He laughs, and is then silent again.
The sun beats down, she grabs at some foxtail and grass. That’s what I want, she thinks. To live alone in a city, with no money, and buy cut flowers. That kind of recklessness, that’s what I want.
He was too frail for this world; but it was she who was made to be the symbol; you are too frail for this world, he could say, drawing her toward him and hugging her. Or else in anger:
you’re never here.
You’re never here. Never present.
You could start to doubt which of them was never there: one of them, at least, always one of the two; somewhere else.
You’re always rushing about, it’s your family that put that into you, he says.
She looks up from a book. Yes, is all she says. You see, that’s exactly what I mean, he says, throwing his hands in the air, his face, like his shirt, at once open and more closed than ever before.
What do you mean.
You don’t hear anything, you’re somewhere else.
She puts the book down in her lap. I’m here, she whispers.
We live parallel lives, he says. Every morning you’re out running, we can’t even wake up together, we can’t even go to sleep together. We eat at different times, we live without each other.
She gives a shrug.
It’s not true, she could say. But it is, true, most of it, true and yet not the whole picture by any means.
You’ll run yourself into the ground like that; it’s hardly surprising you’re finding it hard to keep yourself together.
I’m depressed, she says. You said so yourself. You’re talking about what it’s like to live with someone depressive, aren’t you. It’s hardly surprising you’re falling apart, he says. That we are.
Nothing is allowed to dry, they are a wound continually reopened. It was always that, love is a wound. He sits down on the chair opposite, puts his bare feet on the coffee table between them.
And he was right, but it was quite as true, I think now, this winter, with the snow making everything stand out so clearly or disappear entirely; it was quite as true that you never felt the rush of being loved that I always felt. That feeling of something being important, absolutely necessary: red apples, their brightness, something lifting the day up above a simple matter of getting up or not getting up, the issue of e.g. the work ethic, something like: the doggedness of the work ethic. You always tried to convince me those things were destroying me. From within. You frightened me. But it wasn’t true, I can see that now, or not entirely. I believed in you, even if I suppose I knew different all along.
I knew something else was true as well.
It’s that too: the will of the flesh to be in motion, the work that despite everything kept me together. That gave my life the rhythm your body always lacked. A beat that enabled me to maintain a hold in the flow of all things. To press a paintbrush against the porcelain of the sink, to carefully spread its bristles between the fingers, to see the color wash away, thinner and thinner. To rinse the white sink clean, to dry the brushes. To crumple up a pile of newspaper and feel the stiffness it had gained from the acrylic paint that ran and then dried, sapless newspapers, wrinkled as old apples, a smell of fixative first discovered after having been outside and come in again. You’ve got paint on your cheek, you would say, and I was in something. You had your problems, I’m sure, clutching at you, that was when I realized; yet nothing that would prompt you out of bed in the morning, without lingering, without first wondering: why. If too much time passes between waking and getting up, I suppose that can be seen as a bad sign. Too many questions, if you start asking yourself; all that time. The whole notion of having to consider in that way—a sign of desperation.
To have a matter outstanding with life or not. To be interested—at all. Some kind of undirected enthusiasm. Something like that. Or, an enthusiasm bursting out in all directions. You ask yourself the right questions, and if you still keep lying there it’s because you want to, not because you don’t. The difference that makes.
HE PRESENTED HIS leaving as a sort of doubt. He had kind of begun, as he put it, to see other avenues.
Other people, she said.
He let her do all the dirty work. He had never been good at consequences. Or decisions. It was as if they frightened him.
Copenhagen, in their different apartments: it had lasted six months. She counted the days. Maybe it was the kind of thing you started doing.
Eight years.
They lay on the bed in her bedroom, but she did not stay there. She got up, he sat up with his hand to his mouth, watching her, his gaze was a greased cable trapped in the door that shut, and she locked herself in the bathroom.
It was a tiny room, with no depth. She had to sit with her legs on each side of the toilet, on the floor, her head leaned against the door; banging her head back against the door in a steady rhythm that made the soap tremble like a heart on the edge of the sink.
So this is what you do. After eight years. After eight years, you get up from the bed and leave the room quite composed, and yet decomposed, without form; you pass through another room, lock yourself inside a bathroom and fall apart there. A person melted, sitting in that way, stiffened, banging her head against a door. Perhaps it is the only thing that can be done. Eight years, count the days, and slowly the talk takes place, beginning with a whisper on the other side of a door. Maybe that’s what it takes, maybe that’s the way it starts. That kind of moment that has all of time written into it: what has been, what is to come, what never will be, and, what never was. That, too.
What’s eight years.
When you’re a strangled voice behind a door. That kind of thought, a counting on the fingers, counting on the teeth, on the ribs and all the body’s bones. A rhythm coming through tissue, marrow and bone.
I MISS YOU, please come back.
SHE THINKS HE’S always disappointed by the woods, by nature in general.
She comes home to their apartment on Marselis Boulevard at nine, after her kilometers along the forest paths, and he groans like timber in the bed. Pulls her toward him, or else hates her. You’re cold, he says, and almost hates her there. Or else: You’re cold, he says, reaching out for her wrist, pulling her down under the duvet, drawing her close; a desire to warm her from within; you’re so cold, he says.
After a while she grew cunning: if we have sex now then it’s done, then maybe I’ll have the benefit of his guilty conscience the rest of the day. The kind of care you show an animal you’ve punished only to find out: there was no more water, they break through the fencing not to spite you, but because they’re thirsty. She told herself she could use her body to deceive him. To deceive her own body.
For a long time she thought she had achieved the latter.
For even longer she thought she had achieved the former. But then one evening in winter she realizes she has never deceived his body at all. He has known all along, abandoning her gradually, angry at her for having allowed it. Not for her having made him do it; that’s an idea you get, and maybe in some cases it’s the truth, but not in this one, that’s how she thought of it. He wasn’t angry with her for making him do it: for being an inferior person. What he was angry about—in view of her frailty or her backbone, or both, perhaps—was that she hadn’t stopped him. She was too fragile to accept such treatment, too strong to put up with it. Why did you put up with it.
His disappointment in her, in nature, too. Nature’s pale, and in that way self-embracing, voice. It not making itself known, not rousing you. Or perhaps just the fact that he had imagined something else, that it would do something else, something more for him, at least. That shock, of something utterly crucial.
Only it was a shock that never came, because basically you’re left out all the time. Exposed in the mountains, in the indifferent care of mountains.
THE MORNING IS savage, the sunrise a mockery of art, too exaggerated by far, these new shoes that shine, and train journeys home when everything is ove
r. The audience has gone home. All there is left is this same slow train; alternately, a dismal hotel room. Seeing him search through the kitchen cupboards for bottles that do not exist, but that must exist, as he says, I know they do. I know.
She lets herself in with movements meticulously emptied of sound. She pulls off her clothes, the pile she makes of them looks like a dog resting in the feverish cold of an outhouse; flat as an empty skin in the basket under the coats, crates of orange soda in the corner, crates of empty beer bottles. She can make her body look like gray porcelain, the bones of her hands may be crushed by a handshake, her lungs collapse like moldering wickerwork with any embrace.
She shoves the pile with her foot, out of harm’s way, in case he wakes up and comes down before she gets the chance to do anything about it. And even then a thought occurs to her that sticks out in another direction; that her slackly dumping her clothes in that way might simply placate him, soften his annoyance, fear dressed up as annoyance or anger.
It was more like that.
An almost physical pain at waking up and seeing a new day rise up out of the sea, as it were, and she, coming home after running through the woods to the bathing jetty, after swimming, after, in that way having conspired with the sun, having risen up out of the sea—that was how he looked at it. That she was like vigor incarnate, as simple as that. All the serenity of her body on that account. All the things you cannot attain, only see; never have a part in, but wish for, year upon year. She bends down and messes up the pile so the various items are spread once more. An indication of her slackness, her rummaging about in the world.
Transilluminated, the rooms, on a morning like this.
You’re a detector, he says, meaning: I’ve read what you wrote, and if you could see everything so clearly, how come you, or we, have assembled all that, that whole idea of how it was. How I was. And you, you as well.
Indeed, she thinks. Indeed, I think, I suppose loving someone is like that. Half the time you’re frightened to death. The perspective. The shunting about, from seeing everything—to seeing nothing at all. That you can never go back and be met for the first time: seen. Differences outstanding, everywhere, piles of—well, what. Just piles.
THERE ARE TWO rooms.
There is him, sitting there, slowly ceasing to live; and there is her, banging her head back against a closed door. She is attempting to begin living. Later she thought it was the right thing to do. The fact that one of them had to say something, and that it could never be her.
He sits behind the door. Who knows what he feels. Perhaps he is ceasing to live. Death is there, on the other side of the door. Perhaps we see it all from above. The door between the two bodies is just a thin line someone has drawn in the picture. Later, this is what he told her, later he thought it was the biggest mistake he had ever made.
Maybe it’s that simple, too.
Two rooms.
She may never have loved him more than she did that night, when she thought there was no more love left inside her. When she thought that was that.
And the sound of her head, banging against the door.
And the sound of flesh, rotting. And a picture of a doorstep one morning. And the picture of a breakfast table with juice. Images from an abandoned circus. There will be days like that.
THEY LIVED TOGETHER, there was hardly any skin, most of the time there was a confusion surrounding their bodies, where one stopped and the other began; one body may be switched off, the other pumps life into the unconscious body while it is unconscious. I know nothing about you, she thinks; she knew nothing about him, but maybe it wasn’t true. The opposite is always a part of the picture as well.
Transillumination.
Love as a kind of transillumination.
Everything is very clear. Woods, with darkness falling. Looming silhouettes, all too distinct. The sky, turning completely pale at the prospect of something like night. The crowns of the trees, milking the sky with their eyes, their thoughts, stamping about the landscape, trying. To do what, exactly. To find a home there. In the midst of what is most unwilling: nature, rejecting its young, ejecting them from the nest, over the cliff. And there you stand, worming your way and trying to blend in.
For years she thought she had succeeded in doing just that.
And not for his sake. To become a part. To belong in a landscape, a family somewhere. But then maybe it was never like that at all. Maybe it was he who was right. Her serenity was just a cynical acceptance of that condition of never finding home. Certainly not in nature. Certainly not in love, where all the time you’re—well, what, exactly. Exposed in love; in its neglectful custody. On your way somewhere else, and always another.
HOW LONG HAVE I known exactly, she may find herself thinking.
Some weeks later: she is standing on the street, trying to smoke a cigarette, trying to become addicted to something. She coughs, her nose runs. She doesn’t know if it’s the cold or her having been left, her feeling more together by being totally left on her own. But everything is weeping, everything a collapse, a crashing down around her ears, a gash in her head, and she is as peeled; the sky descending around her, her skin. Utterly exposed in that way: imperiled. Her head feels heavy, she bends backward and thinks: nothing lies heavy.
Nothing anyone can see.
She lies down on the flagstones, puts the cigarette down on the ground, from where it sends a thin coil of smoke into the air. She decides to lie there until the cigarette goes out. Or burns up. One of the two. And then she will let herself into her apartment again; and she lets herself in and finds warmth; she lets herself in, having managed to get to her feet, and then she lights her cigarette, and says: I’ve never smoked before, then speaks her name, and another man speaks his. Movements of that kind, taking place all the time, the kind of movements that can start going in reverse. Behind one’s back. All of a sudden you’re here again, or else you’ve never been here before. There you are; held upright by the suspicious cone of light from a lamppost.
THE WIND BLOWING in through the open windows smells like the sound of envelopes being opened with a knife. Seasons are nonexistent at the moment, in the days following the death of a friend. She gathers the shards, in her thoughts. The days cannot be told apart. Tomorrow already yesterday. She meets him for the first time. It is summer; I have finally come to say goodbye.
The keys of the apartment are as shiny as eyes too young for their face. I have lived inside you since I was eighteen.
Your face, when I am no longer there to see it.
I don’t believe it.
A light, like darkness, all around you.
I let myself into the apartment. I lie down beside you on the bed. Or else I get into the bed between two sleeping figures. I push the other woman out. Sorry.
WE’RE JUST NOT happy, he told her. She went against him instinctively: yes, we are.
You’re not listening to what I’m saying.
Yes, I am, I listen to everything you say. You’re just not saying anything.
It was winter, he was lying with his back against the cold wall in her apartment. The apartment was on the third floor, on Løngangsstræde, backed up to the church, Vartov Kirke, sharing its spine. Sunday morning, and the room trembled, the clinking of the little candle holders and vases in the windowsill. The circular movement of the water in those vases, emanating outward from the stalks of the flowers; from the round eye of the vase, inward to the middle, a sky of new year—geometric patterns, tiny explosions without sound. The submarine rumble of the organ in the room. The hymn ran down the walls, Grundtvig’s “Påskeblomst,” the coldness contained in that. She thought of pushing him through the brick. He would plunge through the church like a beast. Or a bird with clipped wings. Landing heavily on ancient stone. Only the smell of vanilla and timber would discover his body.
Vast areas of loneliness, and of alone here. The edgeland, where the last houses in the village stand and rock their heads to the point of nausea, looking out upon the
void, halted just in time—before the fields, plundered and plowed, made ready for, well, for what, exactly. Open land. A cry that may reach out across the landscape, and yet return to hit you full in the back. You will fall, perhaps, and then, perhaps, the houses will fall, too.
But they stand.
Trembling on the edgeland. Alone. A shift has taken place. They leave a party, and walk through the city. I’m cold, she says. The way he stops there, on the bridge. Takes her hands and pulls off her gloves, holds her hands up in front of his, in front of your, fleshy lips, fleshy and cracked, blowing warm breath against my fingers. Behind you, the tracks as they run beneath the bridge; your breath is moist and warm, and sheaths my white fingers like water.
We say nothing.
A car goes past. A train crosses beneath us, on the tracks under the bridge, it forms a crucifix, and we are in the middle. Your dreadful face is a caring face. What broke it.
When do you realize what these signs mean, a crucifix drawn beneath you. My eyes begin to water, it’s the cold. You think I’m crying, and kiss me. There’s a moment of togetherness there. We walk home, these two people walk home, a man and a woman, without speaking. Before they let themselves into the apartment, he holds her head in both his hands. She can hear herself breathing. The snow can do that: amplify sound. He leans in close, puts his face to hers, and places a kiss below her eye. The feeling of his lips as they touch, before he opens his mouth and licks the skin below her eye, licks the tears from her face, first one cheek, then the other; that kind of moment in time, the fact they exist. And that shift: toward something like words. We have emptied out, she thinks to herself. The noise of a bucket, jarring against the sides of an empty well. A horse, scraping the gravel, putting its muzzle to the ground and blowing, a cloud of dust, a hand feeling inside a dark box when someone has taken the last of the coins and there’s nothing left for anyone. And one day it’s like this: words in abundance, landscapes of them; a face dissolving into syllables: here underneath your nose is the apple tree from the garden at Agri, here is Svinkløv, here are the warm flagstones, everything drawn in outline, laid bare, the dots connected, the face a map: a picture book in which something is revealed, made visible. A person. But all the lines are stiff as wire; you move as if your clothes are still in the cupboard, in a pile: a slide, or a fall, perhaps, a body able—and then again: a body that doesn’t even know what it wants, if it wants, anything other than to talk about—talk about what, exactly. Nothing. Most of what she tells him dissolves as it drifts from her body.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 6