Free The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits Page B

him to help his company, TK Ltd., archive the film holdings generated by Kincaid’s pet project, a suicide prevention service called vanish.org.
    Best I could ascertain from Alwyn’s description of it, vanish.org functioned as a type of witness protection program for people who weren’t in danger of being killed by anyone but themselves.
    “Kincaid studied the negative psychological effects of what he called ‘disambiguation,’ ” Alwyn explained, “meaning the supposed clarity that follows the removal of ambiguity, which is the counterproductive goal of so much talk therapy these days.”
    “Disambiguation?” I said. My stepmother Blanche was an occasional disambiguator on Wikipedia; when she wasn’t tamping her manias on the potting wheel, she was disambiguating a Wikipedia page on rice.
    “Clarity, it turns out, is a death sentence,” Alwyn said. “Kincaid decided that by introducing patients to ‘reambiguation,’ i.e., by removing a person from his or her ambiguity-free, suicide-provoking context, he could offer them a viable suicide alternative.”
    “How does a person reambiguate?” I asked.
    “Kincaid prefers to call it vanishing,” Alwyn said.
    “How does a person vanish?” I said.
    “They leave and never go home,” she said. “It’s a very simple process.”
    When Kincaid started the service, Alwyn said, each familyreceived a detailed personal letter explaining the loved one’s reasons for vanishing. Unfortunately these letters were often mistaken for suicide notes, which led to confusion with the police and the morgues.
    “They might as well be suicide notes,” I said.
    “How so?”
    “To the survivors,” I said, “they amount to the same thing.”
    “Technically there are no survivors,” Alwyn corrected. “Nobody died.”
    “To the family members, then,” I said. “These films are essentially suicide notes.”
    “Interesting,” she said. “So you’re saying you see no difference between your mother being dead and your mother being alive and living somewhere else?”
    I stared at her. When she claimed that she and Colophon knew everything about me, she meant it.
    “My mother didn’t leave a note,” I said.
    “We’re aware,” Alwyn said.
    “Of course I see a difference,” I mumbled.
    Kincaid, she continued, hired video artists to shoot footage of the vanishers. The subsequent collection of vanishing films was stored at the TK Ltd. warehouse in Cincinnati so that family members, friends, acquaintances could view the testimonies of their vanished beloveds. Kincaid described his warehouse as a living mortuary, a hopeful grief museum.
    “Colophon decided that the films could serve a wider population—that the viewing of these films by people who’d lost a loved one to actual death or to suicide, could be therapeutic. Which is how he came up with the idea for the Lost Film Conference.”
    “That’s kind of a misnomer,” I said. “The films aren’t lost. And neither are the people.”
    “The attendees are metaphorically lost, by and large. It’s nota complete misnomer. You saw the weepers in the lobby. Most of them had loved ones who were killed on 9/11. The weepers hold out some hope that their husband or daughter made it out of the buildings, realized they could disappear without a trace, caught a bus west or north or south, and started a new life.”
    I still struggled to understand how this qualified as a preferable scenario.
    Alwyn mentioned, in an offhanded way, that she herself had recently vanished. She complained about her mother and stepfather, neither of whom had gone to see her vanishing film and who were wasting thousands of dollars each month on a private detective.
    “You were suicidal?” I said. I tried to spot the talent in her—because it was a talent, self-killing. I didn’t possess it. I’d tried to find evidence of my mother’s talent in photographs, but anything can appear meaningful at a backward glance: Hands clamped beneath opposing