Free The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits

sherry, please?” she asked.
    The porter nodded. He peered at me.
    “Nothing for me, thanks,” I said.
    “Nothing?” Alwyn asked.
    “Maybe a seltzer,” I said.
    “We have a lot in common, more than just our rejection by Madame Ackermann,” Alwyn said, and then proceeded to describe a life with which mine shared nothing in common (including “rejection by Madame Ackermann”—I didn’t have the energy to parse the distinctions between her and me on this matter; I had never been a Mortgage Payment). She’d grown up in Scarsdale and gone to boarding school in Switzerland, her mother had once been a famous shampoo model known as “the Breck Girl,” her father died when she was thirteen, after which her mother had a series of boyfriends before marrying a Jungian psychotherapist and moving to Berne.Before her brief stint at the Workshop, Alwyn had been a Women’s Studies major at Bryn Mawr, where she’d written her thesis on passivity as a form of feminist protest in the films of Dominique Varga.
    She stared at me as though I were meant to glean some extra significance from this information.
    “Dominique Varga,” she repeated.
    “Who’s that?” I said.
    “Dominique Varga is the Leni Riefenstahl of France,” Alwyn said. “The woman whose office you visited when you were Madame Ackermann’s stenographer.”
    My eyelid spasmed again and refused, this time, to stop. I associated the Leni Riefenstahl of France with my Autumn of Deception, which was, I believed at that point, to blame for my sickness. Chronic fraudulence, and endeavoring to do things beyond my abilities, had destroyed my immune system—in the words of one internist, I’d zapped my motherboard .
    I put a finger over my eyelid; I pushed. I often had the sense that my symptoms were insects, and to eradicate them was to cause a mess of little deaths.
    “You mean Madame Ackermann visited her office,” I corrected her. “I wrote down what she told me.”
    Alwyn smirked.
    “Right, well,” she said. “I’m sure it’s hard to tell who did what. I imagine you must have lost your sense of self while working for such a visionary. In an exciting way, I mean.”
    A waiter arrived with the sherry and the seltzer. Alwyn signed the check and held out her glass.
    “To Dominique Varga,” Alwyn said.
    I clinked her glass warily. My seltzer was flat. As with all previously carbonated liquids, the departed air made the remaining liquid seem heavier than regular liquid, like a saline syrup.
    “Varga’s best known for her political propaganda,” Alwyn said, “but I’m more interested in her porn films. As part of my college thesis, I remade a few of them.”
    “You made porn films?”
    “And starred in them.”
    “Huh,” I said. I suspected that I was being baited, but couldn’t divine what with or for what purpose. “Did you lose your sense of self in an exciting way?”
    She squinted at the skylight.
    “You sound like Colophon,” she said.
    “Colophon?” I said.
    “Even though we work together we’ve never seen eye to eye, ideologically speaking, on Varga’s porn.”
    “Colophon Martin?” I said. I repeated his name in my head, though with far less composure.
    “I’d call him to come meet us but the lobby’s courtesy phone is busted,” she said. “And there’s no cell reception in here.”
    “No, really,” I assured her. “That’s fine.”
    The elevator dinged. Seven people emerged. Three of them were crying.
    This encounter was now officially freaking me out.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to Alwyn. “Who are you?”
    “I’m the person who’s here to help you,” she said.
    She stared at my hands, oven-mitted by eczema. I slid them beneath my thighs.
    “Contrary to how it might appear,” I said, “I don’t need your help.”
    “Trust me,” Alwyn said. “You do. Colophon will explain everything. He’s excited to collaborate with you on his Varga project.”
    “What Varga project?” I said.
    “I should also tell you