The Vanishers Read Online Free PDF Page B

drawing, the outlines of the leaves blurring when I did so and almost hieroglyphing into meaning.
    But when I viewed the drawing peripherally—a trick we’d studied first semester, peripheral vision forcing a bend in the optic nerve, and explaining what the less scientifically minded referred to as the power of the third eye—I saw that something extra, or that something else, and I saw it as clearly as if I were staring at a license plate: 3258432-TR.
    On a clean piece of paper I wrote this down, and preceded it bya detailed and hopefully convincing description of Room 315 right down to an ashtray I hadn’t seen overflowing with olive pits.
    I stood over Madame Ackermann, still sleeping, still scratching herself. She’d pushed her blouse up to expose her stomach and the boundary lace of her bra. Her ribs jutted vulnerably upward, causing the skin to drop toward her bellybutton before rising again on either side to upholster the prows of her hipbones.
    I hovered my hand over her bellybutton; I absorbed, through my palm, her ambient heat. Madame Ackermann had decided against having children, she’d told me, because she couldn’t bear to part with her stomach. At the time this had struck me as an excessively vain preoccupation, even for her. But observing her stomach now, radiating a trapped solar glow like a desert dune, I had to agree that it was worth whatever human sacrifices she’d made to preserve it.
    I noticed, too, what Madame Ackermann had been scratching—an angry patch of eczema the size of a quarter, high on her rib cage. Unlike rashes on the wane, this one bulged at its borders. Its rampaging had just begun.
    The poor woman, I thought. Her psychic blockage had taken its toll. Her face was savaged by stress—the puppet folds straddling her mouth deeper, her eyelids the dark turquoise color of those just-beneath-the-skin wrist veins. She really did look kind of dead. I angled a cheek a millimeter from her mouth to test if she was breathing. Her tea exhalations condensed on my skin, hot, cold, hot, cold.
    She was alive. Sort of. Maybe, I thought, I should put her out of her misery. Finish the drawn-out job that age, or mental weakness, had just begun. Nothing but more failure awaited her. I turned my head and put my mouth atop her mouth. To inhale her life force, I told myself. To thieve the last spark of vitality from her. I kissed her. Her mouth spasmed beneath mine—kissing me back? Or maybestruggling for air. Whatever she needed, whatever she possessed, I blocked it, I stole it. I pressed downward until I could feel, beneath her lips, her teeth, her skull.
    Outside, the neighbor’s schnauzer freaked at a passing car. I guiltily resumed my position in the Barcelona chair and hid the pond drawing in my pocket. Madame Ackermann opened her eyes and I said, Congratulations . I “read” to her the story of her trip to the Tour Zamansky as she palpated her bottom lip with a finger. Then I showed her the serial number.
    She was relieved. I was relieved.
    Madame Ackermann and I broke for coffee, she e-mailed the serial number to Colophon Martin, and that, for the time being, was that.
    Then, a week or two later, I arrived at Madame Ackermann’s A-frame to find Madame Ackermann in a very weird mood.
    “Sit,” she said, gesturing to the Wegman rope chair by her fireplace.
    I sat.
    I was in some kind of trouble; she’d possibly discovered that I had, while she was asleep, kissed her.
    But instead Madame Ackermann asked me if I knew who she’d met for breakfast that morning. I said that I had no idea, a claim Madame Ackermann met with very apparent dubiousness.
    Madame Ackermann informed me that Colophon Martin had flown over from France because he’d found the missing film reel in the film safe stamped with the serial number 3258432-TR and was so astonished that he wanted to interview her about her regression process.
    “That’s wonderful news,” I said.
    Madame Ackermann lit a cigarette. Her lower face