The Vanishers

Part Four

From Vienna I took a train through the Carpathians. The scenery was stunning but I barely registered it, instead spending most of the trip recovering from a fright I’d had at the station when a woman wearing a familiar Pucci scarf cut in front of me in the ticket queue. Her black ponytail hair lashed my cheek as she pushed behind a businessman, knocking his briefcase from his hand.

It was her. I willed myself not to move, to cease breathing. Perhaps she’d fail to detect me, purchase her ticket, swan off toward her gate. But then I had to sneeze, and I tried not to, and the pressure built and built until what emerged from my body sounded less like a sneeze than a rock striking another rock.

She turned.

She was not Madame Ackermann.

Still, I took this mistake as a warning. I “saw” people before I saw them, their arrival preannounced by a doppelgänger stranger.

Thank God for the bunker. I’d started to think of my new venue not just as a health necessity but as an architectural narcotic, even a potential vacation.

Before boarding the train, I checked my e-mail at a “free” Internet café, one that required me to purchase a pastry, and demonstrably enjoy it, before I was allowed to touch a keyboard.

I’d received my daily attachment from Madame Ackermann and a very long response to my override query from senile Professor Wibley.

“Concerning overrides,” he began, and thank goodness he did, because the e-mail did not seem to be about overrides at all, but about the dangers of method acting, and how actors, in using their own pasts to animate the emotions of a nonexistent character, replaced their memories with the memories of a performance in which they’d employed these memories, the result being, after a number of “usages,” that these memories became the province of myriad fictional others, and the actor could only access them by worming his way backward through the various roles he’d played, but that his past, once he reached it, was no longer, in theory, only his.

Wibley then veered into a riff involving T. S. Eliot’s artistic quest for a degree of depersonalization “that approaches the condition of science,” and how Eliot and other modernist writers at the turn of the last century viewed it as their ultimate goal to achieve the continual extinction of their personality, resulting in an idealized state that was adopted by the psychics of the time and renamed, in psychic circles at least, “clairvoidancy.”

“Though these days I am suffering,” wrote Professor Wibley, “more from voidancy than clairvoidancy. See me as a cautionary tale. I was colonized by the Mind of Europe even though I superannuated Shakespeare, Homer, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen. Regardless, it is not my intention to depress the youth. I simply hope that I have been of some small consolation to you, whoever you are.”

He’d included, at the bottom of his e-mail, the following boilerplate:

“Some can absorb knowledge, the luckier must sweat for it.”

A few hours past lunchtime, my train pulled into the tollbooth-sized station at Breganz-Belken.

A man in a pale sage uniform greeted everyone who disembarked — myself and two older couples — he took our luggage, he led us to a golf cart. Soon we arrived at a honed monolith that protruded from the ground at a slight angle as though it had been haphazardly dropped from outer space.

Whereas the Goergen was fluted and cartouched and polished to a high gleam, the Breganz-Belken was a Brutalist cave, the surfaces so matte they looked powdered.

I told the woman at the front desk that I had a reservation.

“Julia Severn,” I said.

She had such good skin, this woman. She was so flushed with health that she appeared feverish.

“I’m afraid there’s no guest here by that name,” the woman said, as though we were discussing a third and presently absent person. I showed her the postcard on which Alwyn had written my confirmation number, as if this constituted convincing proof that her database was incorrect.

She inputted the number and her face flickered. Evidently I did have a reservation, but she refused to outright admit this.

“Additional postcards can be found in the night table,” she said, initiating some rapid key commands. “Should you choose to use them, they will appear on your week’s-end bill as ‘additional room charge.’ May I have your credit card?”

I handed her Alwyn’s credit card.

“Also, I’m scheduled to see Kluge,” I said.

“Kluge,” she said. “I believe he’s in Tehran, skiing. But I’m happy to know that women of your generation are taking the aging process so seriously. It’s never too early to start the fight.”

“No,” I said, “actually—”

“However, I can’t enroll you in the Kluge therapy until you’ve been approved by one of our diagnosticians,” she said.

She told me she’d slotted me in for “a ten o’clock Mike.”

Her computer beeped.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Alwyn’s card. “Declined. Do you have another?”

I told her I did not.

“We are not above accepting cash,” she sniffed.

I sloughed a wad of bills from Borka’s Sad Mood stash.

A sage-uniformed porter unlocked my room with a key card made of wood. After he left, I lay in the bed and, nose against the window, peered down the rubbly slope on which the backside of the spa was perched, the vertiginous view a freeze-frame of falling. From somewhere in the nearby woods, I heard wolves. Then I realized it was a recording of wolves, piped through tiny speakers scattered like spores throughout the room.

When I called the Goergen to tell Alwyn I’d arrived, I was told that she was unavailable. I left a message saying that she might want to pay her credit card bill.

She did not call me back.

That evening I ate in the spa’s restaurant. My fellow diners were male-female couples in their fifties or sixties, seated across from one another at broad two-tops. Nobody spoke. Their faces remained slack, incommunicative blanks. Perhaps given my recent experiences — with silence-mandated meals, with postsurgical dining partners discouraged from facial displays of emotion — this did not strike me as unusual.

To my knowledge, I saw no schizophrenics.

After dinner I wandered back to my room, taking the scenic route past the thermal pools, clustered at the bottom of a windowless silo at the spa’s center, its bubbling cauldron core. Maybe it was the pleasing aftereffects of the Grüner Veltliner I’d had with my entrée, or that I’d been inside this frequency-impermeable bunker for five hours, but I felt safe, entombed. Best of all, when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t plagued by Fenrir on the backs of my eyelids; he left me alone, as though scared off by the stereo sounds of other wolves.

As recommended, I ate a light breakfast in preparation for Mike. I drank three cups of coffee brewed from toasted millet that left a husky residue on my vocal cords. Voice aside, I presented an alarming picture of health. My face, when I caught an accidental glimpse of it in my bathroom mirror, resembled those photographs of me I no longer consulted to measure my decline.

I tried to check my e-mail but the woman behind the desk told me that the Communications Suite was under construction. She spoke of its future existence the way some people speak of the pronouncements of Nostradamus, as curious predictions they suspect will never come to pass.

At 9:58 a.m., Mike knocked on my door.

Mike, an American in his forties, resembled in looks and demeanor a surfer who’d been kept too long from the sea. He wheeled a gurney into my room.

With his hands he commenced a methodical sweeping of my body, hovering, on occasion, over a presumed trouble spot.

“So,” he said, after about twenty minutes, “I’m guessing you were struck by lightning.”

“Me?” I said. “No.”

“Perhaps you don’t remember,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure I would remember that,” I said.

“Your circuitry’s been scrambled,” he said. “Do you work in the nuclear physics sector?”

I told him I was most recently employed as a receptionist who answered a disconnected phone.

“And you’re here alone,” he said.

“I’ve noticed I’m one of the few.”

“The spa’s running a couples’ retreat this weekend,” he said.

“What kind of couples’ retreat?” I asked.

Mike didn’t respond. Instead he asked me if I was sexually active.

I told him I was not.

“Good,” he said.

“Is that your way of saying you don’t want to sleep with me?” I said.

“I don’t want to sleep with you,” Mike replied. “I never sleep with damaged people.”

“Damaged,” I said.

“Damaged people can fuck up your energy,” said Mike, “especially if you’re fucking them.”

Mike inserted the tip of an elbow between two ribs; he ran the tip along the groove between the bones, back and forth, digging a little deeper with each pass.

“You’re fused together,” Mike said. “This is why I’m pretty sure you got struck by lightning; hypercalcification is initiated by exposure to high-voltage electrical currents.”

Mike asked about my medical history. I told him that I’d had a complicated relationship with an old mentor.

“I’m thinking you’ve misread my toxic relationship with this woman as a lightning strike,” I said. “An easy error to make.”

“I disagree,” Mike said. “What zapped you isn’t human.”

“You’ve never met Madame Ackermann,” I said. “She prefers to work through a mythical Norse wolf proxy.”

Mike’s fingers recoiled from my hip bones; I could sense, in that infinitesimally wider space, the conflicted thrum of his trying not to lock me into a doomed diagnostic category. Fuck, I thought. I’d failed the test, revealed myself as a hopeless lunatic unworthy of his energies. This had happened to me in New York; at Blanche’s suggestion, I’d volunteered to be a test patient at the Manhattan Psychoanalytic Institute, but the interviewer, when I’d mooned to her about my lost psychic abilities, had deemed me too deluded to be helped.

Mike busied himself behind me. Filling out my rejection slip, I figured. I abided bluely, listening to the judgmental scratch of his pencil.

Then he returned to the gurney and pressed downward onto my shoulders — a stretch that was also a restriction — and announced that he was recommending me for the Kluge therapy.

“What?” I said.

Mike elaborated on what he called the “not onerous stipulations” involved with enrollment: I was not allowed to go outside, nor was I to stand within ten feet of any windows. The reasons for these stipulations, Mike said, were obvious — in order to be spared the wear and tear of certain frequencies, patients had to surrender, without interruption, to no less than a weeklong quarantine.

“Not to mention,” Mike warned, “when you’ve been protected from all random frequencies for even periods of time as brief as forty-eight hours, abrupt reentry can cause unpleasant side effects.”

He speed-muttered a list of at least thirty side effects from which I heard “self-disfigurement” and “animal hallucinations.”

I promised him I would stay inside.

“I’ve spent my life inside,” I assured him, thinking of my New York days, of my Goergen days. “Lives,” I modified.

“You’ll find it relaxing to have the voices in your head silenced,” Mike said.

How intuitive, I thought. Mike really was a special healer. He discerned, without me needing to tell him, my unique variety of exhaustion. Maybe he could tell by pressing on my skeleton — I did not always live in my body. I was like an astronaut whose every weightless minute came at a physical cost that could be measured in bone density loss.

“But to be honest I’m not convinced the voices are in my head,” I said, thinking of Irenke. “Sometimes I think I’m a voice in someone else’s head. Like a free-floating consciousness.”

“You won’t be allowed to go anywhere,” he reassured me. “Your mind’s staying put.”

“Great,” I said, honestly relieved. “Great.”

“Also you’ll be put on a special diet. For the most part, however, you’re instructed simply to be.”

“Yes,” I said, “but who?”

I meant this as a joke; I was so many people. But I also meant it seriously. Who was I when I was only me?

I laughed to indicate, to Mike at least, that I’d been kidding. Mike, folding his gurney into thirds, matched my laugh, decibel for decibel, and both of us laughed until all of a sudden we didn’t.

My stomach growled, ready for lunch. Only after Mike left did I realize that he was not an especially intuitive man; my bones had told him nothing. He’d recommended me for the Kluge therapy because, somewhere between the wolf mention and the multiple lives, he’d diagnosed me as schizophrenic.

I spent the rest of the day in the thermal baths — so different from the Goergen’s and yet, as with everything at the Breganz-Belken, so the same — soaking in water heated to the exact temperature of the human body, then leap-frogging through the higher-temperature pools until I reached the hottest one, a crack in the stone floor that mimicked a violent splitting-open of the earth’s crust. When I couldn’t stand the heat any longer, I dunked myself in the neighboring ice pool. Shivering, I’d hurry back to the human body pool and begin the sequence again. I worked this loop for hours. I couldn’t make sense of this need, but later, reduced like a sauce to my most gelatinous essence and lying on my bed listening to the stereo wolves, I made sense of it this way: for the first time in over a year, I was choreographing my own pain experiences.

Then I slept the stone sleep of the happily dead.

I awoke at 6 a.m., ravenous. I sat alone in the dining hall and read a paperback mystery abandoned in my nightstand. Eventually another couple appeared. I didn’t take much interest in them until they started arguing.

In German, the woman berated the man with what sounded like a litany of pent-up complaints, each one threading into the next as though she’d been awake all night lying beside him, writing and rewriting this little monologue in her head. The man, meanwhile, stared at the woman with the drowning O mouth of people trying to survive a conversation that is not a conversation but a tsunami of relentless criticism.

The woman finished. She stared at the man, daring him to respond; he thumbed a spot of juice from her chin, did not kiss her, left.

A waiter approached the woman’s table to remove the man’s plate. She faked for him a bright and believable smile.

I squinted at her face, its features tiny and modular like an actress’s, each piece capable of behaving independently of the others. She registered to me as someone I knew from somewhere, though given her generic attractiveness, this could have been the reaction she inspired in everyone.

Her waiter returned, this time with a magazine, which he placed on the table alongside a pen, and a small digital camera. The woman untwined the hasty morning bun in which she’d stashed her hair, combing it out with her fingernails. When condensed her hair was a chestnut color but now, de-roped and catching the dawn slanting through the dining hall windows, it appeared more reddish-blue, as though it had been dunked to the roots in blood.

Then I knew exactly who she was. The resemblance was unmistakable. Plus I’d seen a picture of her skiing at Gstaad.

This was all too strange — like psychically spying on someone without the psychic part. Clearly, too, I’d been sent here by Alwyn for reasons other than my health. Since I’d refused (in Alwyn’s mind) to use my abilities to help her, she’d dispatched me on a personal errand, possibly to find out why her mother and stepfather had yet to see her vanishing films. Recalling the paparazzi magazines in her Madame Ackermann folder, I suspected she’d spent far more time tracking her mother than she’d spent tracking Madame Ackermann. No wonder Madame Ackermann “disappeared”; disappearing wasn’t very hard when nobody was looking for you.

And yet. In a strange way, I suspected I owed Alwyn; I did feel guilty that I’d never experienced even an unconscious curiosity about her.

I approached her mother’s table.

“Pardon me,” I said. “Are you the Breck Girl?”

She smiled that smile that accompanies blushing, but this woman, she did not blush.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But I was wondering if I could get your autograph.”

I handed her my paperback, flipped to a blank end page.

“You’re not disturbing me,” she said. She cast a glance toward the door through which her husband had exited.

I scrutinized the magazine photo of Alwyn’s mother, the one she’d autographed for the waiter. She was posed as Alwyn had described her, the photo really a photo of the back of a woman’s head, her face obscured in a way that suggested it was better left unseen.

“Would you like to sit?” she said. “I’ve been abandoned by my grumpy dining companion.”

“Wrong side of the bed?” I offered.

“But what are the odds,” she said, “of his getting it wrong every single day?”

I sat. She inspected me in the way that older beautiful women inspect younger women, check-marking the areas in which she managed to succeed, despite predating me by thirty years, in being more ravishing.

“And you live where?”

“New York City,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “I once read an interview with a man who could see into the future. As a Jewish child in thirties Germany he intuited that the world was going to hell, and pushed his parents to move the family to New York. The interviewer asked him, ‘So was that your first paranormal experience?’ ”

She chuckled.

“I always want to ask people who move to New York that question. ‘Was that your first paranormal experience?’ ”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “If you’re asking.”

“I don’t think I was asking,” she said.

She searched the room for a waiter. I was about to lose her. Her energy was terrier-like and distractible; it was easy to imagine Alwyn’s childhood as a vain daily struggle to hold this woman’s attention for longer than an eye-blink.

I considered confessing to her that I knew her daughter, but suspected that this would snap our exchange to an immediate close.

Instead I inquired if she’d ever heard of a phenomenon called psychic attack. I told her how I was being attacked by my former mentor, a woman named Madame Ackermann.

“How fascinating,” she said. “And how does one know that she’s being psychically attacked? Is there a blood test?”

“Often people have no idea,” I said. “Often people are sick for years, and visit every conceivable Western and Eastern doctor, and then they commit suicide.”

“So weakness is a sign,” she said.

“More like unexplained aches and pains,” I said. “Rashes. Exhaustion. Loss of hair, pigmentation, appetite, hope.”

“Maybe these people are simply depressed,” she observed.

“Chicken and egg,” I said. “Are they sick because they’re depressed? Or depressed because they’re sick?”

“Depressed people,” she said, “are a bore.”

I took this as a warning.

“And this ‘Madame Ackermann,’ ” Alwyn’s mother said. “You’re hiding from her here?”

“Sort of,” I said.

I told her about Dominique Varga, and how we were both searching for her. I thought perhaps, since her daughter had written her college thesis about Dominique Varga, that the name might spark some recognition. It didn’t.

“So you’re not in any real danger,” she said, “save the danger of losing a race to find a possibly dead person.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s ignoring the fact that I’ve been physically debilitated by Madame Ackermann for over a year.”

“Which is maybe not Madame Ackermann’s fault,” she said. “Maybe your ‘debilitation’ is stress related. I’d be stressed, too, if I were wasting time at a spa when I had work to do.”

“Yes,” I said, “except—”

“Your generation is always so quick to blame other women for its problems,” she interrupted. “You girls and your ideological penchant for matricide. Kill the mother. Kill the mother. No wonder you’re all so lost.”

“Some of our mothers killed themselves,” I said.

“I’m sure it’s comforting to think that,” she said.

She focused on the serrated skyline of firs ascending the slope beyond the windows.

“I’m assuming you don’t have any children,” she said.

I confirmed that I did not.

“No one ever admits that a mother’s greatest heartbreak is when she begins to see her child as the embodiment of her own worst self. Literally, it is as if her worst self — that shameful part she’s able, most days, to quarantine — has been loosed upon the world and refuses any longer to take orders from her.”

“Your daughter’s probably too old to take orders from you,” I said. “Not that you’re old,” I added.

“I scarcely know my daughter,” she said. “She lies to me about tiny things, insignificant things. She’ll say ‘I’m studying math’ when she’s studying film. She’ll say her favorite color is blue when really it’s green. It’s far more insulting than if she had a secret worth concealing.”

A waiter making coffee rounds refilled our cups.

“I’ve been chosen to participate in the therapy designed by Dr. Kluge,” I said. “I … read in the tabloids that you almost married him.”

She didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she might as well have.

“Kluge,” she said. “He recently hit on me in a hot tub in Gstaad. He also seduced my daughter once. You probably didn’t read that in the tabloids. Or maybe you did.” She sighed. “There are no boundaries these days.”

“Your daughter slept with your ex-fiancé?” I said. This news surprised me, until I realized it did not surprise me at all.

“This was how I tried to retard his hot tub advances. When you remind a man that he’s slept with your daughter, most decent ones will desist in their efforts to have sex with you. But not Kluge. I broke his heart when I refused to marry him.”

“But how could you?” I said. “How could you marry a man who did that to your daughter?”

“My daughter had nothing to do with my decision,” she said. “I don’t blame him for what he did.”

“Because you think your daughter instigated it?” I asked.

She sighed weightily.

“If you met her you’d understand,” she said. “My daughter can only ‘manipulate’ a man for whom she is a stepping-stone to greater things.”

She blotted her eyes with her napkin. Because she pitied Alwyn? Because she was ashamed of her?

I had no idea. Perhaps, to her mind, there wasn’t a difference.

She autographed the air, signaling to the waiter that she wanted her check.

She was done with me.

What was more insulting, I wondered: to be lied to about little things, or to be entrusted too quickly with personal disclosures and just as quickly discarded?

The waiter hurried over with her check.

“Well,” she said, “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

I tracked her as she exited through the dining room, pausing to examine her reflection in the mirror behind the host stand. She didn’t pretend she was doing anything but.

“I’m so glad I got to meet you in person,” I said before she was beyond earshot. “All these years I thought you were an ugly woman with a face that needed hiding.”

I tried to steal her teaspoon — this woman, she interested me now — but the waiter had swept the table of every object of psychometric use, right down to the pepper mill.

I’d failed even to get her signature. When I turned to the page that I’d asked her to sign, I saw that she’d left it blank.

I spent the rest of the morning going crazy.

I attributed my brain’s mean squirrelliness to the fantastic sleep I’d been getting, the low-glycemic-index spa food I’d been eating, the minerals I’d been osmosing in the thermal baths, the metallic mountain air. Health, I’d forgotten, was a chore of options.

From my room I called Colophon’s number in Paris.

No answer.

I tried to reach Alwyn at the Goergen, but was informed that she’d checked out last night.

To test that there were, in fact, no cracks in this fortress, I removed Borka’s key from my suitcase. I lay on the bed and clutched it in my hand. Nothing. It didn’t increase in temperature by a single degree. Using the spa-branded pencil I drew on the spa-branded paper pad, thinking I might doodle my way to a regression. I doodled a tree, I doodled a city skyline, I doodled a mountain range, I doodled any shape that might lend itself to inadvertent language, to communication, to a message. I stopped to see what I’d written.

A tree, a skyline, a mountain range.

I felt as though I’d suffered an amputation. I felt as though I’d been buried underground.

It didn’t help that I had no e-mail.

I returned to the lobby and, standing at a safe distance from the windows, stared longingly outside. All I had to do was enter it, but like a regression I couldn’t activate, it warded me off, an impenetrable scene protected by triple-paned glass, a diorama of a world, not a world.

Then I saw the man.

I did not immediately recognize him, kitted out in khaki shorts and hiking boots. He examined the shard-shaped pieces of wood nailed to the top of a stake and indicating, with their pointiest points, directions to various local attractions. When he turned toward the lobby I saw that it was Alwyn’s stepfather.

I exited through the side doors. The day was warm and overcast, the air alkaline. The paths that led to the saunas had been groomed of stones and roots, the soil packed and swept by the attendants.

I caught up to him.

“Heading to the saunas?” I asked.

My presence, from which he initially recoiled, modulated once he saw what I was: in the spa scheme of things, a moderately attractive young woman.

“I’m hiking to the sister spa,” he said, in German-accented English.

“Me too,” I said. “Going for my treatment.”

“Treatment?” he said. “What treatment?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

He pinched his chin.

“That’s part of the treatment,” I said, “not knowing what it is. I was told that preconceptions risk negatively impacting the results of whatever treatment it is that I’m getting.”

He resumed his uphill lumbering. I took this resumption as acceptance of my companionship.

I asked him what he did for a living and he told me what I already knew — that he was a Jungian psychotherapist from Berne.

“How far is it to the sister spa?” I asked.

“About three kilometers,” he said. “This was the original spa, what they now call the sister spa. I used to come here with my grandfather when I was very small. We had to hike from the railway station. There were none of these silly carts to drive you about. There was nobody idiotic enough to sweep paths with a broom. It’s going to rain.”

Two seconds later, it started to rain.

We hustled the last partial kilometer, the path concluding at a large granite bowl that swooped between two peaks. A small, gunmetal lake at its center glistened like a clogged drain. As we neared the front door of the sister spa, located on the lake’s edge, I clocked that it was not an active spa at all but a scenic Alpine ruin. The windows had been de-glassed. What remained of the roof was upholstered in yellow lichen.

Near a giant stone hearth we found a pile of logs, with which Alwyn’s stepfather built a little tepee in the fireplace.

He pulled a matchbook from his shorts and set the wood ablaze.

“So tell me more about this treatment you’re getting,” he said.

I considered running with my original lie — this was the treatment, what kind of preconception buster is better than this, to send a person to a spa that is not a working spa — but decided instead to come clean.

“I know your stepdaughter,” I said.

He grunted.

“Given my experience, that strikes me as impossible,” he said.

“Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough,” I said.

This was an accusation he’d heard before.

“She’s a troubled one,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “Me, I see only the manifestation of her demonic animus.”

“Because she slept with Kluge?” I said.

He did not seem surprised that I should know about Kluge.

“Kluge and my wife were involved years ago. Alwyn is very competitive with her mother. Ergo, she slept with her mother’s former lover.”

“You make it sound so logical,” I said.

“I once believed it was logical,” he said. “I once believed that Alwyn’s father had molested her as a young girl, and that this had created a sexually competitive relationship between the daughter and the mother, with unhappy results for both.”

“You don’t believe that now?” I asked.

He poked at the fire.

“People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn’t any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it’s because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?”

I shivered in my wet dress. He removed his sweater — also wet — and wrapped the arms around my shoulders.

But problems don’t arise from nothing, I thought. This man, this professional interpreter of the source codes of neuroses, was blind to the contributions Alwyn’s mother had made to the emotional construction of Alwyn. Though I was primed, via my Workshop courses, to mock and reject psychological causality, in Alwyn’s case, such causality seemed inescapably apt. After spending a matter of weeks with Alwyn and a mere ten minutes with her mother, theirs struck me as a behavioral muddle with a tragically easy explanation — Alwyn’s mother could not square her identity as a sexualized woman with that of being a mother, thus her neglected daughter’s sole option was to de-daughterize herself by becoming a sexualized woman, and subsequently a competitor worthy of her mother’s attention.

I inspected Alwyn’s stepdad, his new hiking boots, his expensive watch. Maybe this variety of blindness was his husbandly mandate; maybe, like my father, it was not his role to understand his remote wife, or to act as her spokesperson to her offspring. Still, it seemed undeniably evident that his wife had played a role in Alwyn’s Alwyn-ness in that she’d refused to play a role. She’d been an emotional absence, a neglectful null.

I corrected my original thinking. Indeed, problems do arise from nothing, arguably the most vicious ones do.

We have a lot in common, you and I.

It turned out that Alwyn and I did.

Alwyn’s stepfather and I stared into the fire. He was a nice man, not just because he’d given me his sweater, or because he reminded me of my own dad in a way, a man who interpreted his “protector” role as an internal affair. He was not protecting his family members from outside threats; he was protecting them from each other.

“My mother killed herself when I was a month old,” I said.

He took this in professional stride.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” I said. “That’s why I don’t tell people.”

He asked for the details: I told him that she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills while I’d been napping in the next room. The fact that she’d killed herself in such close proximity to me was often cited by our town gossips as proof of her derangement: What kind of person could have killed herself with her infant so nearby?

But why? I’d always wanted to ask. Was death contagious? Did it release a toxin into the air? Why did I need to be protected from her, from it? Because wasn’t it more caring for her to die with me asleep in the next room? Wasn’t this the more compelling expression of maternal love, of her inability to be apart from me, even as she guaranteed that she would forever be apart from me? I preferred to route my understanding of the situation through Sylvia Plath’s children, for whom plates of toast had been left and an insulating towel wedged beneath the bedroom door while their mother went about her business in the kitchen below, these details meant to signal to them, when they awoke, both her maternal commitment and her level of pitiable derangement, also the sad ways that a mother’s love can be amplified or reduced to acts both monumentally considerate and monumentally selfish. A towel. An oven. A plate of toast.

“She must have been suffering from postpartum psychosis,” he said.

“So it’s my fault,” I joked.

“I’m sure you’ve spent a great portion of your life wondering if it was,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. But not in a way that I take personally, if that makes any sense.”

“Maybe she believed she’d do more harm to you alive than dead,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said. She was a bad person, you see. Maybe she understood herself as a form of human contagion. Thus she eradicated herself, and my father helped, via his periodic small disclosures, to regularly inoculate me against any trace remnants of her unique disease, in hopes that I would not catch it.

“Whatever the reason,” I said, “she did what she thought was necessary, despite the hideous personal cost. Thus I refuse to experience her absence as some great tragedy I must spend my life overcoming.”

Alwyn’s stepfather examined me dubiously.

“I’d like to think,” he said, “despite any polite hopes that my daughters — I have two from a previous marriage—” he clarified, “could live happy lives without me, that my death would also, in some irreparable way, ruin them.”

“How candid,” I said.

“I thought that’s what we were being,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “In the interests of candor, let me ask you this: why haven’t you or your wife seen Alwyn’s vanishing film?”

He squinted at me.

“Is that what she’s calling it?” he said.

“You might find it therapeutic,” I said.

“Might I,” he said. “Somehow I can’t imagine that watching one’s stepdaughter engage in pornographic acts with strangers qualifies as therapeutic under any circumstance.”

“You have the wrong idea,” I said. I guessed he’d seen one of Alwyn’s porn homages to Varga.

“I don’t think I have,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be in a hotel room on a business trip, and to be flipping through the television channels, and to stumble across a film of your stepdaughter, from whom you’ve heard not a single word in a year, performing fellatio? Although perform isn’t the right word. Being penetrated, via the mouth, while she lies there unmoving. I watched long enough to determine that she wasn’t dead.”

(A sidebar me was impressed that Alwyn’s work had been so widely distributed; these porn films were not just “hobbies.”)

“In her defense,” I said, “she saw these films as art.”

His eyes watered. He poked at the fire.

“When Alwyn deigned to contact us, it was to invite us to a screening of another of these repugnant films. For the sake of our mental health, I counseled my wife to refuse to be an audience to Alwyn’s narcissistic theatricality. She believes her daughter made a heartfelt confessional film. She has no idea.”

She did make a heartfelt confessional film, I almost said. But I didn’t. I had no idea what kind of vanishing film Alwyn had made. Maybe hers was as stiff and unrevealing as mine had been — an attempt to explain what was not explainable or forgivable. Would her mother and stepfather have learned any more about her by watching it? Maybe not. Maybe the porn films she’d made were the more accidentally revealing documents.

“If that’s how you felt,” I said, “then why did you hire the detective?”

“Excuse me?” he said.

“You and your wife hired a detective. And yet it seems you have no interest in finding her.”

This, for whatever reason, stunned him.

“She told you we’d hired a detective?” he said.

I confirmed this; meanwhile, a heavy dread settled in my gut.

“Well,” her stepfather said hoarsely. “I’d find that lie comical if it weren’t so utterly heartrending.”

He cleared his throat, scrubbed his cheek with his knuckles.

There was nothing left for us to say.

He handed me a coal hod and asked me to fill it with dirt so he could smother the fire.

Outside, the rain had thinned to a mist. I turned my face upward, allowing the moisture to settle on my skin. My hands jittered, my stomach adrenaline-queasy. I recalled Alwyn’s professed envy over the fact that someone hated me enough to attack me. Hate, she’d said, is a form of emotional attachment. How had I missed that Alwyn had been lying to me about the detective, how had I missed that she was maybe really suffering? She’d vanished herself, after all. She’d been suicidal, once. It was my error not to understand: anyone can find themselves on the brink. Anyone can wake up one morning and decide against living. Every single day, the very healthiest among us might be seen to have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

The ground swamped and sagged under my feet. I’d eaten something that didn’t agree with me for breakfast, I thought. I was dehydrated. But then the post-quarantine side effects Mike warned me about — the reason he’d recommended a gradual reentry — started to take hold. Or at least that seemed the most logical explanation for what happened next. Sounds torqued and amplified — each leaf rustle and twig skitter a sonic boom. Each millibar of dropping air pressure a thunderclap. I heard a horrible sandpapery grating I could not place, but which seemed to occur every time I blinked. I experienced a vertigo so intense it was as though I had been gutted by a suction nozzle.

Then everything went quiet.

Even I went quiet. Quiet in the head, quiet in the nerve endings. Snowstorm quiet.

And I felt the presence. I was not alone. It’s impossible to describe this sensation to those who are numb to such things, but there’s an involuntary quality to certain experiences, like the skin tingling that precedes vomiting. You can’t help but feel.

When I opened my eyes, the wolf stood about six feet from me. It looked more or less like the pictures I’d seen of wolves, save this one seemed shorter and more compact, almost dog-like. It gripped the ground with four giant paws, its fur quilled along its spine as though it had just emerged from the lake.

We stood there, the wolf and I. I kept my gaze on the ground, angled so that it appeared in my peripheral vision. I did not want to die surprised.

Staring at the wolf this way, however, I noticed that it was surrounded by a spiraling nimbus, one that coagulated for the span of an eye blink into the astral imprint of a black-haired woman.

Madame Ackermann.

I should have been terrified. I wasn’t. I was pissed. Her appearance registered as a physical space violation, as “unfair,” even though psychic attacks, to my knowledge, had no rules of engagement, there were no Geneva Convention guidelines to humanely shape one person’s cruelty toward another. Fine to kill me from the inside. But a wolf, an actual wolf, struck me as beyond the pale.

The wolf growled. It took two steps closer. It growled again.

“Go the fuck away,” I yelled. “Go the fuck away, leave me the fuck alone.”

The wolf pawed at the ground so viciously I heard the thick canvas sound of its footpads tearing.

“Leave me alone,” I said, holding my ground. “Leave me alone, you bitch.”

The wolf lurched — it intended to remove a chunk of my throat, I thought — but no. It bowed its head to the ground and made horrible noises, roiling gags that threatened to bring up an organ.

Jesus, I thought, watching it convulse. This was no monster; this was barely more than a plain animal, shivering in the astringent wind that, once freed from the toothy firs, gusted unobstructed across the stone.

To think I’ve been afraid of this, I thought. To think I’ve been afraid of you.

The astral swirl of Madame Ackermann was barely visible now, her hair dissipating into the air like smoke from an extinguished fire.

I reached out to touch its fur — whatever “it” was. Not to pet it, not to comfort it. Just to ascertain to what degree it was really there.

But the wolf backed away, reversing a few frightened paces. We stared at each other. The eyes — it would be wrong to say that I recognized them, more accurate to say that I recognized something in them. A flash of myself, a trapped and desperate filament of me.

I reached toward it again.

“Come here,” I said.

The wolf seemed caught between instincts, uncertain whether or not to flee.

“Come,” I repeated. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I’d like to think I meant it.

“What’s happening out here?” said Alwyn’s stepfather, exiting the ruin.

He saw the wolf. He froze.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He grabbed a crutch-length walking stick, whittled by a bored hiker and abandoned beside the doorway. He wielded it like a lance.

“Gehen Sie zuruck zu ihrem holz!” he yelled. He jabbed the stick toward the wolf’s muzzle.

“Careful!” I said. “It’s sick.”

The wolf reared back on its hind legs.

“Zuruck zu ihrem holz!” Alwyn’s stepfather yelled again.

The wolf turned, its body rolling over its ribs with a serpentine smoothness, and disappeared into the woods.

I experienced a tugging sensation in my chest; then a snapping, a sharp elastic recoil, followed by a dull pain.

I knelt on the granite. Tiny puddles of blood marked the wolf’s departure. I touched a wet, oblong spatter. The ache behind my ribs sped to a state of fibrillation, a symptom taking flight.

The ache subsided. And then I felt emptier than ever.

“My God,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “How long was it standing there?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

He helped me up. As we started back down the mountain, I repeatedly swung my eyes backward. I wanted to see the wolf again.

“So,” I said. “What would Jung say?”

“Jung?”

“About the wolf.”

“Often the self is represented as a helpful animal,” he said. “But I imagine Jung would say you were lucky not to be killed.”

“By my own subconscious?”

I glanced behind us. Nothing followed us but wind.

“Wolves,” he muttered. “Wolves are the footmen of the weak.”

At the spa we were greeted with disbelief.

“There are no wolves in Breganz-Belken,” said the man who’d driven me from the train. He was, or so I guessed, the closest thing the spa had to a security guard.

Alwyn’s stepfather assured the man that we’d indeed seen a wolf.

“How big?” the man asked.

We estimated the size with our hands.

“As I said, we do not have wolves in Breganz-Belken,” he said. “The altitude is too much for them.”

I asked him about the wolf sounds that were piped into my room. Certainly this suggested that wolves were native to the area?

“Those are not wolves,” he said. “Those are lynxes.”

“It was sick,” I said.

“Rabies,” said the man. “Only a wolf that had lost its mind would come to Breganz-Belken.”

He regarded me meaningfully. I guessed that he’d been apprised of my schizophrenia diagnosis.

The man issued German orders to an underling with acne so severe it would seem grounds for firing.

The underling unlocked a nearby broom closet. He removed from it a long rifle.

The woman with the pearlized skin found me by the windows, watching the underling hike up-mountain with his gun.

“Do you believe I saw a wolf?” I asked her.

“As opposed to a lynx?” she asked.

“No, I mean … the exposure to energy frequencies after leaving the spa, I was wondering if maybe the wolf wasn’t an actual wolf.”

“You think it was a mirage,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, though the phrase in my head was visible thought forms. I recalled a comment Alwyn’s mother had made: your worst self loosed upon the world.

Had this wolf come for me or from me? I’d assumed the wolf was connected to Madame Ackermann; now I wasn’t so sure.

“But Herr Schweitzer, he saw the wolf as well,” she said.

“Who?”

“Your friend,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” I said. I’d never learned Alwyn’s stepfather’s name.

“Herr Schweitzer is not enrolled in the same therapy,” she said. “So I would think that your wolf was a wolf.”

“Except that there are no wolves at this altitude,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “it would be more true to say that there are not a lot of wolves at this altitude. We wouldn’t want to discourage the hikers.”

She withdrew some papers from her briefcase.

“As disappointed as I am that you were unable to honor the terms you agreed to,” she said, “I think that we can reach a fair termination resolution.”

The terms were this. I’d be expected to pay half of what I owed so long as I departed immediately and promised never to mention the wolf.

The pearlized-skin woman also agreed to give me a week’s worth of the supplements prescribed to successful test subjects.

“These will ease the discomfort of reentry,” she said.

I visited the front desk to settle my bill and book my train to Paris. I’d be arriving earlier than Colophon or Alwyn expected me to arrive, but no matter. After my Madame Ackermann encounter — if that’s what it had been — I felt desperate, unhinged.

“Oh,” said the woman behind the desk. “This arrived with the morning mail.”

She handed me a postcard mailed from Vienna, the front of which featured a photograph of a building unprettily named the Szechenyi Austro-Hungarian Gallery Archives.

I recognized Borka’s script.

“YOU WILL FIND HER HERE,” she’d written. “ASK FOR FILES ON DOMINIQUE VARGA.”

Given my repeated failures to intuit when danger awaited me, it should come as no surprise to learn: I went.