The Vanishers (9 page)

“I should also tell you that I’ve slept with him,” she said.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” I said.

“Just a little pro forma full disclosure,” she said. “If you learn later that he and I slept together it would make the previous months that you and I worked with each other seem like a prolonged period of betrayal.”

“I already have a job,” I said. I clutched the padded arms of my chair; I squeezed them so hard I touched its underlying skeleton.
This mortal chair
, I thought. “A position. I’m sorry. What are you offering me?”

“I can’t disclose the details,” she said, “because Colophon is a control nut and insists on telling you himself. Also,” she continued, “I suppose, if I were to be honest, I’m in a not-so-direct way warning
you
not to sleep with Colophon. According to my Jungian stepfather I’m pathologically territorial and view all females as competition, even for people or things I no longer want.”

A woman emerged from the elevator sobbing quietly, her dignified sorrow amplified to hysterics by the lobby’s acoustics.

Alwyn squeezed her temples between a thumb and forefinger.

“Could you help me up to my room?” she said. “I need to lie down.”

I started to refuse. I had done for Alwyn what any sick stranger owed another sick stranger, and now I could go home. I imagined exiting the Regnor and walking past the shellacked roasts in the butcher’s window, free from whatever complications a further relationship with Alwyn and Colophon Martin and a “project” concerning Dominique Varga would doubtless guarantee, until I remembered the tedious existence, momentarily upset by this woman and her engineered accident, my leaving would force me to resume. The return to my low-ceilinged apartment, the ceaseless strobe lights on the backs of my eyes, the steroid creams that smelled like mildewed bath towels, the friendlessness I’d cultivated
as a means of limiting my social shame to a circle of one, the pill routine, the stupid job, the loneliness, the fact that my life, at twenty-six, had already notched onto a joyless track, the only derailment option one I would never, given my family history, consider.

I caught an inadvertent glimpse of someone in the lobby mirror; I mistook that someone, me, for a frightened old lady, tensely palpating the chair in which she sat, appearing like an Alzheimer’s victim who’s emerged from a sundowner fugue with even less of an idea than usual who or where she is.

A disruption to the given system.

Even knowing what I know now, I cannot blame myself for making what would reveal itself to be a very poor decision.

I stayed.

Alwyn’s room smelled of frequently vacuumed carpets. While I poured the cappuccinos into a water pitcher and removed the contents of the minibar in order to chill it, she lay on the sofa and told me about Colophon’s involvement with the Lost Film Conference.

“I thought he was a control nut,” I said of Colophon.

“He trusts me with his backstory,” she said. “I’m his authorized context provider.”

“That’s your job title?”

“Job title would imply I was paid,” she said.

“I guess that’s why he had sex with you,” I said. “As a form of compensation.”

She smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth.

“I like you,” she said. She seemed more impressed with herself for liking me than with for me being likable.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Seriously,” she said. “I don’t tend to get along with women.”

Reclining on the sofa with a can of minibar beer pressed against her forehead, Alwyn told me how, while researching his book on Dominique Varga, Colophon had become acquainted with a man named Timothy Kincaid, a billionaire Cincinnati businessman plagued by Howard Hughes-ish behavioral oddities who was, more notably, the biggest private collector of Varga’s films. Though Kincaid initially refused to share with Colophon his Varga collection, he’d been impressed by Colophon’s résumé and hired him to help his company, TK Ltd., archive the film holdings generated by Kincaid’s pet project, a suicide prevention service called vanish.org.

Best I could ascertain from Alwyn’s description of it, vanish.org functioned as a type of witness protection program for people who weren’t in danger of being killed by anyone but themselves.

“Kincaid studied the negative psychological effects of what he called ‘disambiguation,’ ” Alwyn explained, “meaning the supposed clarity that follows the removal of ambiguity, which is the counterproductive goal of so much talk therapy these days.”

“Disambiguation?” I said. My stepmother Blanche was an occasional disambiguator on Wikipedia; when she wasn’t tamping her manias on the potting wheel, she was disambiguating a Wikipedia page on rice.

“Clarity, it turns out, is a death sentence,” Alwyn said. “Kincaid decided that by introducing patients to ‘reambiguation,’ i.e., by removing a person from his or her ambiguity-free, suicide-provoking context, he could offer them a viable suicide alternative.”

“How does a person reambiguate?” I asked.

“Kincaid prefers to call it vanishing,” Alwyn said.

“How does a person vanish?” I said.

“They leave and never go home,” she said. “It’s a very simple process.”

When Kincaid started the service, Alwyn said, each family
received a detailed personal letter explaining the loved one’s reasons for vanishing. Unfortunately these letters were often mistaken for suicide notes, which led to confusion with the police and the morgues.

“They might as well be suicide notes,” I said.

“How so?”

“To the survivors,” I said, “they amount to the same thing.”

“Technically there are no survivors,” Alwyn corrected. “Nobody died.”

“To the family members, then,” I said. “These films are essentially suicide notes.”

“Interesting,” she said. “So you’re saying you see no difference between your mother being dead and your mother being alive and living somewhere else?”

I stared at her. When she claimed that she and Colophon knew everything about me, she meant it.

“My mother didn’t leave a note,” I said.

“We’re aware,” Alwyn said.

“Of course I see a difference,” I mumbled.

Kincaid, she continued, hired video artists to shoot footage of the vanishers. The subsequent collection of vanishing films was stored at the TK Ltd. warehouse in Cincinnati so that family members, friends, acquaintances could view the testimonies of their vanished beloveds. Kincaid described his warehouse as a living mortuary, a hopeful grief museum.

“Colophon decided that the films could serve a wider population—that the viewing of these films by people who’d lost a loved one to actual death or to suicide, could be therapeutic. Which is how he came up with the idea for the Lost Film Conference.”

“That’s kind of a misnomer,” I said. “The films aren’t lost. And neither are the people.”

“The attendees are metaphorically lost, by and large. It’s not
a complete misnomer. You saw the weepers in the lobby. Most of them had loved ones who were killed on 9/11. The weepers hold out some hope that their husband or daughter made it out of the buildings, realized they could disappear without a trace, caught a bus west or north or south, and started a new life.”

I still struggled to understand how this qualified as a preferable scenario.

Alwyn mentioned, in an offhanded way, that she herself had recently vanished. She complained about her mother and stepfather, neither of whom had gone to see her vanishing film and who were wasting thousands of dollars each month on a private detective.

“You were suicidal?” I said. I tried to spot the talent in her—because it was a talent, self-killing. I didn’t possess it. I’d tried to find evidence of my mother’s talent in photographs, but anything can appear meaningful at a backward glance: Hands clamped beneath opposing armpits on a warm spring day. Lips pinched shut against (it can appear, in retrospect) the release of a nuclear misery. The innocence of every gesture read as a clue to a future murder no one foresaw.

But Alwyn—I couldn’t see the killer in her. She was haphazard, missing buttons, one shoulder always half out of her cardigan and roots that grew pale, not dark.

Even then: Alwyn’s story did not add up.

“If they’d bother to see my film,” Alwyn said, “they’d respect my reasons for not wanting to be found, they’d stop trying to find me.”

“But what if a person changes her mind after she vanishes?” I said.

“A very small percentage of people unvanish themselves after a few years. But not the majority. Though quite a lot of people choose
to
re
vanish. That’s common. Because disambiguation recurs, after a time. Your life becomes your life, and you need to leave it again.”

This seemed less a comforting solution than a stressful warding off of the inevitable. I imagined the dread and hopelessness suffered by the person who’d vanished so many times that there was no place else to go. She was known to everyone. It was a fear not unlike the one suffered by Blanche, who took medication to combat her mood swings. After a year or two the drug stopped working, as though her body had figured out the trick being played upon it, and formulated a runaround. She’d visit her doctor, who’d prescribe a new drug, and she’d return home to await its failure. Her body registered cures as invaders, as an enemy to defeat. At some point there would be no more cures. Her body would be too familiar, or would know too much.

“Too bad,” Alwyn said, “there was an unvanishing panel this morning you might have enjoyed.”

She flapped a hand toward the conference program. Most of the events were unmoderated screenings, for example “Selected Vanishing Films January 1, 2007–August 31, 2008,” interspersed by panel screenings with titles such as “The Therapeutic Value of Witnessing” and “The Trauma Survivor as Cultural Hero.”

“I’d like to see one of these other panels,” I said.

“Now?” Alwyn asked. “I was going to shower.”

I recalled that a person with a maybe-concussion shouldn’t shower alone. Then I recalled that it wasn’t people with concussions but people prone to seizures. I hadn’t been allowed to shower alone for the month following my seizure at Madame Ackermann’s birthday party. Pam had sat on my toilet reading her course pack whenever I showered, so close to my naked body that I could smell her highlighter.

My phone alarm beeped, reminding me it was time to take my
6 p.m. pills. Also it reminded me: I had dinner plans with my father and Blanche.

“I’ve got to get going,” I said.

“But you need to meet Colophon,” Alwyn said. She sounded quite desperate. “He needs to tell you about the job.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have plans tonight.”

“How about tomorrow night?” she countered. “We’ll rendezvous in the hotel bar. They serve excellent whiskey sours.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

I pulled on my coat, shouldered my bag. I shook Alwyn’s hand and promised not to forget our meeting.

“Looking forward to it,” she said.

“Me too,” I said, my eyelid pulsing its silent alarm. What my mind no longer foresaw, my body did.

Back on the street, the temperature had dropped with the sun, but there was no wind, and walking down Eighth Avenue felt akin to being cryo-frozen, a gradual halting of bodily time. When I reached the Japanese restaurant Blanche had chosen I was pleasantly all-over numbed, a sensation I reinforced by knocking back, at the velveteen-tarped entryway, a pair of Vicodins.

“Julia!” said Blanche. Her yellow hair had grayed at the temples, lending her a punkishly off-kilter vibe that interacted really excellently, I thought, with her Icelandic sweater and her clogs.

Blanche stood and hugged me. And hugged me and hugged me. In contrast to my father’s duck-and-cover personality, Blanche was an energetic wrangler of other people’s messes, capable of dusting and watering the elephants that inhabited the many rooms of our farmhouse in Monmouth, the one in which my mother had killed
herself, the one my father, for reasons both evident and bewildering, refused to sell. Once he married Blanche, my father, with relief, ceded to her female expertise the duty of my physical and emotional upbringing, and thus she’d guided me, from the age of twelve, through a syllabus that focused on Trixie Belden mysteries, the New England arts of wood stacking, linoleum block printing, and chowder assembly, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She insisted that she and I memorize Plath’s
Ariel
; the poems, she said, might help me understand why my mother had done what she’d done. They hadn’t, but I’d liked them very much, and they’d provided for Blanche and me a form of jokey intimate patter, a coded way to bitch, in his presence, about my father’s occasional fits of chauvinistic pique, for example when he came home to find Blanche and I wielding Exacto knives over a pile of concrete-colored lino tiles, arguing over the most appropriately nondenominational holiday card image, the dinner chicken unroasted, the house a booked and scarved and sweatered mess.