The Vanishers (13 page)

“Not very,” I said.

As Alwyn continued to drain glass after tiny glass of Chianti, Colophon told me all that I already knew, and much that I did not, about Dominique Varga. Born in 1942 to a Hungarian mother and a French father, Varga began her career as a morgue photographer in Paris, where she’d moved from Budapest in the late sixties at the age of twenty-six. One day Varga took a razor blade to the photographs she’d snapped of the female cadavers, excising them from their morgue surroundings. She pasted these into the editorial spreads of fashion magazines on the metro newsstands, situating them alongside the models like dead alter egos. When Varga was arrested and charged with vandalism, her career was born.

“From the very outset, however,” Colophon said, “she positioned herself as an artist with a contradictory, even hostile belief system.”

When Varga’s work was championed by French feminist critics Simone Moreault and Lisette Bloch, for example, Varga responded by wearing funeral attire to the trial of Jules Fanon (a then-infamous dismemberer of prostitutes) and weeping on the courthouse steps for seventy-two straight hours following Fanon’s sentencing to life in prison. Later she published a series of domestic photographs titled “Interior ReDecorator” wherein she simulated a self-administered abortion with a curtain rod; obscuring her head is a large photograph of “Let Them Live,” the French 1970s anti-abortion group.

But according to Varga—a claim her oft-mocked critics, Colophon said, met with forgivable dubiousness—her cruelly whimsical attitude changed overnight when, in 1977, her mother died. After selling all of her belongings, including her prints and her negatives, and donating the proceeds to a political collective intent on installing the death penalty in France, she withdrew from the art scene for two years. By the time she reappeared, in 1979, she’d become one of the most prominent directors of underground pornographic films in Europe.

Yet the word
pornographic
, Colophon explained, didn’t accurately capture the tenor of these films, which were less erotic than meditative, even serene. The films gained a fringe cachet among louche, aristocratic Europeans, in particular a wayward heiress who organized, at her Ibiza beach house, the first official festival dedicated to Varga’s films, in June 1980. The second night of the festival, the heiress disappeared.

“Like vanished?” I asked.

“Like dead,” Alwyn interjected.

“Or possibly not,” Colophon said.

“Dead,” Alwyn repeated, bored.

A month later, a gossip columnist in Paris received an anonymous phone call informing him of the existence of a film directed by Varga, one that starred the heiress lying on an Ibiza roadside. Her car, crunched against a cliff, smoked in the background as her body, thrown (or dragged) free of the wreckage, was lovingly fondled by masked women wielding prosthetic hands.

While many in the heiress’s circle claimed to have seen this film, Colophon said, no hard copies were ever recovered. Soon, however, a series of six snuff films bearing Varga’s signature dark aquarium lighting began circulating, again via underground channels, throughout Europe. Though no bodies were found, Varga was charged with the murder of the heiress and six other women. But at
her sentencing, a female spectator removed her coat and lay, naked, in the aisles of the courtroom. Once in custody, the woman identified herself as the “snuffed” star of Varga’s six films.

“Nobody died during the making of these films,” Alwyn said, quoting Varga. “Nobody but me.”

Following her acquittal, Colophon said, Varga again found herself both embraced and reviled by the French feminist establishment. Those who reviled her were invited by Varga to her film premieres and asked to speak to the audience about Varga’s moral flaws while Varga wept audibly backstage. Those who persisted in supporting her, such as Simone Moreault, found themselves mercilessly parodied.

“She made a film called
Simone Moreault
,” Colophon said, “in which a badly dressed academic uses a naked woman as a typewriter stand.”

In 1982, criticism erupted over a series of films showing Varga having sex with young male artists who, afterward, professed to have slept with her only to gain a career foothold. None of these men knew they were being filmed. The results were exhibited in a show Varga curated at Blue Days, her then-gallery in Paris, called “Up-and-Comers, Coming, Going.”

“Varga claimed, ‘My grieving body is the most powerful sculpture any of them will ever create,’ ” Colophon said. “And here is where my scholarly interest in Varga begins.”

According to photographs of this opening, an anti-fascist artist named Cortez was among the guests. Two weeks later, Varga announced she’d accepted an endowed chair at the Institut Physique du Globe de Paris; additionally, she’d been hired to shoot a propaganda film for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National party that would, Varga said, “make
Triumph of the Will
look like a Looney Tunes animation,” a claim that earned her the nickname, “the Leni Riefenstahl of France.”

When Varga disappeared again in 1984, this time for good, no one, Colophon said, was surprised. Some people believed she’d been kidnapped and killed by either the leftist radicals who’d been sending her death threats or by a member of Le Pen’s own security team, many of whom boasted backgrounds in organized crime; others believed that she committed suicide, a claim buttressed by Varga’s last known film,
Not an Exit
, interpreted by some as a suicide note, in which Varga stars as a woman who’s violated by an anonymous hand.

Colophon drank two glasses of wine in quick succession. Alwyn, entranced again by her napkin-burning project, seemed unaware that her lips were pursed and twitching, like a person unpleasantly dreaming.

“And what do you believe?” I said to him.

“He believes she ran off with Cortez,” Alwyn said. “He believes the fact that the film reel was found in Cortez’s safe proves that they were collaborating, and that Varga wasn’t a fascist, or a pornographer, but a bold crusader against ideology. Her ‘fascist’ project was a performance art piece, aimed to undermine all ideologies.”

“The love of clandestine perversions, of exploiting opposing sides of the political propaganda machine, is a familiar Vargian trope,” Colophon retorted.

“Only if you think she was exploiting anything other than her own ability to be exploited and to exploit,” Alwyn said.

“And what do you believe?” I asked Alwyn.

“Me?” she said.

“Is she alive or is she dead?” I said.

“I have no idea,” Alwyn said.

I don’t know why but I did think:
she’s lying
.

“What I mean is,” she clarified, “something happened to her.”

“Clearly,” Colophon said.

“She was emotionally derailed,” Alwyn said. “Watch
Not an Exit
if you doubt me.”

“Probably she had her heart crushed,” Colophon said. “Don’t let the porn hobby mislead you. Alwyn’s a closet romantic.”

“This from the person who refuses to consider the woman who directed films about pretend-dead girls being fucked by strangers to be a pornographer,” Alwyn sniped. “She wasn’t exploiting people, she was exploiting an ideology.”

Alwyn excused herself to the ladies’ room at the precise moment that the waiter delivered our meals. Colophon and I waited five minutes for her to return, then gave up and started eating.

“I don’t suppose you have an opinion,” he said.

“About whether or not she was exploiting an ideology?” I asked.

“About whether or not she’s alive,” he said. “You
were
Madame Ackermann’s protégée. I’m assuming you exhibited some sort of … facility.”

“I don’t have an opinion about that, no,” I said.

“Of course not,” Colophon said. “Madame Ackermann mentioned you’d become sick. That you were taking ‘time off.’ ”

Colophon, chewing, inspected me. Then he reached beneath the table and produced, from his briefcase, a familiar sheaf of ghost-grid paper describing Madame Ackermann’s “trip” to the Tour Zamansky.

“I asked around to find out whose handwriting this was,” he said.

“It’s mine,” I said. “I was her stenographer.”

“Madame Ackermann’s account of how she found the film safe number always struck me as suspicious,” he said. “Among other things, she described the Tour Zamansky as Neo-Gothic, when really it was designed by a disciple of Le Corbusier.”

“To her credit,” I said, “Madame Ackermann’s not a googler.”

“I consulted an automatic handwriting expert,” Colophon continued. “He said that there’s a difference between writing produced from external aural prompts and internal aural prompts, which can be seen in the length of the ligatures. Ligatures refer to letters joined by links.”

“I know what a ligature is,” I said. I had no clue about ligatures.

“When a person is taking dictation, you see ligatures of three to four letters. But when they’re taking what is known as ‘auto-dictation,’ i.e., transcribing an internal voice, the ligatures tend to be five to seven letters in length.”

Using the clicker end of his ballpoint, he counted for me—five, six, five, seven, seven.

“According to the ligatures, you were not taking dictation from Madame Ackermann.”

“Huh,” I said, as though this were news to me.

Then he asked me how familiar I was with the phenomenon known as psychic attack.

I told him that I knew a little bit about psychic attacks, though I knew more than a little bit.

“I don’t want to seem as though I’m diagnosing you,” Colophon said. “But I believe that you’re being psychically attacked by Madame Ackermann.”

I thought he was joking. He was not.

“Why would she waste her energy on me?” I asked. “I’m a nothing.”

“Well,” Colophon said, wiping his mouth. “You are now.”

Alwyn returned from wherever she’d been. With a spoon back, she methodically flattened her gnocchi one by one. It was like watching a child kill bugs, and did very little to warm me toward my own meal, a colorless dish scarred with prosciutto.

I was not a fan of gnocchi.

“So,” Alwyn said. “Did you tell her?”

“I was in the midst,” Colophon said.

“Just tell her already,” she said.

“I’m getting to it,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “I may die first.”

She turned to me.

“Madame Ackermann hates you because you were able to do what she failed to do, namely find the film safe number, and this humiliated her and made her feel old, obsolete, sexually diminished, etcetera, and so she’s psychically attacking you, which means you’re screwed because even though her career is on the wane, she’s still more powerful than most people in your field, but Colophon, contrary to how he might have presented himself to you while I was out smoking, does not feel ‘responsible’ for what happened to you, and thus if he’s offered to help you it’s not because he’s an altruistic guy, trust me, he’s an academic, i.e., an egotistical bastard who’s willing to pay for you to go to a pricey psychic attack recovery facility only if you agree, in exchange, once you’re better and once you’ve regained whatever powers you possessed to the extent that you possessed any at all, to help him resuscitate his failing career by finding Dominique Varga, whom he believes to be alive, and if he can prove it his career will be pulled from the scholarly junk heap and maybe he’ll get tenure somewhere decent and will no longer be forced to take visiting lectureships at agrarian schools in the Urals, but regardless he’s hoping, given what he presumes to be your shared personal interest in ruining Madame Ackermann’s reputation, that you’ll accept his offer to help you avenge your bodily misfortune.”

Alwyn forked a pair of gnocchi into her mouth.

“I might have phrased it a bit differently,” Colophon said.

“Of course you would have,” Alwyn said, chewing. “And yet here we are, meaning the same thing.”

Colophon withdrew a brochure written in German, Hungarian,
and English (denoted, in case the language alone failed to signify, by nation-appropriate flags) from his briefcase. On the cover was a photograph of an art nouveau building located, according to the English copy, in a wooded district of Vienna, abutting a place called Gutenberg Square.

“The Goergen specializes in curing victims of psychic attacks,” Colophon said.

I noticed, on the brochure’s bottom right corner, the TK Ltd. logo.

“Currently the Goergen services two types of guests,” he continued, “those wishing to recover in secret from plastic surgeries, and victims of psychic attack who’ve been forced, in order to evade their attackers and recover their health, to vanish.”

“Point being,” Alwyn said, “you could also get a nose job while you’re there.”

Colophon examined my face for possibly the first time since he’d met me.

“I like her nose,” he said.

“Maybe truer to say that her nose is the least of her problems,” Alwyn said. “Sometimes it’s nice to fix what you can.”

“Psychic attack victims vanish?” I said, ignoring Alwyn.

Colophon nodded. “Psychic attacking vanishings account for a decent percentage of TK Ltd.’s business, one that increases by the year. You are far from alone.” Psychic attacks, he explained, both the conscious and the unconscious varieties, had become rampant among the non-psychic population—among members of book groups, for example. People were attacking each other via shared texts. Many more attacks were launched through social media sites. The possibilities for connectedness, and for privacy invasion, had unleashed what Colophon called “an epidemic of opportunity.”

“I still don’t understand why you want to ruin Madame Ackermann’s reputation,” I said. “She lied to you, OK. But so what?”

“Oh,” Colophon said. Then to Alwyn, “See? You overlooked a major detail.”

“So stab me,” she said.

After he’d received the ligature assessment from the automatic handwriting expert, Colophon explained, he’d accused Madame Ackermann of lying to him about her role in the recovery of the film safe serial number. She’d denied it. A week later, she’d informed him, via e-mail, that she wouldn’t be able to further discuss her research methods with him due to the fact that
she’d
decided to write about Varga. She, too, was convinced that Varga was alive; she, too, had decided it would constitute a bold career move to find her.