She realizes she is smiling.
She cannot stop herself from smiling, because the thought is beautiful and so heartrendingly naive. It is like placing a sheet over a naked body, allowing friends to search the room, and then to stand there in the doorway afterward, guilt-free. Cleared by a lie: if only we are quiet, offer up our empty hands; and then to encounter this peculiar form of discretion. A will to see the island of bones on the bed through fanned-out fingers that desire not to expose, eyes that will not see, for seeing is an obligation, whose nature remains unclear. And who knows if there is time, perhaps they will prefer to leave in the interim, never to witness the grand finale, the conjuring forth of corpses.
I WAS YOUNG when I fell off a horse and damaged some cartilage. I understood something about the body then, realizing the way the thighbone ends at the knee. Your crumpled cotton shirt shares its colors with the pigeons and the bellies of the sky, the sky as it hangs upon the hills again today—these saturated curtains, and unsettled fogs, bluish breasts, falling as rain.
I wonder again if all your reservations about me are in actual fact the closest you can get to telling me you never wanted this. I never asked for any of it, you whimper in sleep.
The work your body does each day is touching.
You are the most touching thing I know, your lack of serenity moves me. Your looking for ways to push me away from you is touching in a way that has nothing to do with morals or not, nor with responsibility, nor even love, I suppose. Your guilty conscience squirms inside you. I don’t know if you’re telling me the whole truth. But then maybe that’s just how it is, all the time. The truth constantly in flux, and whatever you tell me is true, and everything squirming inside you is, too.
Have you told her, I ask.
You nod, only then to shake your head. I don’t know what to say to her.
I try to convince you you don’t need an excuse not to love someone anymore, that you don’t always have that kind of explanation to provide.
We walk through the city and find the only restaurant open so late. For a moment, you actually look happy.
Thanks, you say, and squeeze my hand under the table.
For what.
You’re right, I don’t need an explanation, I can tell her it’s not her fault, it’s just me. Or you.
I smile at him, and my face; it must have looked dreadful.
You’re beautiful, you say, a whisper almost. Do you know that.
I shake my head, my dreadful face, one of those autumn leaves, where you pull the tissue from the veins, and the ominous skeleton that’s left.
Who am I then, am I someone else now. There is a repetition in the world, and it rides around on the most disquieting steeds; ominous as hell itself. The slightest movements are reflections of the very largest; desolation exists, the betrayer, too, the deception.
I’m unsure if we can ever speak again.
I LAY WITH my head on my new man’s chest. It rose and fell, as unsettled in sleep as from the moment of awakening. I thought about the deckchairs outside. I remember this: waking up a few minutes before him, and the weight of the arm that lay on top of me. A collapsed ceiling. Buried alive, the serenity that must be a part of that, regardless of all else. Having only so much oxygen, a few helpless gasps and one final breath.
When morning came we walked along the shore, crossing some black stones embedded in the green moss; it was as if nature had cultivated itself, and yet one couldn’t help thinking it was so exquisite, the green and the black, that it couldn’t have been cultivated at all, for cultivation presupposes thought, and the uncontrived beauty of this was so convincing.
What is it with you and Berlin, I asked him.
He looked down so as not to stumble, or else he looked down so as to avoid looking at me; I live there, he said after a moment. My son’s mother lives there; my son lives there.
And then I was the one looking down.
He lived in Berlin.
It wasn’t so much the distance that frightened me, it was more this: he actually lives somewhere. He has a life, and I know nothing about it. The concept of occupying a space somewhere, and with it the idea of a home. How a body can belong somewhere; and how you can live in a place and not think of it as home. That perspective, of becoming homeless in that way, being tricked into believing that one thing entails the other, that living somewhere brings about a home. Homelessness is so obviously about something more than just a place to live, and yet the insight hit me hard, like emerging from the backshore in autumn into that sudden vista of sand and ocean, the western sea, Vesterhavet, a view stretching out into the infinite, with nothing to see at all to keep you even anchored in the world. The act of walking on that beach, hearing the rush of the sea, the relentless sound of a head banging against a door, abandoned landscapes, abandoned homes, and dogs that slope about and beg at the table of the sky and these empty dwellings.
What did we talk about.
Certainly not our lives, I thought to myself. My mother. Sweden. His music. The fact that my entire family trembled with grief. That my conscience squirmed inside me. That something was always squirming inside me.
The landscape in which we walked; accumulations of black stones, and in between them fierce green moss and grass, sheep shuffling about on legs of reed.
What is it with you and Copenhagen, I asked then.
I can’t remember wanting anything revealed, I can’t remember wanting to know any truth. But he told me that truth, in a voice that made it seem reasonable to assume it surprised him as much as it did me. This: that he really was someone else’s man now, that there was another woman with us on our walk, another woman in bed with us in the afternoon.
He suffered when I touched him.
He suffered when we stood still on the path and looked into each other’s eyes; it made us understand what exactly it is we do when we look into the eyes of another. We are two vessels connected in such a way as to divide up the pain in equal shares. Seductive, and yet—in one cynical breath: the same sum, the same amount of pain, only more neatly arranged, perhaps.
I’ve got a woman there, I live with her when I’m working in Copenhagen.
We bathed from the rocks. We picked our way out into the bay in our ugly footwear, legs bare. I wanted to skinny-dip, but didn’t. Both of us were more cautious than is good for bathing in such locations. That was what made it such a lovely scene, I think to myself now. Not removing our footwear, wanting to keep a grip. Not being able to make up our minds as to the safest way of getting to the water. All that hesitation.
It wasn’t until evening he asked me the question I’ve thought about ever since.
Do you think this is dangerous.
Absolutely, I told him. Neither of us knowing if we were supposed to laugh.
The sun was hot, the last warmth of the year. September, the tail end, moreover. The end of season, everything about to board up, ice soon to be packing in the inner waters, at least in theory, in theory and in thought: a winter from which one cannot escape. Snowed in.
We clambered up in silence. I’m not sure I recall, but at some point we went home. I was extinguished like a light, wanting instead to be quenched like thirst. Sadder than ever before or since.
The same night, before we fell asleep, he said something from some drowsy depth, something I have heard him say so many times since, in my kitchen and in my bed, in an airport once:
On that island, walking on that path, all I wanted was to stay there forever.
I think it was the closest we ever got. We stood there for a few minutes, and the island held its breath, everyone else lay with their phones and their rescued marriages, dozing off to sleep. I was the one, this time it was me who went. He came after me. The path was so narrow there was only room for one at a time. I’m not sure I could have done it any other way.
I’m not sure if the new man was aware how sad everything was, the way it all expelled a sigh that afternoon. I don’t think he did. We understand
each other, only he can’t face seeing how unhappy I am. I can’t cope with the pain of any more women—right, muso.
And what’s with your girlfriend, was something I never asked.
RELAX, EVERYTHING WILL be all right, says the new man. He fiddles with a candle, turning it between his fingers, making sure it’s straight, turning it again, another adjustment.
It’s under control.
I think about what he means, what exactly is under control. I nod and take his hand, holding it tight on the table between us. He pushes a plate aside, squeezes my hand in a rhythm I fail to recognize from anything in nature.
THE ROOM’S DARKNESS is limp. The night is emptied, its remains deposited in the corners, in her face. She thinks about calming herself with rhymes. She must know so many, how often she must have rattled them off in order to remain in a place. She feels an urge to go walking with him. One of their first days together he told her about a hike he had done, somewhere in Sweden, with his mother and his son. How marvelous it had been. That was the word he used: marvelous. I’d like to do it again, he said, and she thought he meant it to be a kind of invitation. That it was she he wanted to go hiking with in Sweden. Only it never was.
She extracts herself from his arms, he gives a start, then wakes slowly. She gets out of bed, his eyes latch on to her naked body, then close again. She doesn’t think he sees her from behind as she goes to the bathroom to get some water. You can sense things like that. But you can choose to believe he is watching nonetheless.
Maybe he’d rather have been left alone, she thinks. I’m glad you’re here, he lies. But she knows: he wasn’t watching her, and what he really wants is to be on his own. Like a woman with a little child, who after a while just needs to be alone. When at night she begins to dream that not only five infants, but also her man and her parents, her sisters and girlfriends start sucking milk from all her fingers and toes, her nipples and earlobes; when all you really want is to be able to go to the bathroom on your own—and simply be a self-sufficient human. If such a thing even exists. I am an instrument of solitude, a tool by which to become myself, to be on my own at last. If this cannot be, she thinks, then I want nothing. It’s that simple, too. That there is no reasonableness, but: unreasonable wants, unreasonable love, even when no love exists, unreasonable love is there. What you give and what you get, with no accordance between them. There is something decadent about not loving those who love you. But decadence is only the start. There is something cynical about it. The way there is something cynical about loving a person who has never asked to be loved by you. These are thoughts that may occur to her. A militant, warlike love, boiling away inside her, a subjugation of land. Love resembling violence.
MY DAD WAS suddenly there for me again, her new man says.
They have to duck to walk under the washing on the line. He’s got the same pillowcase in his hand as when they started three rows earlier. He keeps stretching it out. She nods.
The enthusiasm in his voice is for this encounter with a father who it seems has never been there for him before, the way no fathers ever are. This, too, is a truth like so many others. Such as them being there always. She bends down and pulls up a top with long straps from the basket. It is entangled in some tights and a pair of his underpants, but he lets her do the unraveling on her own. She wonders if his love for her is actually a love for the space she has cleared inside him. It was like she sorted him out, the way you sort out a basement storage room after a partner has left and gone: shifting boxes and bags, throwing out stuff heavy-handedly and sentimentally at the same time. Until gradually spaces appear, small areas of floor, open, barefooted cubic meters, making room for something else. A father, for instance.
HER BODY IS confused, like nature these days; spring flowers finding their way into winter, snow in May, elderflower in February. And now, her childhood lake freezing over, the fish suspended beneath its ice, beneath the glowing orb of a sun. The body is confused, as the air, too, is confused, gusting richly with rented smells of harvest and wool, apples lying stored and silent in barn lofts, rancid fat. One minute her body is a festival, the next it is a darkened tunnel through which passes a shuffling funeral procession. A feeling of elsewhere. In the weeks after meeting her new man, she thinks: there is a state worse than wanting something and not knowing what it is. What’s worse is: knowing what you want, and knowing it to be found, only not here. The mere fact of its existence. Longing is not an emotion, it is a thing. It takes residence in the body and has weight. It distorts the face, and you can’t sleep properly on account of it being there all the time. An attraction to calamity.
WHEN FINALLY HE falls asleep, he does so on top of her arm. She feels how it tingles and throbs, with no way she can move it. She lies there for hours in that way. Kept from sleep by the fear of waking him. He never asked for me, she thinks to herself; he thinks: I never asked her to come, never asked her to stay. Her new man’s breathing is unsettled, fever sweeps through their bed, all is damp. His mouth is open, she sees, it is light enough to see as much. And his feet, sticking out from under the duvet. She thinks: should I ask if he wants a sheet instead. But then she cannot bring herself to utter the words. As if he were a piece of furniture for which there is no longer a use, as if he were dead. She lies there, trapped beneath him, thinking about how she cannot find sleep with her feet sticking out in that same way, a feeling that any part of her not covered by the duvet will be cut away in the night, amputated. Her mother’s mother, drawing the cover up over her if she as much as yawned; a child slept there, always. Her parents visited her mother’s mother and they, too, slept. Disasters may be averted in that way. Many catastrophes are mostly about:
being hungry
lacking sleep
believing oneself to be a victim
The victim finds there to be a particular reasonableness about everything. After all you’ve put me through. After all I’ve done for you.
Her arm tingles; she has never been as comfortable in all her life.
OR ELSE MY mother phones. Mornings are, as ever, a trial. I wake up in a bed without having slept.
My mother tells me things are rough. I sit up in bed and force my legs over the edge.
Things are always rough, I think to myself. She mumbles. My hair is a mess, and the new man reaches out from under the duvet and messes it up even more. I sink my head between my shoulders like a horse about to bite, that expression, ears flat, eyes narrowed like slits of light under creaking doors.
I snap at them.
I’m ill, she says.
I am not breathing. I flex my feet, shuffle further to the edge. You’re ill, I repeat, emptied. Those words, and me, emptied.
The new man’s hand stops its tousling. I feel the abruptness with which it halts, as if suddenly encountering some sloppy mass on my scalp, something that once had life.
I love you, the new man does not say. I love you, too, I do not reply.
We say goodbye, he has a long journey ahead of him.
He whispers that he is sorry to have to go on such a day.
I know, I say, and know that he is already gone, and I am frightened to death, leaving, in every respect. I should be here for you now.
It’s all right, I say. Meaning: it’s best this way. Or just: yes.
I’m going to miss you, he says.
I’m going to miss you, I repeat, without lying, for the words are not mine, but his, uttered out of my mouth. One to one, enthusiasm and fear. I have a feeling my body is bad for his. That it pulls him apart, slowly, like an onion, layer by layer. Rotting from the outside, the way onions rot, from the outside. Or from the inside, the way onions rot from the inside. Paler and paler and paler. Younger and younger. The commotion of my affection, loud as bridges. The summer runs like telephone lines through the landscape, his love is unspoiled, for something that does not exist.
My eyes are the only things left in my crumpled face.
BEFORE WE SLEEP we call each other. Our voices ar
e pressed together like teeth in ancient jaws, by time and too little air, in the vicinity of sleep beneath ceilings, sloping walls; he says he’s with his parents, that he’s so unhappy. I lie a thousand kilometres away from him, albeit in the same room.
The time you have wasted: the time I have wasted, he says, hesitating.
I know that feeling well, I say, believing myself.
We are both adults, though both in the guise of children, the children of parents to whom we have long since become parents. And our bodies are confused: why are we here, in these familiar beds, as they grow smaller and smaller still.
One summer I was so afraid of wasps, he tells me.
A silence ensues. I was lying in my room, he goes on, listening to cassette tapes my girlfriend had made for me.
And all the times I could have gone sailing.
Yes, I say, simply. I don’t know how to talk about it.
Silence.
I’ve no idea where you are, he says eventually, as if suddenly becoming aware that I too exist inside a body. The body of my voice.
I’m in a small room, I tell him. Underneath the roof are two big double beds, two smaller beds, a dresser full of sheets and covers, and a library of books all the way up the wall that is the spine of the house.
I’m in a room like that, too, he says.
It’s so incredibly dark here, he says. I mean, really incredibly dark. He talks about the wind, not knowing that an hour ago I sat with my parents, talking about the wind in the exact same way.
Yes, I say, we talk of the wind and it lays down flat, like a dog in the grass. Not wanting to be seen.
I’M COMING WITH you, is all I say. I think it’s the best way. For me to make that decision for him. He stands there like a tree. There’s nothing more to think about, I say, tentatively. Only it hasn’t even started yet. He hands me the towel, apathetic in all he does. Like the winter, unconsciously repeating itself, a new snowfall, a new blanket of the same fabric.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 11