The Vanishers

Part Three

My favorite guest at the Goergen was a plastic surgery patient who identified herself, when I met her, as “Hungarian skin-care royalty.” A widow named Borka, she showed zero respect for the anonymity rules by which we were instructed to abide.

At the Goergen, the first thing we’d learned was the peril of being known.

“It means ‘foreigner,’ ” Borka told me of her name. “Always I have been a bedbug in my own family.”

Reedy, turbaned, with a spooky Isak Dinesen expression paralyzing her features, Borka appeared to be in her late sixties, though this remained an uncorroborated guess. Her rheumatoid hands — swollen, hooked, beige — resembled ginger roots, suggesting she might be nearer to two hundred. We sat together at meals, including Silent Breakfast, during which she scribbled instructions on a pad. A typical jotting would read LOOK 11 O’CLOCK, and I would do so, only to witness something I did not need to see: a psychic attack victim flaking her psoriatic scabs with a fork tine, for example.

Before bed, Borka and I played backgammon in the lobby, where marble columns severed the vast square footage into many wall-less cubicles of space. We sat in scarred leather club chairs, our knees touching. Borka tried to psych me out whenever it was my move by intensely owling my face.

“You are a big déjà vu to me,” she’d say, her smoker’s rasp so throaty and mechanical it sounded as though it had been routed through a voice changer.

There were many discouragements at the Goergen, the strictest of which involved leaving it; we were threatened with not being allowed back in if we disregarded this particular admonishment. Given the skittish, high-profile clientele, paparazzi lurked across the street in Gutenberg Square with hopes of catching, as one famously did, the wife of an Austrian diplomat, her postoperative face coated with a salve that reflected the camera’s flash and inspired a number of gossip columnists to speculate that she’d had a diamond surgically implanted in her cheek.

The Goergen thus resembled a more extreme version of my existence in New York, my travels circumscribed now to the interior of a single building, the positions I assumed in chairs — the club chairs in the lobby, the chaises in the thermal baths, the lyre-backed chair in my room — acts of sitting with no pressure attending my inertia, no tourists for whom to speak theatrical Arabic.

I found it, at least until Alwyn arrived five days after I did, relaxing.

Alwyn was not a guest at the Goergen but a quasi-employee; given Colophon’s professional and financial entanglements with Timothy Kincaid (Kincaid’s foundation had awarded Colophon his research grant), and given that TK Ltd. owned the Goergen, Kincaid made an exception to the Goergen’s guest-only rule, allowing Alwyn to liaise with my psychic attack counselor, to make sure I abided by the many discouragements, and to guarantee, in the interests of everyone receiving a decent return on their investment, that I took my healing seriously.

In her spare time, Alwyn’s job was to track Madame Ackermann’s movements and keep abreast of any Varga progress she made that threatened to supersede ours.

Not that we, or I, had made any progress.

I met Alwyn in the lobby where, a mere five minutes after walking through the front door, she was already in a fight.

“Cell phones are discouraged,” the concierge said. “If you do not give me your phone, I cannot give you your room key.”

“Just to be clear,” she said. “You’re not discouraging me. You’re forbidding me.”

“I forbid nothing,” he said. “You are free to sleep in the square with your precious phone.”

“But I’m not one of them,” she said, gesturing toward the club chairs occupied by surgical patients in bandages, psychic attack victims overcome by tics and rashes. “Tell him,” she appealed to me.

“She’s not one of us,” I said.

“How can I say this as a compliment,” said the concierge. “You will not always be a young or unloved girl.”

Alwyn grudgingly relinquished her phone.

“What a puffin-stuff,” she said, after procuring her key. “Walk me to the elevator.”

She handed me her heaviest bag. She’d changed her hair while on her brief vacation in Paris, coloring it burgundy and snipping tiny bangs. She’d traded her sloppy cardigans for a collarless tweed jacket with expensively frayed cuffs and hems; around her neck she’d pinned a scarf patterned by miniature equestrian hardware, stirrups and bits.

Alwyn noticed me noticing her, and in return took my quick measure — my wool robe, my boiled-wool slippers, both presents from Blanche one Christmas when she’d themed all her gifts around the support of a local sheep cooperative.

“You look so convalescent après-ski,” she said critically. “I got here just in time.”

“I’ve been taking my healing very seriously,” I assured her.

“No,” she said. “I mean I got here just in time.”

We slalomed her bags between lobby columns, past a quadrant of club chairs occupied by postsurgical patients in headscarves, cards fanned before their bruised faces, legs slung to the side as though riding horses through a copse of spectral trees.

Alwyn babbled, at an indiscreet decibel level that triggered the lobby’s rat-a-tat acoustics, about the detective her mother and stepfather had hired, and how this detective had tracked her to Paris.

“My old prep school roommate, who lives in the Marais, started receiving phone calls from a man inquiring about me. Where was I staying in Paris? What were my travel plans? Fortunately, I told her I was headed to Sofia. Once a deceitful gossip, always a deceitful gossip. How are things with you?”

I told her about the Goergen’s discouragement against sharing personal information.

“Anything you divulge could be used against you,” I said, quoting the book of discouragements chained to the underside of my bedside table. “The less the other guests know about you, the fewer opportunities exist for them to collude, even unwittingly, with your attacker.”

“Hmmm,” Alwyn said.

“It’s kind of a relief,” I said.

“What is?” Alwyn said.

“Not having to be curious about other people.”

Alwyn smirked.

“What?” I feigned. Because I knew what. Alwyn had made it her conversational goal, for the duration of our nine-hour flight to Paris (at which point I’d continued alone to Vienna), to prod me for details about my mother’s life, of which I could provide, in her opinion, pathetically few, except that she’d grown up in a ragtag corner of Connecticut as the only child of a widowed father who’d never remarried and died of lung cancer when she was twenty-three; she’d been allergic to mohair and developed francophone pretensions as a means of armoring herself against the deleterious effects of her lower-middle-class upbringing; she’d resented her honeymoon to a buggy coast of Canada and hated the leather couches my father had inherited from an uncle and refused, because they were basically new, to exchange for something “classier”; she always took the bigger steak and became wickedly depressed when forced to sleep in houses less than one hundred years old; and while living in Monmouth she’d never had a close female friend or a decent winter coat or any sense of social reciprocity, all of which led the people of Monmouth to believe that she thought she was better than them.

It is possible she was.

Also she wore her long, black hair like Madame Ackermann’s, parted in the middle, the ends narrowing to a point on her back like a damp paintbrush.

I did not tell Alwyn that, while apprenticing with a metalsmith in Paris, she’d sold her work to Dominique Varga, nor did I mention that she’d lost her engagement ring and married my father because he was good medicine. It did not, at this point, strike me as any of Alwyn’s business.

We waited for the elevator to grind up from the basement.

“But with your abilities,” Alwyn said, “how could you refrain?”

“Refrain from what?” I said.

“Knowing things,” she said, returning to her plane fixation. “It’s like you have unlimited access to the Facebook profiles of anyone who ever lived.”

“Parapsychologists never use social networks,” I said. “They’re a boon for psychic attackers. For self-protective purposes, we confine ourselves to e-mail.”

Then I tried to explain what I saw as a matter of respecting, psychically and otherwise, a person’s privacy, in particular my mother’s.

“I don’t go where I’m not invited,” I said.

“She forfeited her rights to privacy when she killed herself without leaving a note.”

“Interesting theory,” I said.

“I’m here to help,” she said as she stepped into the elevator. “By the way, I spoke with your psychic attack counselor last week on the phone.”

“My who?” I said. I held the elevator door open.

“Her name is Marta. Your first meeting with her is tomorrow.”

“Oh,” I said, miffed that Alwyn would have spoken to this counselor before I did.

“Marta said we have to assume that you’ve made yourself vulnerable to Madame Ackermann’s attack.”

“Because I deceived her?” I said.

“Everyone has vulnerabilities, everyone has a weak spot. It’s my job to help you locate those weaknesses. These portals. The opening via which Madame Ackermann got to you.”

“Too bad there’s not an MRI for that kind of thing,” I said.

Alwyn sighed testily.

“I thought you said you were taking this seriously,” she said.

“I am,” I assured her.

“Are you?” she said. “Ask yourself that. Ask yourself right now.”

I removed my hand from the elevator door.

“Your sad life,” she intoned, as the door pinched her from view, “when will you stare it in the face?”

I walked to my room beset by claustrophobia, the slurry of my slippers against the floor tiles echoing off the ceiling in a gossipy swirl. I stopped in front of an unclean window.

You, I said to the reflection. When will you stare your sad life in the face?

I pointed at her. She pointed at me. We stood, accused.

Then we shared a laugh that the acoustically hyperactive hallway magnified and sheared to a sharp bark, the kind that a dog emits when his tail is stepped upon, half blaming outrage, half hurt surprise.

En route to my room, I swung back through the lobby to check my e-mail. Though the Goergen discouraged computers and cellular devices, the concierge kept a terminal in his office that, depending on his mood, he allowed guests to use. Fortunately, he’d expended his daily ire quota on Alwyn; he waved me through.

I checked my e-mail even though, per the TK Ltd. vanishing protocols — which required me to dispose of all vestiges of my former self, including the online vestiges — I’d ditched my old account and opened, via TK Ltd., a secure one for the purposes of communicating with my vanishing coordinator in Cincinnati, and with Colophon, who was in Paris.

Colophon’s plan, while Alwyn and I were at the Goergen, was this: He’d obtain objects that had once belonged to Varga in hopes that I might, once cured, be able to psychometrize them. Psychometry—“mastering the hostile object”—was one of the few areas of Workshop study I’d proven good at. We’d learned, in Professor Penry’s seminar, how a flow of electrons moves between people and the things they touch, creating an electromagnetic imprint, a greasy emotional coating you could read like a piece of microfiche. During the midterm exam, I’d been the only initiate to identify a thimble as belonging to a woman whose finger had once touched the mouth of the Mona Lisa.

But no word from Colophon. The only e-mail I’d received was from aconcernedfriend; Madame Ackermann, despite TK Ltd.’s boasted-about firewalls, had somehow tracked me down.

I stared at her attachment, the tiny canted paperclip visibly throbbing. I considered opening it, even though it was against the discouragements to do so (“Refuse any communication with your attacker while in residence; this includes postcards, e-mails, care packages, etc.”).

I slid her e-mail into the trash.

Then I stared at my empty inbox, a rectangular void that finalized what had been under way for a year — I’d been forgotten by everyone.

Vanishing, in other words, proved a redundancy for me. As far as most people were concerned, I was already gone.

I did, however, feel pretty fucking guilty about vanishing on my father and Blanche; Blanche, over sushi that night in New York, had expressed her clear disapproval of both the act and the films, and my father, well, he’d already endured his fair share of sudden human absences. As I’d tried to explain in my film (which, so far, neither of them had seen — we received an e-mail from TK Ltd. whenever a visitor “checked out” our film), I viewed vanishing as an extreme medical necessity, akin to a form of radiation in which a partial killing takes place in order to promote a healing.

I promised to be in touch when I was better.

I was pretty certain this was not a lie.

Back in my room I lay on my bed, two skinny mattresses bridged by a length of V-shaped foam, and failed to sleep. In addition to my passport and cell phone, I’d surrendered to the concierge all of my pill bottles. Without my Nembutal, night was an ice age of unmoving time spent staring at the wolf, or trying to fall asleep with my lids open, eyeballs drying in the dark. Things glowed in my room that shouldn’t: the light switch in the bathroom; the face of the alarm clock. I closed the bathroom door and shut the clock in the armoire. I heard clicking noises outside my window coming from Gutenberg Square, the little-bird-skull-popping sounds of the paparazzi snapping photos, I thought, until I realized it was my clock, echoing from inside the armoire, louder now that I’d enclosed it in a smaller space.

The first of my daily meetings with Marta, my psychic attack counselor, occurred, as scheduled, one week following my arrival.

After breakfast, Borka offered to escort me to Marta’s office, stashed in a distant wing of the Goergen and impossible to locate the first time without a guide.

Borka said, “Whenever you are late, Marta will ask you, ‘Why were you late?’ To which you should respond, ‘Why do you not want to be found?’ ”

We exited the elevator on the Goergen’s gloomy topmost floor, the one obscured behind the building’s mansard roof, its darkness moderately relieved by the high-up circular windows, each one permitting a beam of light to bore through the moted air. These many dull moons marked our travel, and made me feel, as we scuffed our slippers over the tiles, as though we were midnight skaters following a river of dusty ice.

I asked Borka why a plastic surgery patient such as herself should be meeting with a psychic attack counselor. She explained that due to her surgical history — she’d undergone extensive facial reconstruction decades ago, following a bad car accident — she had been deemed worthy of psychological evaluation.

“But the windshield did not ruin my face quite so much as the doctor who fixed it,” she said.

I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was true that hers was not a face that anyone would pay for. This explained why she always wore a hood-like headscarf even though she’d yet to have any procedures or suffer any discoloration or swelling that required, per the Goergen’s unspoken dress codes, polite obscuring. Her face, uncut, was a weapon.

“Now I want to right the wrongs that were done to me,” she griped. “And this indicates that I am insane.”

“You want to be yourself again,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “For what it’s costing, there are far more worthy people to be.”

As we walked down a hallway that narrowed as we progressed toward its endpoint, Borka inquired about my attack.

I knew it was against the discouragements to tell her, but Borka was a harmless old lady and not the sort to hurt anyone. We were friends. Despite my experience with Madame Ackermann and my instinctual resistance to Alwyn, I was not so spiritually wrecked that I’d come to distrust all people.

I related to her a basic version of the events that had landed me in the Goergen.

“So you are like Eve in All About Eve,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I am like Dumbo in Dumbo.”

I told her that I was looking for a Hungarian artist.

“Dominique Varga,” I said. “Maybe you know her work.”

Borka’s body recoiled minutely, as though she’d inhaled a sharp odor; otherwise, she appeared not to have heard me.

She asked me where I’d grown up, what my full name was.

“Severn,” she said. She practically chewed this information. “That is an aristocratic-sounding name.”

“I think, like most aristocratic-sounding names, it used to be Slevovitz,” I said. “Or Severnsky. Or Sevethanopopakis.”

My father, I told her, was born to murky people — the only child of parents whom I remembered best for serving me sandwiches filled with a paste of ground bologna, mayonnaise, and pickles, a combination that suggested either high American Waspiness or one of its many immigrant opposites.

“And your father? What does he do?”

“He’s a geologist obsessed with sinkholes,” I said.

“Here we call them drains,” she said, unimpressed.

“No … well …” I said.

I explained to her about sinkholes.

“They may be formed gradually or suddenly,” I said. “But the sudden ones swallow cars, buildings, sometimes people. My father studies sinkholes caused by human activity, namely industrially produced waste.”

Her stare grew keener.

“And your mother?” she said.

“My mother is dead,” I said.

I expected her expression to stall in that gear of generic pity I’d come to so detest, and tried never to inspire.

But it didn’t.

“No wonder your father is obsessed with holes caused by people,” she said.

We arrived at Marta’s office. The top half of her door was windowed by nubbled glass; on the other side, a dark shape bent and straightened, as though stretching before a hike.

“Put in a good word for me,” Borka said. She scampered down the hallway as though scared of being spotted by Marta in my company.

Marta, a woman with Hunnishly high cheekbones and turquoise bifocals, did not shake my hand when I entered her office, gesturing me instead toward a tweeded loveseat.

Marta riffled through some documents in a desk drawer before sitting across from me in a matching armchair. She wore a patent belt high on her waist that forced her stomach outward and created a convenient podium on which to rest a manila file with my name (“Severn, Julia”) written on the tab.

I recognized the Workshop insignia atop what appeared to be my school transcript.

“It is not specified by the discouragements,” said Marta, “but in the same way that prayer is discouraged, so are regressions or any kind of psychic foray, unless supervised by me.”

She asked me to explain my attack situation.

“In your own words,” she said, as though she’d already heard my story from someone else, probably Alwyn.

I told her about Madame Ackermann, my stenographer demotion, Colophon Martin, and so on.

“You’ve had sex with this Mr. Martin,” Marta said.

“No,” I said.

“In your own words, please.”

“No,” I said. What had Alwyn been telling her?

“It’s apparent to me that she’s enacting some kind of revenge on you,” said Marta.

“Alwyn?” I said.

“Madame Ackermann,” she said. “A revenge driven by the fact that you rejected her as a mother substitute. But your rejection did not stop her from acting ‘motherly’ toward you, and resenting the fact that her powers were on the wane at the precise moment that yours were on the upswing. And by powers,” Marta explained, “I mean her sexual attractiveness and her potency as a mystic, the mutual degenerations of which, alas, tend to coincide.”

Marta played with the bridge of her bifocals, sliding them up-down, up-down, and staring alternately at my file and then at me, as though, of the two, I was the one refusing to appear plausibly 3-D to her.

Madame Ackermann, I informed Marta, had no shortage of willing sexual partners.

“Everyone wants to have sex with her,” I said, unclear why I was so determined to defend her on this point, but it did seem a kind of blasphemy to deny Madame Ackermann, even to this woman who would never meet her, her epic allure.

Then I explained the significance, by way of debunking Marta’s occult mastery decline theory, of the double torque Madame Ackermann threw at her forty-third birthday party.

“Hmmm,” Marta said. “Perhaps this Madame Ackermann is a psychic vampire. Perhaps she siphoned your energies in order to attack you.”

“Meaning I attacked myself?” I asked. Marta made it sound as though I suffered from a psychic autoimmune disorder.

She recommended I do some reading on the subject in the Goergen’s library.

“We’ve scheduled a renowned psychic vampire expert to give a presentation here in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll remind you to attend.”

She slid my file into her desk drawer and announced that it was time for us to perform an exercise called Mundane Egg.

“Many people have fissures or holes in their eggshells,” Marta said, “that allow the foreign entities to invade.”

She instructed me to lie on her sofa and visualize my eggshell.

“Now imagine it’s thicker,” she said.

Marta asked me to inspect my shell for cracks or holes. I imagined running my hands over the bony smoothness until I found an irregularity — a tiny checkmark-shaped fissure.

Marta instructed me to patch it.

“We’ll do this exercise every session,” Marta said. She warned that I’d find new holes to patch as my abilities for espying imperfections in my shell grew sharper.

“In order to get better I must become more skilled at detecting how I’m sicker?” I said.

“If that’s how you need to see it,” Marta said. “Regardless, you cannot take these exercises lightly. I don’t want you to make poor choices.”

“Choices,” I said.

“I want you to channel your energy inward, not outward,” she said. “I stress to my psychic attack patients — revenge is not a compelling therapeutic goal.”

“Revenge is a very compelling therapeutic goal,” I said. “It’s just not a very noble one.”

“For a woman of your exceptional abilities, these exercises are far more dangerous,” she cautioned. “What you do when you leave here is your business. But while you are in my care, I cannot assist you with your … unconscious warfare.”

I promised Marta to engage in no unconscious warfare. In good faith, I promised her this. I was innocent, at the time, of the lengths to which my unconscious would go to mock my inability to know my own warfare intentions.

On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn.

“Hey,” I said.

Alwyn didn’t recognize me at first, her eyes glancing off me with chilling indifference.

“Oh,” she said, catching herself. “Hi.”

Her smile unnerved me. I knew, now, what casually stony person hid beneath.

I followed her to the concierge’s desk. En route she caught me up on what she’d learned about Madame Ackermann’s movements. She’d been to a spa in New Mexico.

She also told me, displaying a recent New York Times article, that Madame Ackermann had been in the news in conjunction with the surgical impersonators case I’d first heard about at the Regnor panel. There’d been a sharp rise in reports of surgical impersonator sightings (i.e., people refashioning their faces to look like people who had died) in and around New York City, prompting a Manhattan criminologist to speculate that these impersonators were part of a terrorist group engaging in civilian psychological warfare. A number of notable American psychics, including Madame Ackermann, had become interested in the case — they assumed these impersonators to be astral imprints whose sudden abundance suggested there’d been a meaningful “rupture” in the astral membrane.

Hilariously, Alwyn said, the psychics had positioned themselves on the side of reason; Madame Ackermann was even quoted in the Times article as saying that a band of surgical impersonators acting at the behest of (and funded by) a terrorist leader was, comparatively speaking, “an unlikely scenario.”

I noticed Borka across the lobby, reading a butcher-papered book. She waved to me. I waved back.

“Who is that woman?” Alwyn asked.

“She’s skin-care royalty,” I said.

“Really,” Alwyn said.

“Her name means bedbug,” I said. Then I started to correct myself — her name didn’t mean bedbug — but I’d already forgotten what it was that it meant.

“She more resembles a praying mantis, don’t you think?” Alwyn said.

“I guess,” I said.

“She’s astonishingly ugly,” Alwyn said. “I hope she finds a better face soon. Don’t you?”

“I like her,” I said.

I was, I’d noticed, one of the few. Borka did not socialize with the other plastic surgery patients — the baronessas and the wives of import moguls, the members of the varied Austro-Hungarian aristocracies with whom she, in the outside world, presumably mingled. Whenever she passed the card-playing quartets in the lobby, mean whispers fizzed in her wake.

For some reason, however, Borka made me feel at home. Also she taxonomized humans using inscrutable animal metaphors that never failed to amuse me. People she didn’t like were half-dachshunds, people she did like — for example, me — were beetles.

Alwyn suggested I join her for tea in the dining hall. I agreed, even though I was made nauseous by the tea they served between meals, called liver tea because it detoxified the liver, the organ most weakened by psychic attacks.

“So,” Alwyn asked, “how’s the work?”

I assumed she meant my first session with Marta. The airiness of her tone renewed my paranoia that she’d shared with Marta inaccurate information about me.

“It’s fine,” I said. “But I’m a little curious … I’m concerned … what I mean is, I’m wondering what it is that you tell Marta.”

Alwyn regarded me, bemused.

“How can I say this,” Alwyn said, “so that you don’t take this the wrong way.”

“By wondering if I’ll take something the wrong way,” I said, “you’re guaranteeing that I won’t.”

“You’re the last person to be trusted to portray an accurate version of yourself,” she said.

“You, meanwhile, are the first person Marta should trust,” I said.

Alwyn stopped mid-stride.

“I’ve never told her anything you wouldn’t eventually have told her,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“OK,” she said, as though the matter were settled.

“But,” I said, “I’m a little concerned that you might tell her something that I would never tell her because I don’t believe it to be true.”

“Such as?” she said.

“Such as the ridiculous theory that Madame Ackermann wanted me to use her as a mother substitute.”

“Only you would find that theory ridiculous,” Alwyn said. “Madame Ackermann is a medium. A person through whom dead people speak.”

“Believe me,” I muttered. “When I was with her, no one was speaking through that woman.”

I circled back to my original worry.

“But you didn’t tell Marta I had sex with Colophon.”

Alwyn pulled at her little bangs as if they were a furled shade she might draw down over her face.

“What?” she said.

I repeated my question.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Have sex with Colophon? Or tell Marta that I did?”

“Please,” she said. “I know you’re way smarter than to do that.”

Alwyn returned to walking, briskly this time. I marveled at how she was able to project a blanket of certainty over a conversation that was pure jumble, stunning her listeners into shamed muteness. I didn’t dare press her to elaborate on what I’d failed to understand, even though a few crucial logic steps were missing from our exchange, steps wherein actually useful information might reside.

The dining hall was empty. We tapped the hot urns, filled our cups with liver tea.

“I know I keep saying this,” Alwyn said, “but we really do have a lot in common.”

She proceeded to recount in dull detail the gist of a paper published by the Journal of Mental Science in the mid-seventies, one that established a telepathic link between mothers and babies, and proved that babies in orphanages — separated from their mothers and deprived of their first, and most intense, human bond — were forced to search further and further afield for this connection.

“Those babies were twice as likely, by the age of three, to exhibit psychic predilections,” she said. “Would you say that’s when your abilities first appeared?”

“I can’t remember,” I said.

“What I don’t get is why I didn’t develop any psychic abilities,” she said. “My mother might as well have been dead for all I saw of her when I was little. Part of me suspects she must have read that article; she’s so competitive, she probably spent just enough time with me to make sure I wouldn’t develop powers that she hadn’t developed herself.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. It sounded totally insane.

“My stepfather told me she tried to abort me.”

“Recently?”

“She denied it when I confronted her. I’d deny it if I were her. It’s curious, though, right? I mean obviously I’m curious. Why did she want to abort me? Maybe she did have some kind of … power. Maybe she knew I’d grow up to disappoint her more than she disappointed herself.”

“I thought she was an internationally famous shampoo model,” I said.

“You say that so dismissively. She had iconic hair.”

“I’m marveling at the inadequacy of the phrase,” I said.

“Because it was a hair campaign her face was barely visible, thus people assumed she was an unattractive woman whose unattractiveness a skilled photographer was forced to obscure. Passersby on the street would say, ‘You’re the Breck Girl!’ And then, ‘But you’re so pretty.’ She was a famous model, and yet she spent her life convincing others she had a face that didn’t need hiding.”

“That is kind of tragic,” I conceded.

Alwyn pulled a tabloid magazine from her bookbag.

“Odd that you should be asking so much about my mother today,” she said.

She showed me a photo of a woman in an ivory ski ensemble standing in front of a gondola at Gstaad, her hair a blue-ish auburn that winged to the sides as though attached to wires.

“That’s her?” I said. “You’re prettier. Not that it’s a competition or anything,” I hastened to add. But it was true. Alwyn’s beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she’d had, or how much water she’d drunk, or how many people she’d annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.

“She doesn’t look like a woman whose daughter has vanished,” Alwyn said. “Though what that would look like, I can’t say. I only know it’s not that.”

She finger-jabbed the page, creasing her mother backward at the knees.

“She still hasn’t flown to Cincinnati to see my film,” Alwyn said. “Has she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Has she?”

Alwyn scrutinized me.

“Just testing,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were obeying the rules. No psychic activity.”

That wasn’t the only reason she’d asked. She was deeply bothered by her mother’s and stepfather’s failure to see her vanishing film. (I wanted to assure her: on this front we did have something in common.) I recalled the crying woman at the Regnor panel and her comment about library books that remained unread for decades. Alwyn and I, by committing our absences to film, had become objects whose neglect could be quantified.

“You’re lucky you’re being attacked,” Alwyn sulked. “Someone cares a lot about you.”

“Your mother cares about you,” I said. “She hired a detective.”

“Mmmm.”

“She probably wants to make sure that you’re not in any trouble or danger,” I said.

Alwyn laughed.

“If you’d had a mother,” she said, “you’d understand what a forgiving interpretation of motive that is.”

“I had a mother,” I said. “But I was spared the rite of passage of hating her.”

“Which is exactly your problem,” Alwyn said.

“Maybe more of a matter of inexperience than a problem,” I said.

“Hate is a form of emotional attachment,” she said. “You’re denying yourself the only maternal bond available to you. This is your weakness, in my opinion. This is why you’re being attacked.”

“Because I don’t hate my mother?” I said.

“Like it’s so outlandish,” Alwyn said. “What kind of woman would kill herself when she had a month-old baby? I’m sorry, but that’s monstrous.”

I picked up my liver tea. I drank what, for me, counted as a lethal dose.

“It’s not monstrous,” I said. “It’s fucking tragic.”

“I suppose you’re one of those people who feel worse for Sylvia Plath than for her two children,” she said.

This was true.

“I don’t understand how a woman could do such a thing,” Alwyn said. “I don’t understand it at all.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” I said coldly. “Thinking it can be understood.”

Two weeks after my arrival at the Goergen, I received irrefutable proof that I was getting better. Or maybe it was proof that the pills I’d been taking in New York had been cleansed from my system thanks to the liver tea and the colonics to which I’d been subjected, and the bookbinding hobby I’d picked up, maybe too the Mundane Egg visualizations I did every day with Marta, even though I always left her office feeling dirty and ashamed.

Regardless of the cause, after more than a year of psychic blindness, I was able again to see.

On my fourteenth night at the Goergen, Helena, a plastic surgery patient from Budapest, blustered into the dining hall.

“My engagement ring is gone!” she announced. Her left hand spasmed above her head, lacking the ballast of the very large diamond she’d made certain we noticed, rattling the gem against table surfaces when she ate, her hand otherwise seemingly paralyzed by its amazing shackle, the fingers slack, the palm upturned, as though awaiting something — a kiss, a nail.

Perhaps I was reading too much into her. Borka had told me: Helena was not a lucky girl (“girl” employed by Borka as an emotional category — Helena was in her fifties). This engagement would be Helena’s fourth marriage; her previous husbands had left her, two of them had beaten her. But on the plus side, said Borka, she’d started out as a secretary, and very poor, so at least she’d married her way to money.

“It’s not all ditch water,” Borka said.

An orderly hurried Helena into a chair and urged cold compresses upon her. Helena’s three-day-old face-lift was in the delicate stage; intense emotions were contraindicated. A man in a white suit took notes while the rest of us hovered. Her ring, Helena told us, had been stolen from her locker while she soaked in the thermal baths.

“I’ll post a reward,” Helena said to us, the silently gathered. “To whomever finds the thief, I shall express my gratitude in a manner known as handsome.”

I heard her tell another plastic surgery patient that she’d lost the engagement ring her first husband had given her, too. “Though it was impossible not to lose that ring,” Helena confided. “The diamond was the size of a lentil!”

Back at our table, Borka and I gossiped.

“It probably fell down a drain,” I said of the ring. The Goergen featured an unnerving number of drains, not only in the showers or puncturing the walkways between the thermal baths but in rooms usually immune to deluges — mine, for example. I’d found a drain underneath my bed, implying that the room would be hosed out once I left, my various residues cleansed. Maybe the drain was regulation. Who knew. I tried not to think about it. Whenever I lay on my bed, I repeated in my head this sentence: I am contaminating the scene. I am contaminating the scene.

“It is for the best that she not marry this man,” Borka said.

“She’s still going to marry him, I’d imagine,” I said.

Borka appeared traumatized by this suggestion.

“She cannot,” she said. “A lost engagement ring means the marriage cannot happen.”

Borka drew a finger across her throat.

“If she marries him she’ll die?” I said.

“Maybe only the living kind of dying,” Borka said. In the Hungarian countryside, she informed me, people believed in the existence of beneficent meddlers who broke up bad marriages before they happened. In ancient times this was accomplished by the destruction of the dowry, for example the disappearance of a herd of livestock.

“But of course it is just a folktale to allow for the theft of jewelry and sheep,” she said.

“My mother lost her engagement ring,” I said.

Borka was unimpressed, much as she’d been when I’d told her that my mother was dead. I’d come to expect such reactions: she was slightly autistic, Borka was, but aware enough to know that she should respond differently. As a result, these confessions of mine made her tense; she seemed to register them as a rebuke.

“And she persisted in marrying my father,” I said, trying to apply a happy spin, also to assure her — I expected her to be nobody other than who she was.

“Indeed,” Borka said. “And look what happened to her.”

“Well …” I said.

“When a woman is enchanted by unhappiness, there’s little that anyone, even a beneficent meddler, can do to dissuade her,” she said.

“I thought you said the beneficent meddlers didn’t exist,” I said.

“I said they were probably thieves,” she replied, her tone embittered for reasons I couldn’t connect to the loss of rings.

That night I had a vivid dream.

The locker room could have been any locker room in any former Eastern bloc country — tiled, steam-noisy, the locker doors painted noxious shades of citrus, the vibe vaguely gas-chamberish. A little girl stood naked while a naked woman — her mother, I guessed — dried her back, her breasts and haunches bobbling with the effort.

The mother disappeared to the lavatories; the girl pulled on her sweater, her too-short pants. Beside her, a young woman disrobed with professional efficiency, quick and fluid. At first I did not recognize her — Helena was a blonde now, and thirty-odd years older. She removed her engagement ring, its diamond minuscule, more of a chip than a stone, and placed it in her locker. Without padlocking the door, she, too, disappeared to the lavatories.

Sneaky as a shadow, the young girl slipped her hand into the locker. She posed in front of a long mirror, hand against her cheek, stolen quarry glinting on her finger.

“I” stood behind her.

As in my previous regressions, I did not appear in reflective surfaces. My consciousness was not embodied, though I inflicted on this world my ghostly void. When I stood before the locker room mirror, a white spot in the shape of a person appeared where I should have been, as though someone had taken an eraser to a charcoal drawing, rubbed me out.

The girl’s mother called her. The girl stashed the ring in the shallow coin pocket of her pants, but as she hurried toward her mother’s voice the ring jogged loose and rolled onto the tiles. It carved a wide ellipsis, its orbit narrowing and quickening toward the drain. The girl fell to her knees and, trying to intuit the ring’s trajectory, snatched at the future space it might inhabit. But then she was distracted by something — me, it seemed — and missed her chance to grab the ring before it disappeared through the drain’s vertical slots.

The girl stared at the drain before returning her gaze toward me, as though I were to blame for the ring’s loss, as though I were the thief.

I awoke to my alarm at 6:30 a.m.

I dressed, ate very little breakfast, did Mundane Egg with Marta, ate very little lunch, took the elevator to the basement to soak in the thermal baths. I’d felt vague all day, my post-dream self like an organ transplant slow to take. I grabbed my towel from the bath attendant. I shakily undressed. I needed, after each slipper removal, to rest on the wooden bench that paralleled the lockers.

Even so, my sense of disequilibrium surged.

I lay on the floor, the tiles against my cheek like hot teeth. At this point, I believe I fell asleep. Again I dreamed, or thought I was dreaming, because again I saw the drain and the ring falling into it, over and over I saw this, I saw the younger Helena, I saw her returning to her locker to discover her ring missing, I saw her telling her fiancé outside a restaurant that she had lost his ring, and I saw him wanting very badly, were it not for the sidewalk spectators, to hit her. I saw all of this except that my eyes were open, and I could hear Borka berating the bath attendant for failing to call a doctor when a doctor was needed.

“But she looks so happy,” the attendant said.

When the doctor arrived he asked me hyper-articulated questions most people could not fail to understand.

“Did you check the drains?” I asked. All I could see, still, was a drain, over which the doctor’s features were superimposed.

The doctor shone a penlight in my pupils.

“Helena’s ring,” I said, “did you check the drains?”

“Of course they checked the drains,” said Borka.

“Can you tell me the date of your menstrual cycle?” asked the doctor.

“All of them?” I asked.

“All of the drains were cleaned yesterday,” the attendant said.

“Just the last cycle,” the doctor said.

I flipped onto my stomach; I crawled across the floor.

“Even a rough estimate,” said the doctor, following me.

I pried the drain’s grate loose with a fingernail.

The string was very long; whoever tied it to the grate’s underside wanted to make sure that a flashlight beam, flashed into the drain, wouldn’t snag Helena’s diamond.

I pulled until the ring flipped onto the tile floor.

I smothered it in my fist.

“Has it been one month?” asked the doctor. “Two?”

“Who did this?” asked Borka, without a touch of curiosity.

“It’s important that I know,” the doctor said.

My body tingled with endorphins. The ring in my hand required no coddling to tell me its tale of future sadness, Helena married to a man who killed her daily.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing the ring away from me. The metal radiated a repulsive sliminess I did not dare absorb. “I haven’t menstruated in over a year.”

That night, we received a memo under our doors.

“Dear Guests,” it read. “Your discretion and relaxation are our utmost treasures. Memory is unnecessary work. To forget is to respect the past, and to enable your pleasant future.”

Soon everyone knew about my role in the recovery of Helena’s ring. I could sense their knowing most forcefully in the lobby, a space unwisely constructed of palissandro bluette marble, a stone touted for its properties of thought amplification. The robed women in the club chairs emanated what I can only compare to a wireless signal that would have measured five full bars; via these frequencies we were bound.

Borka, meanwhile, installed herself as my bodyguard, escorting me to meals, protecting me from the other guests.

“Why did you hide from me the true you?” she said.

“There was nothing to hide,” I assured her. “That part of me was dead.”

“You must have missed yourself,” she said.

“I did at first,” I said. “But then I figured, what’s gone is gone.”

She owl-eyed me weightily.

“I’m sure you have a lot of experience in that area,” she said.

“Me?” I said.

“Because of your mother,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I never experienced her as missing, though. I was so young, you see, when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Borka asked.

“When she … died,” I said. Borka’s inability to process basic tragedies meant that she might not register the distinction between plain dying and suicide.

“But you have visited her,” she said. “So now you can miss her.”

“I’ve never visited her,” I said. “I’ve never been able to.”

“Because it is beyond your abilities?” she said.

“Because I am not invited,” I said.

Borka’s eyes teared up, though probably I mistook for tears the light from the lobby’s chandelier silvering the ointment she rubbed on her lids, preparing her face for its eventual surgery.

Alwyn, when she caught wind of the ring kerfuffle, acted mad.

“I’m obligated to tell Colophon that you’ve broken the rules,” she said.

Beneath her sternness, however, she seemed oddly energized by my breach.

“But I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It’s because they don’t allow any stupid pills in this place.”

“If you don’t abide by the discouragements, you won’t get better,” she said.

“Evidently I am better,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said. “You aren’t.”

I did try to abide by the discouragements. I did. It wasn’t my fault that soon I was being propositioned in the lobby, the thermal baths, the lavatories. An Austrian woman wanted me to find out whether or not her husband was cheating on her while she recovered from the chin tuck she hadn’t wanted but which he’d given her anyway for her birthday. A French woman kept a journal about her sexual activities with a coworker that she worried her teenage daughter was reading in her absence. A former model wanted to know if the tiny newborn she’d abandoned in the waiting room of a doctor’s office seventeen years ago had found a happy home.

I rebuffed them all. What good had ever come from my abilities? I’d never been able to control them. Always someone suffered; often that someone was me. My good intentions meant nothing. Asleep, I proved powerless to refuse the voyages. I intruded upon a ski chalet where a man with a bald spot dumped spaghetti into a colander while another man with a bald spot massaged his neck. I visited a girl trying on a gaping orange G-string for an audience of three boys. I visited a little grave.

None of these visions were conclusive, or so I told myself. Nor were they even terribly vivid: the colors muddy, the image flickering like a movie screened on a projector with a hair stuck in the lens. They could have been dreams. But nor did I seek to corroborate them as valid regressions. I did not ask the woman with the chin tuck to show me a picture of her husband so that I could cross-reference him with the image of the bald men I kept in my head. I did not ask the French woman if she owned an orange G-string. I did not ask the former model if her tiny baby, when she’d left him in the doctor’s office, was breathing.

Instead I provided answers to their questions with a fortuneteller’s vagueness. You are the current cause of your husband’s sexual fulfillment. You inspire others with your spirit of adventure. Happiness comes to those who are well-rested.

But while I soon became one of the most popular guests at the Goergen, I remained unimpressed, even disenchanted. My brain was flabby, clumsy, a geriatric detective that farted on the job. Even at my strongest point — at the Workshop, while regressing for Madame Ackermann — my successes were sheer accidents, flailing sword thrusts into the psychic ether.

So I decided — in the interests of reducing the harm I could cause by amateurishly bungling about in such matters — to do some secret exercises. This, I rationalized, was the responsible way to manage what was going to occur despite me.

First I stole a rump roast from the kitchen and stashed it atop my armoire, wrapped in an ammonia-soaked towel to hide the stink from the chambermaids. Three times a day I lay on my bed, arms and feet canted outward in a modified corpse pose, and tried to petrify the roast.

It became for me a little bit like praying.

I did not check my work for a week. When I unwrapped the meat — noting with a surge of hopefulness that I detected no putrifying stink whatsoever — I found a caramel-colored geode, half the size of the original rump and five times the weight. On one flank I’d created a crystallized ulcer that allowed me to see the jeweled interior, like the peephole into a Fabergé egg.

I tried not to be too proud of my work. Pride, Madame Ackermann used to say — not that we ever believed her — is a psychic’s endgame. Still, I had reason to be impressed, at least a little bit. Also, coincidentally or not, my health, for the first time in fourteen months, improved. I suffered no migraines. The eczema on my hands receded. The wolf, when I blinked, was gone.

When Alwyn asked me how I was feeling, I told her, I feel wonderful. My brain tingled as though it were bobbing in carbonated liquid. I viscerally recalled the way I’d felt when I’d been sitting in the Barcelona chair, regressing in order to save Madame Ackermann’s reputation. I’d felt lightweight. I’d felt disembodied. I’d felt fiery and alive. I missed that person — a person eradicated by all the medications I’d been taking in New York, and to what end? My suffering wasn’t minimized, and these cures had killed off the best part of me. The transgressor. The Peeping Tom. The spy.

Two days after I’d unwrapped the rump roast, I skipped lunch and visited, for the first time since I’d discovered Helena’s ring, the baths.

I was alone, everyone else at lunch.

I chose the hottest bath — more of a swimming pool — and eased myself in one step at a time, the water to my shins, now my hips, now my shoulders. I floated on my back. I noticed for the first time that the skylight overhead was nearly identical to the skylight at the Regnor — same beveled corners, same twining snake-or-ivy.

It gave me an exercise idea that I felt, after my petrification success, skilled enough to attempt.

I centered myself beneath the skylight and tried to imagine myself back to the Regnor, a place I’d once been, a place where there’d be a fossilized placeholder for me to slip inside. This was the easiest form of regression because it allowed you to travel along the familiar byways of memory and required you to be no more foreign a person than a past version of yourself. However, risks were involved. We initiates were advised against using our own lives too frequently as practice fodder; revisiting one’s memories could result, over time, in a form of self-erasure.

I gave it a try.

A busier skylight blotted out the Goergen’s plainer one — it was like watching a text written in invisible ink exposed to heat, the hidden letters burning to the foreground. I saw a giant clock, the hour frozen at 2:29 p.m., the second hand poised, spear-like, over the belly of the six. I stared at that second hand. I tried to activate the space, break through the static barrier that froze this moment in time.

No success.

I imagined myself diving into water, but this felt wrong. Water could too easily, and without yielding apparent wreckage, accommodate a foreign object. Once, as Madame Ackermann lay on her futon couch, snoozing through another failed regression, she’d started crying in her sleep.

This is my only legacy, she’d whimpered. I make scars in time.

So I envisioned the barrier as layers of transparent muscle, fat, skin. (I’d been born by cesarean section, my umbilical cord wrapped three times around my neck.) I dove headfirst into the barrier. It stretched, it resisted. I dove a second time and the barrier tore. I heard amplified sounds: the electric buzz of the clock, the crick of a heater vent.

I opened my eyes. This lobby was not the lobby of the Regnor. There was an elevator, but a smaller one. A wall was covered with mirrored tiles that gridded the lobby’s reflection into cocktail-napkin-sized squares of visual information. People in winter coats spoke French.

The elevator disgorged a trio of women, one of whom was crying.

I searched for someone I recognized and found one person. I knew her from somewhere — as Borka might say, she was a big déjà vu for me. I could see her in the gridded reflection, but when I turned, I could not locate her in the lobby. She existed only in the mirror.

I was comically slow to realize that this girl, she was me. Unlike during my previous regressions, I did not register in the mirror as a foggy blank.

I was there. Or rather here—wherever here was. Based on the outfits worn by the lobby loiterers, I guessed here was, temporally speaking, the early eighties.

The elevator opened again. Four women exited, including the actress I’d met at the Regnor’s bar. She was the same age she’d been when I’d encountered her in New York, even though, based on our surroundings, we were now occupying a moment in time preceding that one by twenty or thirty years.

I recalled how the bartender had never acknowledged Irenke, how he’d placed both whiskey sours in front of me as though I were sitting at the bar alone.

From his perspective, maybe I was. Irenke was an astral imprint. Despite the fact that my medications should have blunted such incursions, she’d managed, somehow, to visit me.

Irenke sat on the couch opposite mine. She slung her coat across her lap. She tried to flag a waiter.

“Hey,” I said. “Irenke, right?”

She lit a cigarette, eyed me along the barrel. She didn’t appear to recognize me.

“Julia,” I reminded her. “I don’t mean to bother you—”

“Except that you do bother me,” Irenke interrupted. “Every day.”

“Really?” I said. I had no recollection of this. So far as I knew, I hadn’t seen Irenke since the Regnor.

“Every day like clockwork,” she said.

Her claim unnerved me. It also thrilled me. It suggested that I’d regressed without any knowledge or memory of doing so; I might even be a living-dead trancer. Without a stenographer present, who could say?

Irenke, fingers throttling her cigarette, was evidently in a mood.

“Let’s try this again,” I offered.

“Too late,” she said. “We’ve been overridden. Or overrode. I never was very good at grammar.”

“What do you mean, overridden?” I asked.

“You’re the paranormal expert,” she said. “Ask one of your professors. The past is not past if it is always present. Memory is an act of murder.”

She loosened a buckle on her dress.

“I’m fat,” she complained. “I shouldn’t eat cream soup. Do you know what this is called? A self-belt. Such an ugly term. Sylvia Plath should have written a poem called ‘Self Belt.’ She liked those staccato word punches: Black shoe. Fat black stake. God-ball. The villagers never liked you. Achoo.”

“We spoke about Sylvia Plath the last time we met,” I said. “Or rather, the time I met you in New York.”

She wasn’t, I noticed, wearing her pendant.

“You must have me mistaken for another girl,” she said. “I’ve never been to New York.”

She stood, smoothed her skirt, tossed her empty cigarette packet on the coffee table.

“Be right back,” she said.

A weeping woman strode past Irenke, clipping her elbow. Irenke glared at her.

In my head I recited the final lines of “Death & Co.”

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.

A waiter appeared.

“Drink for the madame?” he asked in French.

“Whiskey sour,” I said.

“And for the madame’s friend?”

“Make it two,” I said.

Irenke returned before our drinks arrived. She unfoiled a new pack of cigarettes.

Two more weeping women exited the elevator.

“Guess they didn’t get the part,” Irenke said.

“What part?”

“The part of the dead girl,” Irenke said. “There’s a casting call upstairs.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, there’s probably an upside to not getting that role.”

“My mother’s the director,” Irenke said. “I’ve heard she can be very abusive to people who disappoint her. Which is why I’m nervous about auditioning.”

I recalled that Irenke had told me about her mother at the Regnor, how this mother had given her the necklace and called Irenke her “muse.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re a shoo-in.”

“A what?” she said.

“You’re her muse,” I said. “How could she give the role to anyone else?”

Irenke appeared horrified by this suggestion.

“You think a mother should cast her own daughter in a porn film?” she said.

“Your mother directs porn films?” I said.

I knew, then, who this mother was.

Was this why Irenke had visited me — or rather, why I had visited her?

I cased Irenke for proof that she was Dominique Varga’s daughter. I’d only seen Varga once, in Not an Exit; my brain conjured a woman with a jutting, aggressive face, one unwilling to succumb to the victimization of an anonymous hand, even as her motionless body did. Irenke’s face, meanwhile, melted downward, failing to refute the melancholy gravity that pulled at it.

“But she doesn’t know she’s my mother,” Irenke clarified. “I only found out recently myself.”

“And so … you’re here to tell her?” I asked.

Irenke laughed.

“That would be a mistake, don’t you think?”

Probably, I thought.

“You’re here to spy on her, then,” I said.

“I’m here to audition,” Irenke said. “I want to see if she knows who I am. Don’t you think a mother should recognize her own daughter? Even if she abandoned her at birth?”

“I didn’t know that Dominique Varga had a daughter,” I said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Irenke said. “She erased me. She overrode me. A woman like her couldn’t be a mother.”

The waiter appeared with our whiskey sours.

“I didn’t order this,” Irenke said.

“I did,” I said.

“What is it?” she said.

She took a sip.

“It’s good,” she said. “I like it.”

We clinked glasses. Irenke withdrew a camera from her purse and asked me to take her picture.

“I want to remember this day,” she said. She wheedled a compact from her coat pocket and reapplied her lipstick.

She tried, with mixed results, to smile.

I took her picture anyway.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“So,” Irenke said. “Have you decided yet?”

“Decided what?” I said.

“Do you want me to help you punish her or not?” she asked.

“Punish who?” I said.

“I’m an expert at ruining people’s lives,” she continued. “It’s the one talent I possess.”

She flashed her drink, already half gone.

The elevator dinged. Two red-eyed women exited, followed by a woman obscured by long, black hair. Her step, unlike that of her dejected elevator mates, was springy, elated. She noticed Irenke, absorbed again in her makeup compact, picking at her lashes. The woman’s shoulders flicked together. She sped her gait and cut to the left, skimming so near to my armchair that her hand glanced off my cheek as she passed.

She hurried past the doorman, who followed her with his eyes.

Madame Ackermann. For certain, it was she, her hair shivering thickly across her back as she strode into the street without checking for traffic, hailed a cab, was gone.

My cheek burned where she’d touched it.

She’d been upstairs, I thought. She’d possibly met Varga. Apparently, too, she knew Irenke, or at least of her, and had chosen, for whatever reason, to avoid her. What did she know that I didn’t? Quite a lot. We’d funneled our way back through the same regression wormhole, Madame Ackermann and I, but she was leagues ahead of me.

I considered chasing after her, confronting her, threatening her, even (I’m onto you), but decided against it. Psychics died doing this sort of thing. We were data collectors, not participants. Madame Ackermann’s mentor, for example, had drowned as an astral stowaway on a doomed Great Lakes cruise ship in search of a grandfather she’d hoped to save. Madame Ackermann, as her stenographer, had recorded her final, shrieking words before the water sucked her down.

“You know,” I said to Irenke. “I could use your help with a different matter.”

I told her that I wanted to accompany her on her audition. I wanted to meet her mother.

“That’s impossible,” Irenke said. This request spooked her. “I’m sorry, no. She doesn’t want to see you.”

“Your mother?” I said. “But she doesn’t even know me.”

Irenke fell silent.

“Why do you want to ruin people’s lives?” I asked her.

“This isn’t about what I want,” Irenke said. “It’s about what you want.”

“But I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life.”

Agitated, she drained her sour.

“Look,” Irenke said, calming herself. “I’m trying to make it up to you in the only way I can. Please. For my sake. Accept my help.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but she wasn’t going to help me in the way I wanted to be helped until I relented. What was the harm in saying yes? I could pretend to accept her offer, I’d let her think that she was doing me this favor. Because then maybe she’d be more amenable to doing me an actual favor, and introduce me to her mother.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d love your help.”

After dinner, I stopped by the concierge’s office to check my e-mail. I had one message, from aconcernedfriend; though it was against the discouragements I clicked on Madame Ackermann’s video. What hurts you makes you stronger, I rationalized. And I needed to be stronger. I’d seen Madame Ackermann in a hotel lobby in Paris, circa 1980-something. We were fated to collide in the astral ether; I wanted to be up to our future encounters.

The fog registered as green-toned, though perhaps this was due to the concierge’s crappy monitor. I watched the entire attachment. It centered me.

Then I wrote Colophon a quick note. Did Dominique Varga have a daughter?

Then — though it violated the vanishing contract I’d signed — I wrote an e-mail to Professor Hales. Professor Hales, I reminded myself, was so freakishly self-involved that he couldn’t be bothered to care that I’d vanished. He likely hadn’t noticed I’d left the Workshop.

Dear Professor Hales, I wrote. Wondering if you could tell me a bit more about regressions via memory byways, and if you’ve ever heard of a phenomenon called “override.” I ask because I’m interning as a fact-checker at a new parapsychology journal based in the former Yugoslavia called Mundane Egg.

I reread what I’d written. This notion of override was interesting. Though not the word used by my father, override might well have been the reason cited for his refusal to hypothesize about my mother, a request I made frequently as a girl. For example: we are on a beach, he and I. We watch a boy build a sandcastle alone while his mother sunbathes on a towel with a book, we watch a pair of sisters digging holes while their mother hauls buckets of water from the shore. Which mother would she have been, I ask him, the tuned-out sunbather or the hauler of buckets?

This would elicit from him an evasive response, the gist of which was this: Of course it would make sense for me to claim that she would have been the hauler of buckets, because what’s the harm in conjuring a mother of exquisite selflessness? My response would not be a truthful attempt to answer your question, it would be an attempt to compensate for your loss by creating an ideal person whose absence you can mourn unreservedly. However, this puts me in the position of making her into someone she was possibly not; it forces me to falsely represent her to you, and in doing so I become, not the keeper of her memory, but the re-creator of her past, and that role makes me uncomfortable; also I believe it is, in the long run, a disservice to her, because you will grow up missing a mother that you would never have experienced, had she not died. And this strikes me as a second kind of death, a more complete and horrible death, to be annihilated and replaced by a hypothetical person who is not remotely you, thus I think it is better that she remain a quasi-mystery, a pleasant unknown, than an absence filled with compensatory narratives supplied by your guilty father.

Of course he never said this, but he did, in his way, say this. How, as a child of five, of seven, I came to understand what he meant without his ever articulating it was less a measure of my psychic abilities than of my skill for interpolation, a skill that motherless children, raised in a preverbal communication void, come to master. Because he was telling me too, without telling me: She would not have been a hauler of buckets. She was not selfless. She would have been an absence even if she’d been there. And while it was true that he didn’t want to do a disservice to her memory, his reasons were maybe less noble than he was comfortable admitting to himself. He didn’t want her turned into a saint because she didn’t deserve sainthood. He was not so generous that he could allow her a posthumous glory she had not earned.

I respected his caution. Some things, once done, can never be completely undone. Only a trace remains of the original, a scar in time.

Before sending the e-mail to Professor Hales, I added a sentence about my boss at Mundane Egg, an attractive brunette who was a huge fan of his last book.

I checked my account one last time; Colophon had responded.

no daughter.

The halls were empty. Dinner had ended long ago. Alwyn, thankfully, hadn’t shown — she’d had a meeting with the head of the Goergen’s privacy division, because her detective had tracked her to Vienna and was sending her menacing postcards — so I was spared having to lie to her about what I’d done all day. Lately Alwyn emitted a carcinogenic unhappiness that rendered me so anxious that I’d found myself, at one point, making an odd grunting noise with my back teeth like my father sometimes did when he was around me.

From behind the guest room doors came sitcom laughter. The Goergen, at this hour, resembled the interior of an insane person’s medicated brain, the halls like vacant neural pathways lit by the occasional lunatic spark of activity.

I didn’t want to go to my room. I’d started to find discomforting the height of the ceilings. To recline on my bed was not unlike lying at the bottom of a well.

Instead I took the elevator to the fifth floor and stopped by Borka’s suite, for which she’d paid extra, but she didn’t answer when I knocked, and no wonder — when I unlocked my door I found her sitting on my bed wearing her coat and a headscarf.

“I have a treat for you,” she said.

Borka unhangered my parka; she zipped me into it like I was her child.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We are going not-here,” she said.

“But that’s discouraged,” I said.

Borka rolled her eyes.

“Distinguishing us from the other guests,” she said, “is that we are not cows.”

From the street, Gutenberg Square appeared shabbier than it did from my window; the apartment building entrances were graffitied, the square itself populated by drug addicts and paparazzi. Borka called them nodders and snappers.

“There’s one snapper in particular,” she said. “He’s followed me for decades. Now I find I miss him when he isn’t there. You know how these hateful people can become a daily part of normal.”

Borka pulled me through the shadows of the buildings and along the cooler perimeter of the nearby woods. As I swayed down the sidewalk, Borka sped along at a hasty clip ahead of me. She wouldn’t take a taxi because, she said, the taxi drivers were spies, and besides, the metro led to the house her husband had purchased right before he died.

I asked why he’d wanted to leave their hometown of Budapest.

“Because Budapest is the City of Egrets,” she said.

She means the City of Regrets, I thought, then reminded myself — this was Borka.

City of egrets, city of tall, thin, spooky, watchful people.

We emerged from the metro in a neighborhood where apartment buildings yielded to stand-alone houses. The air was dirtier, the heated smog hovering at the height of the rain gutters in a tobacco-colored band.

Borka rang the doorbell of a stone house. A silhouette scurried back and forth in front of the parlor windows.

“My maid,” Borka said. “She loves to sit in my chair when I’m out and read her smutty papers.”

Finally a woman in a robe unlocked the door.

“This,” Borka said to me, “is Sun. It means hedgehog in Magyar.”

“That’s her given name?” I asked.

“Of course it is given,” Borka said. “I gave it to her.”

Sun led us to a living room with walls painted the black-blue of an aquarium for nocturnal fish. Borka prowled around a wing chair — testing the spring of the cushions, brushing her palms over the armrests, inspecting it for illegal use.

Sun asked Borka a question to which Borka testily responded.

“I told her we don’t want dinner,” Borka said. “Only some tea.”

“I’d like some dinner,” I said.

“It will have to be cold,” Borka said. “I cannot tolerate food smells in the evening.”

“Cold is fine,” I said.

Borka sat in the wing chair and busied herself by reading one of Sun’s newspapers.

I ate the cold dinner Sun delivered while Borka flipped through her paper with the rage of old people in charge of television remotes. Finally she settled on a page, her blinkless Strigiforme eyes seeming to literally absorb its contents. Folding the paper, she showed me an article accompanied by two photos, one of a man caught on a short-circuit video camera, one of a second man, or maybe it was the same man, wearing a tie and smiling.

“He is pretending to be this young fellow,” she pointed to the tie guy, “who jumped in front of a train.”

“Why would he do that?” I said.

“Because he was sad,” she said. “Though I can’t say why. He had a beautiful wife and three boys. He managed a hedge fund and had recently bought a house in New Jersey.”

“The sad man’s pretending to be the happier man?” I said.

“No,” she said. “The man who jumped in front of the train was sad. And this one had his face fixed to look like the sad man’s face.”

“Oh,” I said, more interested now. “He’s a surgical impersonator.”

I examined the photographs. The two men looked alike but also not.

“So these impersonators exist,” I said.

“Of course they exist. It’s only people like you who believe ghosts are the more sensible explanation.”

She continued reading, her lips moving.

“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the dead man’s wife is upset. Her husband killed himself. And she remarried to forget about him. And now she doesn’t have to forget about him. What is so terrible about this?”

“Well,” I began. As usual, Borka proved immune to standard emotional logic; it seemed injurious to her person to correct her understanding.

“If someone asked you to change your face to look like someone they loved, would you do it?” she said.

“Would you?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “I am heartless that way.”

“You mean selfless,” I said.

“Maybe it is because I do not have any special attachment to my face,” she said. She poked her cheek. “This one is not even mine.”

Borka folded the newspaper; she lay it atop the other papers stacked beside the room’s tiny fireplace, over which loomed a massive marble mantle, as though any heat the fire might provide was an afterthought, really what she needed was a surface on which to place knickknacks. And knickknacks she had, a hamlet’s worth of little china people holding shepherd crooks and parasols, trailing detritus in the porcelain aura that encased their feet — a family of ducks, a dog, a dropped bonnet.

Borka did not seem like the sort of woman to collect these sugary inanities, but perhaps she was compensating for the fact that mantles beg for photographs, and she had none. Not anywhere. I did not find this absence peculiar, however, because I knew from experience how unsettling it could be not to resemble the person once known as you. Whatever new face the car accident and the shitty surgeon had given her, it had required, for sanity’s sake, the total eradication of the old one, even in pictures.

“Come,” Borka said.

She led me to an upstairs study. From a desk drawer, she removed a perforated metal box.

“I wanted to show you this,” she said.

“It’s pretty,” I said. It wasn’t. “What is it?”

“A Japanese cricket cage,” she said brusquely, as though, given my supposed gifts, this were a question I should be able to answer myself.

She withdrew from the interior a key attached to an elongated diamond of green Bakelite, embossed with the number thirteen.

Sitting at the desk, Borka wrote on a piece of blank card stock, her marks filling the entire white space, her penmanship buoyed by irregular aerial loops.

New York City. 152 West 53rd Street. Room 13. October 24, 1984. 4 p.m.–9 p.m.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“You are invited,” she said.

She closed my hand around the key. The chilly metal heated to skin temperature, then grew rapidly hotter until I was palming the equivalent of a live ash.

I dropped the key back into its cage.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”

“But it is no big deal for you,” Borka said.

“I’m not allowed,” I said. “I’m working for other people at the moment.”

Borka appeared not to hear me.

“We can help each other,” she said desperately. “I can give you what you most want to find. I can help you see her.”

“Who?” I said. “Dominique Varga?”

Her eyes slid toward the floor.

“She’s alive?” I said.

Borka nodded.

“How do you know?” I said.

“You don’t trust me?” she said. “You should. I have your heart in mind.”

She searched my face for something that she appeared both relieved and saddened not to find.

“Why do you care so much about her?” she said.

“Varga knew my mother,” I said. “So maybe she could tell me about her. Since my mother will not let herself be known to me.”

“You might learn things you’d prefer you hadn’t,” she said.

“I’m willing to chance it,” I said.

“Also Varga’s unreliable,” said Borka. “She’s an international liar.”

“A lie is more valuable than nothing,” I said.

Borka’s eyes were the strangest color, brown with a ring of pale blue encroaching upon her pupils like a milk fungus.

She pressed my hand between hers.

“That’s very true,” she said. “In some cases, a lie can be more valuable than the truth.”

“In some cases,” I agreed.

She smoothed my hair with her hand.

“I will help you,” she vowed.

“You will?” I said.

She handed me the cricket cage.

“We will help each other,” she said, blinking.

Inwardly, I smiled. Classic Borka. She never gave something for nothing, not even a lie.

I removed the key from the cricket cage. Again the metal rocketed from cold to branding-iron hot. I dropped it into the pocket of my sweater.

I tried to return the cricket cage.

“No,” Borka said. “You keep it. A gift.”

“A bribe,” I clarified.

Borka hugged me, smearing my hair with the softening ointment she rubbed on her face. She pressed her mouth against my skull so forcefully that I could feel her teeth.

“Silly Beetle,” she said into my head. “As if there is a difference.”

When Borka and I returned to the Goergen, nobody appeared to have noticed that we’d left.

I found this interesting.

The next morning I decided to go outside again. I spun through the revolving front doors, hunched against the sprung alarm, the bark of security dogs — but nothing.

Ha, I thought, as though I had gotten away with something sneaky. Then I realized I’d proved that we were cows, balking at a few white lines painted across a road. The discouragements were bullshit; maybe they existed as some form of thought experiment. Or thoughtless experiment, proving we’d failed to think for ourselves. How thoughtless can people be?

People can be remarkably thoughtless.

The park was empty at this hour, no nodders, no snappers. I sat on a bench to eat a roll and to better inspect, in the daylight, Borka’s cage and key.

A sunglassed man entered the square. He wore coveralls and carried a canvas bag full of what sounded, when he set them on the octagonal paving stones, like tools. I decided that there was something suspicious about him, as though he’d determined which precise shade of brown promised to fade into most city backgrounds and render its wearer unmemorable, failing to register with witnesses save as a beigy blur.

Perhaps this man was Alwyn’s detective. She’d barely left her room in the past three days, convinced that the detective was posing as a snapper in the square, one with a very powerful telephoto lens that might catch her, through the giant windows, in a first-floor common room.

It seemed, for once, that Alwyn was not being dramatic or paranoid.

The probable detective asked me a question in German.

I smiled.

“I said,” the man said in English, “got a problem?”

“Thanks for noticing,” I said.

The man finished his cigarette, checked his watch, opened his bag, and removed three telescoped metal tubes, which he lengthened and attached to one another via a flat, rotating platform.

“So you’re a detective,” I said.

“Huh?” the man said. He pulled a camera from his bag and affixed it to the top of the tripod he’d assembled. He loaded it with a Polaroid cartridge and photographed the pigeons at his feet. He yanked the Polaroid from the camera, shook it, peeled away the black skin. He stared at it. He showed it to me.

It was a Polaroid of pigeons.

“Do you mind?” he asked, pointing the camera at me. “I need a human being.”

No question it was a bad idea to have my photo snapped by a probable detective in Gutenberg Square.

He dialed the focus. “Think about someone,” he instructed.

“What kind of someone?”

“I tell people before I take their picture to think of a person they love. Then the picture will not only be a picture of their face. Because who cares about a face? A face is a hole in the landscape. How ugly,” he said, pointing to the cricket cage. “Please, will you hold it?”

I held the cricket cage in my lap. I tried to think of a person I loved, but no one person stuck. Faces spun in blurry sequence. A sped-up odometer of faces.

“Another?” he asked. “Over there.”

I shifted to a different bench. For some reason he used a flash, even though it was bright and getting brighter, the sun threatening to clear the roof of the easternmost building on Gutenberg Square.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them to total darkness. I couldn’t see the buildings or the bench or the man or the pigeons.

Beside me was an animal; its hairs prickled against my forearm. It swung as though attached to a meat hook, then collapsed in a heap by my legs.

A coat.

I felt to the other side of me. A second coat.

My feet, when I moved them, encountered a battalion of shoes.

I was in a closet.

Then I heard voices.

“You’re so proud to be a bastard,” said a woman.

“A boy shouldn’t ignore his talents,” said a man.

Bed springs depressed.

“Tell me,” the woman struggled to say as the man kissed her. “Tell me why you don’t love me.”

The man didn’t respond.

“Tell me why or this stops now,” the woman said.

The noises ceased. The man laughed.

“Because you’re soulless,” the man said. “And pathetic.”

The noises resumed. There was wetness and gasping.

“I should be blamed for permitting you to fuck me,” the woman said.

“No, for that you should be pitied,” the man said.

“Pity me,” the woman moaned. “Please.”

The act was quick. Afterward there was silence, followed by crying.

I slid my hands along the door molding, feeling for the knob. I turned it.

Through an arched doorway I could see bodies on a bed, clothing askew.

I recognized this room.

The man still wore his shoes.

“Stay,” the woman said. She clung to the man. “I love you.”

The man unpeeled her hands from his torso.

“You’re such a parasite,” the woman said, voice rising. “A nothing.”

Now I was certain: I had been in this room before, during one of my Barcelona chair regressions. I recognized the drapes, behind which, I knew, hid a young girl with a video camera. I recognized the intimidated and repulsed young man; I recognized the woman’s hands, the ones that appeared to have squeezed many necks. Her face, however, remained a blur, as though she were a pedestrian caught in the periphery of a reality TV show, her head digitally smudged to avoid a lawsuit.

“The question we should be asking ourselves,” the young man said, “is why I agreed to this.”

“Because I’m the only contact you’ll ever have with fame,” the woman retorted. “I am the one successful work of art you’ll ever make.”

She reached toward him as he sat on the edge of the bed, cinched a shoelace.

“Pity me again,” she said. “Please.”

The man stood. He straightened his belt. He stepped on the woman’s discarded clothing: a pair of jeans, a striped sailor shirt.

He yanked his jacket off a chair and left.

The woman curled herself around the absence on the bed, dredging from her body hideous scraping noises.

This went on for quite a while.

Then the woman was overcome by a case of hiccups, or what I initially mistook for hiccups.

In fact, the woman was laughing.

Clutching the bedsheet around her like a towel, she yanked the drapes open to reveal the young woman and a video camera on a tripod. The young woman appeared as a silhouette to me. She shivered; her dark boundaries blurred. Even so, I couldn’t fail to recognize her. This was why, when I’d met Irenke at the Regnor, she’d struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before.

The woman kissed Irenke on the cheek, played with her hair.

“Let me get you a sweater,” the woman said.

She walked toward my closet, sheet dragging over the floorboards and toppling a spire of books. She flung wide the closet door and her face snapped into focus, her features sharp, unsheathed.

Up close, there was no mistaking who she was.

Dominique Varga reached toward me with a hand. I closed my eyes, I waited for her fingers to close around my throat and begin to squeeze.

“Stop squinting,” the man said. “Smile a little.”

He kneeled on the pavers, his camera against his face.

I reclined on the bench, overcome by wooziness. I felt as though I’d leapt from a speeding motorcycle. The sensation of sideways falling was impossible to shake.

I asked the concierge if he had a camera I could borrow.

He told me that cameras were not allowed at the Goergen for reasons that were likely very obvious to me.

“How about a flashlight?” I asked.

Back in my room, I shut myself into my wardrobe and beamed myself in the face with his flashlight, hoping to prompt another regression.

No regressions occurred.

I returned the flashlight and wrote an e-mail to Colophon. Intriguing progress to report.

I described to him my “encounter” with Dominique Varga and a woman named Irenke, while stressing to him that my regression had been accidental (I’d been, as Alwyn had surely reported to him, mostly pretty respectful of the discouragements). Then I watched the latest attachment from Madame Ackermann. She’d sent me a new version, one less obscured by fog. I could see the woman on the bed more plainly, she had long black hair and resembled, as she was meant to resemble, my mother — though “she” was no doubt Madame Ackermann.

I could imagine the dramatic arc of these attachments (and frankly I was impressed by the amount of time, money, and creative energy she was willing to dedicate to my attack). Madame Ackermann would become more and more visible, until the figure on the bed was unmistakably her, at which point she would address the camera with fake concern and say, you poor thing, you look like you’ve seen a wolf.

Then she’d laugh until she passed out. Or she’d tempt the video artist from behind his camera and have sex with him on the bed.

She was capable of any degree of blasphemy.

I dragged her e-mail into the trash.

Colophon, meanwhile, had e-mailed me back.

sounds like you witnessed the filming of “up-and-comers, coming, going” and who is this irenke

She was an actress, I wrote back. She claims to be Varga’s daughter.

Colophon responded instantly.

varga had no daughter but if you talk to her again maybe she could help us however be careful she is probably unstable many women were obsessed with varga she had that effect

I told him I’d do my best. I waited for his next parry, a “congratulations” or some expression of enthusiasm or gratitude for what was a pretty significant breakthrough. Nothing.

Then I met Borka in the baths.

As we retrieved towels from the attendant, Borka badgered me about the key.

“Did you do it yet?” she asked.

I told her I had not done it yet. I needed more context. The key was not leading me anywhere.

“But this is the beauty of you, Beetle,” she said. “You get your own context.”

“Can’t you tell me to whom this key belonged?” I asked.

“It’s a hotel room key,” she said. “It belonged to no one. And if I tell you what I’m looking for, you’ll tell me what I’m looking for.”

“That’s the point of all this, I thought,” I said.

She told me a little bit about her past, one that had nothing to do with the key, and truthfully seemed to have nothing to do with her. She told me about her dead husband, a gambling shut-in whom she’d cheated on. He’d given her the cricket cage as a present.

“He was a weak man,” she said. “He wasn’t up to the task.”

“Of being your husband?”

“Of living,” she said.

“And the key?”

“It was once in the possession of someone I might have loved,” she said.

“Not your husband,” I clarified.

She appeared pained. “Correct,” she said.

I asked if she and her husband had had children. Borka adjusted the knot on her headscarf, hauling up on her jaw as though she had a toothache.

“No child,” she said, “would have us.”

Her expression suggested: this was not the truth.

In the locker room, as we undressed, I investigated the sags and droops of her body for signs of motherhood. Even if the heart says no, the body keeps a record of these biological capitulations to others. Or this is how I thought it should be. Those who can’t make scars in time, they make scars in people.

But Borka’s body was unreadable. She was distressingly thin; what flesh remained on her body had slung forward and looked like the pathetic rucksacks in which a person who owned practically nothing had consolidated her possessions. What could have been the stress of a long-ago pregnancy was indistinguishable from the hard wear of years.

“You find me disgusting?” Borka asked, catching me.

“Of course not,” I lied. These regressions took their toll. I wanted to hide in my room with the shades drawn, blot my head beneath a pillow.

“It is not always a tragedy to be unrecognizable as your former self,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because,” she said. “You might be mistaken for someone better.”

She wrapped a towel around her body, forgetting that her face was the scariest thing about her.

My sixth week at the Goergen, I regained yet another talent I thought I’d forever lost.

I awoke one morning to find my pulse quickened, my peripheral vision tinseled. I’d come to understand these symptoms differently since I’d become sick, as dreaded harbingers of a migraine. Prior to my illness I’d welcomed these symptoms; prior to my illness they’d predicted the onset of one of my coincidences. I would learn something. Now, however, they promised an unenlightening journey, one that mimicked the movement of an oil drill, a claustrophobic spiraling into a hole.

I hurried to the lobby where I tried and failed to convince the concierge to slip me my bottle of vicodin.

“You are inhuman,” I whispered.

“You are inhuman,” he replied, and handed me a paperclip.

I spun around; I walked straight into Alwyn.

“Breaking the rules again?” she said. Her face was pale and her hair was a mess, her bangs thrusting upward like the fine tines of a comb.

“I needed an aspirin,” I said. “You also look like you need an aspirin.”

“That’s not what I was referring to,” she said.

I guessed she’d heard from Colophon about my encounter with Dominique Varga. I hadn’t kept this from Alwyn on purpose; I’d figured that Colophon would tell her if he wanted her to know.

“Colophon is fine with me regressing,” I offered in my defense.

“I’m not talking about Colophon. Though he already told me about your visit to the Up-and-Comers set. Very nice, by the way. I’m talking about Marta.”

“What does Marta have to do with this?”

“Marta told me,” she said, “what you’ve been telling her.”

“I don’t tell Marta anything,” I said. “All we do is Mundane Egg.”

“Interesting,” Alwyn said. “That’s not what I hear from Marta.”

“And what do you hear from Marta?”

“Nothing you haven’t presumably heard yourself,” Alwyn said, “given it came out of your own mouth.”

She switched the topic to Madame Ackermann, who’d visited three luxury spas.

“Does she always take so many vacations?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Actually,” I backtracked, recalling what I’d learned of her habits in the crawlspace, “she doesn’t.”

“I’m beginning to worry,” Alwyn said, “that she’s got a lead on Varga.”

“That she works as a masseuse at Canyon Ranch?” I said.

“Could be,” Alwyn said, missing the jibe.

I went to my 10 a.m. Marta meeting, during which we did the usual boring stuff while I waited for my migraine to thunk into gear. Toward the end, I asked her if I could read the notes she’d kept of our sessions.

“That would be against policy,” she said.

“Just what I’ve said to you. I wouldn’t expect access to your notations.”

“No,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”

“But what I’ve told you belongs to me,” I said.

“That is an interesting interpretation,” Marta said.

I shot a look at her clipboard. Marta tipped it closer to her chest.

“Who is Irenke?” she asked.

“Irenke?” I said.

“You wanted to know what you talk about during your sessions. Often you talk about her.”

“I do?”

Marta’s brows cinched.

“Now’s not the ideal time to become involved with people like Irenke.”

“Why?” I asked. I wanted to know what she thought about Irenke. Who was she? Why was she pretending to be Dominique Varga’s daughter?

“You are a medium,” Marta said. “Although so is everybody a medium, an involuntary host to free-floating misery. But you’re a more available one.”

“Available,” I said.

“You are more easily used,” she said.

After our session, I hid in a darkened hallway. I waited until I heard Marta’s door open and shut, her gum soles suctioning over the tiles.

But her door was locked. I glared through the nubbled glass at the inert shapes of furniture, desperate to get inside. What had I told her? Again, I proved a victim of my own inexpertise. I was a clearinghouse for other people’s misery, but lacked the requisite gravity to assert, over these doomy voices, any mastery or control. Mediums, or so Madame Ackermann liked to say, were not merely containers, they were decoders. They imparted meaning and shape to the meaningless and the shapeless. They pulled sense from the sorrowed air.

Me, I was an unreflective repository for people’s sorrow. A trash can of sorrow.

I tried and I tried to get inside Marta’s office.

No surprise. I failed.

I took the elevator to the lobby. Empty. Even the concierge was gone. I went outside again and waited for my migraine in Gutenberg Square. Maybe I’d tempt another snapper to take my photograph.

Two nodders, a man and a woman, kneeled in a flowerbed, slow-motion weeding, or maybe they were holding on to the weeds to steady themselves. Closer by, an old man slept, a Leica over his crotch. His beard was so white it had begun to yellow, like a peeled apple exposed to air.

I sat on the bench across from him. I coughed. The old snapper awoke.

We made small talk. I told him I was staying at the Goergen.

“Your face-lift has healed nicely,” he said.

“I’m being attacked,” I corrected him.

“Age is a warrior,” he said.

He aimed his camera toward the Goergen. A delivery truck had pulled up; a man unloaded crates of vegetables.

“Why do you care about turnips?” I asked.

The snapper reached into his vest pocket and removed a tin of chewing tobacco.

“I’m here to photograph a woman named Borka Erdos,” he said.

Ah, I thought. I’ve heard about you.

“I am her conscience,” he said wistfully. “Or maybe she is mine.”

“She must have been very beautiful once,” I said, meaning prior to her car accident.

“Only my pictures can say,” the old snapper declaimed.

He offered to take me to his flat to show me these pictures. He bragged, as further incentive, that his flat contained “the underground snapper archives of Europe.”

“I own photographs of everyone who was everyone,” he said.

“Do you own photographs of Dominique Varga?” I asked.

He appeared miffed.

“Lady,” he said. “Of course I do.”

We drove a short distance to his flat — one vast room — that indeed appeared to house the snapper archives of Europe. Side-by-side filing cabinets obscured every inch of available wall.

He withdrew a file folder and placed it on a table.

“Who is this?” I asked of a young woman in a shift patterned by saucer-sized dots.

“Borka,” he said.

If I strained I saw the resemblance — mostly in the nose, but the rest of the features belonged to a woman I’d never seen before. When Borka had said her face was not her own, she hadn’t been exaggerating.

The old snapper made coffee while I perused. The youthful photographs — Borka in her thirties — were followed by photos of a much older Borka, a Borka I could more easily square with the post-car-accident Borka I knew. The snapper owned no photos, however, of the intervening twenty-odd years.

He returned with two coil mugs handmade by a child, or at least their weighty lumpenness suggested this to be the case. To the touch mine was greasy, as though coated with a sorrowful residue like Helena’s ring. I set the mug down, determined not to touch it again. This snapper, I did not want to know about his life.

“I’m out of sugar,” he apologized.

I asked him about the gap in his file, the decades between the two Borkas.

“Tell me what I should have done,” he said, interpreting my question as a criticism. “The world thought she was dead.”

He told me that Borka, at the age of forty, had gone missing while on vacation in Ibiza.

“Ibiza?” I said. In my head I heard the words heiress and masked women and prosthetic hands. I was stunned, but I wasn’t. What a moron I’d been not to have put the pieces together already.

“People believed she was killed in a car accident,” the old snapper said. “That she drove her Mercedes into a cliff. But I promise you, it was no accident. She did it for Dominique Varga. She did it for art.”

He sighed.

“The girls in those days,” he said. “What wouldn’t they sacrifice for Varga? I’m lucky my Rita never met her.”

“And Borka didn’t die,” I said, finishing his previous thought.

“Not in the usual sense,” he said.

Little surprise, then, that Borka would claim to have information about Varga’s current whereabouts. She not only knew the woman, she’d ruined her face for her. Also, I felt a tiny bit chastened by this irony, or this coincidence, or this perversity: my most fruitful Varga research source didn’t require me to regress anywhere. All I had to do was take the elevator upstairs to Borka’s room.

“No doubt the family was relieved she was gone,” the old snapper continued. “Borka was no picnic. Always needing to be the center of attention, and eventually she becomes a sort of movie star but she pays for the privilege with her face. So she disappears. The husband never remarries. And then, twenty years later the husband dies, and there is no one to take over the business, and Borka comes back from wherever she’s been, not dead at all.”

“How odd,” I said. But upon reflection it wasn’t so odd. Borka had vanished herself and unvanished herself. This was no longer an alien paradigm.

The old snapper shrugged. “Sometimes pretending to be dead is best for all involved.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. I asked him to show me his photos of Dominique Varga.

He scrutinized me, possibly trying to divine if I, too, were the sort of weak girl who might fall sway to her unhealthy influence.

He deemed me immune.

His Varga file proved lean. Inside were stills of Varga on the sets of her various films, such as Simone Moreault. Also, not that I was expecting it, but I realized upon not finding it that I’d been hoping — maybe there would be a picture of my mother.

“That’s it?” I asked.

The old snapper bristled.

“I mean,” I said, “they’re wonderful.”

“But I haven’t shown you the best ones,” he said. “I keep them in a special place. Someday I will sell them and make an honest fortune.”

The snapper retrieved two photos from his bedroom. The first was of a woman’s face slashed to bits and surrounded by glass.

“A still,” he said. “Of Borka. No one ever found copies of the car accident film, but I have proof — it did exist.”

Borka, I had to admit, appeared pretty convincingly dead, her face a pulverized fruit. I better appreciated what a good job her initial plastic surgeon had done, given the original mess.

“But that is not the most valuable,” said the old snapper. “This one is the most valuable.”

He handed me a photo of a young Dominique Varga — she looked like a teenager — face shadowed beneath a straw visor, breastfeeding a baby.

“Which film is this from?” I asked.

“No film,” he said. “That is from life.”

“She had a baby?” I asked.

“A daughter,” he said.

Irenke. So she hadn’t been lying. Varga did have a daughter. But whether Irenke was that daughter remained unsubstantiated. Given the number of desperate acolytes Varga attracted, and Irenke’s doomy vibe, it seemed prudent to wonder.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She is dead like my Rita,” the old snapper said. “Pottery was Rita’s life. That’s her kiln in the corner.”

“Which one is dead?” I asked.

“Everybody is dead,” said the old snapper, extending his arms to indicate all the inhabitants of his loft, the 2-D people morgued in the file cabinets.

It struck me that he was a little bit senile, my old snapper.

“The child, too?” I asked.

“A face is like a rune stone,” he said. “A face says to me ‘long life’ or ‘happy marriage’ or ‘early death by wrong raising.’ But she was such a terrible potter, my wife,” he sighed. “That she was considered the artist in the family, it was a bad joke we could never, for the health of the marriage, laugh about.”

His eyes bobbled unsteadily, as if he were seeing his wife in the room before him, and maybe he was; the line between senile and psychic was fine, even nonexistent. My father’s father, when he entered his dementia endgame, had let me, then aged twelve, tag along on his sundowner fugues, the two of us traveling together to a World War II naval ship stationed in the Yellow Sea, to a two-story apartment building in Lowell, Mass., his birthplace.

“I guess that’s love,” I said.

“No,” he said, turning back to the photo of Varga and the baby. “That’s love.”

The snapper’s thumb landed on the infant’s head, blotting it out.

That sudden redaction (thumb over face) provoked me. I passed a hand over the photo. The veins on the underside of my wrist twanged, a taut pulling of melancholy threads. Then it happened. This regression wasn’t painless or dreamy, it was the physiological equivalent of being reduced to a mess of protons and accelerated through the Hadron collider, of being looped at light speed and crashed into other protons that had also, once, been part of me.

I coagulated into a crunchy mass in the Parisian hotel lobby, my body a casing for glass shards. I sat in my usual chair. I made grinding, particle noises whenever I moved.

Across from me, Irenke, drink in hand, wept.

I clutched my head.

Irenke threw her glass against the floor, shattering it.

Then the floor disappeared.

“That bitch,” Irenke raged. She tore at the neckline of her dress.

“Who?” I said. I’d never been scared in a regression before; this time, I was scared. I’d arrived at a forbidden place.

“I wanted to be her muse,” she said. “But instead I am her cameraman. She hides me behind the drapes and makes me watch.”

“But you are her muse. She gave you — or rather she will give you — a necklace and tell you exactly that.”

“She’ll give me nothing,” Irenke said. “Anything I own of hers, I had to steal.”

She sobbed into her elbow crook. Her other hand grabbed my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done horrible things.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. I patted her arm. A glass shard poked through my skin, then another and another. I touched one. They were numb as teeth. “Whatever it is you did, I forgive you.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “She deserved it. She used me to get what she wanted and then she dumped me, pretended I’d never existed. I had to make her suffer for what she did. She was a bad person, you see. You’re lucky you never met her.”

“Your mother?” I asked.

She raised her head. To stare into her pupils was to stare straight at the subatomic engine room of the universe’s collective human misery, its self-annihilating, Hadron-collider core.

“No,” she said. “Yours.”

The old snapper drove me back to the Goergen. I gripped my wrist — the one Irenke had held — but I couldn’t stem the vacuum suck that threatened to empty my veins. I worried that I might psychically bleed out onto the car seats.

The concierge greeted me with his usual indifference. I sat in his desk chair — an off-kilter walnut spin that boinged on its base like those playground horses I rode as a kid, the ones attached to a thick metal spring, the ones that tried to buck you, head first, onto the cement.

Irenke was fucking crazy. She was a deranged astral imprint and nobody’s daughter. Possibly she’d known my mother, but more likely she was a psychic stalker who’d, for whatever reason, chosen to pick on me. Maybe Irenke was a psychic henchman of Madame Ackermann’s, an infiltrator tasked to further sicken and confuse me. This would explain why Madame Ackermann had hurried past us in the Paris hotel lobby. She didn’t want to have to pretend to “meet” Irenke, and risk my cottoning on to their plan.

But regardless of who she was or wasn’t, I needed to break off all contact with her. I’d ask Marta for help.

This plan calmed me.

Then I checked my e-mail. I’d received a reply from Professor Hales.

Dear Julia, he wrote.

Attached please find an essay I would like to submit to Mundane Egg for publication. I wrote it to accompany the monograph of a spirit photographer whose photographs, quite frankly, I despised. The photographer rejected the essay because it had nothing to do with her work. Instead I wrote an essay about Indre Shira’s “Brown Lady” photograph, because I had the good fortune, last summer when I was in England, to visit Raynham Hall. I paid the pound equivalent of US$300 to sit on the actual staircase where the Brown Lady photograph was taken, but as you will see from my essay, the expenditure was not a foolish one, especially if Mundane Egg sees fit to publish my findings. Please tell your boss that I’m a fanatical reader of her publication.

I tried to open Professor Hales’s attachment, but the concierge’s computer didn’t recognize the software. Needless to say, I knew there’d be nothing in there relating to my initial question to him concerning overrides.

I did a quick “overrides” Google search and ended up on a Wikipedia page about computer programming that made me realize: anything can strike a person as menacingly apt. (The implementation in the subclass overrides the implementation in the superclass by providing a method that has the same name, the same parameters or signature, and same return type as the method in the parent class. If an object of the parent class is used to invoke the method, then the version in the parent class will be executed, but if an object in the subclass is used to invoke the method, then the version in the child class will be executed.)

I copied the link and pasted it into an e-mail to Professor Wibley, whose advanced senility rendered him safe to correspond with, assuming he’d heard of e-mail. I dispensed with the pretense of soliciting fact-checking advice for Mundane Egg; I asked him about overrides, and left it at that.

Then I wrote to Colophon.

Varga had a child; possibly her name was Irenke. But we don’t need her. I’ve found a better source.

He did not write back.

I did not reveal that I’d met the heiress who’d organized the first official festival of Varga’s films, the heiress who’d once been the suspected victim of a Varga-directed snuff but who’d crashed her car on purpose, and who’d mostly survived her mistake.

I cannot say why I did not tell him this.

On my way to the elevator, I ran into Alwyn. She looked like crap, her hair flattened on one side as though she’d been napping all day. Stylistically, too, she’d backslid; gone were the scarves and the little tweed jackets, replaced by holey cardigans, yoga pants, a pair of blue babouches unthreading from their grubby soles.

“Where’ve you been?” Alwyn asked. Even her voice sounded compressed. “I’ve been looking for you for hours.”

“Baths,” I said.

“I checked the baths,” she said.

“I meant the sauna,” I said.

Alwyn worried a pimple on her chin. Her overall vibe was one of depletion, of exhaustion.

I remembered it well.

“Here,” I said, steering her toward a club chair. “Sit.”

She handed me her bag.

“Pull out that file, will you?” she asked.

I withdrew the Madame Ackermann file. Amidst the dot-matrix printouts I found a number of paparazzi magazines, a few of the pages dog-eared.

I held one up.

“This constitutes research?” I said.

“I like to know where my mother is,” she said. “Last week she was in Stockholm for a charity ball.”

“Oh,” I said. “She still hasn’t seen your vanishing film?”

Alwyn confirmed that she hadn’t.

“I mean obviously she’s busy, right?” she asked.

She stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“She’s busy,” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

“You guess?” she said sarcastically.

She engaged in an intense calculation that involved me, but didn’t.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I know better than to ask anything of you.”

I wasn’t certain what I’d done or failed to do. I left it alone.

Then Alwyn confessed that she’d encountered a “bit of a dry spell” with respect to her Madame Ackermann research.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means I don’t know where she is,” she said.

“Did you call the Workshop?”

“I was informed that she was on medical leave,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “She likes to be seen. You’ll find her.”

“Oh, and before I forget,” Alwyn said, “Marta requested a meeting with you at three. Also, tonight’s that presentation by the psychic vampire expert. Marta and I both think you should attend.”

“Am I in trouble?” I asked. Marta had never scheduled any extra meetings with me before.

“I don’t know,” Alwyn said. “Are you?”

“Maybe,” I said.

I confessed that I’d broken the discouragements again; that I’d gone to the flat belonging to one of the paparazzi in Gutenberg Square; that I’d discovered Dominique Varga had had a daughter, and that I’d met a woman pretending to be this daughter, and that this woman, a liar, was a disturbed astral imprint, in fact I worried that she was psychically stalking me, maybe at the behest of Madame Ackermann.

“I know that sounds a little crazy,” I said.

“I knew it,” Alwyn said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is what I get for not listening to you.”

“I knew it,” she repeated. “I told Colophon that Varga had a baby. Of course he never believed me.”

“Wait … you knew?”

“Gut feeling,” she said. “It’s not so special what you do. Everyone’s a latent psychic. They just don’t make a big deal about it. They don’t get degrees in it.”

“I don’t think I make a big deal about it,” I said.

“And let me guess: she abandoned the baby, right? Because being a mother marked her as sexless and ambitionless?”

“Given what we know about Varga,” I said, “I’d wager she did her daughter a favor by giving her away.”

Alwyn kicked a dust bunny. The Goergen’s floors were always gauzy underfoot.

“Of course you would think that.”

“Of course I would think what,” I said.

Alwyn scrutinized a pair of surgical patients playing backgammon. They resembled — given their gigantic white head-bandages, and the underwater slowness with which they moved the backgammon pieces — very relaxed astronauts.

“I’m honestly curious,” she began.

She hefted herself to a standing position.

“Yes?” I said.

“What does a woman have to do,” she said, “to be classified by you as a monster?”

She put a hand on my bicep and gave it a mean squeeze, though it’s possible she was using me to adjust her balance. She stomped off toward the elevators.

I collapsed into her chair. I wondered, too, what a woman had to do.

At 2:50, I initiated the long wend to Marta’s office.

Marta ushered me inside without a greeting. She eyed me skeptically.

“I’m afraid I cannot be an accessory to your rage any longer,” she said.

“My what?”

“You and this Irenke,” she said. “You are both so angry.”

“She’s the angry one,” I said. “Believe me, I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“You’ve both lashed out at the people you think are to blame for your misfortunes,” Marta continued. “But the blame, you must accept, begins with you.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said.

“You aren’t aware,” she said. “You blame Madame Ackermann. You think it’s her fault.”

“Isn’t it?” I said.

“Even if it is,” she said. “It doesn’t justify what you’re doing. You cannot do to others what they have done to you.”

“It’s do to others what you would have them do to you,” I corrected.

“So you think it is fair to attack a person because she has attacked you.”

“I’m not attacking anyone,” I said.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Regardless, we’re going to stop these sessions for the time being.”

“But I need your help,” I said. “I don’t want to visit Irenke anymore.”

“Then,” Marta said coolly, “don’t.”

There were ten of us at Dr. Papp’s talk.

Borka did not attend. She had not been at dinner. It was as though she somehow knew that I knew about her past with Varga. She did not want to be asked why she’d hidden this from me.

As Dr. Papp spoke, he bounced a ball of kitchen twine in one hand.

“Have you ever heard of the expression ‘bubbling over with happiness’?” asked Dr. Papp, winding the twine around the neck of each guest, connecting us chain-gang style. “Your emotions are like water; they pour onto the people around you.”

Dr. Papp explained, as he distributed pairs of nail scissors, how throwing bad energy caused rips in a person’s psychic carapace, thereby leaving the attacker vulnerable to retaliation.

“This affects all of you,” Dr. Papp said. “You,” he said, pointing at a countess who’d had a face-lift, braiding the fringe of her head scarf. “You’ve sliced open your carapace. Do you think it’s only germs that can find their way into the wound?”

A crucial part of daily hygiene, Dr. Papp said, was to survey our emotional attachments and cut the unhealthy ties.

He instructed us to identify an unhealthy attachment growing from our carapace. Then, using the scissors, we were to cut the string that bound us to the neighbor on our right.

I identified Irenke as my attachment.

Before we cut our string, however, Dr. Papp recommended we imagine our attachment in the basket of a hot-air balloon.

“Revenge is a counterproductive therapeutic goal,” Dr. Papp said, echoing Marta. “Pretend you are sending your attachment on a nice vacation.”

I wedged my fingers into the scissors’ tiny metal loops; the edges were dull, the blades chewed at the string one fiber at a time. The action made me sleepy. Finally the string snapped and I watched my balloon rise. The basket, however, appeared empty. Where was Irenke? I’d launched an empty balloon.

Then I saw her.

She called my name.

Julia, she said. I tried to say I was sorry.

What happened next happened, I later concluded, because my brain was overtaxed by the many exercises and regressions I’d subjected it to. The carpet morphed underfoot to a bed of nails that gouged my legs, and made them bleed and bleed and bleed, until I had to hold my chin up so that I didn’t drown in it, my own rising red death.

Then a storm started. The wind scooted along the surface of the blood, carving it into sharp ridges until the blood was no longer blood, it was an ocean of fire that the wind fanned higher and higher, the waves flicking the balloon’s fabric, saturating it red, then orange, then black.

From the basket I heard screaming.

“Stop now!” Dr. Papp yelled in order to be heard above Irenke’s screaming (which, in theory, only I could hear). Then I understood: I was screaming.

“Bring it in for a landing!” Dr. Papp commanded.

It was too late. The flaming balloon refused to land, powered by its own manic gusts of heat. It made a swipe at me, zooming so close that I could feel its furnace exhale against my cheek. I looked into the eyes of the passenger’s terrified face.

Her face, however, did not belong to Irenke.

I couldn’t watch what happened next, but this seemed worse than cowardly. I forced myself to stare at that burning ball, I forced myself to watch as my mother climbed to the edge of the basket, stared down at my red ocean, and jumped.

Here is what I learned in bed.

The Danube flows through, and partially forms the borders of, ten countries.

After a serious illness, Goya spent five years recuperating and reading French revolutionary philosophers, in particular Rousseau, who taught him that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters.

There are such things as irregular flowers.

I also learned that there’d been a spate of surgical impersonator sightings in European cities such as Paris and Düsseldorf, and that plastic surgeons had been asked to report to the authorities patients who approached them with “unrealistic” plastic surgery goals.

Things I did not learn in bed. I did not learn how I was moved to the top floor of the Goergen where, it turned out, the keypass-only medical facilities were located, and which included a hallway of private recovery rooms and a vast surgical theater. I did not learn the name of the specialist who attended me, a formal man whose hospital jacket had been tailored to fit his wide shoulders and narrow waist (in those first hazy days, I thought my pulse was being monitored by a waiter in a white tuxedo), and who did not speak English. I did not learn the name of the pills given to me, sapphire blue capsules that, when left for too long on the white napkin that covered my bed tray, stained the fabric red. I did not learn how I’d acquired a hand-shaped burn on my face, one that spanned the precise spot I’d been touched, during my trip to the Paris hotel lobby, by Madame Ackermann.

When Marta came to visit, she encouraged me not to think about the incident with the balloon basket.

“We have a saying,” she said. “The wound heals better without the fork.”

When Alwyn came to visit, I told her that Marta believed I was attacking Madame Ackermann.

“I’m aware,” Alwyn said.

“But I’m not,” I said.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” she hedged.

“And I told Marta that I don’t want to visit Irenke anymore,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you can’t help yourself.”

Regardless, Alwyn insisted, the counterproductive result of my regressing was this: I’d become sicker than ever.

I couldn’t disagree with her. Since the night of Dr. Papp’s presentation the wolf had returned with a high-wattage vengeance. Every time I closed my eyes. There it was.

“You are your own worst enemy,” Alwyn observed, as a nurse changed my face dressing. “Have you heard of Dr. Kluge? He’s a very famous electrobiologist. He was also once engaged to my mother.”

Dr. Kluge, she informed me, discovered that a stone called quartzite, due to its density and a property called laser-woven particle distribution, prevented the transmission of certain energy frequencies. He’d helped develop a spa facility made of quartzite slabs to block these frequencies; this building was the perfect place to stall the aging process.

“It also works as a treatment for schizophrenics,” she said. “They hear fewer voices when they’re in ‘the bunker.’ ”

I didn’t object to being classified as schizophrenic. In the metaphoric sense of the word, or maybe the literal sense, no one could dispute that I’d become an unwitting ventriloquist for various hostile others.

But for my “wellness purposes,” Alwyn clarified, I’d be unable to psychically reach out to or be reached by Irenke, or Madame Ackermann, or anyone else for that matter. This spa, to which she and Marta proposed I be moved, was, best I could tell, a building-sized version of the Faraday cage that Madame Ackermann kept in her basement.

“Usually there’s a yearlong waiting list,” Alwyn said, “but I’ve arranged with Kluge, because we’ve remained on friendly terms, for you to hop the queue. He guarantees you’ll show measurable improvements within a week.”

Alwyn fiddled with the cord to my blinds, raising and lowering them until the sunlight stopped at my neck, my head decapitated by shadow.

She admitted, then, that she’d taken it upon herself to do a little extra research “for the sake of our work.”

She handed me a glossy fax that persisted, in the annoying manner of faxes, to curl up on itself rather than lay flat, as though protecting its contents from dissemination. I pinned it open on my bed tray. Written in French, it was a bill of sale from a gallery in Paris called Les Einsteins, dated May 1980, and included a photo of the necklace Irenke had been wearing at the Regnor. According to this bill of sale, the purchaser was Dominique Varga.

Which struck me as curious, but not overly. It confirmed what I already knew to be true. The necklace had once belonged to Varga.

But it grew more curious.

The bill of sale split the necklace’s proceeds into various commissions — the finances of Les Einsteins were modeled more on those of a socialist consignment shop than an art gallery — the figures diminishing into smaller and smaller amounts until everyone who’d had any contact with the necklace, it seemed, received a cut, including, almost as an afterthought, the artist herself, whose name was Elizabeth Severn.

This fact did not strike me with the force it might have; the minute dose of morphine my doctor had prescribed protected me from astonishment. Maybe, too, I had already made this connection in some soupy backwater of my brain, but had failed to fish it to the conscious surface.

I saw threads, wet dark threads, swirling and knotting and leading definitively nowhere. My mother had made Irenke’s necklace. This fact did not strike me with the force it might have; the minute dose of morphine my doctor prescribed protected me from astonishment. Maybe, too, I had already made this connection in the swampy backwater of my brain, but had failed to fish it to the conscious surface. Did this mean Irenke had known my mother? Did this prove Irenke was Dominique Varga’s daughter? Perhaps the only thing it proved was that, yes, Irenke had acquired, and possibly stolen, this necklace from Varga, which Varga had bought from my mother.

But whether or not Varga was Irenke’s mother, and whether or not my mother was, in Irenke’s words, “a truly bad person,” well, this necklace illuminated little more on these fronts, save the stark reality that nothing in my life, no object, no person, spun beyond the orbit of gravely, perversely mattering.

Perhaps I should have wondered how Alwyn, while doing “a little research,” had tracked down the one bit of information I’d thus far kept from her — that Varga and my mother had been friends.

I did not wonder.

“Les Einsteins was Varga’s gallery,” Alwyn said. “Maybe Varga was simply a fan of her work. Regardless, I think it’s safe to presume they met each other.”

Beneath her allotted pittance, my mother had signed her name. I traced her handwriting’s erratic and inscrutable leaps. Not to use these letters as a portal, not to go anywhere. I wanted a thing, not a doorway.

“Also,” she said, “I spoke with the gallery owner. I said that he must have found your mother’s work impressive, given he’d agreed to represent her. To which he said, ah.”

I didn’t know what ah meant. I did not want to know.

“Do you think Dominique Varga would have allowed any old person to regress into her past? She knew your mother. Maybe she respected her for being … similarly cutthroat. Whatever the reason, Varga’s partial to you. This is a big advantage we need to exploit. You need to let her use you.”

Alwyn, I noticed, had worried the pimple on her chin into a scab. She floated her fingertips over this scab, savoring the time when she could return to her room, pry it off, continue her excavation in private.

“OK,” I said. “How?”

“She’s partial to you,” Alwyn said again. She seemed sort of pissed about this. “Just … do what she asks.”

“That depends on what she wants,” I said.

“She probably wants what everyone wants from you,” Alwyn said meanly. “Information.”

I tossed the fax at her. I was in no mood for Alwyn’s jibes.

Alwyn retrieved the fax from the floor. She set it on my bedside table.

“Don’t you find it interesting,” she said, “how you’re allowed to regress or whatever it is you do into my life, but I’m not allowed to pry into yours?”

“I’ve never pried into your life,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, as though she’d been aiming to trick me into this very answer. “And why not?”

“Because I’m taking my healing seriously,” I said.

“Right,” she said, disgusted. “You’re … how do I say this. You’re undiscerning. You’re a psychic slut. Any stranger who’s in proximity, you ‘can’t help yourself.’ So why could you help yourself with me? Why weren’t you interested in me?”

“Because we are work colleagues,” I said, not knowing what else to say — why was it I hadn’t pried into Alwyn’s life? “I figured it was better to respect your privacy.”

“How thoughtful,” she said. She pulled on her bangs so roughly I worried she’d tear them from her scalp.

I put a hand on her forearm. She tensed under me, unwilling to submit to my lame overture.

“Maybe it’s related to the surgeries,” she said dully.

“What is?” I said.

“You’re drawn to infiltrate a weak spot. All of these surgery patients, they’ve made holes in themselves. How could you resist invading?”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking that this category of person did not exclude Alwyn.

“And anyway,” she said, “I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to care about me the same way I care about you. I shouldn’t expect you to do for me what I do every day for you.”

She stared at me defiantly. Suddenly we were having a coded conversation and I was meant to provide my own key.

I could not.

Just as quickly as she’d turned abrasive, Alwyn recalcified into business mode. She’d already arranged, she said, for my train ticket and admission to the Breganz-Belken spa; she, meanwhile, would be staying at the Goergen.

We’d both meet up with Colophon in Paris in one week’s time.

“I’m not coming back here?” I asked.

She told me I was not.

“I think you’ll find your stay at the Breganz-Belken enlightening,” she said.

“Enlightening?” I said. A sealed-off stone bunker, I thought, should promote the opposite of enlightenment: Endarkenment.

“Who knows,” Alwyn said, “you might be forced to learn something you were never curious to learn.”

“About myself?” I said. Given I’d be in a psychic safe house, more or less, mine would be the sole consciousness I’d have access to.

“Well,” she said dryly, “if there’s one person you’re less interested in than me, it’s you.”

Borka arrived as Alwyn was departing. They practically collided in the small aperture to my room.

“Excuse you,” Borka said.

Alwyn did not cede her position. Borka pushed her scarf back. She brandished her face like a gun.

Alwyn caved, permitting Borka to enter. Borka did not thank her or acknowledge her for giving way, causing Alwyn to simmer, not that Borka noticed, or would have understood the implicit meaning if she had. Had they become better friends, or rather better enemies, since I’d been in the medical wing? Something was up. That something appeared to involve me. But I was too sapped to care what or how.

Alwyn tried again to leave, and was blocked by an orderly, a polite man who allowed her to huff through. The orderly bound my arm in a Velcro cuff and took a ridiculously long time to measure my blood pressure. I asked him if I had a pulse, and he answered, I’m not sure.

He stopped trying. He checked the progress of my burn, now mostly healed, he wrote something on my chart, he pronounced me well enough to return to my regular room.

“Fantastic,” I said.

As Borka helped me pack my stuff, she noticed the fax on my bedside table.

“What is this?” she asked, pointing.

“Oh,” I said. It was too difficult to explain. Also, I still hadn’t confessed to Borka what I’d learned of her connection to Varga; this would inevitably arise if I showed her the bill of sale with Varga’s name on it. A part of me enjoyed knowing something about Borka that she didn’t know I knew. She’d made it clear — we were friends, but we were members of an information economy, too. A part of me intuited that I’d be wise to preserve this bargaining chit until I needed it.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Alwyn gave it to me.”

Borka stared at it disapprovingly.

“That girl is a half-dachshund,” Borka said. “She will make you sick.”

“Someone beat her to it,” I said.

“She’s your friend?” Borka asked.

I scrutinized the empty doorway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Alwyn as a friend; I simply thought, given how little interest I’d shown in her, that I couldn’t rightly claim her as one.

“No,” I said.

“You’re right,” Borka confirmed, as though she’d been testing me. “She’s not.”

The night before my train was set to leave, I stopped by the concierge’s desk to check my e-mail for the first time since Dr. Papp’s presentation. I’d received no word from Colophon and ten video attachments from aconcernedfriend, none of which, due to the Goergen’s gluggier than usual connection, I could open, and an e-mail from my father, forwarded from TK Ltd.

I saw your film, it said. And that was all. Maybe he’d hated it, but that he’d bothered to see the film in the first place was a loving overture I couldn’t disregard. I wanted to write him back but knew this was not allowed, and suddenly these rules I’d been (sort of) respecting seemed self-defeating and sickness-enhancing and plain idiotic.

I wrote to my father.

I told him that I was in Vienna. I told him not to worry. I told him I planned to come home after I’d completed the job for which I’d been hired, because this vanishing business wasn’t for me. I told him that I was just now (as I was typing this note) coming to realize that the reason I wasn’t so crazy about vanishing was because I’d met people who seemed strangely in line with his ways of thinking about emotional management — also, for that matter, the Workshop’s. Sealing your psychic shell against intruders. Keeping your personal story to yourself for fear that somebody might use it to hurt you, or for fear that you might use it to hurt someone else, even a dead someone else. Is that why he’d never told me how he’d suffered after his wife had killed herself, why he’d never told me what it was like for him to raise an infant alone — a creature that grievously howled as a matter of plain communication — how I must have functioned as a balm against her loss as well as a ceaseless reminder that she was gone? Did he hate her for this? Did he hate me? Did he hate her for making him, on dark occasion, hate me? Did he, after he watched my vanishing film, experience the same guilty rush I had when I realized: I was happy she was dead, because if she were alive, it would mean that we were somehow to blame for her leaving? That her being dead was preferable to watching a film in which she claimed that we were bad medicine, that we were making her sick? And as for experiencing her death as a relief, why should we feel guilty? If we secretly rejoiced and even bonded over our gladness of her death, so what? She hadn’t left us any less vicious way to commemorate her.

Love, Julia, I typed.

I moused over the “Send” icon. But I didn’t send. I veered toward the delete icon. I deleted.

I wrote to Madame Ackermann.

Dear Madame Ackermann, I wrote. Wondering if we can call a truce. Forever your student, Julia.

This one I sent.

I checked my e-mail one final time before logging out. I’d received a message from The Workshop.

It read:

The faculty member you are trying to contact is on leave. If you’re looking for general information about the Workshop, please contact Dr. Karen Yuen at kyuen@theworkshop.edu. If you’re trying to contact this faculty member in particular, we don’t know what to say. Your e-mail will be forwarded to his or her personal account, but we cannot guarantee its receipt, nor, if received, that it will ever be read. Of course this is always the case with missives, virtual or otherwise; we’re just pointing this out, should you be under the impression that any form of communication is fail-safe. Regardless, if you do not hear from this faculty member, the Workshop is not to blame.

That Madame Ackermann was unreachable was not news to me, but nonetheless this auto-reply ignited a tiny pilot light of panic in my sternum. I was not safe here.

I’m so fucking happy to be leaving, I thought. The Goergen’s loose windowpanes, the gaps between the floors and the walls, the hundreds of drains, the women with the holes in their heads, everywhere I looked I saw opportunities for infiltration and loss.

After packing, I went to Borka’s room to tell her I was transferring to a spa for old people and schizophrenics. Also I wanted to return the key and cricket cage. I’d failed to regress to 152 West 53rd Street, Room 13, on October 24, 1984, between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., and now I was headed to a maximum-security building where it would be pointless to even try. Whatever information Borka possessed about Varga, she would have to give it to me without the promise of anything in return.

I found her in the rare giddy state; Marta had approved her surgical objectives. It appeared she’d already had a procedure or two — her eyelids were swollen, her upper lip distended.

“I can’t wait until you see me again,” she said.

I didn’t bother telling her: I was never going to see her again.

Though I tried to discourage her, she insisted that I take her money.

“For sad mood days,” she said, pressing a hamster-sized roll of bills into my hand.

When I returned the cricket cage and key, however, her mood hairpinned.

“You’re giving up?” she said. “After all I’ve done for you?”

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I can’t.”

She grabbed my hand.

“Tell me what you need to know,” she said. “I’m ready to help you now.”

“I don’t know if that would make a difference …”

“Someone died in that room,” she blurted.

I blinked at her.

“Who?” I said.

“A stranger,” she said. “But her conceits were sent to me.”

“Conceits?” I said.

“Clothing,” she said. “Belongings.”

“Why would a stranger send you her belongings?” I asked.

“There was a note,” she said, “instructing the concierge. Should anything happen to her, I was to receive her conceits.”

“What else did the note say?”

“Nothing,” she said bitterly. “It said nothing.”

“So you want to know why this stranger sent you her things?” I said.

She nodded.

“I want to know if I am somehow to blame,” she said.

“Why would you be to blame?” I asked.

She pushed her fingers into her eyeballs. Literally, her fingers disappeared to the first knuckle, her old face like a snakeskin beginning to molt.

“These people,” she said. “These people who die and you never knew them. What are you supposed to feel?”

She really wanted me to tell her. She really thought that I would know.

“Nothing,” I said, tossing the key on her bed. “You’re not supposed to feel anything.”

She removed her fingers from her eyes, and it was, I swear, as though she’d pulled her fingers from holes in a dyke that had previously held back a flood. It struck me with the force of a riot hose.

“Oh really,” she hissed. “Hasn’t your blighted, miserable life taught you anything? You’re just like her. Doomed to fail because you’re too scared to try.”

“Who?” I said. “Who am I like?”

My mother, I thought. Since she’d been in cahoots with Varga, maybe Borka had known my mother, too.

It was possible.

“My mother?” I said. “Did you know her?”

Borka laughed meanly.

“No,” she said. “I did not.”

I didn’t push her to explain; to do so would be pointless. She wasn’t giving me anything I didn’t earn first. But I wanted her to understand: I had information, too.

“I discovered your Varga secret,” I said. “I know about your ‘death.’ ”

I didn’t say: I know you disfigured yourself on purpose, that you drove your car into a cliff because you were an attention-hungry rich girl who wanted to be a celebrity, or maybe because you despised, with an intensity that drove you to violence, your face.

She scrutinized me as though I were a math problem, an x-value that remained momentarily, and terrifyingly, beyond her comprehension.

But whatever she divined reassured her. The wrathful floodwaters withdrew; she tamped her real self back to invisibility. Again, she was only ugly on the outside.

She smiled and held out her arms to me. I allowed her, one last time, to smooth my hair.

“Silly Beetle,” she said. “You know so much nothing.”

She forced the key into my robe pocket.

“But we still have our deal, right?” she said.

I didn’t tell her that I had no intention of touching this key ever again. Whatever she wanted me to discover in that hotel room, it was a fool’s errand. No matter what I found out, no matter whose face she had, it would not stop her from hating herself.

“We have our deal,” I lied.

Back in my room, I opened my French doors and stepped onto my room’s small patio. I took a mental snapshot of the view — the distant lights of the various bridges stretching over the Danube, and the blackened void of the Vienna Woods; the immediate quiet of Gutenberg Square, and the lighted flat windows across the square, revealing the collapsed cushions of easy chairs and dirty plates on tables but never people.

Soon, my presence was detected; below me, the camera flashes popped. I canted my face downward so the snappers could get a clear shot of my face. I waved. I smiled. I hoped that Madame Ackermann would see these photos and be lured to the Goergen in search of me. Let her come, I thought, because I will be long gone.

The flashes weakened, flickered, extinguished. Now there was only night down there. What I’d taken for flashes were the flames of many individual lighters as the nodders fired up their pipes. In the newly keen silence I listened to the wind that, when I closed my eyes, became the sound of the nodders’ gaseous brains leaking from their bodies, whirling around Gutenberg Square, filling whatever lonely vacancies.