmatic photograph I’d cherished of my mother. I had been chosen. And I could not, I decided, be unchosen.

Scattered claps from the birthday guests.

“Speech!” yelled Professor Blake, holding an upturned martini glass on his head.

I overheard Professor Yuen complain to Professor Penry that Madame Ackermann’s Fenrir story didn’t benefit from retellings; over the years, it had come to sound like the plot of an inane children’s book.

Madame Ackermann fanned away the applause, already concluded. Then she proposed they play a few rounds of Spooky Action at a Distance, a mental telepathy parlor game during which the “thrower” mentally projects the image of an object and the “catchers” compete over who can identify the object first.

Because it was her birthday party, Madame Ackermann designated herself the SAD thrower.

“Not fair,” yelled Professor Yuen. She accused Madame Ackermann of throwing torques, wherein the image that’s telepathically communicated shape-shifts mid-journey. Professor Yuen deemed such practices
dirty playing
.

“Torques are not dirty,” said Madame Ackermann, implying, by her intonation, that Professor Yuen was sexually unadventurous. “But in deference to your blunter powers of perception, Karen, I promise to throw no torques.”

A handful of guests chuckled. It was no secret that Madame Ackermann and Professor Yuen had been squabbling for months over the Workshop’s financial woes. Madame Ackermann, who liked to remind people that “esoteric means ‘intended for an initiated few,’ ” wanted to introduce a reverse scholarship system, in which students would be charged for getting poor grades and monopolizing professors whose energies might be more worthily expended on Initiates of Promise. Professor Yuen believed this violated some discrimination clause in the school’s bylaws, to which Madame Ackermann replied, “talentless people need to learn more, thus they should pay more. It would be discriminatory against the Initiates of Promise to have it otherwise.”

(“Greatness cannot be taught,” Madame Ackermann was known to say. To which Professor Yuen habitually rejoined: “You mean
you
cannot teach it.”)

Madame Ackermann shut her eyes and tucked her top knuckles into the front pockets of her jeans. She crooked her head forward, knocking from behind her ears two glossy plaits of hair that individuated into strands and bead-curtained her face from view. She clicked the wooden heels of her Dr. Scholl’s three times and threw.

A telepathic novice, I had no intention of catching Madame Ackermann’s throw. Two years of study were required before we initiates were permitted to attempt acts of mental telepathy, and no initiate was accepted into Madame Ackermann’s advanced workshop until they’d first proven their psychic fitness by petrifying a piece of meat. Indeed. For two hours a day during August and leading up to the meeting of the first classes in September, all rising third-years dedicated their energies toward petrifying a one-pound chunk of pork, stashed out of sight on a high bookshelf in our rooms. Despite the rising third-years’ familiarity with Bell’s Theorem, the success rate for this exercise was pitifully low, and explained why the initiate dormitory, by the end of August, stank
like an abattoir. Even so, each year one or two initiates managed to arrive for the first day of class with a blackened, odorless object in a book bag, one that resembled a mummified human head. (Madame Ackermann kept her own petrified meat samples, cracked in half, atop her desk. Hers were like geodes—fanged, crystallized, a display of gorgeous knives.)

Which is to say that I had no intention, given my lack of training and run of academic failures, of participating in the SAD game; I was happy enough to be the spectator to a sport with no balls and no visible signs of participation save a few bunched-up brows and jalandara-bandha-tucked chins. I did, however, create a contest for myself—I decided to test if I could read in a catcher’s expression his or her clear reception of Madame Ackermann’s throw.

In particular I concentrated on the boyishly moist Professor Penry, who, after Madame Ackermann, was the most sought professor, and who’d recently returned to the Workshop following a year’s “reprieve,” forced upon him by the administration because of an affair with a second-year initiate, now mother to his infant son.

So I was looking at Professor Penry when his face, sheenier now due to his enthusiastic martini consumption, receded into a haze of pink, tinted on the edges by a ring of blue. The pink moved counterclockwise and mutated into a funnel, at the far end of which I saw a black spider with silver legs.

“Spider,” I heard Professor Yuen call out.

“Spider,” confirmed Professor Penry.

“Spider,” said Professor Blake.

But then something unexpected occurred. The spider continued to evolve. It caught a leg in the candy-cotton whirl (or so it appeared); the funnel dismembered the spider, its legs cycling about like the metal remnants of a shuttle drifting through deep space. As they approached me, the pieces reassembled into a very familiar shape.

“Spider,” said an unidentifiable someone.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said the emeritus and senile Professor Wibley. “I can see nothing but a piece of bacon.”

“It’s not a spider,” I said.

Nobody heard me.

“It’s not a spider,” I repeated. “It’s a Barcelona chair.”

The moment I said “Barcelona chair” the vision evaporated, leaving me naked before a great room’s worth of eyes, but none so penetratingly set upon me as Madame Ackermann’s.

Glaring between her bead curtains of hair, her single visible eye appearing not unlike a funnel that could tear me limb from limb should I catch a toe in it, Madame Ackermann said, “I’m sorry, Julia. It was a spider.”

I receded into the landing’s shadow. I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew she was lying. This disturbed me, but not for the reasons it ought to have disturbed me. I felt humiliated, as I had when she’d insisted on telling the professors that I was her archivist, thereby more or less announcing that I had failed as her stenographer. She’d invited me to her party, I began to suspect, to embarrass me.

This was, I later learned, the mildest interpretation of her intentions.

The throwing continued. Keeping her promise to Professor Yuen, Madame Ackermann stuck to dull, unevolving objects: A hurricane lamp missing its shade. A tin trunk with an overbite. A chipped enamel skillet. A dust-jacket-less copy of
The Joy of Cooking
. It was like being at a metaphysical yard sale. That she should be throwing old and broken domestic items could, in the kindliest of scenarios, be seen as a form of housecleaning—Madame Ackermann, on her forty-third birthday, wanted to dispense with the deadweight of her mental storage space—but could also, and less charitably, be read as a direct insult to her birthday guests. Madame
Ackermann was known for her unsubtle throwing subtexts, especially when Professor Yuen was involved, and she’d been in such a foul mood since her regression troubles began that it seemed justifiable to her, perhaps, to pelt her schadenfreudy colleagues with telepathic junk.

But I was far more transfixed by this: not only could I receive everything Madame Ackermann threw, but I received her throws nearly a full second before anyone else. I didn’t know how this could be; I’d yet to even attempt to petrify meat or earn beyond a B in any of my courses. And yet I proved to be unexpectedly good at SAD; I was, based on my observations, the best player of SAD in the room. Better than Professor Penry (who, granted, had had too much to drink), better even than Professor Yuen, who, despite Madame Ackermann’s slight, was the furthest thing from a blunt perceiver.