The Vanishers (7 page)

I believed this, too.

I remained at the Workshop through the end of the semester even though I spent most of my waking hours in bed, too ill to attend class. Madame Ackermann released me from my stenographer/archivist duties and replaced me, “only until you feel well enough to resume your position,” with an initiate named Pam. At the behest of Madame Ackermann, Pam became my unofficial nursemaid, appearing at my apartment with tin-pan strudels and liter containers of broth. Because I was too weak to drive, Pam took me to my appointments at the hospital in the next town. There I was administered blood tests, screened for Lyme disease, lymphoma,
mono, lupus, and MS, prescribed antibiotics, anti-seizure meds, SSRIs. By winter break, I had been diagnosed with seven different diseases, fetal medical hunches that never survived the subsequent rounds of testing.

The very worst of my symptoms, however, was this: a chronic insomnia unhelped by the winking pricks of light I saw on the backsides of my eyelids. To close my eyes was akin to being flashed by a car’s high beams.

Before the Workshop closed for winter break, I received a letter from Professor Yuen suggesting that I take a leave of absence. She followed her suggestion with a citation of policy, something to the effect that new semesters could not be embarked upon until the incompletes issued the previous semester had been resolved.

On December 12, I packed my suitcases and broke my lease. I e-mailed Madame Ackermann to thank her for all she’d done, and two days later got an auto-response from her that said, “This message has no content.” Soon I began receiving regular spam from an online dating service whose e-mail handle was “aconcernedfriend”; their motto was “Anything Is Possible.” When I clicked the video attachment, all I saw was a blob of clockwise-spinning fog, inside of which I could occasionally discern the shape of a woman lying motionless on a bed.

Madame Ackermann, at least via the usual channels, never contacted me again.

The
first time I met Alwyn I mistook her for a Lydia.

It was just past lunchtime on a broody day in December, the sky issuing over Manhattan a slushy gruel. A girl hurried through the electronic glass doors of the Belgian Natural Fiber Flooring Company Showroom balancing, on one upturned palm, a molded takeout tray plugged with four coffee cups.

In the twelve months since I’d left the Workshop and assumed my position at the flooring company—literally, I’d been hired to
assume a position
, to sit for eight hours a day in a chair whose name, if it even had one, I never bothered to learn—I’d ascertained that the majority of our customers weren’t customers at all, but tourists who mistook me for an art installation. Despite its name the showroom showed very little save a clear Lucite desk, a jute rug—a barbed and unkempt thing, woven of coconut shell fibers and resembling, because of its swirled weave, the hair that collects over a shower drain—a red dial telephone, and me; as pedestrians walked by the plate glass that faced Park Avenue, I’d been instructed to hold the phone against my ear and move my lips. Because wires would have been visible behind the clear desk, the phone wasn’t connected; nonetheless, when a person entered the showroom I was to speak in prescripted Arabic to a pretend customer calling
from a state within the United Arab Emirates. When I asked my boss, a beautiful Belgian-Iraqi woman, about the significance of the Emirates, she responded, arms outstretched to indicate the whole of our white, hypercooled space, “Because we call this concept The Emirates.”

But this girl—I categorized her as an unusual customer. I noticed her sodden Mary Janes, her so-thin-it-was-pointless coat, the sticker adhered to her lapel; beneath the preprinted HELLO a person, presumably she, had written LYDIA in blue ink.

I experienced a twang of jealousy for these assistants and the interns of the city, robust young people running around in imprudent outerwear with no need for health insurance, people who were the same age as me but who’d proven immune to physical and psychological downturns lasting longer than a weekend matinee.

As this unusual customer beelined for my desk, however, she caught her toe on the corner of the jute rug and departed the floor, kraft tray outstretched and then released so that it collided with my chest as I’d been uttering in Arabic to no one, “I’ll transfer you to the sales department.”

The brown milk soaked my dress, but given that my late-morning round of pills had hummed into effect—blunting both my nerves and my reaction time—I felt neither the heat nor the shock.

The girl lay in a heap of coat, two fingers pressed above her eyebrow.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She peered upward through the Lucite desk, the curve of which distorted her head into an encephalitic swoop. She had red hair and blond roots that were the photographic negative of most roots, white instead of dark. They made her middle part seem two inches wide, a firebreak shaved over her skull that traced the exact path of the longitudinal brain fissure located beneath the bone.

“Huh,” I said, staring at that firebreak.

She palpated her left frontal lobe.

“Some people have an electrified steel plate inserted between their left and right brain hemispheres,” I said, wondering if perhaps she’d had this operation.

“What?” she said.

“To prevent bilateral contamination,” I said.

“I hardly think it’s that serious,” she said. “It was just a little graze.”

She trained her eyes spacily on my feet.

“I like your boots,” she said.

I was wearing my silver party boots, though I now considered them simply boots. The last party I’d attended I’d been felled by such a gutting attack of vertigo that I’d been forced to spend the night in the stairwell of the hostess’s apartment building, the flights of steps throbbing above me like a stressed vascular system. The last date I’d been on I’d bled from the mouth when kissed. My last visit to a restaurant I’d spent voiding my intestines in the unisex bathroom. Whereas I’d once been able to infiltrate other people’s lives and heads while I remained unknown to them, now the opposite was true. Everyone was an impenetrable stranger to me, while I proved a livid advertisement for myself. My symptoms were an ugly secret I couldn’t help but share. Save to go to my job or the occasional doctor appointment or yoga class taught by the soothing adherents of a Canadian named John, I’d become a hermit. If I could not prevent the nausea, the insomnia-provoking pricks of light on the insides of my eyelids, the canker sores, the explosive bowel, the numb extremities, the swollen joints, the eczema-covered hands, I could at least limit the unattractive way that people came to know me when I was anything but alone.

“Thank you,” I said of my boots.

“Your dress,” she said. “I’ve ruined it.”

“It’s fine,” I said, though it was not.

“And your rug,” she said.

“Not my rug,” I said.

“Do you have any stain remover?” she asked. “It’s important to apply stain remover within the first two minutes of the stain event.”

“I believe there’s some in the break room,” I said.

I started alone toward the break room, where there was a folding table and a charry old coffeemaker—we’d been told never to bring a customer to the break room—but it seemed lawsuit-worthy, not to mention very mean, to abandon a customer with a head injury.

“Come with me,” I said. “We’ll get you some ice.”

The girl stood woozily, though it’s possible she always stood that way—her body was a bad bit of engineering, her legs pick-thin and double-jointed, her large breasts seemingly transplanted from another girl.

“I don’t need ice,” said the girl. She held out her hand. “I’m Alwyn,” she said.

I glanced at her HELLO LYDIA nametag.

She unbuttoned her coat to reveal a mussy cardigan underneath, to which was affixed a HELLO ALWYN sticker. While Lydia wrote her name in architecturally precise caps, Alwyn’s script looped around like a piece of dropped string.

“I’m Julia,” I said.

I located the stain remover in the cupboard above the coffeemaker.

“Dry cleaners will scold you for pretreating a stain,” Alwyn said, “but thirty-five percent of stains can be positively impacted by pretreatment.”

“You know a lot about stains,” I observed as Alwyn, seated at the folding table, sprayed my dress.

“I’m the daughter of a textile magnate,” she said. “When I was
young I thought that meant he was a man to whom fabrics would gravitate and stick.”

“Are you in town on textile business?” I asked. This, of course, would explain why she had entered the showroom.

“I’m here for a conference,” she said.

The conference was being held at a hotel I hadn’t heard of called the Regnor.

“There,” she said, finishing with my dress. “Let’s do the carpet.”

She stood up. She sat back down.

“Dizzy,” she said.

My cell phone rang. It was the Belgian-Iraqi woman.

She said she’d heard there’d been a mishap at the Emirates. I confirmed this to be the case. She ordered me to lock the doors.

“But I have a customer right now,” I said.

“Get rid of the customer,” she said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

For what would prove to be the first but not the last time in our relationship, I wondered how to get rid of Alwyn.

“Why don’t I walk you back to your hotel,” I offered.

To replace the coffees she’d spilled, I took her to a Greek café that served hot beverages in Styrofoam cups, the kind with the rims you can’t resist biting.

As I was waiting for her to pay, my cell phone rang again. The Belgian-Iraqi woman, I assumed, checking to make sure I’d locked the showroom doors. I dug around in my bag, trying to distinguish by touch the plastic of my many pill bottles from the plastic of my phone. The plastic of my phone pretended, to the eye, to be stainless steel, and to the touch it did feel slightly colder, though perhaps that was my imagination.

It was not the Belgian-Iraqi woman.

“Hi,” said my father.

“Hi,” I said.

While he said nothing I held the phone a safe few inches from my ear, his audible unease registering to me like a neglected teakettle’s whistle. He and my stepmother Blanche had just arrived from Monmouth, New Hampshire, where I’d grown up, where they still lived. They’d come to Manhattan on the pretense of seeing a ceramics exhibit of a onetime mistress of Duchamp, but their real reason, I knew, was to check on me.

Finally he spoke.

“I’m just making sure we’re still on for dinner,” he said.

“We’re still on,” I said. My poor father acted around me like a guy expecting to be dumped.

I asked him what else he and Blanche had planned during their visit.

“Tomorrow I’m having lunch with a former colleague from South America,” he offered. “He’s in town delivering a paper about the sinkholes in Guatemala City.” My father also specialized in sinkholes, though his area of expertise was a man-made phenomenon called “chemical weathering.”

“The Guatemala City sinks,” my father continued, “certainly have, I’m not denying it, an inexplicably perfect roundness.”

He paused. He’d been headed somewhere with this information, but he’d temporarily forgotten where.

“Oh,” he said, remembering. “The inexplicable perfect roundness. Did you know there’s such a thing as Paranormal Geology?”

“I didn’t know that, no,” I said. Of course I knew it, but it excited him to think he was telling me something I didn’t.

“I thought you might get a kick out of that,” he said, making it clear that he absolutely did not get a kick out of it—territorial incursions by soft science into hard he found distressing—but that he could, as a father, allow himself to get a kick out of my getting a kick out of it, and wasn’t that something?

I had to agree that it was.

More ill-at-ease silence. I held the phone away from my head, the full length of my arm. I recognized, however, now as always, it wasn’t his fault that he behaved toward me as he did. To be honest, I doubt I would have been able to receive his adoration in any less clumsy or oblique a manner. Our relationship was a sensitive coproduction, no one person’s brainchild, no one person’s fault.

“And so how are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Good, good. By any chance did you get the article Blanche sent about candida?”

“The opera?”

“The systemic yeast infection,” he said. “A common affliction among unmarried women in their twenties. You should ask your doctors about it.”

I promised I would. This prompted him to launch into a story about a colleague who’d contracted a rare variety of flesh-eating bacteria while hiking in New Hampshire, but none of the doctors could quite believe he’d contracted the flesh-eating bacteria where he claimed to have contracted it, because this particular flesh-eating bacteria had never been documented so far north of the equator.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this anecdote. That doctors were immune to surprise? That his colleague was a hypochondriac, an amnesiac, or a liar?

The latter was the more likely interpretation, given my father and Blanche were effortlessly, incurably healthy people, and thus convinced that a variety of mental weakness must plague any person who wasn’t equally vigorous. Though neither my father nor Blanche had ever said as much, I knew they both figured me for a hysteric, Blanche repeatedly plying me with copies of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
The Yellow Wallpaper
and reminding me that
“hysteria, in Greek, means ‘traveling uterus.’ ” They were concerned but skeptical; they doubted the symptoms, if not the existence of a cause.