The Vanishers

Part Two

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.

I did not take their concerned skepticism personally. Concerned skepticism, after all, had been my father’s default mode toward me since the age of three, when I was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist with electromagnetic hyperactivity, which explained why our household appliances — toasters, radios, computers — were perpetually blowing fuses or known to spontaneously, in my presence, fail. By the time I was eight I could darken streetlamps by walking beneath them, I could set off car and house alarms and inspire automatic garage doors to a state of rapid fibrillation. By the time I was twelve I realized that I could, on the random occasion, mindfully direct these electrons (if that’s what they were) into spaces where my body had never been. I knew when I saw a woman crying on the street that she’d had her purse stolen on the train. I knew by the backs of a bank teller’s hands that his wife had recently suffered a miscarriage.

My father and I did not speak about my predilections, and I honored his sense of decorum by keeping to innocuous practices, such as telling him that he should be very nice to his secretary because her husband had lost their nest egg at the track. We functioned as a family until I started menstruating and Blanche became necessary. When I left for boarding school, at fourteen, my father treasured me as much as anyone can humanly treasure a person who has come to resemble his dead first wife.

“And now he’s lost his foot,” my father said of his colleague.

“Insane,” I said.

“Which could be good for him,” my father said. “A disruption to the given system.”

I indulged a mental eye roll. “A disruption to the given system” was a well-worn phrase of my father’s, his way of cauterizing any conversation or situation that risked devolving into an emotionally messy bleed-out.

“At any rate, keep a lookout for that candida article. You should have received it last week.”

“It could be a while,” I said. “My mailman’s an alcoholic.”

This initiated a different sort of silence from my father, a disapproving silence. My internist had forbidden any type of psychic activity, and had gone so far as to prescribe an anti-seizure medication that cut all psychic radio signals, making it impossible to disobey his orders even if I’d wanted to.

“He stinks of gin and has a clown nose,” I said. “Even you would know he was a drunk.”

Alwyn, I noticed, was resting her head miserably on the pastry display case. I thought, the weight of the world. I thought, the girl with two lonely, decontaminated brains. Then I remembered: she was hurt.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll see you at the restaurant.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Very good,” he said. “Good-bye.”

Good-bye, I started to say.

Instead I said: “I can’t wait to see you.”

“We’ll talk then,” he said.

“Then we’ll talk,” I said.

I snapped our connection to a close, but an aftershock remained. From within my phone’s fake metal shell I sensed the weakening pulse of the many words we never found we much needed, once confronted with each other’s actual faces, to say.

The Regnor was located on the kind of generic Manhattan block that vanishes the moment you leave it. We passed a dry cleaner and a florist and a butcher with signs that read DRY CLEANER and FLORIST and BUTCHER. I paused to stare at the unpetrified roasts in the butcher’s window, their wet surfaces appearing, in the mute December daylight, shellacked.

Once inside the Regnor’s lobby, Alwyn dropped onto a velvet deco couch, its nap balded to the backing fabric in certain popular butt- and head-resting places. Overhead, the lobby was degloomed by a stained-glass skylight that might have portrayed an image of twining ivy, though the ivy might have been snakes. I positioned myself on an armchair so that I couldn’t see my reflection in the giant mirror on the opposite wall. My face — meds-bloated and, due to the recent onset of Bell’s palsy, afflicted by a droopy right eyelid — remained a surprise I could not avoid inspecting.

Alwyn set her coffees on the table, unbuttoned the HELLO LYDIA coat, and lay back, her head notching into one of the upholstery’s denuded spaces.

“My skull’s killing me,” she said.

I reached into my bag’s inner pocket and withdrew a handful of plastic pharmacy bottles.

I shook three painkillers into my palm.

“Pick one,” I said.

Alwyn chose a pink Darvocet and washed it down with a swig of cappuccino. I followed with six different pills. These I swallowed dry. Caffeine was contraindicated for thirteen of my twenty-three medications; plus I was a practiced pill taker now, my esophagus an inflatable airplane slide. Nor did I mind that these medications caused my psychic abilities to disappear. Shorting out a streetlamp by walking beneath it seemed as impossible to me now as extinguishing, by walking beneath it, the sun.

“So this is where the textile conference is being held?” I said.

“What textile conference?” Alwyn said.

“Aren’t you here for a textile conference?” I said.

“No,” she said. “A film conference.”

“Ah,” I said, wondering where I had come up with the idea of the textile conference. This was not unusual for me these days, to fail to make proper inquiries of people, to stopper their blanks with my uninformed filler. In the past, I hadn’t needed to ask. “What kind of film conference?”

“A lost film conference,” she said.

“Ah,” I said again. “The films were lost?”

“ ‘Lost’ refers to the people in the films,” she said. “Though it’s slightly more complicated than that.”

I nodded as if I understood. She dug into the pocket of the HELLO LYDIA coat and withdrew an enameled cigarette case that she, or more likely Lydia, used to store breath mints.

“So,” she said, “what’s up with all the medication?”

“I’m living the dream,” I said. “Bewildered girl in her mid-twenties moves to the big city, works a crappy, unrewarding job, and dulls her existential disorientation with drugs.”

“These are recreational,” she said. “You’re not sick anymore.”

My eyelid spasmed.

“I heard you’d been sick for a long time,” she said.

Behind her, the lobby elevator disgorged a trio of ashen people. One of them was crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

“Thirteen and a half months,” she said.

“Since we’ve met?”

“Since you became sick.”

I did some creaky arithmetic.

“That’s more or less correct,” I said.

“More or less since the twenty-fifth of October, two Octobers ago.”

“More or less exactly,” I said, getting nervous. Who the hell was this person?

Alwyn leaned closer.

“I say this as a friend,” she said. “There’s nothing you could tell me about yourself that we don’t already know.”

We, I thought. Then, Ah. Alwyn was a Workshop person; maybe, it occurred to me, and not without a little bit of envy and indignation, she was Madame Ackermann’s new stenographer. Or maybe she’d been sent here by Professor Yuen to check on me, less because Professor Yuen cared, more because she needed, from an administrative perspective, to discover whether or not I “merited” another semester’s medical leave. (“The student must prove,” she’d written in an e-mail, roboticized by her trademark form-letter-speak, “by submitting a T-76 form, filled out by a physician, an ongoing medical condition, or take a leave of absence and pay $1,000 per semester to hold his or her spot until that future point when he or she is medically sanctioned to return.”)

“But you’re not my friend,” I said.

Alwyn considered this.

“True,” she conceded, flopping back against the couch. “But I will be.”

I registered this as a threat.

OK, I thought, bored enough by my life to find her coyness intriguing. I’ll play your game.

“Could I have a mint?” I asked.

I recognized her now, or at least I thought I did. She was Stan’s cousin; she’d visited him a few falls ago as a Workshop prospective.

That Madame Ackermann or any of my old friends at the Workshop were gossiping about me struck me as the height of insensitivity, especially when not a single one of them (save Professor Yuen) had bothered to shoot me so much as an e-mail to see how I was doing. The only person who wrote to me was aconcernedfriend; the e-mails themselves had no content, but they always included the same video attachment of swirling fog, through which I could see a woman on a bed.

But my indignation ebbed, replaced by a far more pathetic response. People at the Workshop were talking about me, Madame Ackermann was talking about me, ergo — I still mattered.

Alwyn offered the cigarette case. I accepted a mint. I suctioned quick craters in the surface.

“So,” I said. “You must be a first-year Initiate.”

“I’m no longer at the Workshop,” she said. “According to Madame Ackermann, I wasn’t ‘initiate material.’ ”

“You were never her stenographer?” I said.

“I was a Mortgage Payment,” she said.

She appeared more bothered by this failure than she cared to let on.

She gestured to a porter.

“Could I get a sherry, please?” she asked.

The porter nodded. He peered at me.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” I said.

“Nothing?” Alwyn asked.

“Maybe a seltzer,” I said.

“We have a lot in common, more than just our rejection by Madame Ackermann,” Alwyn said, and then proceeded to describe a life with which mine shared nothing in common (including “rejection by Madame Ackermann”—I didn’t have the energy to parse the distinctions between her and me on this matter; I had never been a Mortgage Payment). She’d grown up in Scarsdale and gone to boarding school in Switzerland, her mother had once been a famous shampoo model known as “the Breck Girl,” her father died when she was thirteen, after which her mother had a series of boyfriends before marrying a Jungian psychotherapist and moving to Berne. Before her brief stint at the Workshop, Alwyn had been a Women’s Studies major at Bryn Mawr, where she’d written her thesis on passivity as a form of feminist protest in the films of Dominique Varga.

She stared at me as though I were meant to glean some extra significance from this information.

“Dominique Varga,” she repeated.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Dominique Varga is the Leni Riefenstahl of France,” Alwyn said. “The woman whose office you visited when you were Madame Ackermann’s stenographer.”

My eyelid spasmed again and refused, this time, to stop. I associated the Leni Riefenstahl of France with my Autumn of Deception, which was, I believed at that point, to blame for my sickness. Chronic fraudulence, and endeavoring to do things beyond my abilities, had destroyed my immune system — in the words of one internist, I’d zapped my motherboard.

I put a finger over my eyelid; I pushed. I often had the sense that my symptoms were insects, and to eradicate them was to cause a mess of little deaths.

“You mean Madame Ackermann visited her office,” I corrected her. “I wrote down what she told me.”

Alwyn smirked.

“Right, well,” she said. “I’m sure it’s hard to tell who did what. I imagine you must have lost your sense of self while working for such a visionary. In an exciting way, I mean.”

A waiter arrived with the sherry and the seltzer. Alwyn signed the check and held out her glass.

“To Dominique Varga,” Alwyn said.

I clinked her glass warily. My seltzer was flat. As with all previously carbonated liquids, the departed air made the remaining liquid seem heavier than regular liquid, like a saline syrup.

“Varga’s best known for her political propaganda,” Alwyn said, “but I’m more interested in her porn films. As part of my college thesis, I remade a few of them.”

“You made porn films?”

“And starred in them.”

“Huh,” I said. I suspected that I was being baited, but couldn’t divine what with or for what purpose. “Did you lose your sense of self in an exciting way?”

She squinted at the skylight.

“You sound like Colophon,” she said.

“Colophon?” I said.

“Even though we work together we’ve never seen eye to eye, ideologically speaking, on Varga’s porn.”

“Colophon Martin?” I said. I repeated his name in my head, though with far less composure.

“I’d call him to come meet us but the lobby’s courtesy phone is busted,” she said. “And there’s no cell reception in here.”

“No, really,” I assured her. “That’s fine.”

The elevator dinged. Seven people emerged. Three of them were crying.

This encounter was now officially freaking me out.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Alwyn. “Who are you?”

“I’m the person who’s here to help you,” she said.

She stared at my hands, oven-mitted by eczema. I slid them beneath my thighs.

“Contrary to how it might appear,” I said, “I don’t need your help.”

“Trust me,” Alwyn said. “You do. Colophon will explain everything. He’s excited to collaborate with you on his Varga project.”

“What Varga project?” I said.

“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 revanish. 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.

It can sew, it can cook, it can talk talk talk, Blanche would say after he’d stomped off to his study, to which I would rejoin, Will you marry it, marry it marry it.

She had married it. And thank God. When Blanche arrived, our years preceding her arrival appeared, by contrast, a weary slog, a tiptoe, a blueness. And yet, with Blanche, there were boundaries. Blanche had never had children because she’d never wanted children. As much as she loved me, she did not desire to be my mother, in deference to my real one, yes, but also in deference to her own inclination to provide, for the needy, the occasional break from their lonely routine. She was the hired help, a hospice worker by trade, beloved by her patients and their families. She existed for me, too, as a temporary caretaker whose generosity was limitless because the job was not.

Blanche’s hug concluded and my father stood to take his turn. My father expressed physical affection like a bad mime. He threw himself at me and administered the Heimlich maneuver of hugs, then, after stripping my coat from my arms and forcing it on a passing busboy, situated me on a chair and pushed me so far into the table that my lower ribs rubbed against the edge when I exhaled.

He seated himself across from me and made a low, silence-filling grunt that I’d mistaken for years as the sound of him clearing his throat, and had only recently come to identify as the grinding of his back molars. This was no harmless de-gumming of vocal cords. This was damage I was hearing.

We stared at our menus and readjusted, in those minute physical and emotional ways, to being in close proximity to one another.

As we waited for our drinks, Blanche chatted about the ceramics exhibit they’d seen that afternoon, and showed me the autobiography of the artist, a book called I Shock Myself.

“That,” I said, “is an amazing title.”

The waiter delivered a pitcher of sake and three small wooden boxes. Alcohol was contraindicated for twenty-three of my twenty-three medications. I filled my box with water.

“Did we mention that we saw James the other day?” Blanche asked.

“How is James?” I said. James had been my boyfriend from our chaste note-writing romance in the third grade through college and up to the summer before I’d left for the Workshop, at which point I’d been with him for a longer period of time than my father had been married to my mother, and we both thought we should try out other people. Unbeknownst to James, during the intervening two years, I had done nothing but hold tryouts.

“He’s seeing a Kathy,” Blanche reported. “He had no idea you’d left school.”

“We haven’t been in touch,” I said. “Not for any mad reasons.”

“I told him you hadn’t dated anyone since him,” she said.

“I hope you also told him that I’ve had sex with about fifty people since him,” I said.

My father origamied his paper chopstick sheath into a little staircase.

“Even if you did sleep with fifty people,” Blanche said, “it’s not in your nature to do so. There are thrilling harlots and there are steady old dogs. I’m sorry to report that you’re the latter.”

“You’d be surprised, Blanche,” I said. “I shock myself.”

Blanche and I knocked sake boxes.

We ordered, we endured the intensification of the restaurant sound track, one volume bump every five minutes, until we were pretty much screaming at one another, and my father rolled the cardboard cocktail flyer into an ear trumpet that he used in full view of the hostess, who was not the least bit guilted into turning down the music.

“I love this place,” he said, after our various makis and dons had, an hour after ordering them, still failed to arrive, and we were all gassy on fried peas.

Finally our meals appeared. Because we’d worked our way through all of the noncontroversial topics, my father asked about my health.

“You got my candida article,” Blanche said.

“I did,” I lied.

“Maybe what you have is sexually transmitted,” my father said into his rice bowl.

“That’s chlamydia,” Blanche corrected.

“Believe me, I’ve been tested for everything,” I said.

“And how is your job?” my father asked.

“A soul-crushing bore,” I said. “Otherwise great.”

“That’s life for most people,” he said. “That’s why you need to find something about which you are passionate.”

“I had something I was passionate about,” I said. “But I can’t do it anymore.”

“Maybe the Workshop wasn’t your true calling,” Blanche said. Blanche persisted in hoping I’d retrain my psychic abilities toward the pursuit of a more practical career; she thought I’d make an excellent member of a political advance team, danger-proofing foreign sites for upcoming diplomatic visits, preventing future harm instead of prying into the pasts of random strangers, for whom the damage was already done.

“But today something unusual happened,” I said.

I told them about the girl who tripped on the rug, her maybe-concussion, my visit to the Regnor, the vanishing films.

“I’ve never heard of anything so cruel,” Blanche said of the vanishing films, and of vanishing generally.

“Do you really think it’s cruel?” I said. “Would you rather, Dad, that mom be dead than alive and living elsewhere?”

“That’s not a question anyone should ever be asked,” Blanche said.

“I was asked that question earlier today,” I said.

“And how did you respond?” Blanche challenged. She was a steady old dog herself.

“She is dead,” my father interjected. “Thus making this a futile conversation.”

“Maybe a film is a bit much,” I said. “But a note might have been nice, don’t you think?” Once I’d asked my father why my mother hadn’t left a suicide note, to which he’d replied, We are not that sort of people. To his mind, this oversight of hers was less a mark of insensitivity than of the tensile strength of her character.

“Most meaningful sentiments are cheapened by articulation,” my father said.

“In America today …” Blanche began.

“In America today,” I said. “How could you possibly finish that sentence?”

“… people overestimate the value of expression,” Blanche said.

“Don’t be bitchy to Blanche,” my father said.

“Blanche can handle it,” I said.

“It’s your father who can’t handle it,” Blanche said. “Be nice to me for his sake.”

“Maybe that was her problem,” I said of my mother. “She never found something about which she was passionate.” My mother, or so my father liked to tell me, was “always a bit drifty.” The implication being that she might not have killed herself if she were less drifty, never mind that I considered suicide the least drifty act a person could commit.

“She had a passion,” my father said defensively.

“What?” I said.

“She was a metalsmith,” he said. “She won a fellowship to apprentice in Paris after we became engaged. She sold her jewelry on the street to make extra money. Then a gallery picked her up. She had some very rich clients. Famous clients. But you knew that.”

I stared at him incredulously.

“How would I know that if you’ve never told me?”

“Don’t be disingenuous,” Blanche said. “We know what you got up to at that school.”

“I don’t go there,” I said. “I mean that in the literal sense of the phrase.”

I could tell: They didn’t believe me.

“She lost her engagement ring while she was in Paris,” my father said, apropos of God knows what.

“Which I wouldn’t have minded so much,” he added, “except that it cost me the bulk of my tiny savings at the time.”

Then, changing his mind, he said, “I minded a lot. I was very angry with her. She wasn’t one to talk about things, ever. I couldn’t help but suspect that she lost the ring because she didn’t want to marry me.”

“But she did marry you,” I reminded him.

“I suppose,” he said, as if this remained debatable. “But only because she viewed me as good for her health. Our marriage was the medicine she forced herself to take daily.”

I could see Blanche wondering whether or not she should attempt to reassure him about the probably honestly loving intentions of a person she’d never met.

“Well,” Blanche said, opting instead to revert the conversation to me and my problems, “I think you’re lucky, given your lack of qualifications, that you’ve found a job at all. The next step is finding a job you like.”

“I might have a new job soon,” I said. “A man I sort of know through the Workshop wants to hire me.”

As I confessed this I realized: I had no intention of meeting Alwyn and Colophon tomorrow night at the Regnor’s bar. Aside from the fact that any doings with Colophon, and more crucially doings with Dominique Varga, represented a serious health risk, two restaurant outings on two consecutive evenings was a form of exertion for which I’d end up paying.

“He’s a … psychic?” my father asked.

“He’s an academic,” I said.

“Is he,” said my father, more interested.

“He writes about film,” I said.

“Ah,” said my father, less interested.

“What sort of films?” Blanche inquired.

“Art films,” I said. “Made by an artist named Dominique Varga.”

My father’s interest re-upped, but cautiously.

“Dominique Varga?” he said. “The French woman?”

“By birth she’s half French and half Hungarian,” I said. “But yes, I believe she lived most of her life in France.”

“That’s curious,” said my father, who sounded totally incurious, even half scared.

“You’ve heard of her?” I said. I found this hard to believe. My father’s area of professional interest — sinkholes and underground streams produced by the chemical erosion of carbonite rocks such as dolomite — singularly obsessed him. He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.

“Your mother knew her,” he said. “When she lived in Paris, I mean.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “When was this?”

“Eighties,” my father said. “That Varga woman bought a lot of her work. Practically supported her.”

“What kind of stuff did she make?” I asked.

“I don’t know what they’re called,” he said. “Necklaces?”

“Wow,” I said, still too stunned to know what to make of this. “Do you own any of these necklaces?”

“No,” he said, as though it would be unthinkable that he would hide such a thing from me. “She sold it all before she came back to the States. She was somebody else by then.”

“What did they look like?” I asked of the necklaces.

“Very ugly,” he said. “Very … angry.”

He pinched his lips with his thumb and forefinger. He was done with this conversation.

I, however, was not.

“And you’ve met Dominique Varga,” I said.

“Me?” he said. “Never. But I heard all about her. Your mother was quite … taken with her. And not in a good way.”

“What does that mean?”

“She was not a positive influence,” he said.

“Because why,” I pressed.

“She …” He grew uncomfortable. “She was not a nice person. From what I could glean.”

“Mom told you this?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No. Your mother thought she was an inspiring person. A magnetic person. But she did not have your mother’s weaknesses in mind. Or maybe she had them too much in mind.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

My father snapped.

“Because that woman romanticized death. And she made your mother believe that death could be an artistic act. She exploited people who lacked a sense of self — not that your mother lacked a sense of self. I don’t mean that. She lacked … resistance. She lacked resistance to bad ideas. And so she married me because she thought that I could help her, that I could boost her resistance. But I couldn’t do it. I turned out not to be who she thought I was. I failed her, but not for lack of trying. I did try, I tried very hard, though she might tell you otherwise. I assumed she already had told you otherwise. That you knew how I’d failed her. In which case, you did not and you do not need to hear it from me.”

He pulled off his glasses. He pushed his thumb and forefinger deep into his eye sockets.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had a long day.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said.

“I am, though. Sorry. No helping that.”

He replaced his glasses and stood behind my chair, patting me twice on the head. I tried to reach for his hand, to give it a reassuring squeeze, but he’d already retracted it, shoved it in a pocket.

He struck out in search of, presumably, a restroom.

Blanche tracked him until he disappeared behind a translucent shoji screen.

“He doesn’t hide things from you on purpose,” Blanche said. “He just … thinks he doesn’t need to tell you stuff. Because you can … because you already know it.”

“That’s kind of like assuming you don’t need to tell your daughter about sex because she was raped by her uncle,” I said.

Blanche speared a maki wheel with a chopstick.

“That’s unfair,” she said. “He honestly has had a very hard day. He doesn’t like to leave home. And he’s worried about you. We’re both worried about you.”

She peered around to see what had become of my father. She was also worried about him, and with good reason. My father had an unerring ability, when searching for a restaurant restroom, to fail to return for thirty minutes or more, and later claim to have lost himself in the kitchen.

But moreover my father was a man who nurtured an emotional void that Blanche, in her decision to stay married to him (and to live in the Monmouth house), had long ago accepted as a chasm she needed to navigate rather than one she might someday hope to fill. Because it had mass, this hole; it had a name. Elizabeth. Blanche hadn’t known my mother, Elizabeth, any more than I had known her, but we’d both lived with her, or this void version of her. We had agreed to honor a vacancy we’d never experienced as occupied; we tried our best, but we never fully succeeded, and this kept my father at a distance from us both, the fact that neither of us could miss her the way that he did. Neither of us could share his grief; in this he was alone, and thus whenever my father failed to return from one of his restroom forays, I could see the panic in Blanche’s face, quavering like the thin crust of the earth before it crumbles into a perfectly circular dolomite nothingness: this time he wasn’t coming back to us.

The next morning I had a message from the Belgian-Iraqi woman, informing me that the Showroom was closed for cleaning.

I spent the balance of the day on my couch thinking about my mother and Dominique Varga. What a crazy coincidence! Blanche had said, as she, the lone conversationalist by that point, recounted to my father and me the highlights of our own evening while we shared a cab uptown. This coincidence must signify something important (not that she believed in such things, she insisted, but regardless) — this new job of mine, she said, could prove very meaningful to me.

“You can’t deny that it’s a crazy coincidence,” Blanche repeated.

My father and I exchanged a baleful glance. Before my illness, this was another of my so-called abilities, what my father chose to see as an aptitude for engineering credulity-straining twists of fate. When I was ten he’d taken me to Hong Kong for a geology conference, and we’d met a photographer on the plane who told us about his assignment to track a nomadic eco-terrorist through “China” (he refused to be more specific), and since we, too, were headed to China — we planned to explore the caves in the Guilin karst region, those ulcers formed by salt water percolating through the limestone over a period of time measured by glaciers — we made plans to have dinner with the photographer in Hong Kong the next day, but the photographer never showed at the restaurant (we later learned he’d gotten food poisoning). Two weeks later my father and I flew to the tiny airport in Guilin, we took a four-hour boat trip down a river and then, when the river became too shallow, a flat-bottomed canoe, and as we approached the dock to our tiny stilted guesthouse we saw, standing at the end of the float, snapping photos of the birdless twilight sky, the photographer.

Coincidence, of course. But after a while you can begin to feel stalked by coincidence, or as though you can manipulate the world by expressing a narrative desire — this thread is loose, this thread inconclusive. It must be doubled back upon, it must recur. You can start to suspect, as I suspected, that I provided a gravitational center to which all lost people, past and present, were invisibly tethered, to which they were drawn. I know this sounds like the most profound sort of egoism. I don’t know how to make it sound otherwise.

But while I wanted to disregard Blanche’s exhortations to, as she put it, nurture life’s random alignments, I had to admit that I, too, was piqued by the fact that Varga had known my mother, and that, despite having at my disposal a few new data points, my mother had become (if this were even possible) more of an unknown to me. The longer I turned these new facts in the cement mixer of my mind, the more I failed to spin from her vexing particulates a substance that could harden without trapping, within its interior, a billion weakening voids. What was this resistance she lacked, what were these bad ideas? I could not synchronize the woman who’d married my sinkhole-obsessed dad with the woman who had lived in Paris, pawned ugly jewelry on the street, and hung out with artistic pornographers. If my dead mother refused to visit me, perhaps I could visit Varga, wrest from her the account I would never get from my father, who hadn’t been in Paris with her anyway.

For this reason, I met Alwyn and Colophon at the Regnor. If he wanted me for his “Varga project,” whatever that entailed, well, I could only assume our mutual goals would coincide, and I could quit my job at the showroom.

Though I wasn’t due at the Regnor’s bar until 6 p.m., I decided to go early and check out one of the Lost Film Conference panels. Alwyn had recommended “The End of Scarcity” since it was being moderated by Lydia, owner of the tweed coat.

The Regnor’s lobby was empty save for a lone weeper crying into the handset of the lobby’s busted courtesy phone, a sight that made me think, not wrongly, of me on my red phone in the showroom, a person speaking in public to the disconnected air.

I took the elevator to the third floor. Save for the flapping crepe paper sounds emitted by the floor vents, the hallways of the Regnor were silent, as though the building were host to a Zen meditation retreat rather than a film conference. I’d hoped that the door to Room 337 might be open to latecomers. It was not. I contemplated the door’s faux-wood paint job, wondering if I should knock or just enter.

I knocked.

The door opened; a person hushed me inside. People sat cross-legged on the bed and on the floor or stood against the wall; the four panelists occupied folding chairs pushed against the drapes, which were drawn.

One panelist, a sexpot in fishnets and ankle boots, eyed my awkward attempts to puzzle myself against a wall blank. She, possibly Lydia, announced that, prior to the panel, she planned to screen a few vanishing films rated “inspirational” by focus groups.

She killed the lights and, using a remote, thrummed up the room’s TV.

Each vanishing film began the same way: a black screen with a white identification number that cut to a person standing before a fake backdrop — of the Tokyo skyline, or of the Matterhorn, or of a Mars-scape roamed by mustangs.

A woman in her thirties, identified as 3298732-MU (backdrop: file closet interior), read an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) before reciting, for the remaining four minutes, the sentence “I thought that I could love you.”

The blandly pretty 7865456-BK (backdrop: rain ticking down a window screen) told stories about her childhood summer lake vacations in Minnesota. All of the people in her stories came off as charming and decent, her parents and siblings, her cousins and grandparents, even the stepfather who, she maintained, had molested her when she was twelve, but not without her permission.

A twenty-something man with a chapped upper lip, 8764533-WE, told a story about himself in the third person when he was babysitting the neighbors’ two-year-old son. The neighbor’s son was prone to running into the road, and so he’d decided to strap the boy into a plastic toboggan on the lawn, but then the family’s dog ran into the path of an oncoming car, and the car, in order to avoid the dog, swerved onto the lawn and crushed the boy, who was strapped into the toboggan and unable to save himself.

“But the truth was that the man had never liked that kid,” he said of himself. “He’d even, on occasion, wished him dead.”

We watched three more films, the most squirmy-making an homage to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, in which a man slit open a cow’s eye with a razor blade while speaking dispassionately about the pains of his dyslexic childhood.

The films ended, the TV screen cataracted by a brilliant block of cobalt. The room shifted as the people readied themselves again to be seen. Possibly-Lydia cued the lights.

A hippie panelist with Asian coin earrings opened the discussion by raising the issue of scarcity. Was scarcity scarcer than ever?

“My specific question,” she said, “is whether or not reproductions — of paintings, of people, but specifically I suppose I’m speaking about these films — create scarcity or negate it.”

“But we’re not talking reproductions,” countered a panelist who resembled, with her asymmetrical bob, a brunette Cyndi Lauper. “It’s not as though TK Ltd. is a wax museum. These are testimonies. These are not substitutes for actual people. You cannot touch them or hug them or fail to be hugged back.”

I struggled to focus my attention, finding it difficult to hear the panelists speaking over the voices of the vanished people, their testimonies echo-calling to one another in my head, their individual explanations weaving together to form a suffocating textile through which I found it hard to breathe. A sharpness, like an exercise cramp, cinched the underside of my diaphragm. Would you rather your mother be dead than alive and living somewhere else?

My answer was ugly and unequivocal. Given the choice, I’d prefer her dead. To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself. To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you.

“But you can’t deny,” Cyndi Lauper said, “that a wax museum carries a heavy death implication due to the embalmed quality attending even the best reproductions. Did you know that many so-called wax artists learn their tricks by apprenticing for morticians?”

The mention of “morticians” elicited a mousy sob from a woman on the bed.

Possibly-Lydia checked her bracelet watch — its loose chain necessitated a few staccato wrist rolls to bring the face into view — and said it was time to take questions from the audience.

“I found it interesting that you should raise the topic of wax museums,” said a man in suede. “Scarcity could be viewed as a romantic way to refer to manufactured celebrity. We can’t care about a person unless they’re famous. So you could accuse the people who made these films, and the people who control their distribution, of manufacturing fame for profit.”

“Not to mention emotional profit,” said a woman in a head kerchief. “All those traumatized ‘survivors.’ The collateral gains reaped by the psychiatric industry shouldn’t be underestimated.”

“I don’t understand,” said the hippie panelist. “Are you implying that the psychiatric industry is in cahoots with TK Ltd.?”

“The world of commerce is a web of interconnected extortionists,” the kerchief woman said.

A woman wearing an ethnic sweater-coat asked a question about something called “re-performance”; a theater group had secured the rights, from TK Ltd., to “re-perform” a handful of vanishing films. This had led to quite a bit of heated arguing at an earlier panel, said the sweater-coat woman.

“I was Vito Acconci’s studio assistant in the seventies,” she said. “When asked to re-perform Seed Bed, he responded, ‘If a performance is teachable and repeatable, how does it differ from theater? How are the participants not actors?’ ”

“You raise an interesting point about acting our own memories out of existence,” said Possibly-Lydia.

“It’s been estimated,” said the hippie panelist, “that seventy-five percent of the people who vanish suffer from Acquired Situational Narcissism, a syndrome that afflicts ninety-two percent of real celebrities.”

“But what kind of celebrity are we talking about here?” asked Cyndi Lauper. “How many people see these films? The more films that exist, meaning the more successful a venture TK Ltd. is, the greater the chance that a film will remain unwatched — assuming it’s not ‘re-performed’ by some low-rent theater company. Is that fame, or is that the cruelest definition of obscurity?”

“It makes me think,” said the woman who’d been crying on the bed, “of library books. I always look at the due dates stamped on the back. Sometimes, between readers, whole decades pass.”

The woman in the sweater-coat asked if TK Ltd. had anything to do with the recent rash of “surgical impersonations” she’d read about in the papers.

“People who died tragically and often young,” she explained to the room at large, “and suddenly a stranger shows up at the family’s house, a stranger who’s had his or her face surgically altered to look like the face of the dead person.”

“Strangers can be so perceptive,” said the formerly crying woman.

“TK Ltd. has nothing to do with those ‘impersonations,’ ” the probable lesbian asserted. “Also, there’s no proof that these impersonations have occurred. Most of the witnesses were severely damaged by the loss of their original loved one. Most had spent time in mental institutions.”

I raised my hand, wanting to ask if these impersonators weren’t impersonators at all, if perhaps they were restless astral imprints (a common byproduct of an accidental or a young death), returned to deal with unfinished business. But no one called on me, and it was just as well, in part because, though I publicly endorsed the theory of the young and unhappy dead, privately I’d chosen to believe that certain people might find great solace in being deceased.

Possibly-Lydia wrist-rolled her watch into view again and announced that the panel was over; she reminded people that her books were for sale in the lobby, where there would also be a cocktail reception in half an hour.

The room’s population surged toward the exit. I found myself crushed against the wall, butted by backpacks and messenger bags. I allowed myself to be pushed down the hallway and into the elevator, our collective cozy mood calcifying under the brighter scrutiny of fluorescents. We mass-flowed into the lobby and paused by the revolving door to furtively unball scarves from coat sleeves, produce gloves from hats, as though we’d all emerged from a hotel room in which we’d conducted a love affair, and now every innocuous act was tainted by embarrassment and regret.

My kneecaps bleated; I searched for a place to sit but all of the sofas and chairs were occupied by weepers. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the garish blinking on the underside of my lids. I, too, felt embarrassed, or regretful, on the verge of dissolve. Perhaps it was the repeated (if unintentional) bumping of bags against my body, which reminded me of certain massages I’d received from physical therapists who communicated, via their cold hands and blunt, stabbing gestures, that they believed me to be a psychosomatic faker who drained from their fingertips all traces of goodwill, leaving them face-to-face with their own empathic shortfalls as healers. Or perhaps it was the crying woman’s mention of the unread library books, because truly there was nothing sadder, except a gift that a person has hand made for you, a scarf or a poncho, that, try as you might, you cannot ever see your way into wearing. This is when the cold indifference of the world envelops you, and makes you feel invigorated by emotion but also acutely alone. These moments of heartbreak for unwanted scarves and unread books can reveal to you, more than the inattention of any long dead mother, what it is to be alive.

The Regnor’s bar was located through a windowed protuberance I’d mistaken, the previous day, for a phone booth. I needed a drink, but no bartender materialized from behind the mirrored escarpment of liquor bottles.

I sat two stools over from the bar’s only other occupant, a vaguely familiar woman who held an unlit cigarette and wore a pendant that resembled a flattened mace. Perhaps, I thought, my mother’s necklaces had looked like this. I hoped so. I fetishized black-and-white photos of women in ladylike clothing and barbaric jewelry. I’d always admired a photo of Sylvia Plath wearing a cardigan and a pendant that is either a gargoyle’s face or a hazardous flower.

“Are you here for the film conference?” the woman asked. She had an Eastern European accent. With her doll eyes blinking from her scavenged face, she resembled a person buried inside another person.

“No,” I said.

“I’m an actress,” the woman offered. “Visiting from out of town.”

I smiled a force field. I was in no mood for talking.

She played with her necklace, balancing it on her pointer finger.

“My mother gave this to me,” she said. “She’s a movie director. She told me I was her muse.”

I squinted at her anew. This, perhaps, explained why she’d seemed familiar to me. No doubt she’d appeared in one of the many foreign films I’d watched since arriving in New York, my apartment located a block from a revival house that insisted on screening films without English subtitles or dubbing. I’d become gifted at extrapolating story lines without the aid of a single comprehensible line of dialogue. These movies also made me miss my psychic forays less, these oblique glimpses into the lives of cinema strangers functioning as a plausible substitute.

“Your necklace reminds me of one Sylvia Plath wore in a photo,” I said.

“The one where she was also wearing the flowered dress and the sweater?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Sometimes her eyes look blue and sometimes black,” she said. “And what was she thinking with the over-the-head braids? She might as well have tattooed the word hausfrau on her forehead, or what little you could see of it under those dustpan bangs.”

“ ‘He tells me how badly I photograph,’ ” I said, quoting from the poem “Death & Co.” Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself — she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me — no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face.

“Irenke,” the woman said, failing to extend a hand.

“Julia,” I said.

Finally the bartender appeared.

“Can I get you something?” he asked.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

“I’ll have what I’m having,” Irenke said.

“Make it two,” I said to the bartender.

“Two what?” he said.

“Whiskey sours,” Irenke said.

The bartender grew very irritated.

“Well?” he said.

“Two whiskey sours?” I said. “Please?”

“All you got to do is ask,” he said gruffly.

Irenke put on her coat.

“It’s so cold in here,” she complained.

“It’s really cold,” I agreed.

“Tell it to the management,” the bartender said.

He throttled up a pair of whiskey sours and placed them both in front of me, as though Irenke weren’t even there.

I slid a sour to her.

We sat without speaking. She snapped beer nuts between her front teeth and shot me sidelong glances when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

“I think we are suffering in the same way,” Irenke said finally.

“Huh,” I said.

“We have both been jilted by people who might have loved us,” she clarified.

“I practice a no-attachment policy with men,” I said. “I’m all business.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re a call girl?”

“I used to call on people,” I said. “But I was never paid.”

“It’s no big deal to be used by strangers,” Irenke said. “It’s when you’re used by people you know that life becomes unfathomable.”

She announced she had to visit the ladies’ room.

“Need anything?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe a toilet.”

She examined me at unabashed length.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Your life is about to get better.”

“It is?” I touched my cheek, always an alienating sensation. The anti-seizure meds numbed my skin; to touch my face was to enter a failed romance between body parts.

“You must have been such a pretty girl,” she said. “We should get her back.”

“Get who back?” I said.

She touched my droopy eyelid with a fingertip.

“The woman who did this to you,” she said.

Her lids flung wider. Suddenly her madness, like the flecks of lead sifting to the surface of her blue irises, was all that I could see of her.

I shied away.

“Nobody did anything to me,” I said.

“You did this to yourself?” she asked.

“I’ve contracted a virus,” I said.

“Fascinating,” Irenke said. “And how’s that going?”

“How’s what going?”

“Believing that.”

As she dismounted her stool, she knocked my bag to the floor. She shoved the pill bottles back inside. She handed it to me.

“When you’re ready to fight,” she said, consonants blurring, “give me a call.”

I amended my diagnosis. Irenke wasn’t crazy, she was drunk.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know I’d do anything to help you,” she said, flipping up the collar of her coat. “I owe you that much.”

“You owe me a lot more than that,” I said, humoring her.

“You’re right,” she said. “I owe you much, much more than that.”

There was no point in correcting her drunk’s outsized commitment to our insta-barroom intimacy — we didn’t know each other. She owed me nothing.

“I mean it,” she said. “When you decide you need my help, call on me, call girl.”

“I will,” I said. “And same here. If you ever need my help. Don’t hesitate to call.”

She steadied herself on the edge of the bar.

“Not to worry, Julia,” she said. “There’s no helping me.”

Irenke disappeared through the door, over which an exit sign buzzed. I swear I heard the sound of dirt raining onto a coffin lid. I experienced, or thought I experienced, what might be described as a muscle memory, if the brain could be considered, as psychics considered it, a muscle — my gray matter straining to interact, for the first time in over a year, with those ulcerations in the astral plane. But then I realized that there was nothing psychic going on here, this was plain old human intuition kicking in — an arguably more useful talent for me to manifest. Because it didn’t require any special talent to know: Irenke was doomed.

My phone alarm beeped. It was time to take my 6 p.m. pills. I swore to myself as I struggled with the tops. My pharmacist refused to give me non-childproof bottles even though I promised her I knew no children.

On the bar I lined up one Dramamine, three ibuprofens, two vitamin Cs, four folic acids, a Voltaren, and two psylliums. Handling pills, even after a year of copious pill taking, still gave me an illicit charge. I did not touch, but often visited, the prescription bottle I’d found in my father’s bedside table when I was seven, a bottle with my mother’s name on it containing a single, half-nibbled pill.

Weirdly, I couldn’t find my bottle of diazepam. I emptied the contents of my bag onto the bar. I checked under the stools, searching the shadows where an errant bottle might have rolled when Irenke spilled my bag.

Then I understood: Irenke had stolen my diazepam. She didn’t strike me as a drug addict, but as something worse — a creepy collector of souvenirs.

Her odd violation tiptoed me to the brink of dissolve again — really, what was wrong with me? If there was one victory I could claim to have achieved over the past thirteen and a half months of illness, it was my refusal — or inability — to wallow. Perhaps, I thought, my unsteadiness could be blamed on the whiskey warming my chest, and its bittersweet reminder of my carefree early Workshop days, when the only schedule I respected, after basking, hungover, on the campus green, was one that landed me each afternoon in the windowless reading corridor because I liked the packaged butter cookies the librarians served with the four o’clock tea, the silly daintiness of this ritual leavened by the violent death images on the reading corridor walls, painted by a forerunner of the Mexican mural movement.

Such nostalgia left me vulnerable, however, to the understanding that this person didn’t exist, and not only because I’d left the Workshop. I didn’t count my life in days anymore, I counted it in hours. I counted it in pills. That carefree person no longer functioned as the norm from which I’d deviated. As the months elapsed, my old self would be vanished by this new self. It was a mean variety of suicide that permitted you to keep living, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Your life is about to get better.

I clinked Irenke’s empty glass.

As I finished the last of my sour, the bar door opened — Irenke, I assumed, returning from the ladies’ room. But no.

Alwyn entered, followed by a balding man in a charcoal muffler.

“There you are,” said Alwyn, as though we hadn’t agreed yesterday to meet exactly here.

“This is Colophon,” she said, presenting a drawn man who most resembled, of the famous people I could think of, Virginia Woolf. He wore a gray suit beneath a gray overcoat, and could have passed for an overworked diplomat were it not for the felt beanie on his head.

Colophon announced that he was hungry and needed to eat. He did not appear interested in me, save to discover whether or not I was a fan of gnocchi.

Fine, I thought. We could be mutually indifferent to each other.

Alwyn insisted on charging my bar tab to her room. I left Irenke a napkin note that said, “You vanished. I’m off to eat Italian. I’ll call on you.” Of course Irenke hadn’t given me her phone number, but I hoped she’d figure that I was drunk and forgot I had no way to contact her. Because the truth was this, I told myself: I was never going to call.

At the restaurant, Alwyn filled and refilled her tiny wineglass with Chianti, and occupied herself by holding the corners of her polyester napkin in the candle flame, watching the fabric wither to a nub. After we ordered our food, she engineered a tiff with Colophon.

“Did you mail the grant application?” she asked.

Colophon confirmed that he had mailed the grant application.

“Because it had to be postmarked by today,” Alwyn said.

Colophon repeated that he had mailed the application.

“You always insist that postmarks don’t matter,” Alwyn said, “but I assure you that the committee is dying for a reason to throw your application in the trash.”

“We’ve applied to Timothy Kincaid’s foundation for a research grant,” Colophon explained. His voice was subterranean and minor-keyed, mellow but not altogether relaxed.

Not that I wanted to sleep with him, but — I could sort of understand why Alwyn did.

“We are not trying to get a grant,” Alwyn said.

“I am trying to get a grant and Alwyn, though she does not agree with my Varga theory — that her acts of political and professional immorality were performance pieces meant to critique such political and professional immoralities — will nonetheless benefit from the funding as my research assistant,” Colophon explained.

“Porn is porn,” Alwyn said. “Authorial intent does not make it less porny. That was her point.”

“And what was your authorial intent?” Colophon asked. Then to me: “Alwyn had quite a porn career once upon a time.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a career,” she said. “More of an inspired hobby.”

“Not so inspired,” Colophon said. “How familiar are you with Dominique Varga?” he said to me, cutting to the chase. Colophon, I’d already registered, was not one for small talk unless it, too, was of the cutting variety.

“Not very,” I said.

As Alwyn continued to drain glass after tiny glass of Chianti, Colophon told me all that I already knew, and much that I did not, about Dominique Varga. Born in 1942 to a Hungarian mother and a French father, Varga began her career as a morgue photographer in Paris, where she’d moved from Budapest in the late sixties at the age of twenty-six. One day Varga took a razor blade to the photographs she’d snapped of the female cadavers, excising them from their morgue surroundings. She pasted these into the editorial spreads of fashion magazines on the metro newsstands, situating them alongside the models like dead alter egos. When Varga was arrested and charged with vandalism, her career was born.

“From the very outset, however,” Colophon said, “she positioned herself as an artist with a contradictory, even hostile belief system.”

When Varga’s work was championed by French feminist critics Simone Moreault and Lisette Bloch, for example, Varga responded by wearing funeral attire to the trial of Jules Fanon (a then-infamous dismemberer of prostitutes) and weeping on the courthouse steps for seventy-two straight hours following Fanon’s sentencing to life in prison. Later she published a series of domestic photographs titled “Interior ReDecorator” wherein she simulated a self-administered abortion with a curtain rod; obscuring her head is a large photograph of “Let Them Live,” the French 1970s anti-abortion group.

But according to Varga — a claim her oft-mocked critics, Colophon said, met with forgivable dubiousness — her cruelly whimsical attitude changed overnight when, in 1977, her mother died. After selling all of her belongings, including her prints and her negatives, and donating the proceeds to a political collective intent on installing the death penalty in France, she withdrew from the art scene for two years. By the time she reappeared, in 1979, she’d become one of the most prominent directors of underground pornographic films in Europe.

Yet the word pornographic, Colophon explained, didn’t accurately capture the tenor of these films, which were less erotic than meditative, even serene. The films gained a fringe cachet among louche, aristocratic Europeans, in particular a wayward heiress who organized, at her Ibiza beach house, the first official festival dedicated to Varga’s films, in June 1980. The second night of the festival, the heiress disappeared.

“Like vanished?” I asked.

“Like dead,” Alwyn interjected.

“Or possibly not,” Colophon said.

“Dead,” Alwyn repeated, bored.

A month later, a gossip columnist in Paris received an anonymous phone call informing him of the existence of a film directed by Varga, one that starred the heiress lying on an Ibiza roadside. Her car, crunched against a cliff, smoked in the background as her body, thrown (or dragged) free of the wreckage, was lovingly fondled by masked women wielding prosthetic hands.

While many in the heiress’s circle claimed to have seen this film, Colophon said, no hard copies were ever recovered. Soon, however, a series of six snuff films bearing Varga’s signature dark aquarium lighting began circulating, again via underground channels, throughout Europe. Though no bodies were found, Varga was charged with the murder of the heiress and six other women. But at her sentencing, a female spectator removed her coat and lay, naked, in the aisles of the courtroom. Once in custody, the woman identified herself as the “snuffed” star of Varga’s six films.

“Nobody died during the making of these films,” Alwyn said, quoting Varga. “Nobody but me.”

Following her acquittal, Colophon said, Varga again found herself both embraced and reviled by the French feminist establishment. Those who reviled her were invited by Varga to her film premieres and asked to speak to the audience about Varga’s moral flaws while Varga wept audibly backstage. Those who persisted in supporting her, such as Simone Moreault, found themselves mercilessly parodied.

“She made a film called Simone Moreault,” Colophon said, “in which a badly dressed academic uses a naked woman as a typewriter stand.”

In 1982, criticism erupted over a series of films showing Varga having sex with young male artists who, afterward, professed to have slept with her only to gain a career foothold. None of these men knew they were being filmed. The results were exhibited in a show Varga curated at Blue Days, her then-gallery in Paris, called “Up-and-Comers, Coming, Going.”

“Varga claimed, ‘My grieving body is the most powerful sculpture any of them will ever create,’ ” Colophon said. “And here is where my scholarly interest in Varga begins.”

According to photographs of this opening, an anti-fascist artist named Cortez was among the guests. Two weeks later, Varga announced she’d accepted an endowed chair at the Institut Physique du Globe de Paris; additionally, she’d been hired to shoot a propaganda film for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National party that would, Varga said, “make Triumph of the Will look like a Looney Tunes animation,” a claim that earned her the nickname, “the Leni Riefenstahl of France.”

When Varga disappeared again in 1984, this time for good, no one, Colophon said, was surprised. Some people believed she’d been kidnapped and killed by either the leftist radicals who’d been sending her death threats or by a member of Le Pen’s own security team, many of whom boasted backgrounds in organized crime; others believed that she committed suicide, a claim buttressed by Varga’s last known film, Not an Exit, interpreted by some as a suicide note, in which Varga stars as a woman who’s violated by an anonymous hand.

Colophon drank two glasses of wine in quick succession. Alwyn, entranced again by her napkin-burning project, seemed unaware that her lips were pursed and twitching, like a person unpleasantly dreaming.

“And what do you believe?” I said to him.

“He believes she ran off with Cortez,” Alwyn said. “He believes the fact that the film reel was found in Cortez’s safe proves that they were collaborating, and that Varga wasn’t a fascist, or a pornographer, but a bold crusader against ideology. Her ‘fascist’ project was a performance art piece, aimed to undermine all ideologies.”

“The love of clandestine perversions, of exploiting opposing sides of the political propaganda machine, is a familiar Vargian trope,” Colophon retorted.

“Only if you think she was exploiting anything other than her own ability to be exploited and to exploit,” Alwyn said.

“And what do you believe?” I asked Alwyn.

“Me?” she said.

“Is she alive or is she dead?” I said.

“I have no idea,” Alwyn said.

I don’t know why but I did think: she’s lying.

“What I mean is,” she clarified, “something happened to her.”

“Clearly,” Colophon said.

“She was emotionally derailed,” Alwyn said. “Watch Not an Exit if you doubt me.”

“Probably she had her heart crushed,” Colophon said. “Don’t let the porn hobby mislead you. Alwyn’s a closet romantic.”

“This from the person who refuses to consider the woman who directed films about pretend-dead girls being fucked by strangers to be a pornographer,” Alwyn sniped. “She wasn’t exploiting people, she was exploiting an ideology.”

Alwyn excused herself to the ladies’ room at the precise moment that the waiter delivered our meals. Colophon and I waited five minutes for her to return, then gave up and started eating.

“I don’t suppose you have an opinion,” he said.

“About whether or not she was exploiting an ideology?” I asked.

“About whether or not she’s alive,” he said. “You were Madame Ackermann’s protégée. I’m assuming you exhibited some sort of … facility.”

“I don’t have an opinion about that, no,” I said.

“Of course not,” Colophon said. “Madame Ackermann mentioned you’d become sick. That you were taking ‘time off.’ ”

Colophon, chewing, inspected me. Then he reached beneath the table and produced, from his briefcase, a familiar sheaf of ghost-grid paper describing Madame Ackermann’s “trip” to the Tour Zamansky.

“I asked around to find out whose handwriting this was,” he said.

“It’s mine,” I said. “I was her stenographer.”

“Madame Ackermann’s account of how she found the film safe number always struck me as suspicious,” he said. “Among other things, she described the Tour Zamansky as Neo-Gothic, when really it was designed by a disciple of Le Corbusier.”

“To her credit,” I said, “Madame Ackermann’s not a googler.”

“I consulted an automatic handwriting expert,” Colophon continued. “He said that there’s a difference between writing produced from external aural prompts and internal aural prompts, which can be seen in the length of the ligatures. Ligatures refer to letters joined by links.”

“I know what a ligature is,” I said. I had no clue about ligatures.

“When a person is taking dictation, you see ligatures of three to four letters. But when they’re taking what is known as ‘auto-dictation,’ i.e., transcribing an internal voice, the ligatures tend to be five to seven letters in length.”

Using the clicker end of his ballpoint, he counted for me — five, six, five, seven, seven.

“According to the ligatures, you were not taking dictation from Madame Ackermann.”

“Huh,” I said, as though this were news to me.

Then he asked me how familiar I was with the phenomenon known as psychic attack.

I told him that I knew a little bit about psychic attacks, though I knew more than a little bit.

“I don’t want to seem as though I’m diagnosing you,” Colophon said. “But I believe that you’re being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann.”

I thought he was joking. He was not.

“Why would she waste her energy on me?” I asked. “I’m a nothing.”

“Well,” Colophon said, wiping his mouth. “You are now.”

Alwyn returned from wherever she’d been. With a spoon back, she methodically flattened her gnocchi one by one. It was like watching a child kill bugs, and did very little to warm me toward my own meal, a colorless dish scarred with prosciutto.

I was not a fan of gnocchi.

“So,” Alwyn said. “Did you tell her?”

“I was in the midst,” Colophon said.

“Just tell her already,” she said.

“I’m getting to it,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “I may die first.”

She turned to me.

“Madame Ackermann hates you because you were able to do what she failed to do, namely find the film safe number, and this humiliated her and made her feel old, obsolete, sexually diminished, etcetera, and so she’s psychically attacking you, which means you’re screwed because even though her career is on the wane, she’s still more powerful than most people in your field, but Colophon, contrary to how he might have presented himself to you while I was out smoking, does not feel ‘responsible’ for what happened to you, and thus if he’s offered to help you it’s not because he’s an altruistic guy, trust me, he’s an academic, i.e., an egotistical bastard who’s willing to pay for you to go to a pricey psychic attack recovery facility only if you agree, in exchange, once you’re better and once you’ve regained whatever powers you possessed to the extent that you possessed any at all, to help him resuscitate his failing career by finding Dominique Varga, whom he believes to be alive, and if he can prove it his career will be pulled from the scholarly junk heap and maybe he’ll get tenure somewhere decent and will no longer be forced to take visiting lectureships at agrarian schools in the Urals, but regardless he’s hoping, given what he presumes to be your shared personal interest in ruining Madame Ackermann’s reputation, that you’ll accept his offer to help you avenge your bodily misfortune.”

Alwyn forked a pair of gnocchi into her mouth.

“I might have phrased it a bit differently,” Colophon said.

“Of course you would have,” Alwyn said, chewing. “And yet here we are, meaning the same thing.”

Colophon withdrew a brochure written in German, Hungarian, and English (denoted, in case the language alone failed to signify, by nation-appropriate flags) from his briefcase. On the cover was a photograph of an art nouveau building located, according to the English copy, in a wooded district of Vienna, abutting a place called Gutenberg Square.

“The Goergen specializes in curing victims of psychic attacks,” Colophon said.

I noticed, on the brochure’s bottom right corner, the TK Ltd. logo.

“Currently the Goergen services two types of guests,” he continued, “those wishing to recover in secret from plastic surgeries, and victims of psychic attack who’ve been forced, in order to evade their attackers and recover their health, to vanish.”

“Point being,” Alwyn said, “you could also get a nose job while you’re there.”

Colophon examined my face for possibly the first time since he’d met me.

“I like her nose,” he said.

“Maybe truer to say that her nose is the least of her problems,” Alwyn said. “Sometimes it’s nice to fix what you can.”

“Psychic attack victims vanish?” I said, ignoring Alwyn.

Colophon nodded. “Psychic attacking vanishings account for a decent percentage of TK Ltd.’s business, one that increases by the year. You are far from alone.” Psychic attacks, he explained, both the conscious and the unconscious varieties, had become rampant among the non-psychic population — among members of book groups, for example. People were attacking each other via shared texts. Many more attacks were launched through social media sites. The possibilities for connectedness, and for privacy invasion, had unleashed what Colophon called “an epidemic of opportunity.”

“I still don’t understand why you want to ruin Madame Ackermann’s reputation,” I said. “She lied to you, OK. But so what?”

“Oh,” Colophon said. Then to Alwyn, “See? You overlooked a major detail.”

“So stab me,” she said.

After he’d received the ligature assessment from the automatic handwriting expert, Colophon explained, he’d accused Madame Ackermann of lying to him about her role in the recovery of the film safe serial number. She’d denied it. A week later, she’d informed him, via e-mail, that she wouldn’t be able to further discuss her research methods with him due to the fact that she’d decided to write about Varga. She, too, was convinced that Varga was alive; she, too, had decided it would constitute a bold career move to find her.

“I understand Madame Ackermann has a habit of nicking other people’s ideas,” Colophon said. “Which is why, if you managed to do what it seems you somehow managed to do — find the correct serial number — then it would appear you have a talent that could help me, and we could be of mutual use to one another.”

“Ah,” I said. It was less a sound of revelation than of defeat. Ah.

Had it come to this? I thought. Was I this sick, this desperate that I’d embroil myself in a relative stranger’s revenge fantasies against my former idol in order to punish her for misfortunes that were, best I could tell, nobody’s fault but mine? And regarding Madame Ackermann’s psychically attacking me, well … I couldn’t see how I was worth the personal cost such an act would incur. Psychic attacks risked destroying the health of the victimizer as well as the victim.

I picked the prosciutto strips out of my meal. The stink of air-cured meat turned my stomach and reminded me of my first late August in the Workshop dorm, the air redolent with what amounted, in hindsight, to the ridiculous ambition to alter the molecular state of dead animal flesh with one’s spastic, twenty-three-year-old attention span. I remembered thinking, as a first-year initiate, this is the smell of my future. I would be a giddy, sweating failure, but then I would, without question, succeed. When I matriculated at the Workshop I was under the impression, as was probably every untried and untested initiate, that I was fated to be famous. Every streetlamp I walked beneath and darkened was proof of this. The Workshop, thus, had always been, in my mind, a temporary resting point on my life’s journey to greatness. But it hadn’t happened that way. Nothing about my time at the Workshop was restful. And while greatness no longer seemed a destination within my reach, I no longer knew, even in the average scheme of things, where the hell I was going.

I couldn’t sleep that night, even though I’d swallowed one Nembutal, two over-the-counter sleep aids, a glass of valerian-browned water. Finally I decided to kill the hours that remained until day watching the DVD Colophon had given me. As he’d chased a runny tiramisu around a plate, he’d emphasized: in order to cure myself of this psychic attack — in order to become well enough to humiliate and discredit Madame Ackermann by finding Dominique Varga before she did — I would first have to vanish.

There was no other way.

“And if you’re going to make a vanishing film,” he’d said, “you might as well be inspired by the master.”

I slipped Not an Exit into my computer. I clicked “Play.”

Varga’s film was about five minutes long, and I watched it fifteen times in succession. I couldn’t help but giggle at the title, until, by about the sixth watching, it no longer seemed funny, Varga and her mean love affair with an anonymous hand. Nor did the single line of dialogue, delivered by voiceover, possibly Varga as well, while a child cried in the background: It’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it.

Then I became depressed.

I removed the DVD, I drew a bath. As the tub filled I hunched on the toilet lid and considered the possibility that I was being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann. Professor Blake had explained psychic attacks with one simple and incontestably true statement: People make other people sick. Blake tweaked that statement to suggest that sickness was purposefully, malevolently, caused by other people. After an hour of witnessing Blake at his twenty-foot-long slate board, layering chalk scribbles over fist-erased chalk scribbles, his hands by the end of class as dusty and swollen as a wrestler’s, his ideas seemed the furthest thing from radical. They seemed obvious. They seemed like the only viable ideas.

I closed my eyes. I tried to sense Madame Ackermann inside of me, like the chatter of enemy bacteria I could sometimes hear when I had an ear infection. Surely there would be a trace of her; more than a confusion of symptoms, Madame Ackermann would want to leave her personal mark.

And she had. My pulse gonged in my ear canal as, eyes closed, I stared at it. And stared at it. And then marveled how, for all the hours I’d spent looking at the backs of my own eyelids, I had never until this moment realized what should have been apparent to me from the start — the annoying constellation of light pricks outlined the shape of a very familiar wolf.

I tested this suspicion. I opened and shut my lids rapidly. I tried to dislodge her design on me. But the pricks remained.

It was she.

I should have been alarmed. No, I should have panicked. I was being psychically attacked by the most powerful person in the field of parapsychological scholarship. But instead I was so relieved that I could almost hear the endorphin floodgates sliding open.

My sickness had a cause. What had been, for over a year, my free-floating, possibly fabricated (according to some doctors) state of misery had been validated and identified. I knew where it lived, what it ate for breakfast, what kind of parking tickets it amassed on vacation, the type of sheets it desired.

It even had a name.

I ran to my computer to e-mail Colophon. He’d been right. I had proof. But when I opened my inbox, I’d received another e-mail from aconcernedfriend — my third that day — with the same attachment of the woman on the bed. And then I nearly slapped myself in the head, it was so obvious: aconcernedfriend was Madame Ackermann. These e-mails constituted a form of psychic warfare, proving she’d hacked into my immune system and also my past. She’d been invited places that I’d never been invited to go. She’d been to my mother’s death bed, and she’d filmed this dramatized artifact to taunt me.

I watched the attachment so many times that it started to collapse, in my mind, with Varga’s vanishing film, the woman lying on the floor and the woman lying on the bed becoming one, and I could hear Varga’s voice saying, it’s not the people you let into your vagina who can hurt you, it’s the people you let out of it.

I closed my eyes again. I savored the wolf.

This is your fault, I thought, thrillingly. Your fault.

I drew a bath. As the tub filled, I stared at my face in the mirror and dared it to care. It did not care. With a gummy razor I cross-hatched, for the sake of experimentation, the topmost layer of skin on my wrists. I held my hand over the toilet and watched the blood drip into the bowl, a sight that made me remember my last menstrual cycle, now more than a year ago, with detached fondness. I would not say I was suicidal. I would never say that.

Besides, there was no point in punishing myself. Madame Ackermann was to blame for my misery. And I was going to make her sorry that she’d ever met me.