The story I’m about to tell could be judged preposterous. Fine. Judge how you must. Protect yourself by scare-quoting me as the so-called psychic, the so-called victim of a psychic attack. Quarantine this account however you must so that you can safely hear it. What happened to me could never happen to you.
Tell yourself that. Even though what happened to me happens to people like you all the time.
In the beginning, an attack can look just like regular life. You wake to discover eyelashes on your pillow, bruises on your skin where you’ve never been touched. You smell a stranger on your bedsheets and that stranger is you.
As the weeks pass, you notice other humiliations. An unceasing bout of acid reflux and an irritable bowel. Gums that bleed when you sip hot tea. Fingernails that snap when you push your hands through the sleeves of a sweater. The ghostly withdrawal of pigmentation from your cheeks. A rash on your torso. A rash on your hands. A rash on your scalp.
And so it goes, your body’s hurtle along a failure trajectory that no doctor can explain. There is only the numb leg, the searing esophagus, the face—its frostbit complexion, its vinegar stare—you no longer recognize as your own.
I’m overworked and need to take more vitamins, you’ll tell yourself. Maybe I’m allergic to wheat or my new car. Maybe I’m depressed, or not enough in love anymore with my life, my spouse, my self. You’ll schedule beach vacations or more time at the gym, but no matter how many times you dunk yourself in oceans or flush the liquid content of your body through your pores, you can’t escape the suspicion that a cancer drifts through your anatomy, that it will soon metastasize to your personality, that it is only a matter of time before it breaches the cellular firewall encircling your soul.
When this happened to me, I did what people do: I saw my doctor. She sent me to another doctor. And he to another. I saw so many, many doctors. I was pricked and I was bled, I was leashed to computers, scanners, drips, I was MRI-ed, EEG-ed, and CT-scanned, my body subjected to a battery of lie detector tests that, because the claims it spouted were deemed inconclusive, it apparently did not pass. I acquired a medical file so thick it practically required its own gurney to be moved. I was greeted by each new specialist with a weary smile. I was patronizingly quoted Donne. (“There is no health. We, at best, enjoy but a neutrality.”) Because the doctors could not cure me, they decided I could not be sick.
They told me it was all in my head. Namely, I was to blame. I was the sickness.
Which I don’t deny. I brought this on myself. I failed to take the proper cares and cautions, I failed to live invisibly or wisely. Besides, don’t the healthy always suspect the afflicted? She drove herself to exhaustion. She was so stressed out. She never dealt properly with the death of her mother.
All of this is true. However. I cannot take all the credit. I say this humbly, not reproachfully. Someone else made me sick.
Let me explain this in terms you can understand. People make people sick, it is not a stretch to claim this. What remains up for debate is the degree of malice involved when a person makes another person sick. Did your sister, for example, intend to give you her head cold? In most cases, not. We do not blame head colds on other people’s heads, we blame them on their bodies.
But what if your sister or girlfriend or roommate or coworker intended to give you a cold? What if, while you were in the bathroom, he or she coughed on purpose into your water glass?
And what if we’re not referring to people as carriers of disease but people as diseases? The self is a source of contagion, oftentimes an unwitting one. He makes me sick, you’ve said of your ex-boyfriend. She’s toxic, you’ve said of your boss.
And maybe he did, maybe she is. After you become afflicted, after the doctors finger you as the cause, it’s instinctual to blame others for your physical misfortune. But blame is lonely, and your loneliness is compounded by the fact that you’re scared to go outside. To be near others is to risk further exposure and, worse, humiliation. Even your best friend can’t help staring at the sores on your mouth.
In retaliation, to preserve whatever small amount of pride you still possess, you become the secret curator of the suffering of others. Homebound now, you do online searches for people from your past. You’re pleased to discover that your college roommate’s looks have been lost, that a former coworker’s start-up went bankrupt, that an ex-girlfriend’s Broadway dreams did not pan out. You spend your days monitoring demises. You become, over time, the connoisseur of downfall, a covert expertise that distracts you from your own decline.
You might realize, as I realized, that there exists one individual whose downfall over which you fixate, even obsess. For me that individual was a woman named Dominique Varga. She was a mother to me when no one else wanted the job. My own mother killed herself a long time ago. But your obsession might be a basketball coach, a softball coach, a graduate TA, a personal accountant, or a special, unlucky stranger you choose at random, as though from a police lineup, and falsely accuse. Why be fair? Nobody’s been fair to you. Monitoring this person’s disappointments functions as a course of steroids might, each new failure for her registering as an improvement for you. Her marriage implodes, your rash subsides. The economics of revenge. Your stock rises as hers declines. Perhaps you befriend her, and send the occasional e-mail. Otherwise you watch and harmlessly wait for your fortunes to reverse.
But what if you are not the only victim here? What if your daily online visits to this person whose ruin you’ve charted are not so benign? What if you are not a spectator to her demise? What if you’re to blame for her shitty life?
What if you are her disease?
In other words, this is not just a story about how you can become sick by knowing other people. This is a story about how other people can become sick by knowing you.
part One
The attack, we later agreed, occurred at Madame Ackermann’s forty-third birthday party.
The evening was typical for late October—icebox air, onyx sky, White Mountains humped darkly in the distance, and peripherally visible as a more opaque variety of night. Because I knew that Madame Ackermann’s A-frame would be underheated, I wore a wool jumper and wool tights and a pair of silver riding boots purchased from the Nepalese import store, run by an aging WASP hippie. Hers was one of seven businesses in the town of East Warwick, New Hampshire (there was also a vegan pizza parlor, a hardware store, a purveyor of Fair Isle knitwear, a bank, a pub, and a real estate agent), a town that existed in the minds of some to provide basic material support to the faculty and students at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology—referred to locally, and by those in the field, as the Workshop.
That I—Julia Severn, a second-year initiate and Madame Ackermann’s stenographer—had been invited to her forty-third birthday party was an anomaly that I failed to probe. When I let slip to my stenographic predecessor, Miranda, that I had been asked to Madame Ackermann’s for a social occasion, Miranda tried to hide her wounded incredulity by playing with the pearl choker she habitually wore and, in apprehensive moments such as these, rolled into her mouth, allowing the pearls to yank on the corners of her lips like a horse’s bit.
Madame Ackermann observed a firm boundary between her academic and personal lives, Miranda said, removing her pearls halfway, wedging them now into the recession above her chin.
She was not the kind of professor, Miranda cautioned, straining her necklace’s string with her lower jaw until it threatened to snap, to invite an initiate to her house for a social occasion, not even as a volunteer passer of hors d’oeuvres.
Miranda’s jealousy was understandable. Madame Ackermann’s attentions were the prize over which we initiates competed, the reason we’d come to the Workshop—to study with her, hopefully, yes, but in more pitiable terms to partake of her forbidding, imperial aura by walking behind her on the many footpaths that vivisectioned the campus quad into slivers of mud or grass or snow.
Thus, I reassured Miranda (who, despite the year she’d spent as her stenographer, clearly did not know Madame Ackermann), one of the many admirable qualities Madame Ackermann possessed was that, even as a relentless investigator of past lives, she could permit bygones to be bygones. Yes, she’d selected me, from a pool of thirty-five initiates, to be her stenographer, and yes we’d both immediately come to regret this choice of hers. But after weeks of misunderstandings, deceptions, and hostilities between us, Madame Ackermann was not above extending an olive branch.
And so on the night of October 25 I donned my silver boots and, awash in optimism and specialness, drove to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame. As I passed the custodian-lit Workshop buildings, their windows flickering behind the spruces, I allowed myself to view the scene from the future perspective of an older self, wrought by nostalgia for this place I’d yet to leave or miss. In order to prolong my anticipation of what was sure to be a momentous evening, I took the scenic way along the Connecticut River; in the moonlight, the water, whisked to a sharp chop by the wind, appeared seized into a treacherous hoar of ice. I spied a hunter emerging from an old barn whom I mistook, for the shadowy half second before my car...
Winner of the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction
"Fantastic"
--Vanity Fair
“An absorbing meditation on female competition with Hitchcockian twists....Gripping”
--Entertainment Weekly
"Darkly comic....sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious....Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. Nearly every page contains a showstopping description or insight...narrative voice is superb. Funny, self-deprecating, exquisitely attuned....Vivid....Remarkable....Heartbreaking."
--New York Times Book Review
"Open The Vanishers to any page and you'll find some of the snappiest dialogue going. Stylish and fiercely funny, Heidi Julavits's fourth novel explores the imagined dangers and dizzying thrills of being a career psychic....Julavits is a fearlessly inventive writer, a risk-taker who never shies away from prickly, tangled, often meaphorical emotional darkness and constantly strikes out into unexplored territory....the sharply original narrative, which moves at top speed, [is] always entertaining and full of curiosities, deadpan banter, and metaphysical playfulness.....a wild, fun ride that doesn't let up until the last sentence."
--Elle
"Heidi Julavits has a questing, eclectic intellect....wry wit and linguistic exuberance. She creates a sophisticated symmetry in the final surprising moments of Julia’s story, and, as if in an encore, adds an adroit comic flip at the end."
--Boston Globe
“The protagonist could join the ranks of literature’s most unreliable narrators alongside Humbert Humbert…”
--Wall Street Journal
"Sharp-eyed, sardonic"
--New York Times, Editor's Choice
"Part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery, part absurdist romp, part neurological novel. I loved it.....Julavtis' characters are as earnestly bizarre as Haruki Murakami's, and she's as funny as Lorrie Moore.....wonderful and interesting complications....Julavits is so smart and funny, and her writing is so good."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Ms. Julavits is a keen observer of the high drama...An evocative writer, she conjures up the supernatural in a way that feels plausible....Lavish....Haunting"
--The Economist
"Thrilling, subversive insights...powerful in many ways....On the subject of loss in particular, Julavits is an expert, writing with eloquence and poetry.....sturdy intellectualism.....achieves a deepening of the novel's wisdom and insight....delivers a thunderclap of real feeling"
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"A blistering read. Female aggression may lurk everywhere, but Julavits decides to unleash her antagonists in a quirky realm, the fictional Institute of Integrated Parapsychology, a New Hampshire school for students of the occult....funny, satiric and savage....the visceral kick of Julavits' prose....will provide a similar jolt of transgressive, feminine thrill."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Julavits is no ordinary writer, and the meta-heavy brilliance of her fourth novel is something akin to a Sylvia Plath poem transferred telepathically to a psychic who happens to be solving a missing-person's case while being film-followed by artist Sophie Calle."
--Interview
"Fantastic, deep and complicated...explores the way loss, disappointment, anger, deception and trauma can bleed down from generation to generation....a complicated, often troubling meditation on the complexities of relationships..."
--Boston Phoenix
"Bristling with wicked humor and sharp-edged irony, The Vanishers explores the ways in which the dead can haunt the living and the often painful persistence of memory"
--Huffington Post
"Clever....funny, affecting....an ambitious world that reveals the depths of matriarchal power structure....At the same time, Julavits does some clever twisting to the classic revenge plot....satisfying in all its attempts as a robust mystery, satire of academia, and finicky family drama."
--Grantland
"Intelligent and ambitious"-
-Kirkus Reviews
"Wry, witty....magical, and Julavits's often acerbic prose generates laughs despite the sad reality"
--Publishers Weekly
Praise for THE VANISHERS:
“The Vanishers is a fascinating inquiry into matriarchal structures: their power struggles, the projections, distortions and anxieties that result, and, above all, the creative - and destructive - energies that they unleash. A real achievement."
—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C
“It is always an adventure and a delight to read Heidi Julavits. Her intellectual brio and descriptive inventiveness are on full display in The Vanishers, but she’s gone further this time by inventing a new genre: the astral detective thriller.”
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“The Vanishers is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, delivering all the immediate pleasures of mystery, horror, and satire while exploring grief in language that is as shocking for its originality as its precision. Julavits takes readers on a wild ride that hops continents and decades, but the real setting of The Vanishers is the gray territory between sickness and health, sanity and delusion, love and hatred, life and death.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Praise for THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT:
"A technical marvel . . . that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train . . . Entertaining, devastating, and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine's lank hair." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Julavits expertly keeps the reader baffled until the end, but beneath the mystery is a sophisticated meditation on truth and bias." —The New Yorker
"Suspenseful, energetic, and literarily playful." —San Francisco Chronicle
