by Alex Dahl
‘I was so shocked to hear that she’s pregnant. You can imagine how it made me feel. I completely broke down with Vera. You know, it’s made me realize how I’m absolutely not ready to give up. I think we should call the clinic and make plans for a new round of treatment.’
Eirik is quiet and holds himself very still. I can tell he’s thinking about how to word his response. ‘You’re right. It’s been a few months now. But we need to wait until after the election.’
I feel suddenly, irrationally angry and turn away from him. Everything needs to wait until after the election.
‘Come here, honey,’ he says, pulling me closer. I let him hold me because there are tears in my eyes and I don’t want him to see.
‘I wish you could come with me tomorrow,’ he says, after a long while.
‘Come with you where?’
‘I’m off to Bergen again tomorrow morning, remember? Six thirty flight, nightmare. The campaign? This one is really, really important. If I get the nomination there, I’m likely to win most of the west coast. And then I go on to Trondheim and Tromsø. Back on Thursday.’
‘I don’t remember hearing about this. I would have written it in my diary…’ I untangle myself from Eirik’s arms and go to get my diary from my handbag in the hallway. I’ve been looking forward to this weekend, to us finally having some uninterrupted time together. But there it is – Eirik Bergen it says, on Saturday 31st. I can’t help the tears that pool in my eyes again, but immediately feel stupid. I feel unsettled and anxious about being here alone for so many days. What if Anton gets questioned by the police but released because of a lack of evidence and comes after me?
‘Kristina, I told you about this,’ says Eirik, pulling me back toward him. I nod and bury my face in the warm crook of his neck. ‘You know it’s not for nothing. I hate leaving you, but it’s only for a few days. I’ll be back before you even realize I’m gone.’
‘Sorry. I just want one whole weekend together. It’s October and I don’t think we’ve had that this year at all, not once. In over ten months.’
‘I know. It should calm down a little soon.’
‘When? When you’re prime minister?’
Eirik chuckles softly and kisses the inside of my palm.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘Shhh. I’m here now. Besides, didn’t you tell me you have a boozy brunch with some girlfriends tomorrow? That will keep you busy. And maybe you can go back to see Camilla and the kids.’
He’s right, I’ve made brunch plans with my university friends, and just the thought of it makes me feel exhausted. I’ll have to think of an excuse, but for now, I try to relax into his embrace, to enjoy the way his fingers trace shapes across my collarbone and the hollows of my throat, but my thoughts feel disjointed and dense, layered one on top of each other, like the many layers of paint in Elisabeth’s artwork, made to look like a single color at first sight.
18
Elisabeth, June
Elisabeth gets up and stands a while at the window. It’s a cool, overcast early-summer night, and though she can see no moon or stars, the sky is a pleasant light dove gray, even at midnight. Villa Vinternatt is quiet but it has the comforting hum of sleeping people gathered together. At the end of the vast sweep of garden, a pond. Then thick woods. Beyond the woods, the still and silvery Oslofjord, caught between two narrow headlands like a giant rock pool at low tide.
When she first came here, she couldn’t sleep. She lay night after night on top of her bed, sweating and shaking, wracked with sobs, nausea and intense itching. They anticipated this with new arrivals and after dinner, one of the staff members gave her a fistful of pills to take, but she didn’t take them; she kept them for a moment in the wet pocket of her cheek until she could spit them out. Nobody checked; Villa Vinternatt isn’t that kind of place. She did take the methadone, but it took several weeks before she began to feel better, and several more before Elisabeth started to feel at home. But she still can’t sleep.
This is a place to grow and to reconnect, they said when Elisabeth was first introduced to the idea of Villa Vinternatt. A rehabilitation center for artists with addiction issues, which offered progressive treatment for substance abuse, using a combination of methadone, intense group therapy and a chance to contribute to the arts, supposedly giving recovering addicts a sense of purpose and community. Some stay for a few months, some for years, all government funded. Many people want the opportunity to come somewhere like this, Kristina had said, and Elisabeth knew she was lucky. She hadn’t had much luck in the years before coming to Villa Vinternatt.
For years, Elisabeth had sold herself for heroin. And if you have sold yourself, what, if anything, of yourself remains yours? She was there, in the little yellow room in the eaves, a woman without doubt. A tired and thin and pale one, but definitely a female human. There were brittle bones and broken veins and some patches of permanently bruised skin and a sweet, youthful face almost untouched by the horrors she’d lived. In her veins rushed blood, and she was often preoccupied with blood; it was in her therapy notes, and it was in her art – repeat mentions of blood, as if it was the source of everything that had happened. Hungry blood, bad blood, blood that needed something injected into its flow to give her body and mind what it craved: she had tried many analogies over the years to describe the notion that what drove her came from her very core, it ran through her veins. But was it always there?
For years, Elisabeth had felt dead inside, as if her internal landscape was a bleak and barren November afternoon. She was stunned by the trauma endured in her teens, and nothing helped; not the care of her family or her friends, or a long succession of various doctors and therapists. Then, in a group therapy session for PTSD sufferers, she met Andreas, who had kind brown eyes, trembling hands that moved her, and a blossoming heroin addiction. He helped, and the heroin helped, too. Those first few years with Andreas were one big high, and the darkness of her early twenties finally faded away in Elisabeth’s mind and heart. Elisabeth and Andreas were the sexy kind of addicts, they used to joke; he was heir to a salmon farm fortune and could more than afford to fund them and access quality heroin. They lived in a beautiful apartment in central Oslo, and socialized and went to art school and loved each other deeply, but with time, every aspect of their lives became increasingly dominated by their love affair with the Big H. It began to show. People started to ask questions. Their families grew concerned, then suspicious, then horrified as the scope of their addiction became clear.
Though Elisabeth still doesn’t consciously allows herself to return to the icy January morning five years ago when she woke up next to a dead man, the man she loved, those moments are always with her like a backdrop to her mind. Overnight, she was evicted from Andreas’ apartment by his family. She had no job and had dropped out of art school several months before. She was thirty-four with nothing to show for it except a body full of broken and bruised veins. Her family tried to help, Kristina tried to help, the welfare office tried to help, but within weeks, Elisabeth was living in a hostel and working the streets, reeling with ever-increasing use to dull the grief. In those days, just being felt like falling through endless layers of hot burning air, and every night, lying on the hard hostel bed, coming down from a high, Elisabeth would be bombarded with gruesome images of giant needles plunging into frail veins, blood splattering to the ground, guns pointed in faces, the hairy backs of another faceless client, Andreas dead, his soft brown eyes open and staring straight at her. The only thing that helped, was the only thing that had ever helped – the intensely warm, euphoric lull of a clean, strong hit of smack.
It all feels like a long time ago now, almost two years. Tonight, Elisabeth feels calm and content. If someone were to place a bag of heroin on the table in front of her, Elisabeth wouldn’t touch it. She’d be able to hold the memory of its potency in her mind, and still not be tempted. She has too much, now, even though if she were to compare herself to some people she knows, she has nothin
g at all. But she has a blossoming career as a painter, Kristina – the best friend who’d do anything for her, people she trusts and a sense of purpose. In the group therapy sessions that happen every day of the week except Tuesdays and Sundays, Elisabeth and her fellow residents at Villa Vinternatt explore their pasts, their current experiences, and their wishes for the future – that vague future in which they must leave Villa Vinternatt and reintegrate into society. Someday, she hopes to be ready. In her individual therapy, Elisabeth has begun to address how her family has been affected by her addiction, and ways to hopefully heal those wounds someday. Once a month, her parents visit. Kristina visits, too. And once a month, Elisabeth is released overnight and usually spends the night at Kristina and Eirik’s, or her parents’ in Bærum.
She looks out at the narrow Drøbak Sound and the wooded headland of Nesodden across the bay. She shivers in the cool breeze coming in through the open window, carrying the scent of Villa Vinternatt’s rose garden. She watches the blonde hairs on her arm prickle and stand up, and in the twilight, the fading scars underneath are invisible.
Looking back at her love affair with heroin now, she knows it wasn’t love at all, but a very human need for escape. And little wonder, Elisabeth had a lot to wish to escape from. She still does, it is heavy stuff she carries, and it is all the heavier for having to carry it alone. And yet, it has helped to be here and to express herself by returning to painting and being encouraged and supported to do so. Still, she is tired. Elisabeth often thinks of herself as a much older woman, someone who has lived a long life and doesn’t yearn for more. Other times, she thinks of herself as an animal, a wild little thing who has exhausted itself just trying to stay alive, and who craves the long, dark months of hibernation, tucking herself away in a tiny cave, giving in to a dreamless, peaceful sleep. Elisabeth leaves the window wide open and returns to bed, tucking herself in tight with the light summer duvet. When the usual images insist themselves upon her and want to keep her up all night in terror, she holds on tight to the image of herself as a wild animal, exhausted but safe in its snug winter den, and it works, she’s lulled into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
*
‘Nightmare disorder,’ the new therapist says, an attractive woman named Olivia with a faint American accent. Dr Olivia Hudson reads the diploma hung on the wall above her desk. Formal and impressive, thinks Elisabeth, and knows that must be exactly the intention. She studies the other woman’s face carefully, trying to decide whether she instinctively likes her or not, if this is someone she could envision speaking to several times a week. Olivia sits opposite her on a blue sofa, casually dressed in jeans and a plain black T-shirt, her face clean of make-up except for a deep red shade of lipstick. Elisabeth is tired: though she fell into an initial, deep sleep, she woke up after less than three hours and the night was short and broken. She didn’t want to come here today, running through her therapy notes from her previous shrink with the new one. Getting to know each other, Olivia had called it when she entered the room.
‘What do you mean?’ asks Elisabeth. ‘I have bad dreams, so do a lot of addicts. I’ve read about it. Heroin changes the pathways of the brain and makes them more alive. Comes out at night.’
‘Yes, but nightmare disorder, one form of parasomnia, is more than just having bad dreams; it’s a disturbed sleeping pattern, being too afraid to fall asleep, to such an extent that it affects you during the day. How does it present itself for you? Are you restless during the night? Do you find that you’ve kicked the duvet off? Do you sweat? These can all be signs.’
Restless at night, Elisabeth laughs to herself – that would be a rather modest way of describing the full extent of her nocturnal demons.
‘Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything much you can do or medicine you can give me for my nighttime terrors. Besides, I’m a big girl.’ Elisabeth stares pointedly at the clock above the door: seven minutes left. She doesn’t want to get into a deeper conversation about any of this; if she starts to talk about her dreams she can’t be sure she could stop herself building the horrific images in her mind again. It can stay boxed up and maybe touched upon someday.
She leaves Olivia’s office on the ground floor and walks down the empty corridors and up the sweeping staircase of Villa Vinternatt back to her room, passing a couple of unknown faces along the way. They look more like visitors than drug addicts, but you never know – Elisabeth knows the same has been said about her. Occasionally new people arrive. Most of them go back to shooting up in a matter of weeks, and Elisabeth can always tell who isn’t going to last – she can practically smell the desperation for another hit oozing from their pores. She hasn’t made any close friends here – friendships are in fact gently discouraged, as they exponentially increase the risk of setbacks. She is encouraged to think of the other residents at Villa Vinternatt as co-healers. There are a couple of people she prefers to others, but mostly Elisabeth keeps to herself, or speaks to her mother or Kristina on the phone during free time in the afternoon.
In her room stands a wooden easel positioned toward the window to give the best light onto the canvas. It’s Italian-designed, a gift from her parents after twelve months clean. She looks out of the window now; the view is beautiful and she never tires of it. The rich green pines of Nordmarka forest in the distance with hundreds of trails for enthusiastic hikers, each path leading to somewhere new. The frothy gray sea, great big rolling waves chasing back and forth in the narrow sound.
She spots a sparrow sitting on the narrow ledge below her window, cocking its head and chirping merrily, and wants to believe it is the same one she has seen many times before, and painted, too. The sparrow shakes off water droplets from its squat, fluffy body, after taking a bath in a drainpipe. Its movements are so precise and so fast, eyes darting everywhere to make sure it’s safe. Another sparrow joins it and they both indulge in splashing about, dunking their beaks into the rainwater dammed in the drain blocked by twigs and leaves from the weekend’s summer storms, when lightning and thunder tore at the skies. Elisabeth wishes she could be like the little birds, oblivious to the dangers of what really lies out there.
She takes out her palette and brushes which she keeps meticulously clean and rolled away safely in their canvas sleeves. There is something almost religious about untying the frayed green ribbon and slowly unrolling the fabric to expose the brushes, some so worn the varnish has whittled down to the wood. They’re tatty, but they’re hers, and they tell a thousand stories of her life when she used them back in art school, when Andreas was alive. She takes the palette knife and starts mixing the colors, always adding dark to light, like she was taught. Maybe that’s her problem, she thinks; she always adds dark to light, in life and in her dreams.
Again, she thinks about telling Olivia everything, at least everything that happens in her dreams. She doesn’t have to say that the dreams that torture her are real, visceral memories, scorched into the neuropathways of her brain. The irony, Elisabeth thought, when once, years ago, she learned that morphine, the medical derivative of opium, was named after Morpheus, the Greek God of sleep.
Elisabeth places the brush back into the canvas sleeve. Harder than intended, she puts the palette knife down in its holder on the easel, sending the sparrows scrambling into the air. She walks back down the stairs and along the corridors, all empty; it’s just minutes until lunch time and most residents will already be waiting in the dining room for the unveiling of the buffet. She sees Olivia through the glass pane on the door, typing away on her computer at the desk. When she knocks on the door, Olivia looks up and smiles when she sees her.
‘I’m sorry, you’re probably busy. Umm. I could come back another time if that’s better, or, like, if you’re not the right person to talk to about this, just say, and—’
‘Now is fine, Elisabeth. My afternoon is wide open today.’
‘Oh. Umm, okay.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘I thought maybe I should tell you about
what happens in the night. The dreams I have. Or dream, really – it’s almost always the same one.’ She pauses, trying to find a way to describe what happens to her when Villa Vinternatt settles down for the night, purring with tired, sated humans. Her anxiety at dusk is visceral. Her skin starts to itch, the same way it used to when smack was leaving her body. Her senses bombard her with panic, and she has the sensation of drowning, gasping for air. She’s endlessly tried to create a routine to relax, but nothing works; it’s the same story, the same recurring nightmare, every single night.
‘I’m running though a thick, overgrown jungle. I’m barefoot. Terrified. Wild animals are chasing me, they snap their jaws and tear pieces of flesh from my body, stripping me to the bone. I can feel warm blood running down my face and the metallic taste of it in her mouth. I fall down, I always do, and the animals encircle me, breathing heavily, inching closer; I can see the gnarly, bloodied teeth of wolves, the razor-sharp talons of a white-tailed eagle, and I can smell death in the air. I know that often people wake moments before something dramatic happens in a dream, like falling or being shot. I never do. For me, it is still only the beginning. The animals tear at what remains of my skin, ripping it from the muscle, my eyes are plucked from their sockets. I can feel my lifeless body being pulled in different directions until my remains sink deep into the forest floor, as if the branches and brambles will take whatever is left. When I wake up, I’m always exhausted, like someone has drained my body of blood, and my head spins with dizzying thoughts.’
‘What kind of thoughts?’ asks Olivia, softly.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, and stands back up, making for the door, avoiding Dr Hudson’s eyes. But she does know. These nights make her resent Kristina; it’s not like she has night after night of this hell. She’ll sleep peacefully, next to her perfect husband in her perfect home. It feels unfair.