Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  They tell me I have a monotonous voice and that upsets me, it upsets me terribly. I have never thought about it but I assume it has to be seen as neutral information, that it is among the symptoms and that therefore I shouldn’t feel upset. The intention of giving me information is not to hurt me, surely?

  Is my voice monotonous, Jonas?

  In which case, what should I do about it?

  A social interaction impairment. I presume you could call it that, give it that description. And that’s what it is. In which case why is it so painful?

  As I wrote earlier, when it was confirmed I was shocked. Well, shocked is an understatement to describe the reaction that completely engulfed me. I was unable to speak. I could not communicate. I lay on the floor in my psychologist’s office and stared at the ceiling and could not bring myself to get up. I didn’t know what there was to get up for. What I thought was me was only a diagnosis. There was nothing of me left. They had to commit me, as they say. Now I have been committed. Committed to a psychiatric ward.

  And I swore I would never come back here.

  It is terrifyingly the same, as if thirteen years haven’t passed but thirteen days. Thirteen hours or minutes.

  I remember when Maja was here, how she came in wearing that white dress, the one I bought in Germany. The way she held your hand. Her hair was in plaits that hardly reached her shoulders. Her hair was thin, each plait no thicker than a little finger. I remember her coming here and how she stood in the doorway not wanting to cuddle me, not wanting to give me the hug I was asking for. I don’t think I have been an especially competent mother.

  I don’t want you to tell Maja. I want to tell her myself. I don’t know how to formulate it yet. I hope she can come to stay the weekend after next, just as usual, but perhaps I should be realistic and not make any decisions yet. On Thursday we will discuss my discharge from hospital. For your information I have taken sick leave from the university.

  This is a long email, Jonas. I hope I have made myself understood, despite my documented difficulties in communicating. It is my birthday today, if you remember. Forty-five years old.

  Jana.

  I was naked and cold and I stood up without knowing it. I held the laptop like a baby to my breast. I swallowed. I swallowed again, but I couldn’t dislodge the hard lump in my throat.

  I remembered that. Now I remembered it. I had only buried it deep, deep inside. That bare room with yellowish-white walls, the ruby cross on the gold chain that hung around her neck. Mum, with greasy hair, with her arms folded across her chest, inviolable – I remembered that. She was silent, and thin. I was afraid of her. Afraid of everything.

  But behind the words in her letter was a warmth that hadn’t come out then, not that I could recall. It was hard to imagine she had even written that email, it was so . . . emotional.

  Dad. I couldn’t remember him there. He must have been, of course, but I couldn’t place him there in my memory.

  Couldn’t see him.

  Is that because he was so familiar to me?

  Or …

  Because he hadn’t been able to protect me?

  Phantom Pain

  I walked along Vinterviken’s shoreline, moving like a robot. Like a super-efficient, unstoppable machine. I went past the boat club, the rocky outcrops, and the old, graffiti-covered blasting bunkers, and on past the abandoned sailing boat. Then round the bay and out along the promontory, where it was windswept and desolate. I heard my breathing amplified as if through small loudspeakers. I felt my heart about to burst in my chest and the tears running down my cheeks. When I had walked once around the promontory I did it again, and then a third time. The sweat soaked through my hat. I did another lap and I made up my mind never to leave that dreary spit of land. I would walk like this for all eternity, following the same track, like the arm of a turntable playing a scratched record. The same groove over and over again. That’s how I would walk, until my footsteps wore a hole in the ground.

  And I walked.

  And walked.

  And walked.

  The sun travelled over the sky, shadows crept over the grass, and morning turned into afternoon. People came and went, their dogs sniffing in the gravel. They lifted their heads and looked at me. Then looked away. I imagined I looked normal. Yes, I think that’s how I looked, because my body was hard and determined, and I walked and walked and walked.

  And while my legs were moving mechanically, hitting the ground with the regularity of a machine, my thumb was hurting. The bit that had been sawn off hurt. A phantom pain. Wasn’t that what it was called? I passed the fingers of my other hand through the air over the top of my thumb. I couldn’t feel anything. When I touched the actual tip I felt a different pain that soon ebbed away. After a while only the phantom pain remained, quivering there in the air, just above my thumb. Was this my pain, even though it was outside my body? And if it wasn’t mine, then whose was it?

  I walked and I walked and I walked.

  But when the body was created it wasn’t designed to walk forever, however strong the will power. I fell. I let myself fall. I dropped straight onto the damp grass, the sweat running down my face, my back, my chest. I hit my shoulder but I didn’t care. I lay there with my chest heaving up and down, up and down. Violent, uncontrollable gasps. And then I shouted.

  ‘Shit!’

  My shout was carried off by the wind. I sat up and sucked ice-cold air into my lungs.

  ‘SHIT SHIT SHIT!’ I yelled, and a bubbly string of saliva was snatched away by a gust of wind.

  Then I stood up, walked to the shore, and tore off my clothes. A thousand needle-sharp spikes hit my skin. The wind was blowing so powerfully and incessantly that it hurt. It stung. It was like being lashed. My skin became hard and cold and impenetrable. At last.

  I walked to the water’s edge and sharp pieces of gravel dug into the soles of my feet. I looked out over the water. It was grey and the wind was whipping up small spume-topped waves.

  My voice was harsh as I said:

  ‘It’s only phantom pain. It doesn’t really exist.’

  And then I fell headlong into the water.

  Asperger’s Syndrome

  I sat wearing Valter’s bloodstained T-shirt, searching the internet to get some sort of clarity. Everything was so confusingly blurred, so bewildering and difficult. My hair had dried but my teeth were still chattering and had been doing so for almost an hour. It was like they would never stop.

  Asperger’s syndrome.

  I read about lack of eye contact and remembered Mum’s large eyes following me, appearing not to blink. How nervous it could make me, how irritated I could get. How beautiful they were.

  I was so cold that my skin shrunk. I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of whisky. My hand shook and the neck of the bottle knocked against the glass. Dad drank whisky when he was cold. But he drank it when he wasn’t cold as well.

  Then I went back to the computer.

  Asperger’s syndrome.

  I read about the difficulties in understanding how others think and feel and recalled the numerous tragi-comic situations she had landed herself in, recalled the amazingly literal replies to check-out staff and librarians. How confused they became, how dumbfounded they were. I contemplated her inability to understand why those thoughtless comments she sometimes aimed at me left me feeling hurt and speechless.

  I consider you to be moderately intelligent, Maja. Verbally gifted, very gifted in fact. I mean, what chance did you have with us as parents? But apart from that: mediocre. Don’t get me wrong! Mediocrity is good, despite what people say. It makes life easier. The extremes are hard to live with. Being unintelligent naturally makes life, school work und so weiter difficult. You have fewer choices then. But to be gifted, overly-intelligent, is also a curse. I want things to be different for you than they were for me. That is why your mediocrity, your . . . your averageness, makes me so happy!

  And her voice certainly was monotonous, now I came to think of
it. So maddeningly expressionless and monotonous.

  How could she not understand?

  And would it ever stop hurting?

  It felt as if I had been chilled to the bone and that I would never get warm again. I drank the whisky which tasted so harsh and rough, which smelled of smoke and tar and petrol. A stream of warmth flooded my mouth and then my throat, but it didn’t manage to spread further out into my limbs.

  Asperger’s syndrome.

  I read about being obsessed by detail at the cost of the big picture and saw in my mind’s eye Jana single-mindedly scrubbing the tiles above the hand basin for hours, only to totally ignore the rest of the bathroom.

  I drank and I drank and I drank.

  Asperger’s syndrome.

  I read about stubbornness, resistance to change and difficulties with social interaction. I read about the need for routine, a gift for language, and an obsession with particular interests.

  It was as if everything was falling into place. I saw this “everything” fall literally, like three-cubic-metre blocks of concrete falling from the sky. Piece by piece they fell into matching-sized holes that opened up in the asphalt. It all made such amazing sense.

  Such terrible sense.

  And to think I thought it was just Mum being Mum. And it turns out it was only a syndrome. A diagnosis.

  And I thought the same as she did: What was she without Asperger’s? Was there a core inside or was it only a void? A shell? A body?

  Somewhere inside me I wondered if it wasn’t those thoughts that had kept her lying there on the floor.

  I understood her. I would have stayed there too.

  I looked out of the window. The sky was a whitish grey and the clouds hung so low they seemed to be resting on the rooftops. My thoughts were as thick as treacle.

  I shut my eyes tightly. What now?

  What the hell was I going to do now?

  So Afraid of Your Words. And Your Silence.

  I pushed my way through the crowd, forced myself past stiff, stressed bodies. I jumped over cases, ducked under outstretched arms, and dodged children who stepped unexpectedly out in front of me. My breath was straining and my pulse was beating hard at my temples. I held the shelf close to my hip and the wood dug into my upper arm. There was the bus. Through the tinted panes of glass in the first floor waiting room at City Terminal, I could see there was no one outside the bus. Everyone had already got on. There was one solitary man below a window, visibly moved, teary-eyed. The driver gesticulated with his hand to indicate departure.

  I ran as I have never run before, with only one thought in my head: ‘I’ve got to get on it, I’ve got to!’ I just made it inside the sliding doors of the airlock before they shut behind me. It took forever before the outer doors opened. Blue-grey clouds of exhaust fumes surrounded the bus. I dived in through the rear door, which was still open, while the driver was crushing a cigg to death with his well-polished shoe. I sank down on a seat and leaned back into it with the shelf on my lap and darkening spots of light behind my closed eyes.

  The bus was cold but the radiator at my feet was burning hot. I looked down at a bus shelter covered in graffiti, the scratched plastic cover of the timetable, and behind it a brown field. Suddenly heavy snowflakes started floating gently through the greyish half-daylight. Snow! Again! It had hardly snowed at all during January and February but now it was snowing for the second time in April. Weird.

  The dirty ditches lining the road were slowly dotted with white. The engine sounded far-off. No one was standing at the bus stop and no one got off, but we stopped anyway. An icy blast of air swept in through the doors.

  There was a girl sitting in the seat in front of me. I caught a glimpse of her between the seat backs. She was about ten or eleven, with tangled blonde hair, a rustling red jacket. She turned round and looked at me with large wet eyes, and whispered so I could hardly hear:

  ‘Have you got cancer?’

  And perhaps it was the hair. Or perhaps it was me.

  I shook my head many times, too many times, but I didn’t say anything.

  She turned to face the front again, not saying anything else. She just sat there, completely still.

  No. I haven’t got cancer, but my mum’s got Asperger’s syndrome.

  The bus began to move slowly and then it swung away from the bus stop, picking up speed. It drove onto the motorway, skidded slightly on a sharp bend, and picked up even more speed.

  I couldn’t distinguish the trees. They had melted together into a black impenetrable wall. I leaned my forehead against the glass and felt a raw chill against my skin. We went into a tunnel. There was darkness and cold orange lights. I was breathing heavily. The mist from my breath lay like a skin over the window and I drew my finger through it. Thin brown water fastened in the fine lines of my fingerprints. I closed my eyes. The pulsating light forced its way through my eyelids, one pulse for every orange light we passed. I shut my eyes tighter.

  It looked like fire, burning.

  I thought:

  Mum

  Mum

  Mum

  I’m so afraid of you, Mum, of your words and of your silence. I’m so afraid of sudden icy roads, of being crushed against the side of a mountain. Afraid of dying and not being able to think anymore. Except, of course, that would be sublime.

  But there were no mountainsides, only trees and fields where the clay-like earth had frozen in ploughed furrows. The only thing I saw in the window’s reflection was myself, my eyes wide open and panic stricken. There it was again.

  That look that wasn’t mine.

  That was my mother’s.

  It was 1 o’clock and we were travelling through an endless tunnel. It was as dark as night, or hell.

  When we swung into the bus station at Norrköping, like an hour later, the heavy snowflakes had changed into vile rain and the greyish-white light was back. I got off the bus, wet a tissue with rainwater, and gently rubbed away the blood around the varnished heart on the shelf. It didn’t all disappear but it looked very nice anyway.

  A heart with a floating, blurry halo.

  Was I Even There?

  Looking back it seems unreal.

  Was I even there?

  Was she?

  The images are dreamlike. Indistinct and static, like grainy black and white photos taken by amateurs with artistic ambitions.

  She was sitting there, wasn’t she? On the bed with that pale yellow bedspread pulled tight across the sheet. Her hair a shiny brown, her eyes large and wide, like open windows. Her head bent over a book, her upper body unnaturally hunched, as if she had a slipped disc. Like a cat. Or … the curved neck of a flamingo. I didn’t know if I ought to think it was a comfort or not, that she was sitting like she always did.

  And me? I stood there, didn’t I? In the doorway, with the blue-white fluorescent light in my eyes, the shelf pressed tight under my arm. So tight my arm trembled, that I trembled.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, but my voice was only a dry whisper, like when you pulverise crisp, dry leaves between your fingers.

  I said Mum. Not Jana. I don’t know why but I said Mum.

  I tried again:

  ‘Mum. Happy birthday.’

  Mum. It felt was so unaccustomed in my mouth. Like a pet name you are not used to using, unsure even if you are allowed to.

  She continued reading her book and didn’t look up.

  Her book.

  Happy birthday, Mum.

  Suddenly a thick, glutinous rage rose up inside me. Unpredictable, instantaneous.

  The books.

  As if I had eaten something that didn’t agree with me and I needed to vomit.

  Mum. Happy birthday.

  I hated them.

  Those crappy books!

  My greatest rivals. Always.

  But at the same time my short-cut to her, my way of getting close, of being included. Always.

  Congratulations.

  She licked a finger, turned the page.

  I
saw it as if through a strobe light, black pauses between illuminated still pictures. Pulsating blue-white light.

  And then.

  Precisely when I thought she would continue reading she looked up briefly.

  Her eyes wide, her look unyielding.

  That look.

  Dismissive and impenetrable? Or only dismissive? Not deliberately so? Would I ever know – was it the syndrome or her? Was it her or the syndrome?

  And all that rage simply fell away.

  I put down the shelf.

  Her look, however you described it, held me, nailed me fast. I stood there, my pulse like hammer blows in my thumb.

  She went back to her book again, directing her eyes away from me.

  Her eyes made of glass. And she carried on reading. As if I wasn’t there. As if she had looked up because she had heard an unexpected sound and catching sight of the source judged it irrelevant.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing.

  I just stood there, the heart showing between my hands, longing for her to say my name. But of course she was so very bad at that.

  And then her voice, clear. Her gaze directed at her knees.

  Were her eyes moving over the lines, over the pages?

  ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  Was she continuing to read?

  I thought I couldn’t be hearing right.

  And then, louder:

  ‘You have to go. You shouldn’t be here.’

  Was she continuing to read while she was dismissing me?

  I took a step forward, approaching her slowly, the way you approach a timid animal.

  But it’s me, I wanted to say. Me, Maja. You wrote that you could be completely relaxed with me. Only with me. Do you remember?

  But I said nothing.

  Nothing.

  She looked up at me, her eyes cold.

  ‘You have to go. You shouldn’t be here. It’s wrong.’

  I stayed where I was.

  And then there was her voice, unexpectedly strong as if it was coming from somewhere else, like out of a loudspeaker in the ceiling. Did her mouth even move?