The Vanishers

Part One

The attack, we later agreed, occurred at Madame Ackermann’s forty-third birthday party.

The evening was typical for late October — icebox air, onyx sky, White Mountains humped darkly in the distance, and peripherally visible as a more opaque variety of night. Because I knew that Madame Ackermann’s A-frame would be underheated, I wore a wool jumper and wool tights and a pair of silver riding boots purchased from the Nepalese import store, run by an aging WASP hippie. Hers was one of seven businesses in the town of East Warwick, New Hampshire (there was also a vegan pizza parlor, a hardware store, a purveyor of Fair Isle knitwear, a bank, a pub, and a real estate agent), a town that existed in the minds of some to provide basic material support to the faculty and students at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology — referred to locally, and by those in the field, as the Workshop.

That I — Julia Severn, a second-year initiate and Madame Ackermann’s stenographer — had been invited to her forty-third birthday party was an anomaly that I failed to probe. When I let slip to my stenographic predecessor, Miranda, that I had been asked to Madame Ackermann’s for a social occasion, Miranda tried to hide her wounded incredulity by playing with the pearl choker she habitually wore and, in apprehensive moments such as these, rolled into her mouth, allowing the pearls to yank on the corners of her lips like a horse’s bit.

Madame Ackermann observed a firm boundary between her academic and personal lives, Miranda said, removing her pearls halfway, wedging them now into the recession above her chin.

She was not the kind of professor, Miranda cautioned, straining her necklace’s string with her lower jaw until it threatened to snap, to invite an initiate to her house for a social occasion, not even as a volunteer passer of hors d’oeuvres.

Miranda’s jealousy was understandable. Madame Ackermann’s attentions were the prize over which we initiates competed, the reason we’d come to the Workshop — to study with her, hopefully, yes, but in more pitiable terms to partake of her forbidding, imperial aura by walking behind her on the many footpaths that vivisectioned the campus quad into slivers of mud or grass or snow.

Thus, I reassured Miranda (who, despite the year she’d spent as her stenographer, clearly did not know Madame Ackermann), one of the many admirable qualities Madame Ackermann possessed was that, even as a relentless investigator of past lives, she could permit bygones to be bygones. Yes, she’d selected me, from a pool of thirty-five initiates, to be her stenographer, and yes we’d both immediately come to regret this choice of hers. But after weeks of misunderstandings, deceptions, and hostilities between us, Madame Ackermann was not above extending an olive branch.

And so on the night of October 25 I donned my silver boots and, awash in optimism and specialness, drove to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame. As I passed the custodian-lit Workshop buildings, their windows flickering behind the spruces, I allowed myself to view the scene from the future perspective of an older self, wrought by nostalgia for this place I’d yet to leave or miss. In order to prolong my anticipation of what was sure to be a momentous evening, I took the scenic way along the Connecticut River; in the moonlight, the water, whisked to a sharp chop by the wind, appeared seized into a treacherous hoar of ice. I spied a hunter emerging from an old barn whom I mistook, for the shadowy half second before my car beams illuminated him, to be wearing the decapitated head of a deer. A bat died against my windshield. And yet despite these dark portents I somehow failed to divine, as I turned off the river road and began the slow ascent to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame, that I would never drive along this river again. Or that I would drive along this river again, yes, but I would no longer be the sort of person who wore silver boots to parties and believed that bygones could be bygones.

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.

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.

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.

I noticed, too, what Madame Ackermann had been scratching — an angry patch of eczema the size of a quarter, high on her rib cage. Unlike rashes on the wane, this one bulged at its borders. Its rampaging had just begun.

The poor woman, I thought. Her psychic blockage had taken its toll. Her face was savaged by stress — the puppet folds straddling her mouth deeper, her eyelids the dark turquoise color of those just-beneath-the-skin wrist veins. She really did look kind of dead. I angled a cheek a millimeter from her mouth to test if she was breathing. Her tea exhalations condensed on my skin, hot, cold, hot, cold.

She was alive. Sort of. Maybe, I thought, I should put her out of her misery. Finish the drawn-out job that age, or mental weakness, had just begun. Nothing but more failure awaited her. I turned my head and put my mouth atop her mouth. To inhale her life force, I told myself. To thieve the last spark of vitality from her. I kissed her. Her mouth spasmed beneath mine — kissing me back? Or maybe struggling for air. Whatever she needed, whatever she possessed, I blocked it, I stole it. I pressed downward until I could feel, beneath her lips, her teeth, her skull.

Outside, the neighbor’s schnauzer freaked at a passing car. I guiltily resumed my position in the Barcelona chair and hid the pond drawing in my pocket. Madame Ackermann opened her eyes and I said, Congratulations. I “read” to her the story of her trip to the Tour Zamansky as she palpated her bottom lip with a finger. Then I showed her the serial number.

She was relieved. I was relieved.

Madame Ackermann and I broke for coffee, she e-mailed the serial number to Colophon Martin, and that, for the time being, was that.

Then, a week or two later, I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s A-frame to find Madame Ackermann in a very weird mood.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to the Wegman rope chair by her fireplace.

I sat.

I was in some kind of trouble; she’d possibly discovered that I had, while she was asleep, kissed her.

But instead Madame Ackermann asked me if I knew who she’d met for breakfast that morning. I said that I had no idea, a claim Madame Ackermann met with very apparent dubiousness.

Madame Ackermann informed me that Colophon Martin had flown over from France because he’d found the missing film reel in the film safe stamped with the serial number 3258432-TR and was so astonished that he wanted to interview her about her regression process.

“That’s wonderful news,” I said.

Madame Ackermann lit a cigarette. Her lower face crinkled meanly around the filter when she inhaled.

She explained the situation further.

The reason Colophon was so interested in her regression process was because the serial number, which did correspond to the film safe in which Colophon discovered the missing film reel, did not correspond to the film safe once owned by the Leni Riefenstahl of France.

The film safe in which the reel was located had belonged, Madame Ackermann continued, at least according to auction house records, to the estate of a man known as Cortez — an anti-fascist painter with whom, it had been rumored though never proven, the Leni Riefenstahl of France had had an affair.

“Colophon Martin believes that she met Cortez at a gallery opening, after which they fell in love and plotted a performance art piece,” she said. “Which would mean that, when she accepted the commission from Jean-Marie Le Pen to direct a fascist propaganda film, she did so as an artistically subversive act.”

In short, the discovery of the missing film reel paled beside the discovery that the Leni Riefenstahl of France had known, and possibly collaborated and/or slept with, the painter Cortez.

“Very intriguing,” I said.

“Very intriguing,” Madame Ackermann agreed, left leg viper-coiled around the right. Her eyes probed, with subdermal intensity, my face.

“But what I’m wondering, Julia,” she said, “is how I found the correct serial number, as you claimed I did, on the bottom of a safe in Room 315 of the Tour Zamansky.”

I saw, then, what this was about. She didn’t care whether or not the Leni Riefenstahl of France had collaborated/slept with this Cortez person. She only cared to know how she’d found the correct film number on the bottom of a safe that was not the correct film safe, because the correct film safe belonged to somebody else.

“You described to me her office in the Tour Zamansky,” Madame Ackermann said, reviewing the transcript I’d provided.

“You described it,” I lied. “I just wrote it down.”

Then I asked Madame Ackermann if it were possible that the Leni Riefenstahl of France kept two safes in her office.

Madame Ackermann did not concede this possibility. I blundered forth.

Madame Ackermann, I posited, when she’d regressed to the Tour Zamansky, hadn’t noticed the two film safes, but luckily she’d reported to me the serial number from the correct film safe.

Again: no response from Madame Ackermann.

“Meaning,” I said, “if the Leni Riefenstahl of France and this Cortez person became lovers and collaborators, isn’t it likely that she eventually gave him her extra film safe, in which she’d left one of her film reels?”

Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me. She smoothed the wrinkles on her black silk pants.

“There’s a popular saying among non-occultists,” said Madame Ackermann, dry palms hissing over the silk. “Anything is possible.”

At our next meeting, we did not talk about the film safe incident. Madame Ackermann claimed to be too bothered by allergies to regress; she suggested my time might be better spent replacing the bungees in her built-ins. The following week, she handed me a three-ring binder and a glue stick, and directed me to a drawer of her review clippings. We settled into a “strictly professional work relationship,” rife with all the tensions and incrementally building resentments that phrase implies. Madame Ackermann, without officially demoting me, employed me like any old intern, sending me to town to xerox recipes from a cookbook on loan from Professor Penry, or to deliver receipts to a tax accountant at her offices located on a literal mountaintop.

One day she tasked me to clean her family photos with an herbal disinfectant that she sprayed obsessively on light switches and doorknobs. Madame Ackermann stood behind me as I was wiping a photograph of her mother holding a baby, presumably her.

“Whatever could have possessed her,” she said, staring at her own swaddled image, “to do such a thing?”

“Her?” I said. “What did she do?”

I scrutinized Madame Ackermann’s mother (a sweet Viennese woman — I’d met her once) whose young face resembled a blurrier version of Madame Ackermann’s. Even then she was no match for her own daughter, an ominous, night-haired squib equipped, at that negligible age, with an untamed laser glare seemingly capable of setting her own blankets ablaze.

“My mother used to say,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that she’d rather die than miss a single day of my life.”

I waited for her to laugh. She did not laugh. Perhaps, I thought, this was a famous Austrian saying that, translated word-for-word, became a cannabalistic koan.

Madame Ackermann flapped her starfish eyes at me. They gleamed with a liquid substance I would never mistake for tears.

I understood, then, what she was referring to. We’d never spoken about my mother’s suicide, but she’d had access to the medical interviews I’d undergone prior to matriculation at the Workshop, the results of which claimed I suffered from a physiological and psychological syndrome called febrile disconnection or “pure motherlessness”—and described how, from nearly birth, I had compensated for this lack by developing alternate ways of linking my internal world with my outside one.

Madame Ackermann grasped my wrist. We were about to have the exchange I’d had with so many teachers and mothers of friends, the squirmy upshot of which was this: you poor dear.

Except, of course, we weren’t.

“Poor Julia, you must believe that you’re innately unlovable,” Madame Ackermann said. “No wonder you need so much from me.”

I pulled my wrist away.

“Also, you’re handicapped by guilt,” she said.

“Me?”

“You shouldn’t be so ashamed,” she persisted. “No one blames you for hating her because she abandoned you.”

“I don’t hate her,” I said.

Madame Ackermann kinked a dubious brow.

“You can’t hate a person you never knew,” I said.

“Plenty of people hate complete strangers,” she said.

“I guess I lack imagination,” I said.

“And whose fault is that?” she retorted, possibly implying that my mother, by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills when I was a month old, and dying alone in the middle of the day in her bedroom, had also lacked imagination. Suicide by pills was such a cliché, or so the whispering wives of my father’s friends would claim, women whom I’d eavesdropped upon (really eavesdropped upon) at the barbecues and the picnics to which we were invited throughout my childhood. I’d wanted to ask them: What, to their minds, counted as a less clichéd way to kill oneself? Was hanging oneself also clichéd? Was it a cliché to fill one’s pocket with stones and walk into a river? Was it a cliché to shoot oneself through the mouth, or hurl oneself into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, or take an overdose of hemlock, or douse oneself in gasoline and strike a match? Or was the act of suicide itself a cliché? Regardless, I had to wonder how much, when deciding to kill oneself, matters of originality came to bear.

“It can’t help the situation,” Madame Ackermann continued, “that I look so much like her.”

Then Madame Ackermann drifted off to her study, as if we’d been discussing nothing more fraught than her upcoming dermatologist appointment (the eczema on her rib cage had begun its march north).

I sprayed and wiped and sprayed and wiped. I emptied an entire bottle onto that picture frame, trying to disinfect it. To my knowledge, Madame Ackermann had never seen a photograph of my mother, thus how could she have known how much she resembled her? Which suggested that, perhaps while considering my stenographer application last spring, Madame Ackermann had done a psychic background check on me. Perhaps she’d been places I had never been. Perhaps she’d visited my mother. This made me feel betrayed, violated, spied upon, the expected reactions. But it also made me feel humiliated, as though I’d been beaten at a game at which I should have been uniquely positioned to excel. Because, despite my supposed gifts, I had never visited my own mother. She had never allowed it.

The first time I’d tried and failed I was nine; I’d taken a photograph of her to a carnival psychic, who ignored the photo and insisted instead on reading my tarot cards. Outside the psychic’s tent a barometric vise squeezed the air, the pressure creating a tear in the atmosphere above us, from which issued a chilly black exhalation. The carnival psychic, her hand atop the tarot deck, began to perspire; though a fake, she was not numb to dark warnings. I think we both knew, before she flipped the card, that it would be the Fool, cautioning me not to take the imprudent path.

For a year or so, I had not taken the imprudent path. I decided that I would not force myself upon my mother. She would have to visit me first.

But she hadn’t visited me. Not on my birthday, not on her birthday, not on her death day, not on Halloween or Easter or Christmas, not even on those plain old Tuesdays or Mondays when the hectopascals, which I measured religiously with a meteorologist’s digital barometer, indicated an atmospheric pressure so low, so hospitable to astral invasions, that even we heavy cow humans, with a minimum of struggle, might hope to pierce the membrane that separated alive from dead and turn like clouds above the world. On the days when the pressure was unfriendly to her kind and maniacally high, I’d still been attuned, I’d still been open, I’d still been willing to see her — as I’ve heard even the least psychically inclined mourners can sometimes see their dead — in the wind or in the polygraph chittering of tree branches. I’d searched for her in the bottoms of teacups and under the bed in which she’d died, the only grave she’d been afforded because her body had been burned, her ashes scattered on a mountain that was always cold when we visited. I had looked into the backyard brush fires my father fed with things a husband should not burn. But I had never found her. She had not wanted to be found. And if I had gone to the Workshop to sharpen my finding abilities so that I could track this most reluctant woman — so what? Sillier reasons drive people to read the air.

That night I confided the Madame Ackermann situation to a Mortgage Payment named Stan. Stan had never understood why I had been chosen to rise from the bottom of the initiate heap; he was relieved to see order restored. I allowed him his moment of delight. Then I asked him what I should do.

“Break up with her,” Stan said.

“I’m not dating her,” I said.

“Quit,” he said. “Whatever.”

I told him I couldn’t quit. No one had ever “quit” Madame Ackermann.

“Exactly,” Stan said.

Thus I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s house the next morning, my letter of resignation in my pocket, my thigh muscles shaky after a night of fucking Stan.

She greeted me with her old quasi-conspiratorial warmth. She’d intuited my intentions, I later came to think, hours before I arrived.

“Good morning, Julia,” she said. “Something exquisite has come up.”

We sat in her kitchen alcove. We drank septic tea.

Certain odd-yeared Octobers, she explained, wanding honey over my mug without asking if I took honey, were famously poor months to attempt regressions (something, she offered, having to do with di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations; I later googled the phrase “di-annually recurring autumnal planetary configurations” and got zero results), which explained why she’d had me doing such drab tasks; but now, she said, I could assist her with an exciting archiving project. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University had purchased her private papers; the curator of the university’s museum needed an archival installment for an upcoming exhibition of the university’s holdings called ParaPhernalia.

Madame Ackermann escorted me to her crawlspace, reached by pulling a metal ladder out of the ceiling of her guest room; I felt, each time I climbed it, as if I were stepping aboard a small commuter plane. The crawlspace was windowless and lit by a thin fluorescent fixture with a seizure-inducing flicker. The walls — some sheetrocked and others not, revealing between the studs a cottony insulation the color of peed-on snow — were lined with cardboard boxes, badly stacked, heavy boxes riding atop lighter boxes that had become accordion-squashed over the years.

The air, overheated and dense with micro-particulates, had, when I inhaled, a felted quality.

In these boxes, Madame Ackermann announced, on that first odd-yeared poorly planetarily configured October day, in no particular order, is my life.

I allowed myself, for about five minutes, to misinterpret this announcement as a promotion. Madame Ackermann was allowing me — me! — to read her private correspondence, in which there might be a letter from the famed lover who’d inspired the Fenrir appearance, or maybe early drafts of her many parapsychology game-changing books such as E-mails from the Dead, in which she detailed the recent rise in technological paranormal occurrences (ephemeral, frequency-based forms of communication being much easier for astral imprints to hijack than manual forms). Perhaps, too, there’d be old journals or a notebook that refuted (or confirmed) the rumors surrounding the source of Professor Yuen’s dislike of Madame Ackermann, a scuffle dating back to their student days when Professor Yuen accused Madame Ackermann of stealing her dissertation idea.

Madame Ackermann, or so I optimistically concluded, kept these incendiary materials in her crawlspace, and I had, after passing an inscrutable series of tests, proved worthy of her confidence. Which furthermore meant she was no longer bent on punishing me for the transgression I’d committed regarding the film safe incident. She was communicating her forgiveness and respect by promoting me to an airless, mausoleum-like space, meant to aggravate my mild claustrophobia and promote future fiberglass-particle-inspired respiratory ailments.

Exactly.

It took me less time than I needed to finish my first capful of septic tea (Madame Ackermann supplied me with a full thermos) to realize that I had been really and truly demoted.

For starters, the boxes in her crawlspace did not contain letters, or photos, or journals, or anything of overt interest to anyone driven by nobly archival rather than creepily prurient aims. In these boxes were bills. Bank statements. Dry-cleaning tickets. Bottles of expired malaria pills and Benadryl blister packs. Unpaid parking tickets (twenty in one box, all from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all issued within a period of five days). Jury duty notices. Dog-eared linen catalogs. Grocery lists. Unfilled prescriptions. A note written on the back of a pristine scratch-off lottery ticket that said, apologies I hit your car but I don’t have insurance so instead I am giving you this lottery ticket good luck!

She instructed me to organize the box contents into a kind of chronological life portrait collaged from this paper detritus. I was to match the credit card statement to the parking tickets received during that time period, the prescriptions written, and so forth (this per the request of the curator of ParaPhernalia).

“But what about undated items?” I asked. Meaning, for example, her grocery lists.

“One doesn’t shop for leg of lamb in the summer months,” Madame Ackermann replied.

She left me to my sorting. Did I learn anything unusual about Madame Ackermann during those hours I spent dry-sweating in her crawlspace? I learned that she had, according to her statements, an intense Norma Kamali bathing suit habit; that she rarely bought organic meat and was more familiar than I wished her to be with diet TV dinners; that she desired, but apparently never purchased, an Austrian featherbed; that she visited a general practitioner who prescribed her enemas and dandruff shampoo; that her preferred stationary vehicular violation was the double park; that she tended to drop thirty items simultaneously at the Bon French dry cleaner, located in a mini-mall on the outskirts of East Warwick, and was never required to produce a ticket in order to pick up her clothing.

For seven long afternoons, I puzzled these paper scraps into a chronologically accurate approximation of Madame Ackermann’s existence. These scraps failed to suggest that Madame Ackermann was a woman of unusual psychic talents. They failed to suggest she was unusual in any way at all.

This experience made me question, as I sorted receipts into piles while drinking capful after venomous capful of septic tea, whether Madame Ackermann was anything more than the averagely constipated, irresponsible, dry-scalped, high-thread-count-sheet-desiring person. There was nothing special about this woman I’d idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired; it was even possible that practically anybody — maybe even I — was more gifted than she.

Which is to explain why, at her forty-third birthday party, I called out “Barcelona chair.” Because I was more eager than ever to prove to the attendees of Madame Ackermann’s party that they had underestimated me.

I was, in a word, stupider.

In the end, nobody in that A-frame save Madame Ackermann understood the import of my calling out “Barcelona chair,” because no one else had caught her torque. When I called out “Barcelona chair” I received, from my professors (who’d all, save Wibley, seen a spider), disapproving glares. By calling out “Barcelona chair” I exposed myself to Madame Ackermann alone.

No, that’s not true.

I also exposed myself to me.

When I called out “Barcelona chair,” the personal toll exacted by my deception, like the image of the chair itself, spun into focus. I was psychically exhausted by the charade of the past months; I wanted Madame Ackermann to know that I had not, from the ten-to-the-seventh-power-multiplied-by-thirty-six-twice options, accidentally doodled my way to the correct film safe serial number. As she snored on the Biedermeier sofa beneath her silk eye pillow, she was not enabling me. If anything, I had succeeded despite her.

Even so, I wasn’t prescient enough to avoid stepping into what we later came to understand as Madame Ackermann’s trap. She’d stashed me in her crawlspace like a pound of meat — hidden from view, awaiting petrification. She’d invited me, her demoted, deceitful stenographer, to her forty-third birthday party, and I’d been foolish enough to interpret the overture as a peace offering, when in fact she was bringing me into the killing arena. This was blood sport for her. But first she wanted to be certain that I was the person she suspected me of being.

I was only too happy to oblige.

After catching Madame Ackermann’s yard sale junk for nearly thirty minutes, the professors began to get bored. Professor Blake, unable to secure a martini refill, defaulted to sipping abandoned drinks. “Is it cake time?” whined Professor Hales. Professor Yuen, a recreational harpist, strummed a bookshelf bungee.

“One last throw,” Madame Ackermann begged. “A torque for the road.”

The professors, Yuen included, agreed to humor Madame Ackermann.

I stood on the landing of Madame Ackermann’s staircase, hands gripping the banister, peering over the heads of my professors, ego inflamed by my superior conviction that I was, in so many literal ways, above them all.

Again Madame Ackermann hair-curtained her eyes, locked her chin. She leaned so far forward, shins hovering at a ninety-degree angle, it was as though she’d nail-gunned her Dr. Scholl’s to the floorboards. For the last time that evening, she threw.

This was the throw for which she’d been reserving her energies, and explained why she’d spent the past half hour lobbing meaningless trash; she’d been building to what was known as a psychic cascade, when a person’s superior abilities have been utilized for silly tasks, thereby causing a surplus of energy to accumulate.

I did not intend to “catch” what Madame Ackermann threw, but to avoid doing so was like trying not to watch a car burn. What tumulted through the air was a wheel of horror (dismembered limbs, splatters of gray matter) that repeated its sequence as it rolled toward me. I clutched the banister. Dizzy did not begin to describe how I felt.

The wheel slowed as it came within inches of my face, the images condensing into a compact gory redness. She threw a bloody egg, I thought. But no. Spidery fault lines appeared in the egg’s surface as Madame Ackermann’s hairy-eared torque emerged from its chrysalis.

Fenrir.

His oversized wolf jaws parted and I saw, bobbing in the glottal gloom, my own disembodied head.

More distressing still: nobody else saw what I was seeing.

“Sorry, love,” I heard Professor Penry say to Madame Ackermann. “Botched that one.”

“The risk of throwing torques when you’re forty,” said Professor Yuen. “The blank rate is one in three.”

“Cake time,” said Professor Wibley.

In my sensitized state, I could practically hear the gloating. My professors thought Madame Ackermann had thrown a blank (i.e., a torque that fails, from the outset, to coalescence into anything more precise than a blob of spinning fog). And she had thrown a blank. An intentional blank. But that wasn’t all. Whereas her first throw of the night had been a straightforward torque — a single throw that appears to most as one thing, but to the skilled few as its evolved, “second-phase” form — her final throw was a double torque, wherein two unique throws occur in parallel, in this case a blank and a spiral (alone a highly advanced maneuver).

At that moment, however, I was too locked inside my own skull to see anything beyond its dome, upon whose surface strobe-lighted an explosion of over-exposed images.

Then my life went dark.

I awoke on Madame Ackermann’s Biedermeier to the clipped sounds of Professor Yuen speaking on her cell phone to the school nurse. I felt as though someone had inserted a hacksaw at my hairline and removed the top of my skull. A foggy substance whisked over my brain, cooling it dangerously, cooling it to the point of hyperthermia; I sensed my brain shutting down, and yet in the midst of this psychic twilight I was beset by visions, the last ones I’d have for a while. I stared at the water-stained ceiling above the Biedermeier. This is what she sees from here. Madame Ackermann, poor dear, looked at her ceiling and saw only a ceiling. A hilarious idea intruded on my delusional state, one destabilized, still, by the peripheral darts of jaws and teeth—someday I’ll take her place.

Then I heard a horrible noise, like someone mortar-and-pestling shards of glass. I turned my head. Madame Ackermann, I noticed and with some alarm — had I spoken my thoughts aloud? — sat next to me on the Barcelona chair, attention trained on Professor Yuen while one hand rested on my forehead, holding against it an icy dish rag.

She scratched an oval of eczema on her collarbone. The bottom of the oval disappeared into her shirt, presumably connected to the original patch now armoring her entire abdomen and making a play for her face. Her fingers provoked an irritated blush that yielded, as she clawed her way downward, to the sleepy burble of actual blood.

She appeared pursued, even trapped.

Madame Ackermann was scared.

This unnerved me more than the dizziness, more than the snouts and teeth that continued to buzz my optic nerve, more than the one-by-one extinguishing of my brain cells. What was she scared of? Who was going to help me now?

I groaned.

Madame Ackermann noticed that I was conscious and reset her facial expression, staring at me with what I still stupidly read as concern.

She leaned over me. I thought, for a deranged half second, that she was going to kiss me on the lips.

“You poor thing,” Madame Ackermann whispered, mouth inches from mine, fingers raking her neck. “You look like you’ve seen a wolf.”

The rumor that made the rounds claimed I’d had a seizure at Madame Ackermann’s house, brought on by my attempts to catch as a novice. I’d strained something, or broken something, or disturbed some precious equilibrium by exhorting my brain to perform an activity it was not trained to perform.

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.