The Vanishers

Part Six

We decided it would be in poor taste for me to rent Madame Ackermann’s vacant A-frame.

“We don’t want people to talk any more than they’re already going to,” said Professor Yuen.

Plus the A-frame was on the market, had been on the market for months. “You wouldn’t want them to sell it out from under you,” said Professor Yuen, though we both knew it was unlikely that the A-frame would sell, given what had happened to Madame Ackermann. Too many people in East Warwick were sensitive to bad psychic residue, especially in matters of real estate.

Instead I subleased a small apartment on East Warwick’s three-block-long stretch of student-oriented commerce. Located above a store that specialized in flannel nightgowns and henna kits, the apartment belonged to Professor Blake, now on semi-permanent sabbatical at a drying-out facility in Kansas. Sparsely furnished with a feeble kitchen but featuring a well-equipped bar conveyed, for no additional fee, to the subsequent tenant, the place proved great for parties, even though the bathroom was a literal closet, privatized by an accordioned rubber curtain that slid back and forth on stuttering runners.

I arrived in East Warwick with very few belongings. What clothes I had filled two of the five drawers in Professor Blake’s dresser. I online-shopped for basics in neutral shades like groat and topsoil. I purchased a lamb’s-wool coat at a vintage store. Winter in New Hampshire was always coming.

While it was never explained to me why I’d been offered a three-year lectureship at the Workshop, compared to the other mysteries of the world, this one didn’t haunt me much. The letter from Professor Yuen, by the time it reached me at my father’s house in New Hampshire, had been forwarded three times. “We have an opening for a three-year renewable lectureship,” her letter read. “I think you’d be perfect for the position.”

The letter confirmed that the rumor of my psychically attacking Madame Ackermann had not remained limited to the staff at the Cincinnati headquarters of TK Ltd.

“You’re the Julia,” my TK Ltd. counselor said when he accepted the paperwork I’d filled out to officially unvanish myself.

WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR VANISHING FILM TO REMAIN AVAILABLE FOR VIEWERS?

I checked the NO box.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE A COMPANION FILM EXPLAINING YOUR REASONS FOR UNVANISHING?

I checked the NO box.

“I’m a Julia,” I replied, accepting the safety deposit box. Inside was my driver’s license, a set of keys to my New York apartment, three silver sticks of gum that had dissolved, coating the drawer with a membranous goo.

“You messed that Madame Ackermann person up,” he said. “You should watch her vanishing film.”

En route to the bursar’s office, I was stopped by a man wearing a pair of elbow-length leather gloves. He introduced himself as Timothy Kincaid. He shook my hand overzealously.

I flinched.

“Bah,” Kincaid said. “You can stop with the delicate act. But you sure had me fooled. Any chance you’ll authorize me to screen your film for training purposes? We need to be able to spot sleepers like you.”

I denied him authorization.

“I’d like to take my original with me,” I said.

Kincaid shook his head.

“Not possible,” he said. “You signed a contract stating that the original belongs to TK Ltd. But you can stipulate when it can and cannot be seen, of course. We’re not total monsters.”

From Cincinnati I flew to Boston; my father met me at the airport to drive me back to Monmouth, where I planned to spend the spring and probably, too, the summer.

We didn’t talk about my vanishing or my unvanishing. Mostly we talked about quartzite, and I asked him what he knew about an electrobiologist named Dr. Kluge, because it was one of those moments, so rare in our relationship, when my paranormal life intersected with his scientific one. He lectured while I fiddled with the radio. This was a familiar configuration for us, one that had always worked — him driving, me in the passenger seat. We’d always had our best conversations in the car because it allowed us to be in close physical proximity without his ever needing to look at me.

After seeing the photo of Varga’s half-finished surgery, I better understood the daily haunting I enacted on my father with my face.

A few weeks after arriving in Monmouth, I received an e-mail from Maurice, my former Workshop colleague who’d not once, while I’d been sick, bothered to contact me. The breezy tone of his e-mail tipped me off. The font twanged on my screen with envy and curiosity.

Got the yen to reconnect, Maurice wrote. Wondering what you’ve been up to.

A day or so later I received an e-mail from Maurice’s Workshop confidante Rebecca, never a friend.

Glad to hear your health has improved, she wrote. Need your address so I can invite you to my wedding.

She was orchestrating a viewing for my old classmates, I thought. Their idolatry of Madame Ackermann didn’t trump their need to inspect the person who’d proven to be the most powerful psychic of all, if the rumors of my destroying our mentor were to be believed. How did she do it?

For all of these people, I constructed a fake auto-response message.

If you’re receiving this message, I wrote, it means that the person you’re trying to contact is no longer at this address. Of course there’s always the possibility that the person you’re trying to contact remains at this address, but does not wish to be in contact with you. Additionally, it’s possible that this address has been compromised, and in the amount of time required for you to read to this point, a virus has been downloaded to your computer. Among other forms of havoc, this virus will send all the flame mails you’ve saved in your “drafts” file, the ones you wisely thought better of sending but couldn’t bring yourself to delete, because the anger is still so real.

In August, the letter arrived from Professor Yuen offering me a job.

Over dinner that night (grilled andouille and grilled bread and grilled radicchio — my father and Blanche prided themselves on never once, during the summer months, turning on their stove), I told them I was returning to the Workshop.

“To take a job,” I said.

“A job,” said my father. The fact that the Workshop would hire me confirmed its unceasing commitment to charlatanism.

“It’s a three-year lectureship,” I said. “Renewable.”

“Why?” Blanche asked.

“Because if I do a good job, they’d like the option of keeping me.”

“No,” said Blanche.

“What she means is,” my father said, “why did they hire you?”

“Because you don’t even have a terminal degree,” Blanche added. Blanche was bothered by incomplete degrees and any other endeavor embarked upon and abandoned. She always finished the movies she checked out of the library, even if she hated them. Experiences needed to be sealed up by credit sequences, commencement speeches, death. Closure was her thing, though she viewed it less as a vehicle for acceptance and recovery than as a matter of hygiene.

My father sawed at his radicchio.

“I would think that your health problems would make it difficult for you to commit to a three-year position,” Blanche said.

My father cut his radicchio into smaller and smaller pieces until he’d reduced it to a purpled mush.

He pushed his plate away.

Blanche hadn’t put scare quotes around “health problems,” nor did she need to.

“Sometimes one can resolve the unresolvable by accepting it as unresolvable,” I said.

“Hmmm,” Blanche said.

“Meaning it only registers to the brain as unresolvable if your brain is trying to resolve it,” I clarified.

“So you’re not looking to get better,” my father said.

“I am better,” I said.

Since leaving the Goergen, I told them, I’d been asymptomatic.

This was true.

Dinner wound up in the usual manner. My father smoked a pipe on the rattan chair with the giant circular back that rose behind his head like a woven-reed thought bubble. Blanche and I did the dishes and listened to a radio show, on which a curvy actress was interviewed about how it felt to be fat, at least compared to other actresses.

We said good night. We went to bed.

Before I drifted into sleep — sleeping was no longer a problem — I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable: that Madame Ackermann had never been attacking me. But this possibility I let seep into my mind for just a second or two. To release Madame from the blame I’d assigned to her only put me at the mercy of a greater and scarier unknown. What had made me sick?

Maybe Madame Ackermann was innocent, I thought, as sleep closed in. Maybe she was. But of one thing I was fairly certain: I had never intended to attack her.

“This will be your office,” Professor Yuen said. The walls stank of paint. Without Madame Ackermann’s posters — of the chairs from the Vitra Design Museum, of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (which featured a woman splayed on a fainting couch, a troll-like incubus hunched on her chest) — the room reminded me of an operating room, all brightness and anti-bacterial smells. “We’d prefer if you didn’t tack things to the walls,” Professor Yuen said. “Certain previous occupants were very disobedient when it came to this rule.”

Professor Yuen excused herself to a meeting; she’d be back in an hour, she said, to pick me up for lunch. She was itching to bring me to a new Japanese restaurant, located in a renovated mill that hung over the banks of a river.

“Rural sushi,” she said, without a flicker of humor, “is no longer an oxymoron.”

I closed my office door. The paint stink, bell-jarred, intensified. From my window I watched Professor Yuen exit the building and hurry down the walkway to her pumpkin-colored Saab. We’d become friends of a sort. Buddies who respected an implied boss — employee hierarchy (she took pains to remind me) as we did banal domestic errands together. She’d driven me to the nearby bigger town, the one with the strip mall, and helped me pick fabric for curtains I’d never sew, and new bedding for Professor Penry’s futon at an overstock store that sold discounted sheets, cashews, and pool noodles. She’d requested that I sit by her during the first faculty meeting — because, she implied, the faculty needed to see that she supported me as a new hire, despite my controversial situation. She was assuming the valiant role as my protector. For this, she made clear, I owed her. But soon this gambit revealed itself as a sham, a cover-up of her real motives, as well as a distortion of her actual understanding of the constellated relationship between me, her, the faculty. By befriending me she was taking a stance against Madame Ackermann, thereby challenging those who might seek to defend her, or argue that she should, upon her release from whatever secret asylum she’d been committed to, return. She was locating herself on the side, or so she believed, of true power. I was the muscle. I was the one not to be messed with.

Because look at what I had done.

I did try once to tell Professor Yuen that she might be mistaken. Over a meal of lame dim sum, I’d tried to hammer a dent in her certainty.

“Funny that I don’t have any memory or knowledge of attacking Madame Ackermann,” I’d said.

Professor Yuen’s eyes hardened like those of a person hearing that a loved one has died in a plane crash, then liquefied again when she remembered, But no, he changed his plans at the last minute, he took the train.

“The most virulent psychic attacks issue from the unconscious,” she said. “Whether ‘you’ intended it or not is immaterial. We are helpless before our lower power. And isn’t it kind of fun,” she said chummily, “to think you’re living a parallel life about which you’re unaware?”

She offered to bring some book by my apartment later that night; she needed me to be as convinced of my covert ruthlessness as she was.

I wasn’t. At least I was pretty sure that I wasn’t. However, the more I attempted to deny my involvement with Madame Ackermann’s misfortune, the more passionately Professor Yuen believed I’d masterminded it all.

So I stopped denying it. Living the lie seemed less aggressively mendacious than failing, by trying, to set the record straight.

Living the lie was not such a bad way to live — especially given the respect I was afforded by those who, in the past, had afforded me so little. When my hire was announced in a Workshop alumni newsletter, I received congratulatory e-mails from Maurice and from Rebecca (so sorry you missed the wedding). Professor Janklow invited me to headline a psychic attack conference in Berlin. Professor Hales forgave me for failing to accept his submission to Mundane Egg.

Their attentions made me feel good, but not easy. Each morning I awoke and conducted an examination. Head: no migraine. Torso: no rash. Anus: not fiery. Finally I’d get out of bed — cautiously, in case gravity should prove, as it did in the past, my undoing — and run through a checklist of possible failures.

No.

No.

No.

No.

Then I would get dressed.

At the same time, I was regressing like a champ. Gone were the days of patchy psychic activity, impossible to harness. Simply lying down on my new Florence Knoll bench was all it took to send me off to specific destinations, and for hours. Professor Yuen assigned me a stenographer, a young girl named Sheila, soon forced, due to my prolixity, to wear a brace on her writing wrist. She came to my office every morning smelling of men’s sporty deodorant, an annoying trait I vowed never to comment upon. Save for the basics, we never spoke.

Despite these successes, the key that Varga had given to me still proved psychically useless. It did, however, unlock the actual door to the actual room where Irenke had committed suicide in 1984; I knew because I’d visited 152 West 53rd Street over a long weekend to collect my few possessions from a storage unit. I’d been unsurprised to discover, at that address, the Regnor Hotel. An interview with a gossipy lifer janitor, a man who functioned for the Regnor as its memory morgue, revealed the grimmer specifics of what I’d known to be the facts — that Irenke had checked into the Regnor Hotel on October 24, 1984; that she’d swallowed a lethal combination of whiskey and diazepam; that her belongings, including a heavy pendant necklace, had been shipped, per the instructions detailed in the note she left behind, to her mother in Paris.

So I’d checked into Room 13, I’d taken a nap on the bed. Contrary to what many believe, rooms in which people have killed themselves are often the quietest rooms, unrattled by restless electrons. My mother’s bedroom was a neutral space, a psychic beigeness. I left Room 13 having experienced the same peaceful vacancy. Why Irenke had killed herself remained unknown to me, and just as well. Reasons were for the survivors. They did Irenke no good.

But after my trip to Room 13, Irenke began to let me visit her again in Paris, and pretty soon we’d developed a routine. Every morning we hung out for an hour, like friends meeting for coffee at a local East Warwick café, though Irenke preferred to drink whiskey sours, a bad habit she’d earned the right to enjoy. We had one of those relationships that was organic and easy because we didn’t discuss the unpleasant things, and the refusal to do so was not viewed by either of us as an act of cowardice, nor did we view it as an indication that we were incapable of real intimacy.

Because I’d decided — this kind of hating, this kind of fault-finding, this kind of symbolic matricide, it had to stop. If I’d formed an allegiance with Irenke, it was because I’d decided that to befriend Irenke was to ensure that my mother’s death did not perpetuate more pointless, self-defeating rivalries among women who, in the end, were only killing themselves.

Besides, we had a lot in common, Irenke and I. We were sisters of a sort.

At the Workshop, meanwhile, my classes were a hit. I dated a variety of blue-collar, off-campus men. I even reconnected with my first boyfriend, James, which is to say that I started sleeping with him again, and we thought, for a week or two, that we were doomed to be a couple. But he was a bit of an emotional mess, his own mother having recently died of something prolonged and horrible, the length of which had enabled him to have too many wrenching conversations with her about how she missed both what hadn’t happened to her yet and what had happened to her already with equal vividness. Her dying, she said, made her miss James’s childhood and the childhood of his unborn children in the exact same moment, with the exact same nostalgic intensity, which had rendered her life both timeless and collapsed, an immortality in which she existed forever or a grave into which her past, present, and future disappeared. This sort of talking had undone James, and it also, even when related to me secondhand, for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, undid me. We decided to part ways before we overrode our old good memories of one another with new bad ones.

But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware. I visited a number of physicians in the area, all of whom pronounced me fit as a fiddle. If it had been difficult to convince my former doctors of the medical validity of an illness comprised of many contradictory symptoms, it was even harder to convince these doctors of an illness whose only symptom was a complete absence of symptoms.

I consulted Professor Yuen, who was sympathetic.

“It’s not easy to do what you do,” Professor Yuen said. As far as she was concerned, I was still attacking Madame Ackermann.

She recommended that I visit Patricia Ward.

Patricia Ward lived in a winterized cottage, part of a twenties vacation development called the Occum that included a pond, a shingled club house used for staid second weddings, and a five-hole golf course.

“Patricia Ward,” she said, giving my hand a hard, efficient shake.

Patricia Ward was too tall for her own house, her hyperbolic blond hair near-skimming the rafters as she walked me to her office, a small room off the kitchen that looked out, through multipaned windows, at a tangle of burdock. She wore severe black glasses, jeans, and a shrug made of linen and tie-dyed in a muted way that whispered, “pricey tribal.”

My resistance to Patricia Ward intensified when she led me into her study.

Two black Barcelona chairs faced off over a glass coffee table.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the Barcelona chairs. The leather cricked when my bottom hit it. I winced.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked.

“Very,” I said.

She smiled.

I smiled.

I noticed the video recorder on a tripod.

“Is that on?” I asked.

“It can be,” she said.

“But it’s not currently on,” I said. I wanted no more recordings of me that I could not control.

“Not currently,” she said. She turned it on to demonstrate. She turned it off.

“See?” she said. “I do, however, prefer to videotape my clients. It’s a process thing with me. Also a legal thing.”

“Maybe we can work up to it,” I said.

She flipped through my Workshop medical file, sent to her by Professor Yuen.

“Do you mind if I ask what you do?” I said.

“Do?” she said. “Didn’t Karen tell you?”

Professor Yuen had not.

She handed me a business card that read PATRICIA WARD, SPIRITUAL MIDWIFERY.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, trying to return the card. Patricia did not accept it.

“I’m a spiritual midwife,” she said. “Primarily I birth stillborn emotions, the fetal remnants of bad pasts. But sometimes I help people birth their true self from within. Sometimes the person you are now is the mother to the future you.”

A tiny mobile device rang on her side table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said. She texted with her thumbnails.

“Thank you for your time,” I said. “I don’t think spiritual midwifery is for me.”

Extricating myself from the Barcelona chair required me to roll to my right side, lift my ass in the air, push to a standing position. Among the countless hostile design elements of the Barcelona chair, it featured no armrests. These fucking chairs.

I straightened my legs. A wave of nausea knocked me back down.

(I tried not to get too excited about this; a stomach flu had been making the rounds.)

Patricia replaced her phone on her desk.

“There!” she said. “Do you need some water? You’re green.”

“No water,” I said. “I just need to go home.”

“You know what Robert Frost wrote,” she said, opening a door to a half bath. “ ‘Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in.’ ”

Water battered a tiny basin.

“The cheap platitudes of art,” she said. “Home is the oven where you stick your scared little head.”

She reappeared with a Dixie cup.

“Then again,” she said, waving my file, “when the home teems with emotional vermin, sometimes it’s best to return and hire an exterminator.”

“That would be you?” I asked.

She flipped her glasses into her hair.

“Your mother,” she said.

“My mother is the exterminator?”

“No,” Patricia said. “Your mother is the gift. Your stillborn gift. Death is a gift to some people. Death was a gift to your mother. But is death a gift to you? It might be, if you can’t give birth to this dead baby mother. But my point: you have options.”

The urge to vomit tsunami-rushed my esophagus. I tamped it back.

She flicked on the video camera.

“Tell me about her,” she said.

I stared into the camera’s eye, determined to give it nothing.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“But not really,” Patricia said.

“Yes, really,” I said.

“She lives in you,” Patricia said. “Decomposing in you. Poisoning you. Attacking you.”

I flashed to that rainy afternoon in the Carpathians, and my encounter with the wolf that had peripherally revealed a dark-haired woman.

“Attacking you,” Patricia repeated. “And yet you blame innocent people for your illness. Why? Because she’s your mother. She would never do anything to hurt you. She doesn’t even know you. A person so uninterested in you couldn’t be the cause of your sickness. In order to want to hurt you, a person has to care.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Consider it,” she said. “Consider how you’ve brought this on yourself.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“The sick are never blameless,” Patricia called after me. “Remember that when you stick the pistol in your mouth.”

I stumbled toward the front door. Why would my mother attack me? Neglect was one thing, but targeted hostility? Then I heard in my head—you’re the hostile one. And maybe I was. Maybe what I’d interpreted as her inattention, she’d interpreted as mine. And wasn’t it true? My search for her had never been a search for her; I’d been searching to feel what I knew I should, by biological rights, feel, but couldn’t. Grief, basically, or a variety of grief — one that didn’t involve missing a person, one that was far more self-involved. A grief over a grief.

I made it as far as the road before vomiting. I did so discreetly, behind a tree. Afterward I covered the vomit with dirt. Because I was polite even when incapacitated, I thought. Because I was such a decent person that I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, not even Patricia Ward. But as I scuffed the dirt over my vomit, my patch of shame, I felt less like a highly evolved human than a dying animal, covering its tracks so that it could expire with dignity under a rock, alone.

Toward the end of September, I received an e-mail from Colophon. He’d landed at a university in Lyon, a yearlong scholar-in-residence position at their film studies department, a sinecure he seemed to find beneath him.

He included a link at the bottom of his message. No explanation.

I didn’t follow the link, and soon forgot about it. I had a faculty meeting that day. That night I was hosting a student party at my apartment and I’d been tasked to find eclectic bitters for my volunteer mixologist, a scholarly alcoholic named Klaus.

The following day, I was busy being hungover, a state of self-induced illness I’d been experimenting with more and more. My father and Blanche arrived that afternoon for a weekend visit, the two of them in a throbbing marital huff. That night we ate dinner at a French inn-restaurant. After the wine arrived, my father handed me a skinny box.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I found it,” he said.

“He didn’t find it,” Blanche said.

My father glanced at her stonily.

“What?” Blanche said. “You didn’t find it.”

“It was mailed to me,” he said.

“By whom?” I asked.

“It arrived in the mail after you moved back to East Warwick,” Blanche said. “No return address.”

I opened the box.

Inside was the pendant made by my mother, purchased by Varga, stolen by Irenke, returned to Varga. The surfaces had a molten rumple to them, like metal just pulled from the forge.

“Your mother made it,” Blanche announced. “See? Ugly.”

Each sinew furled to a menacing point. I pushed against one with my fingertip. Hard. I didn’t break the skin. But I could have.

It was as hostile an object as I’d ever touched, and yet I experienced with it an instant kinship. Despite the long line of tragic women who’d owned it, it seemed to have always belonged to no one but me.

I slipped my head through the chain. The pendant hung to my navel, and was so heavy it pulled on my shoulders, dragging me downward. I closed my eyes and imagined: this is what it felt like to be her, or to be around her, or both.

“Was she always unhappy?” I asked.

“Depression ran in her family,” Blanche assured me.

“I could never tell if she was happy or unhappy,” my father said. “I suppose that says something not very flattering about me.”

My father stared into his wineglass.

“She was emotionally remote and impossible to read,” Blanche, the old dog, said.

My father made a wall of his hand; he showed it to Blanche.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I can’t ever seem to tell you what you want to hear.”

“You shouldn’t worry about what I want to hear,” I said. “You should just tell me what you want me to know.”

I placed my palm against his, the one he’d erected as a Blanche silencer, and our hands hovered there, supported by our elbows on the table. We might have been arm wrestling except we neither of us pushed against the other. We held our own weight.

My request, I understood, was complicated; what you want a person to know is often the last thing you want a person to know. For example, I wanted him to know about the terrible war waging in my brain. For months I’d lived in terror of seeing Varga’s face again, because even that single glance, via a grainy photograph, had initiated a scary variety of override. I could no longer conjure my mother’s face without seeing Varga’s half-baked rendition, as though the two had been combined by a lenticular lens, resulting in a stereoscopic 3-D effect in which, depending on the angle from which I viewed them, my mother became Varga and Varga became my mother, a rapid alternation that risked a dangerous blurring, even an extinction.

If I’d spoken to anyone about it, I would have spoken about it to him. But I never did. I’d made certain he never knew a thing about Dominique Varga. Given his general incuriosity about the aboveground world, and the fact that most of the press about Varga was in Europe anyway, it hadn’t been difficult to shield him from her.

“I’ve always assumed that you could know whatever you wanted to know about your mother,” my father said. “Thus I never had to make the decision about what I wanted you to know. Or what she would have wanted you to know. I’m embarrassed to say — that you didn’t require me to do this for you, I found it to be a great relief.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I understand.”

“There’s so much I can’t tell you,” he said. “No matter how much I might want to do so.”

Then he did what he could bring himself to do so rarely — he looked me in the face. I saw there, surging to the surface of his pupils, an oily flash of shame so repugnant I had to force myself not to look away, to receive this confession he’d chosen, maybe involuntarily, to unloose. He was relieved she was gone. Maybe not immediately, but very soon after she’d died he’d realized — he’d been spared. In their marriage the bad had long outweighed the good, but she would never leave him, at least not by half measures. By dying she’d released him from a life of vicarious, and then increasingly not, misery. She’d been toxic, a chore. Then she died, and he’d never forgiven himself for getting so lucky. He’d been spared her worst, but allowed to keep her best in the form of me.

I understood why he couldn’t share this with anyone. I doubt he’d ever shared it with himself.

“In America today,” I said, smiling, because I knew when I smiled that I chased her resemblance away, “people overestimate the value of expression.”

I meant it. If he was incapable of telling me that we’d been better off on our own, I was just as incapable of telling him that there was a woman living (last I heard) in Paris with my mother’s face.

I stored the necklace in its box in the top drawer of Professor Blake’s wet bar, alongside his monogrammed muddler. For the obvious reasons, I never touched it. I came to view it as an unusual pet I had to keep in a cage, a small snake or lizard. One night I decided to wear it out.

The party was being thrown by and for Professor Hales, whose manuscript had won a prestigious English prize, the occult equivalent of the Man Booker.

I’d planned to drive with Professor Yuen, who came up to my apartment for a pre-party old-fashioned. She critiqued my outfit as I muddled the maraschino and the sugar in the bottom of her high ball.

“A little meh,” she said. “Do you have a colorful scarf?”

I didn’t do scarves. Scarves were risky for psychics to wear unless you were Madame Ackermann, the equivalent of accessorizing with a crystal ball and a shoulder crow.

“How about a statement necklace?” Professor Yuen asked.

Since I was, at that moment, replacing the muddler in the drawer beside my mother’s necklace, to claim I didn’t own such an item would be too much of a bald-faced lie.

“Perfect,” Professor Yuen said, eyeing the pendant. “Is that some kind of a dog?”

“Dog?” I said.

She pointed to the pendant.

“It’s abstract,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s the eye,” Professor Yuen said, pointing to the red stone. “And the snout. A wolf, maybe.”

I squinted. It had only ever resembled a mean alphabet to me.

“I’m not seeing it,” I said.

The night was clear and cold. I smelled woodsmoke as I walked to Professor Yuen’s Saab, parked in a handicapped space in front of the vegan pizza parlor. The full moon shone with arctic intensity over East Warwick, reflecting off the tin roofs of Main Street, glaciating the landscape. We drove past the Workshop buildings, glowing in the woods, and took the scenic route along the river, sinuous as mercury between its banks. The night assumed a déjà vu creepiness that intensified when Professor Yuen turned off the river road and started to climb up the hill that led to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame.

“Where does Professor Hales live?” I asked.

“Top of this ridge,” Professor Yuen replied.

We passed Madame Ackermann’s driveway with its hinged For Sale sign. Through the woods it appeared as though the house was brightly inhabited, but really it was just the moon’s reflection in the windows.

The party was like every other Workshop party. Martinis and oven-warmed hors d’oeuvres, high-pitched congratulatory chitter-chatter ballasted by sotto voce bitching. Professor Hales gave a toast to himself—“there’s no one better qualified to tout my many virtues”—and a cake the size of a dollhouse was served. I’d drunk too much Prosecco and decided to take a breather in Professor Hales’s study, one wall of which was glass, affording a helicopter’s-eye view over the White Mountains. I pulled a chair close to the window and stared out at the mostly wilderness. Here and there signs of civilization blinked — windows, a cell tower, the sweep of car headlights on an unlit road — but primarily the scene promoted emptiness and loneliness, an ocean void of lifeboats.

I massaged my neck and between my shoulder blades, which had begun to ache. I lifted the pendant in my other hand, relieving myself of its weight. I was buzzed and trying to relax. Maybe I honestly did fall asleep, and maybe I only dreamed that I stood at the threshold of my parents’ old bedroom, the door in front of me a square outlined in light like an e-mail attachment I could click open by touching my hand to the knob. I waited. I heard wind. I touched the door. It opened. The interior was obscured by clockwise-swirling fog.

I entered.

A shadow at the back of the room took on volume and shape. My mother. She lay on the bed. I said nothing, not wanting to disturb her, not knowing if I was welcome — nor if I wanted to be. I took a step closer. Then another. She watched me approach; she did not, like some uncertain bird, flee.

Why now? I wanted to ask her. Why now, after all of these years? But I didn’t dare talk. Words had no place in this foggy cocoon. We were, for the first time, meeting. We were only bodies.

But as I drew alongside her bed, she died. Before I could grab her hand and expect it to grab mine back. She closed her eyes and she died. Her body vanished. On the bed there was no trace of her, not even a fossilized rumple of sheets.

This was astonishing. Stunning. Then a boiling, obliterating rage burst from my mouth. The words ricocheted like bullets shot by a person sealed inside a shipping container. Trapped velocity. These words could hurt no one but me. This did not stop me from saying them. Couldn’t she have waited until I reached her bed to fucking die? Was that too much to ask? I was sorry that she’d been so miserable. But I did not accept this as an excuse. She’d had a duty to be interested in me; that alone should have kept her alive, at least until my first Christmas, or until my first day of school, or until my first heartbreak, or until my first bad haircut, or until the first time I had a stomach bug and needed someone to hold my head out of the toilet. I had never blamed her for this failure. Not once. Nor did I blame her for possibly sickening me for over a year, or for my entire life. If I had never properly grieved, was that my fault? I couldn’t miss her because there was no one to miss. Which made me confused, it scrambled my emotional compass, this magnetic craving toward norths that didn’t exist. It was like missing a missing. So the least she could do was wait until I’d reached her bed to die. The least she could do was give me one experience, one, so that I could grieve her — not her absence, her—every single day of my life.

The necklace choked me. It was a drag, an unhealthy attachment. I freed my head from its noose. I threw.

Professor Hales genially chalked my misbehavior up to drunkenness, and asked that I pay for the cost of replacing the giant window, which would run me $2,000. Professor Yuen confiscated the necklace from me as though it were a mace I might use to brain an innocent party guest.

“Keep it,” I said.

“I’ll keep it for you,” she said.

“You can sell it on eBay,” I said. “You can throw it in the fucking river.”

“I think there’s been enough throwing for one evening,” Professor Yuen responded curtly.

That night I went home and put a block on my e-mail account. aconcernedfriend was not and had never been Madame Ackermann. aconcernedfriend was my mother. And I rejected her variety of concern. I did not need her fucking concern. Concern was a bullshit way of caring for a person you couldn’t or wouldn’t love.

I figured my breakdown at Professor Hales’s would mandate a tarnishing of my status in Workshop circles — I was a lunatic — but instead the shattering of Professor Hales’s window was read as further proof of my fiery unpredictability and reinforced my reputation as a person who caused interesting harm.

I was the not-to-be-messed-with genius.

I was the new Madame Ackermann.

This was my victory. This was fate — to become the bad person I apparently, despite the extreme measures taken to prevent my contamination, could not help but become.

In the short term, taking Madame Ackermann’s place was my way of graciously permitting the mistake that had been made, for the time being, in my favor. This lie I cultivated because I preferred it to people knowing that I experienced every day as a solitary hell. If I had come to miss my pain, it was not because I was a masochist or a martyr, but because to be free of pain was to be, in the most soul-vacant way, alone. The reason I preferred pain was nothing that a poetic if inaccurate application of the first law of thermodynamics couldn’t explain. If matter cannot be destroyed, neither can the lack of matter be destroyed, because the lack, over time, becomes matter, it becomes the equivalent of the plaster cast of the interior of an empty room.

A year later, I scrolled through my e-mail inbox — somehow I’d accumulated 3,689 unread messages since I’d returned to East Warwick — and noticed the e-mail from Colophon to which I’d never responded. His yearlong position at the university in Lyon had terminated in the interim, and he hadn’t bothered to send me an update on his whereabouts.

Again I saw the link he’d included. This time I followed it.

IS FAILURE TO GRIEVE A CRIME AGAINST THE DEAD? read the headline of an article published in a London art journal. I examined the accompanying photo of Alwyn and Dominique Varga.

A severe bob fit Alwyn’s skull like a downhill ski-racing helmet. She sat on the arm of Varga’s wingchair, Varga’s hand stilled in the act of smoothing Alwyn’s head, a gesture so familiar it made me — as though I were the one being touched — recoil.

Varga’s face, fortunately, was obscured by shadow.

The article detailed what I’d deduced to be true about Alwyn’s involvement with Varga. Varga had contacted Alwyn after she’d seen Alwyn’s film homages to her own work. Alwyn, as coincidence would have it, was by then assisting a scholar named Colophon Martin who was writing a book about Varga. Varga’d quite liked Colophon’s theories that she’d been “exploiting an ideology,” and so hired Alwyn in order to manipulate the story being written about her from within.

“We decided, however,” Alwyn was quoted as saying, “that the truth would be more fruitfully misleading than yet another lie.”

Alwyn spoke about her undergraduate dissertation — scheduled, with updates, to be published as a book — that promised to show how Varga’s portrayal of female exploitation and passivity (deemed “masochistic” and “viciously retrograde pornography” and “satire without the satire” by her critics) could be construed as an antifeminist message that was, in fact, urgently feminist. Feminists, Alwyn said, had been “killing the mother” or “killing the daughter” for decades in the name of advancement.

“We are the feminists who know,” Alwyn said, “that self-exploitation is the only safe expression of empowerment and love.”

Finally, the article delved into the financial and legal disputes surrounding Varga’s latest project, Memorial. (There was no mention of a woman named Elizabeth Severn. All three of us, apparently, were quite happy to forget about her.) The families of the impersonated had filed a case against the volunteers who’d had their faces reconstructed, demanding that these volunteers be legally required to have their surgeries reversed.

Varga, meanwhile, had, with Alwyn’s help, secured the support of an anonymous patron and hired a criminal attorney to clear her of the death of Borka Erdos — who had, according to Varga’s testimony, died in a car accident “of her own design” on Ibiza in 1980. Now this same attorney had, on Varga’s behalf, filed a countersuit against the families of the impersonated.

Varga, the article claimed, intended to sue them for murdering the dead.

I left my office. It was October again, the leaves bronze again, wood-smoke tannins in the air again. Walking to my apartment, I passed the office of East Warwick’s one real estate agency, Slaven and Slaven, the window papered with listings that obscured the interior from view, as if the office were undergoing a top-secret renovation and would soon be unveiled as a Pilates studio, the first definitive sign: East Warwick was turning into a smugly enlightened yippie hell. The real estate prices seemed to bank on exactly this variety of invader. There was a stone house in the Occum for sale, one that promised a backyard view of an active beaver dam. A contemporary Colonial boasted a stereo mudroom. A dingy ranch on a private mountain awaited its manor rebirth.

None of these houses spoke to me; their prices were beyond my relatively modest income, unless I did as Professor Yuen had suggested I do, namely to sign up with a speaking agent who could, Professor Yuen guaranteed, book me university gigs that would double my annual salary.

You’re in demand, Professor Yuen assured me.

Maybe it would be worth it. I imagined spending my nights in university Sheratons, brewing single-serve coffee and amassing a collection of tiny mouthwashes because I liked the turquoise color, pay-per-viewing rom-coms until dawn, suffering the rapidly alternating traveler states of ravenous hunger and, after enjoying a free Continental breakfast of precut melon cubes and shrink-wrapped Danishes, queasy disgust. On the plus side, I would look forward to returning home, even if I still lived in Professor Blake’s sublet with the closet-shower and the smell of old cat litter that wafted, on mysterious occasion, from the floorboards near the kitchen sink. My windowless lofted bedroom, the dark alcove furnished by a small desk and a poster of Dürer’s woodcut, Melencolia I, would seem — in comparison to my hypothetical Sheraton room, papered the bronze of a bad tie — the pinnacle of tastefulness and airiness and light. I would enjoy East Warwick more if I were forced to leave it. And I could make enough money, perhaps, to sublet Professor Blake’s apartment back to the undiscerning student population from which it had been wrested, and buy myself a proper house.

Three-year lectureship. Renewable. Workshop code for: unless you molest an initiate (and even if you do), you’re a lifer.

I decided to embrace it, my lifer life.

Inside, Mrs. Slaven greeted me. I knew her in the same limited way that I knew most of the locals — a familiar face enhanced by a gossip brushstroke, the equivalent of a photo caption or a gravestone epigraph. Mrs. Slaven was a woman of inscrutable peerage, her Hepburnesque bearing suggesting blood relation to the minor robber barons who’d built country houses in the area at the beginning of the last century, and whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with the dwindling familial spoils, settled around East Warwick to eke out a year-round life of parsimonious leisure.

But complicating this read was her accent, a local New Hampshire variant with hot-potato vowels and barely hit consonants, diaphragm spasms that sounded like the grunts of a person being punched. It wouldn’t be paranoid to suspect that the locals intensified their accents when speaking to us, such that they ever did, underscoring the fact that we did not share so much as a common language. That we were the locals’ source of income did not increase their desire to make us feel welcome in their town or in their stores. For this failure to sweeten their demeanors for the sake of money, we heartily respected them. For this respect they respected us. It was a tenuous social means of constructing a town, but it worked.

As per the East Warwick codes governing such interactions, Mrs. Slaven treated me, when I entered her office, as an intruder whom she refused to acknowledge. She busied herself with the unhurried completion of an envelope-stuffing, addressing and stamping task.

After five minutes, she took grudging note of me.

“It’s my lunch hour,” she said.

“I can come back,” I said.

She ignored my offer. She gestured toward a black-lacquered university chair of the physically punishing sort my father owned in triplicate, each with a different gold seal on the narrow backrest, one for every school attended. The seat was slippery and the butt indentation too deep and wide for most butts; plus the seat was canted so that the sitter slid backward until her vertebrae rolled against the spindles and the seat’s sharp edge dug uncomfortably into the tendons of her popliteal folds. If there was a chair more hostile than the Barcelona chair, it was the university chair.

I sat.

Mrs. Slaven clicked around on her computer. In a back room, a printer exhaled.

She disappeared and returned with a pile of listings.

“You won’t like this place,” she said, handing me the topmost listing, for a modestly priced cape. “Built as a summer house, you’ll never be able to heat it.”

“OK,” I said, setting it aside.

“This place might kill you,” she said, handing me a log cabin contemporary. “There’s a mold problem that will cost thousands of dollars to eradicate.”

She showed me a few other places that, she announced before handing me the listing, I wouldn’t like.

“Well.” She glared at me as though I were the hard-to-please one. “Why don’t you tell me what you do want.”

I stared at her blankly. I wondered how she could ask me this question. I wanted what everybody who walked through her doors wanted. I wanted a home.

Above her computer she’d tacked a calendar, the one given for free by the heating oil company to its customers, the one once magneted to Madame Ackermann’s fridge. They used the same photos every year, switching out the numbered grids below. I experienced for the October photo — of the pond papered shut by red leaves — the muted fondness I felt for a childhood cup, lost for decades in the back of a cupboard. As I stared at the leaves they broke apart and shifted like ice floes. Through those peepholes I could spy the pond beneath, filled not with water but a familiar swirling whiteness.

I saw her. My mother floated in that foggy ether, suspended in a netherworld that was as safe for her as it was empty. I realized: I’d missed her e-mails. She’d sent me that attachment, again and again and again she’d sent it to me, not as an explanation, not as her version of a vanishing film, not because she wanted me to understand why, when she’d been at that crossroads between living and not, she’d opted for not. She wasn’t making excuses. She wanted me to be with her at that darkest moment in her life. She wanted not to be alone.

I waved to her as the leaves notched back together, sealing her under the red. Connected by blood, divided by blood. She was my blood. She was my mother. I’d missed her. She’d tried to keep me safe from the pain of her, she’d tried but she had failed. I’d been, from the day I was born, contaminated. She was, even if she wasn’t, entirely to blame for me. I was her bodily fault. But I bet, if pressed to choose, she wouldn’t have wanted our relationship, insomuch as it existed, to be any other way. Not because she was a bad person. Because she was a person. Because who doesn’t want to be blamed by the people she loves, or might have loved? Blame is the cord you can never sever, the viscous umbilical you can swipe at with your hands, but there it will always ghostily hover, connecting you to monsters exactly as pitiful and needy and flawed as yourself. People can vanish or even die, but the blame keeps them present and alive. To be forgiven is to be released into the ether, untethered and alone.

I vowed: I would never forgive her.

I hauled myself out of the university chair. I lay on Mrs. Slaven’s couch. I instructed her to take notes.

I described to her what I wanted. A seventies-era A-frame home drastically reduced in price and uninhabited for over a year, formerly owned by a beautiful, sexually promiscuous woman and filled with the residue of a once-fantastic life such as might provide a sort of psychic compost for the next owner, namely me, a person who’d lived in pasts that didn’t belong to her and forfeited to feminist pornographer filmmaker performance artists the one that did, a person whose soul was so encrypted by pain that she had come to miss it with an intensity that had mutated into pain (this absence of pain registering as pain), and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Also I wanted, while in the study, to be able to hear the baying of coyotes that could be mistaken for wolves. And a Faraday cage in the basement. And a crappy Internet connection so that I could watch, in evocatively slow motion, e-mail video attachments of my mother in the fog. And Barcelona chairs that conveyed, so that I could maybe, on occasion, keep her company there.

Mrs. Slaven finished writing. She capped her pen. She read back to me everything I’d said to her.

She told me she had just the place.