The Vanishers (4 page)

This realization—that I, without the proper training, excelled at SAD—made me reconsider a few other happenings of the past few weeks. For example, the missing film reel sought by Colophon Martin. True, Madame Ackermann had failed to regress herself to the Paris Institute of Geophysics circa 1983–1984. But of this failure I’d made certain she was unaware.

In the second week of September I decided that unless Madame Ackermann awoke from her nap to some evidence that she’d regressed, my presence would be eradicated. I’d lose my position as her stenographer; I’d be demoted from Initiate of Promise to, as she termed the less adept students at the Workshop, a Mortgage Payment, i.e., a hopelessly untalented person whose only conceivable contribution to the world of psychic scholarship was to help pay, with their tuition money, the Workshop’s bills. Starting around that
second week of September, I guaranteed that Madame Ackermann awoke to find, curled on the floor between us, a pile of scrawled-upon ghost-grid paper, from which I would then read aloud.

In other words: I made shit up.

The risk was considerable; typically, per Miranda, Madame Ackermann emerged from her regressions with an accurate memory of what she’d reported. I thus worried that when Madame Ackermann awoke to be told, for example, that she’d spoken in the voice of an Argentinian-born psychotherapist living in London during the Falklands War, a woman who’d engaged in amatory adventures with her Cabinet patients in order to acquire strategic military information for her brother, a commander of the Argentine navy, she would be perplexed and then suspicious, recalling none of this.

So I did some research. Madame Ackermann, ironically, provided me my own best alibi. While completing her postdoc at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, she’d written a paper called “Trance Qualities and the Ideal of Bodily Departure,” which claimed the ideal trance state to be indistinguishable from what she called a
living death
. Such deep trances—identifiable by certain measurable physiological responses, such as heart rate—allowed a person to travel beyond the boundaries of consciousness, resulting in regressions of unusual detail. But most notable, for my purposes, was this: the living-dead regressor awoke from these trances with no memory of where she’d been. She relied, for proof of her journey, on her stenographer.

During the meeting prior to my first planned deception, I set the stage for her success. I woke her from her nap (she was snoring) in a false panic. She’d ceased breathing, I said. She’d turned gray, I said. I’d thought she was dead, I said.

Madame Ackermann ordered me to get the blood pressure cuff she kept in her desk drawer. She was so pleased with my reading (I
divided her actual numbers in half) that she invited me to stay for coffee.

When we met the next day, I allowed Madame Ackermann to nap without interruption. I wandered around her house; I snooped. I discovered that she kept nothing in her refrigerator but olives, kefir, and an uncorked, half-drunk bottle of Vouvray. That her cupboards housed stacks of melamine dinner plates and a few foggy plastic bags of bulk nuts. That atop her bathroom toilet tank she kept a catalog that sold overpriced sheets in shades of whites named
qualia
and
bastille
.

I returned to her study, but instead of sitting in the Barcelona chair I sat in Madame Ackermann’s Knoll desk chair, an original Charles Pollock design upholstered in royal blue wool and much more comfortable than the Barcelona chair. I flipped on her antique desktop computer that made hideous gear-grinding noises as it booted up. First I read the newspaper. Then I checked her search history. I was unsurprised to learn she’d been researching a procedure wherein a metal plate is inserted between the two lobes of the brain in order to prevent a condition called
bilateral contamination
. Typically recommended for psychics twice her age, the procedure was described on this particular site as a “facelift for the mind.”

Then I unsheathed the Düsseldorf pen and began to write.

Madame Ackermann, when she gave me this pen, told me that its creator, before he turned his brilliance to writing utensils, was an unacknowledged pioneer in parabolic ski design. His pens were called “hypnosis tools for the hand.” The mind, she said, is freer to wander if it’s not attached to the mechanics of transcription.

I didn’t have an exact story in mind for Madame Ackermann’s regression, so I began by writing about a house by a lake that looked quite a bit like a lake house in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where I’d vacationed as a teenager with my father and then-new
stepmother, Blanche. I described the path through the woods that led to the dock, though as I described this path I understood that it wasn’t going to lead me to the dock. And it did not. I emerged from the woods at the end of the hallway of an apartment building to see a young woman knocking on a door. An older woman in a sailor-striped shirt, her face out of focus, let the young woman into the apartment. She unbuttoned the younger woman’s coat, she positioned her against the bedroom window and handed her a video camera before closing the drapes around her, but not so tightly that the camera’s lens could not film the room through the fabric gap. A key turned in the door and a young man entered. He stared at the older woman with a look of revulsion and intimidation as, without speaking to her, he undressed. The woman pushed him onto the bed with a veined hand and said, before she violently kissed him,
Who’s pitiful now?

The pen, as promised, had a seductive snaking motion that required little effort, forming words that were mine though I could claim no real attachment to them.

I was still writing when Madame Ackermann began to stir.

When I read the story back to her, it was as if I, too, were encountering it for the first time. I told her about the hallway, the young woman, the young man.

“And there was an older woman,” I said. “But you couldn’t see her face.”

“Then how did I know she was older?” she asked.

“You said her hands looked as though they’d spent a lot of time squeezing other people’s necks,” I said, recalling how they’d appeared to me.

And so our meetings normalized. Madame Ackermann was thrilled by her living-dead trances. I was thrilled that Madame Ackermann had renewed faith in me, and thus dedicated very little
thought as to why my deceptions were so easy. I had found a way to be enabled by Madame Ackermann’s psychically powerful presence, or this is what I told myself, and thus our relationship proceeded as I’d always imagined it might—me the worshipful initiate, she the skilled mentor.

Except, of course, we were neither of these.

Here was the day in early October when things began to go wrong.

I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house to find her in a manic frenzy. Her feet were bare, her hair plumed from a Pucci scarf knotted on the top of her head, her eyes raccooned by day-old mascara.

“Julia,” she said, tumbling her hands as though she were plotting an underling’s demise (she’d had a case of dry skin she couldn’t eradicate; she was forever rubbing Vaseline into her palms), “we must get to work
instantly
.” She claimed that we needed
by that afternoon
to procure the serial number stamped on the bottom of the film safe formerly belonging to the Leni Riefenstahl of France.

I sat in the Barcelona chair. Outside I could hear the witchy baying of coyotes that I’d mistaken, when I first arrived in East Warwick, for wolves.

Madame Ackermann handed me a mug of lapsong. She blended her own and the result was, in my opinion, a fair approximation of septic effluent. She arranged herself on the Biedermeier and within five minutes was asleep, a filament of drool catching the gray New Hampshire light through her study windows, making her look as though she were seeping mercury from the mouth. She clutched in her hand a scrap of paper, like a boarding pass, with her intended destination: Paris Institute of Geophysics. Room 315 Tour Zamansky.

I switched from the Barcelona to the Pollock—not to write, but to google. I ascertained, via a crazed collector’s website, that the best film safes were produced in France; I guessed the Leni Riefenstahl of France would be partial to French film safes, and, given her fascist leanings, she’d have chosen a safe produced by the best of the French film safe manufacturers, a company called Le Polinaire. Le Polinaire, I learned, marked their safes with a seven-digit serial number hyphenated and concluding with two letters—for example, 1234567-AA.

I’d never been gifted at probability calculations, but I estimated that my chances of guessing the correct safe number were in the vicinity of ten to the seventh power multiplied by thirty-six twice, or something equivalently shitty.

I returned to the Barcelona chair. I stared at Madame Ackermann, snoring.
Regress
, I urged her.
Paris Institute of Geophysics, Room 315 Tour Zamansky. Tell me the serial number on the bottom of the film safe
.

Madame Ackermann stirred. She mumbled.

“What did you say?” I asked her.

“Fifteen,” she said.

Useless Madame Ackermann.

I retreated to her kitchen; I slugged kefir from the bottle. On her refrigerator she’d magneted the free calendar delivered by the local heating oil supplier, each page featuring a photograph of a month-appropriate New England scene. Madame Ackermann’s calendar was correctly turned to the October page and its picturesque snapshot of a pond papered over by bright red leaves, an image that didn’t make you think of lots and lots of blood only if you refused to stare at it for very long.

Returning to her study I sat in the Pollock chair and began to write—not words, but a series of tight wavy lines, a block of EKG squiggles. I continued to let the pen skate around the page, watching
as Madame Ackermann slipped a hand under her blouse to scratch her rib cage.

Time passed. I tried to imagine the Tour Zamansky, a building I figured would be Gothic, constructed of bluestone and varicosed by dead ivy. I climbed a staircase, I entered a door, I sat on a leather couch, positioned across from a mirror that leaned against a wall of bookshelves. And here’s where I started to see things that surprised me. For example, the couch on which I sat appeared in the mirror, but I did not. Where I should have been I saw a hypnotically flickering bright spot, like a tear in an old film print. Numbers flashed in that gap where my face should have been; so did a dismembered hand.

In her laundry room, Madame Ackermann’s drier alarm goose-honked the end of its cycle, and the Tour Zamansky, such as it dimly existed for me, disappeared. I checked my watch; I was surprised to note that an hour had passed.

Madame Ackermann slept on.

My calves ached. I lay on the floor and did some runner’s stretches. I returned to the desk.

I stared at my notepad.

During my visualization of the Tour Zamansky, I had somehow drawn that heating oil calendar pond covered in leaves, each leaf a puzzle piece interlocking with its neighbors. I squinted at the drawing, the outlines of the leaves blurring when I did so and almost hieroglyphing into meaning.

But when I viewed the drawing peripherally—a trick we’d studied first semester, peripheral vision forcing a bend in the optic nerve, and explaining what the less scientifically minded referred to as the power of the third eye—I saw that something extra, or that something else, and I saw it as clearly as if I were staring at a license plate: 3258432-TR.

On a clean piece of paper I wrote this down, and preceded it by
a detailed and hopefully convincing description of Room 315 right down to an ashtray I hadn’t seen overflowing with olive pits.

I stood over Madame Ackermann, still sleeping, still scratching herself. She’d pushed her blouse up to expose her stomach and the boundary lace of her bra. Her ribs jutted vulnerably upward, causing the skin to drop toward her bellybutton before rising again on either side to upholster the prows of her hipbones.

I hovered my hand over her bellybutton; I absorbed, through my palm, her ambient heat. Madame Ackermann had decided against having children, she’d told me, because she couldn’t bear to part with her stomach. At the time this had struck me as an excessively vain preoccupation, even for her. But observing her stomach now, radiating a trapped solar glow like a desert dune, I had to agree that it was worth whatever human sacrifices she’d made to preserve it.