Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  In the meantime, there is nothing to do but wait; she has to believe that Kristina will come. Please come, she whispers into the air. Please.

  She picks her favorite book off the shelf and sits down on the sofa. She opens The Bell Jar, flicking through it to where she last marked it by folding down the page.

  What I want back is what I was

  Before the bed, before the knife,

  Before the brooch-pin and the salve

  Fixed me in this parenthesis;

  Horses fluent in the wind,

  A place, a time gone out of mind.

  It’s this that finally brings tears to her eyes. Not the words, or the strike, or the devastating kindness on Kristina’s face, nor the long, lonely drive on winding roads into the hills, then the mountains. It’s Sylvia Plath who unleashes the storm of emotion Leah has held back, suppressed, and it’s Sylvia who makes her lean into the pain, pushing herself deeper and deeper into it until she emerges into the still, black eye of the storm. From there she invites it all and observes its devastating rampage through her mind from the safe vantage point at its very core.

  She gets up, suddenly filled with conviction about what to write. For so long, she’s tried to force the words, though anyone who’s ever tried to write knows words won’t be forced.

  As she starts to type, she fights the urge to both laugh and cry, consciously maintaining her focus on the screen. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before, she begins, that what I really wanted all along was to write to you. So that’s what I’m going to do. A memoir, perhaps. No. A confession.

  And finally, the words flow, so fast that Leah can barely keep up, and by the time she takes a break, it’s already past midnight and she is several thousand words in. It felt good, even though they were hard words to write. She still can’t be sure whether this confession, or whatever it will be, is a work of love or a work of hatred; the two always seemed intrinsically linked, like we can only hate that which we also love and crave. She gets up and stands a while in front of the bathroom mirror, taking in her bruises; purple and blue and yellow, spreading across her face like supernovae shockwaves across the black velvet universe.

  29

  Kristina

  ‘Leah?’ I say, first gently and then louder. There is no answer. I’m in a dark entranceway and I fumble around for a light switch, but realize there isn’t one. The cabin doesn’t appear to have electricity – there are no visible wires or switches anywhere. I grab my torch, shining it around, trying to get my bearings. There are three doors leading from this tiny space. I try the first one. It’s a large, empty bathroom, its timber walls painted a beautiful deep shade of aqua blue. A round gilded mirror hangs above a stone sink, and under the window stands an antique brass bathtub, big enough for two. I shine the beam from the torch into it as though Leah might be lying at the bottom.

  I try the second door but it’s a deep airing cupboard used to store linen and towels, as well as a thick down winter duvet. The third door leads into the cabin’s main room and I quickly scan the space, but it’s empty. Still, I call her name while shining the beam into all the nooks and crannies. I stand in the middle of the room for a long moment, deciding what to do. She’s not here, that much is obvious. Maybe she’s gone outside for some reason, a walk around the lake perhaps, though with heavy snow forecast I’d imagine she’d want to stay close to the cabin. Perhaps I’ll wait for her for an hour or so; I can still make it back to the car before it’s fully dark. There is also the possibility that she has been picked up by someone, and could be anywhere by now. Or, Anton really has hurt her and has had several days to cover up his crime.

  I swallow hard and glance around the room for any sign of what could have happened to Leah. The cabin is made up of one large, open-plan room, with a built-in sleeping alcove in the far corner by the hearth. There is a cozy timbered kitchen nook held up by low, original beams painted a dusky gray. I take in Leah’s space, the space she loves. It’s as if the cabin is a physical incarnation of my soul, she once said, and with this in mind, it seems inevitable that this is Leah’s space. Unfussy and sweet, unconventionally beautiful and a little cluttered, like its owner. There are books everywhere, crammed onto shelves, piled on the floor, stacked on windowsills and a couple splayed face-down on the coffee table.

  There’s a strange little stuffed animal sitting in a chair – it looks like a child’s toy. I pick it up and quickly place it back in its seat – it feels wrong to snoop around and touch Leah’s possessions. I walk into the kitchen and stand by the sink. The workbench is beneath a window, looking out at the empty valley, the lake and the white-capped mountains beyond. A chipped mug stands to the side of the sink and I pick it up. It bears a faded crest from Stanford University and I recall that Leah went there for a semester on an exchange program. It occurs to me that even as her therapist, there is so much I don’t know about Leah and her life. In this moment she could be anywhere and with anyone, and there is a real chance I’ll never see her again or learn what brought about her abrupt change in behavior.

  Finding myself standing here, in her space, in the place she loves, looking at a quirky hand-made key holder and a framed poster for her first novel hung side by side on the wall, her walking boots carefully placed under a wooden bench, and a lingering scent of what I now realize is Leah’s perfume, intensely familiar to me, I feel her absence acutely and just want to get to the bottom of this.

  It’s easy to understand why she loves coming here. The cabin is my oasis, she often says, and this makes perfect sense. And yet, it’s quite a radical thing to do, for a lone woman to come somewhere like this on a regular basis. What, exactly, does she do here? I feel a strange jealousy of Leah’s bravery, of her obvious connection to nature and commitment to this simple life – it’s very far removed from the comfortable life I lead in central Oslo.

  The cabin is miles away from the nearest dwelling, set in woods so thick I doubt one would be able to pick out the house from above. It has no modern amenities. What it does have is beautiful wood carvings, lovely rounded blonde timber walls that I imagine would take on a golden glow from the hearth when lit, and books everywhere, leaving the sweet, subtle scent of well-thumbed pages and firewood on the air.

  I pick a random book off a heavily laden shelf – Dostoyevsky – and run my finger lightly across the cover. I pick up another, Arundhati Roy’s first, one of my own favorites, and feel pleased to see that it is well-thumbed and dog-eared. I let my eyes roam and everywhere they go, they find something beautiful and comforting. Books. Small, carefully curated paintings in the same warm hues as the timber walls themselves. A little black Chinese antique lacquered cupboard with fine crystal glasses lined up on its shelves. I lift one and hold it up to the weak light from the oil lamp I’ve lit, its intricate carvings glinting in rainbows. Leah clearly loves beautiful things.

  And then it’s like something in the air shifts, like she’s here with me, having sidled up beside me, becoming clearer and clearer as I begin to sense her and now I can practically see her. She’s sitting on the stone ledge next to the hearth, feet drawn up, beneath a collection of ancient copper pots and pans strung from a metal railing.

  She’s singing out loud, softly, rubbing her arms trying to get more warmth into her body. She’s almost childlike in the way she’s sitting, hugging herself, staring into the leaping flames, willing their heat to spread faster around the little room. Her beautiful face is red and glowing, like she’s run here through heavy snow.

  Sometimes in our sessions, she came across as almost childlike, too, displaying unusual mannerisms for an adult: picking at her jacket sleeve until it frayed, a constantly jerking foot, or an unusual choice of words. She dressed young, too, especially at the beginning, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she still wears items from her mid-teens, though she’s over thirty. This is something I see quite often, and can be seen as a desire to hold onto youth and freedom, a subtle rejection of the demands of adult life. I see i
t particularly often in the very wounded, those clients who come to therapy with life-altering trauma. It’s natural to seek out those feelings of security and protection we felt in childhood when we have had the experience of living entirely unprotected in the world and suffering deep wounds as a result.

  A strange sound snaps me out of my reverie, and I hold myself entirely still, suddenly irrationally fearful. I hear it again, a long and exaggerated murmur, like an old animal exhaling slowly, sending air through obstructed passages. There is a series of splutters, like a throaty cough, then silence. Could an injured animal have gotten into the cabin, now dying in a dark corner? I feel the hair on my arms stand up and begin to shiver. I move slowly toward the kitchen nook, peering into corners, but see nothing unusual. I light another oil lamp and turn the torch back on to boost the light.

  In the kitchen nook the noise starts up again and it turns out to be coming from a small refrigerator on the countertop, seemingly running off a generator placed on an open shelf near the floor.

  I open the refrigerator and there is a bottle of white wine and a pint of milk, both open. There is a plate of cooked margherita pizza, but it has patches of mold on it. There are a couple of browning, shrunken limes and a wilting bunch of coriander. At the back, I find an unopened packet of minced meat, which expired two days ago. Another sound insists itself into the cocoon space of Leah’s cabin. It is the wind chasing up the mountainsides from the lake in the valley, and it carries with it a smattering of snow, tiny perfect snowflakes kissing the diamond-gridded windows. I close the refrigerator and stand for a while looking out into the main room; its hushed, peaceful atmosphere is intoxicating and instantly soothing, like standing inside a hug. And yet, there is something not right about this place and Leah’s absence. Then I notice something I missed on my first sweep of the room. Next to the sofa is a small, low table on top of which sits a MacBook Air, exactly the size of the tabletop. I stare at it and have the disturbing feeling I often get when I try to reach back in time through my own life and come up against that blank wall of nothingness that shrouds significant chunks of my experiences. I know that something dark is there beneath the ominous white haze, like the charred bones of a burned-out house beneath deep snow, but I can’t quite grasp it. Now, I feel as though I am looking straight at the missing piece of the puzzle, but still can’t make out what the bigger picture is.

  I move toward the laptop but feel a headache coming on, so I sit down on the sofa and press my fingers against my eyes, and I see Leah so clearly in my mind, as if she was stamped on my retinas like the blurred shadows that roam across my field of vision. That last session, her last day. Pleading with me, eyes wild. Come to my cabin. Please, please, please. I open the computer and it instantly lights up to the home screen, its backdrop a beautiful photograph of the valley below Bekkebu in summer, the hillsides draped in heather and the lake reflecting a bruised evening sky. The desktop is empty besides a document titled with a single word: ‘Supernova’. I shiver lightly at the memory of her disturbing words.

  This is about the truth.

  I wrote about you.

  I called it Supernova because that’s the word that comes to mind when it comes to you and me.

  And I want to talk to you about Carúpano.

  30

  Supernova

  I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before, that what I really wanted all along was to write to you. So that’s what I’m going to do. A memoir, perhaps. No. A confession.

  Kristina, I’m waiting for you. I pray that you’ll come. I’m alone and I’m afraid for the future and I want to use this time to put everything I want to say to you into some kind of coherent account. I want to tell you everything myself, I have it all planned out in my head – you’ll come here and you’ll sit across from me and we’ll light the fire and I will start from the beginning and I won’t stop talking until there is absolutely nothing unsaid between us. If you can’t or won’t come or if something outside of my control happens to me, you’ll find what you need here. Either way, I need you to know the truth.

  Let’s imagine that the story of our relationship was a novel. Writing a novel is like constructing a body from severed chunks of flesh and then magically breathing it to life, sending themes coursing through its inner framework like blood through veins. Love, empathy, obsession, jealousy, fear, grief, memory, betrayal, redemption. Which would be the main themes in our story, Kristina? I think by the time I’ve said everything I want to say, we’ll see that all of the above will jostle for space in a complex narrative in which past and present are as entwined as a body with its soul.

  And which genre might such a novel fit into? My first instinct might have been that it was an unusual kind of love story, one that explores connection and vulnerability rather than romance and sex, but the boundaries between them became blurred a while ago and now they have come to seem increasingly indiscernible from one another. On second thought, just a few weeks ago, before I began to see the lines, the ones that link each occurrence in a person’s life to the next and the next, I would have called it a nihilistic reverie of sorts; meaningless fragments of lives and experiences, souped together and brought to the boil. Now, I’d be inclined to call such a novel a psychological thriller. It would contain all of the components of the genre’s best offerings – unreliable narrators, a missing woman, the dangers of love and desire, the past looming at the edges – more potent than ever, a dash of amnesia, murder. This is, of course, not a novel, though I’m finding it an interesting comparison. Like I said, it’s a confession.

  I’m calling it Supernova because it’s the word I could never let go of. It’s what I think of when I think of you. I can’t let go of the images, either. Did you know that a supernova is a result of two stars colliding and they both end up dead? A big star and a little one, together in a celestial dance. The little white dwarf star steals material from the big one until it has too much, too much to carry and to hold, drawing both stars into a gigantic thermonuclear explosion so bright it can light up anything, anything at all. And afterward, a black hole, a rip in the lining of the heavens.

  It’s late at night and it feels as though I am the only person left in a cold and deserted world, but as you know, I have often felt like that in my life, and not only in the dead of a freezing October night. I have felt like that on hot afternoons in summer when the air is clammy and the stench of barbecue smoke drifts across the city, walking down streets and through parks aimlessly, surrounded by throngs of laughing people, unseen. I have felt like that in bed with lovers, feeling their touch travel across my skin, but actually being light-years away, shut away inside myself. I have felt like that in my family, as though nothing of me could have come from anything of them; at best I was like a ball of phlegm – expelled and forgotten about, certainly not loved or missed.

  But I didn’t feel like that with you. You changed everything and you don’t need me to tell you what that kind of shift can mean to someone. It was seismic. And it was dangerous. It made me believe that I could be like you, and that I, too, could have everything. Those can be dangerous thoughts and in this moment, alone and waiting for you, I wish I could have learned to be content with what I did have: health, a home, people reading my words, you. But people always want more, don’t they?

  I am sitting here trying to imagine you reading these words, but can’t imagine a world in which that would be possible, simply because I know what it would mean. It would mean that you never came. Or that I’ve been hurt. Or perhaps it would just mean that after writing everything I want to say to you I’ll come to the conclusion that I’d rather send it to you than speak these words out loud. Any way, I can’t envision us ever sitting across from each other again, in that dear little room in Homansbyen that came to mean so much to me.

  We need to go back to the beginning, though beginning in itself is a relative term – there are many story threads here and each one of them has a beginning – we’ll get to each one of them in tu
rn.

  You were chosen for me, and I think of that with a measure of awe now. That a psychotherapist was assigned me and it just happened to be you; it seems almost impossible to grasp that the most important person in my life would be delivered to me by random allocation. Fridays at two, my GP said. Dr Kristina Moss will see you. A very impressive psychotherapist. Fifty minutes.

  It was all paid for, all I needed to do was show up.

  You know, you fully had me from the very first session. I became yours in a way I’d never been anybody’s before, just by really being seen. Our sessions were my first meeting with being taken seriously and being fully listened to. You were the first person I ever met who offered me an unconditional relationship without judgment. My mother loves me, as we’ve discussed in depth, but her love was always conditional. She drilled into me that I was free to be whatever I wanted, but really, it was only true when I was little enough for her to still believe that I’d want to be like her. She celebrated my achievements, but only when she could take credit for them. She commiserated when I failed, too, but wouldn’t want any credit for that.

  You were just there, regardless of what I brought to therapy. You made me feel like there was space for all of me. That it was okay to be sad and angry and empty, that none of that took away from my worth in your eyes. I hadn’t anticipated the effect that would have on me, nor how deep the grief it triggered would be, to realize that I’d never had it before.

  I know that to you, I’m nothing. Or at best, I’m a number on a list, just another name in your professional diary. To me, you’re everything. Don’t think that I simply idolize you; I know you better than you think, I see a whole person, and at first it was difficult for me to accept you were actually real, flaws and all. People inevitably change when light is cast upon them; they seldom turn out to be the beautiful, perfect holograms you saw when you first looked. They crumble or grow distorted because nothing in life is pure enough to withstand real scrutiny – people and places and objects equally. Take the supernova. What looks so beautiful, like the moment something precious is created, is actually the moment of violent destruction. Nothing is ever how it looks at first, it’s just how it is, and it was the same with you. And me.