Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors

  There’s a buzzing in her body. Small packets of endorphins being released; it’s the massage taking root in her from within. Her right shoulder is warm and alive. The pain’s still there, but it feels warm and alive. Like when blood floods back into a frozen hand, and the sky’s doing it too: it tumbles down. When it rains this hard, she can’t see the city she’s gone astray in. Nor can she hear it. The inhabitants have vanished, the cars have pulled over. People sit in their kitchens and fear for their basements. They stand and peer out from under awnings.

  Sonja pushes her shoes off and stretches her long legs. It feels good to take off her moccasins. She thinks of love, for Paul’s still a living part of her awareness. What he could do to her with his face, now she thinks back on it. He had an effect, Paul did, but if it weren’t that Sonja had such a hard time forgetting everything—except her future, that’s gone—the effect wouldn’t have lasted so long.

  Back in Balling, you screwed whatever was at hand. You weren’t going anywhere, after all. You had to take from the assortment available, and it wasn’t very large. But you learned to make do, and you learned to tolerate. And hang in there. Just not Sonja.

  Once when Sonja was sixteen, Kate told her that she should give things time. That she should keep going out with Kenneth. Kenneth didn’t have anything against tall girls, and she didn’t need to be in love with a guy to begin with. If she gave it time, the feelings would grow on her. Like moss, almost, or yeast cells. They’d multiply, in any case, because the two of them would became entangled in each other. Because the world around them grew accustomed to the constellation. It might well be that the role was as flat as a pancake, but it demanded no effort, other than to keep dancing slow dances with Kenneth. To keep feeling Kenneth’s tongue in her oral cavity. To let Kenneth stick his hand into her panties and press up with his fingers. That’s what you did: choose or make sure you’re chosen. When the situation settled down, the cow would no longer be out on the ice and everyone could breathe easy. No longer were you a potential misfit or a traitor to your class.

  But then Kenneth invited Sonja to the movies to see Jodie Foster in The Accused, and Sonja had already seen it. Kate thought that that didn’t matter, the whole idea was getting the pot to boil. But Sonja had seen The Accused and knew that five or six men would take turns raping Jodie Foster over the same kind of pinball machine that they had in the sports clubhouse. Sonja didn’t care to subject their relationship to that, so she let Kenneth stand and wait in vain in front of the movie theater. He was five foot six and the youngest son from the plant nursery. A nice boy. Good with animals, and of course Kate didn’t get it at all. She felt that Sonja had sinned against the M.O.

  Yet staying away from Kenneth was the smartest thing I’ve done in my so-called love life, thinks Sonja, while the heavens flash and bang overhead. And then there was the time that that guy Tonny, the one Marie married, had stood in the back passage over at Kate and Frank’s, and we’d been barbecuing, and folks had gotten pretty pixilated, and then he’d pulled out his prick.

  He’d stood over by Kate’s dryer and asked, “Don’t you want to put it in your mouth?” and he looked like Mickey Mouse, yes, like Mickey Mouse with those big ears, though his prick looked more like a tulip. A cut white tulip when it starts to swell and open. And while there’s a certain power in being always willing to take a prick in your mouth, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of not being willing to take a prick in your mouth.

  Sonja draws in her feet. She goes over her string of men. The list isn’t terribly impressive, but it’s left its mark nonetheless. Like cheap sex itself. Lean meat, lanolin, the taste of rubber. Palle Mikkelborg and the shower stalls, and later there came early adulthood’s attempts at conversion and retention. First the married college adjunct, and then the composer, but he drank, and how Sonja got the notion that she could convert first a narcissist and then an alcoholic seems incomprehensible as she sits here now, free of her moccasins. Not to forget the period with newly divorced men. For instance Paul.

  He’d been there at the convent, the one with the psychic chambermaid in faraway Jutland. It was early in the morning, and the first thing Sonja saw was the light in his face. So there we have him, she’d thought: the unhappy love.

  Paul claimed that he’d seen the ghost in room 10. He’d been lying there in bed, unable to sleep. The sounds from the highway fled across the heath. It was as if the landscape around him became young again. He’s been looking at the desk when a mist arose. The mist came toward him as he lay there in bed, and he’d had to sit up in order to see her. For it was a woman. “I don’t dare sleep in room 10 again now,” he’d said. “Where are you sleeping?”

  Sonja was in room 7 and thought the ghost had been a man with a hipster goatee. Paul said she was mistaken. “The ghost is a woman—not unlike you.”

  And then part of Sonja felt suspiciously light-headed, and part of her felt that she might as well get the unhappy affair over with. So she could move on with her life. After it was over, that is. She’d smiled, and Paul had automatically turned up the volume in his face. He let warmth stream out of its orifices, and Sonja didn’t twig that she was the target of a trick. She thought she was the one who’d inspired the warmth in Paul’s face. But there she was mistaken, for nature wants woman to offer up her body, and Sonja certainly saw the signs. After all, it wasn’t as if Paul hid his attraction for Gitte Hænning when she’d been a teen sensation. Wasn’t as if he didn’t sign his letters with arch aliases. Love, Paul Pedant, he wrote; he wrote Love, Miss O’Gyne.

  But Sonja had to go through with the unhappy infatuation. It was tough, and now she can’t walk past faces that light up too much, jack-o’-lanterns for instance, without thinking of Paul the Ex. Paul and that twenty-something girl he preferred in reality. The type who could look up to him and wanted to marry Daddy.

  I’ve got an unfortunate tendency to love men who can’t really see me, Sonja thinks. They can’t see me, but I’m such a fighter, Mom says. She says I can make anything happen. Yet “I can’t make you love me,” Sonja thinks, and then she can’t remember who it was who sang that song. She has to dig her phone out of her shorts pocket. She does a quick search for info. Bonnie Raitt, bingo, but now Sonja’s forgotten: what was she just thinking? She can’t find her way back, it’s sealed itself off, and the rainwater slides along the asphalt in waves. It won’t be long before the rats arrive, she thinks. When the water rises in the sewers, they swim upward. When the water fills the sewers, the rats make their way toward the manhole covers. When the water gets that high, the rats drown, and that’s a good thing. Yeah, that’s a good thing.

  15.

  IF YOU DRIVE FAR ENOUGH SOUTH from Balling, down toward the Skjern River and out toward Ringkøbing Fjord, you come upon a heath. It was down there on the fringe that Mom was born, and the heath was called Lønborg. She often told us that, unlike other heaths in Denmark, it had never been cultivated. It consisted chiefly of gravel and sand, and it was hard to get so much as a twig to sprout there. The heath had lain there for millennia, untouched by human hands—vast, eerie, and capricious. People would tell how they’d lost their way on the heath. They declared that they’d had fixed reference points in the landscape, but that the landscape was dynamic. It revolved, changed form, did whatever it wanted. Then when Mom was young, an American moved into the area. And he didn’t fear the landscape. Every weekend he’d go out on the heath, come rain, come shine, and at regular intervals he’d go missing. His wife had to ring the police chief several times, though her husband always did turn up. Then she’d chew him out for not looking after himself. But he did: the American tied ribbons to dry branches and chalked crosses on stones, although on the heath such markers tended to move. “Time and space behave differently out there,” the American maintained, and he knew what he was talking about, because in the us they had pristine landscapes of such immensity and abundance that they developed consciousnesses of their own. Everyone there knew that the prairi
es, the mountains, and the deep forests all have their own characters. “The laws we bow before are ones they rise above—or rather, ones they’ve never been subject to,” the American said, declaring that such landscapes didn’t give a fig about the minuscule consciousness of the human individual. The wilderness zigged right, zagged left, it rose and curved the way the universe curves. A tiny person alone would get discombobulated as the wilderness unspooled, and the tiny person would run around, searching for civilization. “But the American,” said Mom, “he’d sit down on a stone out there, and he’d just kept sitting in that spot until the landscape settled and lay still. Then he’d walk home. Happy, he claimed, and our minister backed him up, even as he advised people to stay off the heath. There were forces out there that weren’t to be trifled with, the minister said.”

  “What kind of forces, Mom?”

  “Female forces, I expect,” Mom said, and Sonja walked out into the farthest part.

  She walked through the tree plantation onto open land and farther out, farther. She walked out to the whooper swans, and there she sat down like the American sat down on Lønborg Heath: she surrendered sovereignty, came to herself, put people behind her, and was happy there in her yellow clogs.

  But Søndre Fasanvej slides into Frederiksberg. Soon Sonja has to get off the bus, and what if Jytte’s standing there waiting in front of the driving school? What if she’s standing there working up a rage? How do you hide from people who make themselves angry just to feel alive? They’re everywhere, and it’s tricky making yourself invisible in a world that’s as flat as a pancake. Nervousness gropes Sonja from within. It’s the drive with Folke, but it’s also the fear of confrontation.

  Sonja presses the STOP button and gets to her feet like an old woman. She’s scared of getting dizzy and has to hold her head still, while at the same time bringing it with her. No tilting now. Down the bus steps, onto the city sidewalk, careful, careful. It’s not because she’s dizzy right now. It’s because she mustn’t become so. Sonja doesn’t want to sit at Folke’s side and not be in possession of her full five. His hands are diligent, his fingers long, and Sonja has books in her backpack. Now and then she’ll squeeze in a historical romance in the breaks between Gösta, and perhaps Folke’s wife has a taste for that kind of thing too, and it should seem as if his wife’s sitting in the backseat.

  Sonja moves through Frederiksberg on foot. She thinks of the letter that’s still lying in her bag. Even though it’d be good for her connective tissue, she doesn’t want to send it. She won’t, no, and at the same time she’s hoping that Jytte’s out driving with somebody. Since Sonja began studying for her license, she’s made special note of driving-school vehicles. This must be what it’s like for mothers when they see other women with baby buggies. They’re in the same boat. Like cells in a guerrilla movement, they don’t need to put their reality into words. They can say everything with a look, no need for gesture. Jytte could learn something from that, Sonja thinks as she walks down Gammel Kongevej.

  There are driving school vehicles at almost every light. Behind the wheel sit focused young folks. Once in a while Sonja glimpses an older person with shame in their face, but right now it’s the seat with the instructor she’s keeping an eye on.

  Jytte?

  No.

  Jytte? Jytte—?

  No.

  Sonja turns onto Folke’s street. It’s a small street garnished with cars. Folke’s vehicle is easy to spot. It looks like the sneaker of a towering basketball player, and Sonja doesn’t feel safe approaching it. In the back of the car she can dimly see a figure poking up. The top of it is tinted henna, and it’s emitting a plume.

  Jytte?

  Jytte.

  She’s gotten out of her Hyundai to smoke, and to judge from this distance, she’s got approximately seven minutes of cigarette to burn. It may well be, as Folke claims, that Jytte has a heart of gold, but her heart’s gotten a scratch, and here comes Sonja with her mutiny.

  She’s in the middle of life, Sonja, a grown woman, but she doesn’t dare walk over past Jytte. Something in the situation makes her seize up so completely that she splits in two. She’s someone who knows that the right thing would be to act like a grown-up, but she’s also someone who would not for all the tea in China want to be confronted with her own treachery. It must have been a shock for Jytte when Folke told her that Sonja was somebody other than she’d feigned in the car. If she was feigning. Jytte did force Sonja into her world and presume she was part of it. It was as if she’d been hauled into Jytte’s changing stall at the swimming pool, and there Jytte had shed all her clothes, peeling off her maxi panties while she spewed bile upon the planet’s drivers. She involved Sonja in her family, and she revealed that she colored her ends.

  Jytte had no doubt thought that, with all that intimate knowledge, Sonja couldn’t possibly take flight. She’d been initiated, after all. And yet Sonja managed to squeeze her way out of the stall, and now Jytte’s standing over there, belching smoke.

  Gingerly, Sonja withdraws into a doorway. The doorway belongs to the local chess club, which is apparently open only during evening hours. When Sonja went to theory with Folke, she often glimpsed the chess players steaming up the worn-out windows. They were all men, and a number of them were decidedly tall. While she stood and fumbled with her bike lock, they’d emerge now and then to smoke in the twilight. Then they’d stand there, tall and thin on top, and discuss castling. There was something safe about them, Sonja felt. Something enclosing, benign, almost confidence-inspiring, but now it’s morning. The premises appear deserted and Sonja’s hidden herself in the doorway. Sooner or later Jytte’s student will arrive, and when that happens the coast will be clear.

  It’s really a form of fear, she thinks. It’s irrational in any case. I’ve purchased an item in Folke’s shop. And Jytte’s a grown person; an educator, kind of. It’s not right for me to be scared of her feelings.

  She cautiously pokes her head out of the doorway. On the far right-hand side of the scene she can now see Folke. He’s placed himself on the steps over there. Folke and Jytte are talking together as if nothing had happened, and then a door opens behind Sonja.

  “Excuse me, if I may?”

  A man is standing in the stairwell, wanting to go out onto the street. A tall man. He looks like one of the chess players, skinny as a snake, but this fellow has a stroller with him. In the stroller, a toddler sits and sulks. The child doesn’t want to go outside, and definitely doesn’t want to go with him.

  “Sure, of course,” says Sonja, stepping quickly to the side.

  The stroller charges over the doorsill. The chess player’s irritated with the child, the child with the chess player. The child’s acting haughty in the stroller, and the chess player tackles the front steps a bit too roughly. Then the child drops its teddy bear.

  “I’ll get it,” says Sonja.

  She bends quickly for the bear and instantly it’s there: the positional vertigo.

  It’s an acute attack. It’s the sort that makes her eyes centrifuge. Someplace in Sonja’s head, a darkness descends and she has to grab for the chess player. She gets ahold of his elbow, latching on to it, otherwise out of control. Her body catapults and her mind swims, but in the middle of feeling she’s lost her footing she manages to apologize.

  “I’m just a little bit dizzy,” she says.

  “Don’t you want to sit down?” the chess player asks.

  “Yes, please,” says Sonja, but it’s a major attack.

  She has a hard time getting herself seated without sailing into the brickwork. The chess player lets go of the stroller, Sonja grabs for his leg and then clings to him, and he clings to her, and she’s about to cry. It arrives swiftly and unexpectedly. This sensation of the chess player’s jeans and behind them, the hard shinbone, the skin.

  “Oh man,” he says.

  The stroller with the angry toddler starts rolling down the sidewalk, but the chess player’s a modern man and he grabs the angry
toddler with one hand while the other keeps its grip on Sonja. Somewhere in the distance, Jytte’s grinding out her cigarette, but Sonja doesn’t witness it. Her eyes are closed and confounded.

  “Can you sit up now?”

  “Yes,” she says, leaning her head against the door behind her. “There, I just have to hold my head still for a bit.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to call somebody?” asks the chess player, who’s evidently just a dad from the building.

  Sonja’s worlds slowly lay themselves over each other. Now she can see the man who’s helped her. He’s got discomfort painted on his face, a furious child in his stroller, and a woman around his ankle. Sonja releases him and the child screams. It doesn’t want to, it wants to get out and down and in again. It has a strong will to not want to do anything, this child. Its mother is doubtless up in their apartment, and perhaps she’s braided her hair and is sitting down with a cup of coffee. Or perhaps she’s standing up there and looking out the window, at Sonja, at the sky, at the pigeons rising up in great flurries.

  “Shouldn’t I just call someone?”

  The chess player has gotten his phone out.

  “No, I just have to sit for a little while,” says Sonja. “It’s a condition called BPPV.”

  That’s too many letters for the chess player.

  “Otolithic vertigo,” she tries.

  Still too many letters.

  “A family disorder.”

  The child, a boy Sonja can see now, has started to disintegrate. Tears leak out of every opening in his face, and he won’t sit down.

  “You probably need to get a raisin bun for him there,” she says, pointing.

  “If you don’t think I should call anyone …”

  “You shouldn’t, you should just take care of him,” she says, for whom should he call?

  Ellen’s hovering up in the air, Molly’s drawing giraffes in her clinic, Kate isn’t answering the phone and Mom and Dad are old. There’s no one to ride to the rescue, and she’s also feeling better now. Her long legs clatter onto the sidewalk. Her hands are resting in her lap, and she listens to the stroller squeaking down the street with the chess player’s footfalls right behind.