When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back

by Naja Marie Aidt

  Truth (trooth), n. [pl. TRUTHS (troothz, troths)], [ME. treuthe; AS. Treowth, truwth; see TRUE & -TH]. 1. the quality or state of being true; specifically, a. formerly, loyalty; trustworthiness. b. sincerity; genuineness; honesty. c. the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality; conforming with fact. d. reality, actual existence. e. agreement with a standard, rule, etc.; correctness, accuracy. 2. that which is true; statement, etc. which accords with fact or reality. 3. an established or verified fact, principle, etc.

  *

  We hold each other’s hands, and the mornings are the worst, they’re overflowing with anxiety. The first days and weeks we go from apartment to apartment in Copenhagen, our friends move out to give us their homes to stay in. The anxiety pushes us out of bed each morning, out to face the other bewildered people sitting around the kitchen table, the others—friends, family, children, youths, and adults—we are many, we sleep on air mattresses and couches, we sleep light nightmarish sleep or deep alcohol sleep, and every morning we have to face it all over again. We have to understand. Yet we understand nothing. We’re freezing. So we drink coffee. Then we brush our teeth. Then a friend arrives. Our friend says: Now we’re going for a walk. Our friend says: Come on. Put one foot in front of the other. We go out. The morning light is sharp. The light drives fear around like oil in water. And we drift. We are drifting lumber, sticks, bits of bone. We are no longer a self. We cannot contain our selves. We are I-less. We have become we.

  there is no I anymore, only we

  Nothing is real. Language is emptied of meaning.

  Shock-language

  How “are” “you” doing “now”?

  A little “better.”

  Have “you” gotten any “sleep” at all?

  Yes, “I” “slept” a little.

  Quote marks are necessary for describing the new reality, the no-reality, the one we suddenly find ourselves in, a state of emergency, where nothing ordinary resonates or can be established, where nothing in the entire world is recognizable.

  The use of quote marks unleashes spontaneous laughter, and the laughter gives brief moments of ease. “Redemption.”

  Should we try to “eat” now?

  Should we “go” for a walk?

  We can only talk with an extreme use of quotation marks; it becomes our code, a way to express the impossible: this state, the unthinkable.

  Are “you” okay?

  We use our hands to show this cryptic, effacing sign, these constantly fluttering hands around the empty words, which give the empty word some sort of meaning.

  “Meaning.”

  *

  Your older brother got up and spoke at your funeral. He continued:

  The tragic element begins when the hero commits hamartia, a fatal flaw or a fatal miscalculation. This fatal miscalculation is never malevolent, but is carried out with the best intentions. An action anyone in the audience could commit if the circumstances were in place. A small, insignificant action. When Carl purchased and grew his own hallucinogenic mushrooms, it was not his intention to take his life or do any harm. Carl had taken mushrooms before with positive effects. Now he wanted to go one step further and grow completely organic ones, to obtain a true and natural high. But the miscalculation in the tragedy is the triggering factor for peripeteia—a reversal of fortune. A reversal of fortune is the sudden shift from lucky to unlucky. In the reversal of fortune you get caught by your good intentions. No doubt, Carl was fortunate; he was always happy and positive, right up until his death. Carl’s reversal of fortune occurred when his homegrown organic mushrooms triggered a drug-induced psychosis. During his psychosis, he undressed, opened the window, took a running start, and jumped out into the night. A seemingly harmless action started a cascade of events that ended in his death.

  Hamartia

  Peripeteia

  Fortuna, prop n. [Fortuna] (L.: Fortuna, the name of the Roman goddess representing what is to come, the vicissitudes.)

  Anne Carson writes:

  Single motion which departed, leading itself by the hand.

  *

  Tyche (Gr.: Tύχη, meaning luck) An ancient Greek term for how a person’s fate plays out in life, lucky or unlucky.

  This depiction of fate relates to medieval ballads about fortune and misfortune, which can neither be predicted nor averted.

  In antiquity, philosophers believed that fate was the expression of an unexpected causal sequence that humans simply could not perceive.

  The concept of tyche is personified by Tyche, the goddess of chance. The Romans depicted her identically with Fortuna.

  *

  I read about psychosis, trying to understand how you can be yourself and not be yourself at the same time. I try to understand how you did not commit suicide, but how your body threw you out of the window from the fifth floor. You were not present in your self when your body threw you out of the fifth-floor window, you did not know it happened. My brain burns; it cannot get these extreme opposites to fit together; it cannot get this information to form a sequence, one story, the story we will have to live with for the rest of our lives, the story about your death, on the one side undeserved and unwanted, and on the other, expressed so violently and resolutely, so absolutely, in a sudden movement that in a matter of seconds changed you from being a strong, fortunate young person to a lifeless body on the street in Copenhagen. The psychosis exists between these two states.

  Psychosis. The legal definition: Ruptured/injured/lacking a grasp of reality, loss of reality. An inability to grasp reality.

  In psychiatry, the definition is narrower: The presence of “productive psychotic phenomena” = hallucinations, delusions, unusual actions as well as signs of “disintegration” of the mental “firmness”: incoherent speech, unnatural speed of activities (slow or fast).

  In scientific diagnostics, the concept of “psychosis” is avoided. Instead “psychotic” is used since the state cannot be precisely defined.

  And I read:

  Some mushrooms contain the naturally occurring drug psilocybin, which belongs to the general category of hallucinogens. The drug’s effects are similar to LSD. There are also other hallucinogenic plants, but psilocybin mushrooms are the most common.

  The mushrooms cause hallucinations, a powerful distortion of sensory input, thinking, and feeling. One hears sounds and sees things that aren’t there. One loses control over what is happening. The physical experience is altered, and all impressions are distorted, unstable, and intrusive. The intoxication is similar to psychosis, and lasts for six to eight hours. With so-called bad trips—a nightmarish state—the high can last much longer. It is often accompanied by nausea and a slight rise in temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. The pupils dilate. There is a great risk for accidents with the use of mushrooms because the user’s view of reality is distorted.

  Carl: Vegetarian, rarely drank alcohol, liked to smoke a little pot. Never abused drugs, never addicted, never suicidal.

  The dark gaze that your friend N saw. The dilated pupils. The black swollen eyes that we saw at the hospital and in the chapel. Caused by the excessive internal bleeding.

  The black eyes. Behind them: your beautiful eyes, vanished.

  *

  We sit in the kitchen of a borrowed apartment, and time has stopped. We sit around a table in Copenhagen, holding each other’s hands. We can both see and hear the clock that’s ticking on the wall above the refrigerator. But time is broken. It floats, it is floating, all there is is now, it’s always only now, nothing more or less than that. We don’t know if it’s day or night. We stand outside days and nights now, days and nights have nothing to do with us; we don’t perceive the difference any longer. We have no hope for the future, we can neither imagine nor sense the future anymore. We can’t see an hour, a quarter of an hour, a minute ahead. We cannot make plans. We find ourselves in a futureless time. We sit around a kitchen table and survive second to second; we rarely get up. We’ve become rigid, while t
he spring light rises and falls in the sky outside: Now that you can no longer be in chronological time, neither can we.

  Roubaud writes:

  in your loss of time I found all of myself included.

  Denise Riley writes about the sudden loss of her son in Time Lived, Without Its Flow:

  A sudden death, for the ones left behind, does such violence to the experienced “flow” of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live inside a great circle with no rim. In the past, before J’s idiotic disappearance, the future lay in front of me as if I could lean into it gently like a finger of land, a promontory feeling its way into the sea. But I’ve no sense of any onward opening but stay lodged in the present, wandering over some vast saucer-like incline of land, like the banks of the river Lethe, I suppose, some dreary wide plain. His sudden death has dropped like a guillotine blade to slice right through my old expectation that my days would stream onwards into my coming life. Instead I continue to sense daily life as paper-thin. As it is. But this cut through any usual feeling of chronology leaves a great blankness ahead.

  *

  We are like children.

  Helpless.

  Our friends help us with everything.

  Our friends come to our rescue.

  They gently shove us forward from one moment to the next.

  Those dim and blurry weeks.

  *

  Much later we begin to understand:

  How your friend N had forgotten his keys when he left your apartment and called the police. How the police, when they finally arrived, could not get in. How the police rang all the buzzers and there was one person who answered “hallo” from the front-door intercom.

  How your friend N was still intoxicated by the mushrooms. How your friend N mumbled to the emergency call center that you, under the influence of mushrooms, had said that maybe you were a homosexual. How the message that your friend N feared both for his life and yours was noted in the Independent Police Report as follows:

  A call came in on the radio from central dispatch saying that there was a “fracas” in an apartment on Vesterbrogade, with apparently two people present. They indicated that it had something to do with a homosexual relationship, and that a mentally ill person was involved.

  Dispatch said that the mentally ill person in the apartment had lost control, that the situation was chaotic. A dispatch was put out that it had something to do with a homosexual person. The police did not put the sirens on. The dispatcher did not consider it urgent.

  Consequently, it took the police eight minutes to arrive from the time they received the distress call. The distance between the police station and the address on Vesterbrogade is 500 yards. A distance that takes three minutes by car at the most if you don’t rush.

  The accident happened in a highly dense area of Copenhagen on a Saturday evening. There were lots of patrol cars out on the streets.

  So why was it so important for the police that the word homosexual was mentioned? Does this word have anything to do with them not driving over there as though it were an emergency?

  So where did they get the idea of mentally ill from? Do those words have anything to do with the police driving over there without their sirens on?

  So was “homosexual” and “mentally ill” the reason why none of the many patrol cars already out were called?

  So was “homosexual” and “mentally ill” the reason why you are dead?

  homophobia, (from homo- =[homosexual] + Gr. –phobia), irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals.

  discrimination, (from L. discriminare “distinguished between”), the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of sex, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, as well as physical and psychological handicaps.

  We begin to understand, and what we understand is ghastly.

  *

  I read the police reports, and I read the autopsy report, and people say that I should not torment myself by reading these reports. But I read manically every testimony, I read about fractures and cause of death, I read about the blood on the street, the blood that runs out of your mouth, I read about your heart that was still beating, I read the interrogation report, I read the descriptions of your dead, mutilated body, both legs broken, several fractures in the pelvis, fractures in the pubic bone on the left side, severe bleeding in the brain, the base of the brain is pressed down against the large opening at the skull’s base, the crushed frontal bone, lacerations in the brain’s frontal lobes, longitudinal fractures at the top of the skull, and I read the eyewitness accounts about how you “fell like an animal,” how you “fell like a doll,” how you “came flying from the sky,” how you made a “high-pitched thwack,” how the witnesses saw the bones sticking out from your ankle, your hips, your knee. I read all about it and then once again, because I want to understand each and every detail about what has happened to you. I must know what happened to you. Of course I must know what happened to you.

  You are my child.

  *

  The question “What if?” (N had not left Carl/had remembered his keys when he left the apartment/the police had arrived a few minutes earlier/and were let in by the person who answered the front door intercom with “hallo”/and had restrained Carl and brought him to a psychiatric emergency room) is the one path we cannot stop ourselves from going down, and it’s the one path we should not go down.

  But we must go down the path that’s about how N and Carl did not get the help they needed because the words “homosexual” and “mentally ill” were in play and dominated the dispatcher’s account.

  So we file a complaint against the police.

  We complain and complain and complain.

  And each time we’re rejected, we file another complaint.

  We get nowhere.

  It doesn’t surprise us.

  Our lawyer writes the final complaint to the attorney general.

  It’s hard to imagine a more critical situation than one involving a call from an obviously frightened person saying that there is a threat of both murder and suicide.

  The faulty communication in this case shows a culture in the police department of discrimination against homosexuality, which has unfortunately resulted in an important omission in that emergency dispatch call.

  There is a significant difference between being mentally ill and being affected by intoxicating drugs, and it is relevant information for the officers who will head out to such a situation. The risk of suicide is significantly greater and more acute if a person is hallucinating than if someone has been depressed for a long time.

  To start with, the two officers were sent out to a “fracas” and homosexuality. These two pieces of information are all that the officers are told at first, and there is no doubt that the most significant information the officers should have been told was that there was a person under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, who was in danger of committing suicide.

  Our complaint is once more rejected. True, the attorney general admits that … the dispatcher’s communication in this case could have been clearer and more precise, and that it would have been appropriate if the police were told immediately that there was a suicidal person when they got the call from Central Dispatch.

  When Carl jumped from the fifth floor, the police were standing on the street and saw him hit the asphalt. The officers didn’t do anything wrong. They simply did not receive accurate information about the seriousness of the situation in time.

  THE ANGER IS BLUNT AND BOUNDLESS

  *

  We walk by the scene of the accident holding each other’s hands. We drag ourselves past the scene of the accident, something drags us toward the scene of the accident. It’s a cold day in March when we walk by your building, when we see the spot on the asphalt that you hit when you jumped, when we see the win
dow on the fifth floor that you jumped from. The window is curved and tall, like a cathedral. The window reflects the light, the traffic is loud, and there are people with dogs and bikes everywhere. We’re not present in our bodies; we’re empty rustling shells. We look up and see the window. We look down and we see the street, the asphalt, we see the little stain on the asphalt, and we steady ourselves on the brick wall and parked cars; we steady ourselves against each other, while our eyes see, while our legs walk. We are all body, bodies that walk, bodies that see; there’s no resonance in us, no feelings. We only sense the physical pain: how we are about to fall, crash, how we are lead-heavy, earth-heavy, how there is pain in our arms and legs. And we sense our burning eyes.

  Denise Riley writes:

  Wandering around in an empty plain, as if an enormous drained landscape lying behind your eyes had turned itself outward.

  Or you find yourself camped on a threshold between inside and out. The slight contact of your senses with the outer world, and your interior only thinly separated from it, like a membrane resonating on the verge between silence and noise. If it were to tear through, there’s so little behind your skin that you would fall out towards the side of sheer exteriority. Far from taking refuge deeply inside yourself, there is no longer any inside, and you have become only outwardness. As a friend, who’d experienced the suicide of the person closest to her, says: “I was my two eyes set burning in my skull. Behind them there was only vacancy.”

  *

  Joakim got up to speak at the funeral. Joakim, twenty-four years old. He said:

  Carl and I lived side by side since we were kids, right up until the end, when we were sharing an apartment here in Copenhagen. Now, unfortunately, I look back on that place as cursed. It wasn’t. It was a fantastic place. And that was only because Carl lived there.

  *

  The day we packed up your things, emptied your room: