Falling Sideways

  He would stay awake. He would savor this little cave of time, this hideaway. It could as well have been eternity from this end of it. A ninety-minute eternity of ease. But only if he stayed awake.

  Then his hand was moving downward, and he thought about the new au pair, Jytte. Her smile. The dimple in her right cheek. So pretty. But he didn’t want to think about her that way. Then he remembered the magazines he had found the Sunday before. His parents had been at the dining table over a late Sunday breakfast, sunlight slanting in the leaded windows from the garden to mix with the light of the PH lamp over the maroon Piet Hein table, laden with fruit and cereal and bread and cheese, the teapot, pitchers of juice of every color, the heap of newspapers they went through for hours, every one of them except the tabloids, leaning back in their maroon Arne Jacobsen chairs. Twins on the floor on their stomachs, chins propped on palms, leafing through their Barbie comics, studying the pictures, making up stories to fit them.

  “Adam, Adam, will you read to us!”

  “No.”

  “Is that a way to talk to your sisters, son?” his father said without looking up from Berlingske.

  “Sorry, no, I can’t, I’m going out.”

  His mother looked up with a smile. He could see into the split of her robe, the swell of her breasts, and turned his eyes away. He zipped his jacket.

  “Where are you off to, honey?” she asked.

  “Going to church.”

  Only then did his father look up. He said nothing, but the expression on his face was clearly skeptical for anyone who knew his father’s face. Doesn’t believe me. What right do you have to doubt me? It worried them. He could see that. Well, it worried her. His father was only annoyed by it. They went to church once a year. Christmas Eve. Apart from the occasional requisite baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral. Adam could see the question in her smile, her searching blue eyes: What have we done wrong? But what she said was, “That’s really nice, honey.”

  “Sunday’s family day,” his father said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  The cocking of his father’s head said he didn’t like the tone, so Adam repeated the words more gently. “Yeah, yeah, Dad, I’ll be back later this afternoon.”

  “Long service?”

  Adam was at the door now, not a meter from freedom. “Take a walk afterwards. Maybe see a film.”

  “Sit in the dark on a day like this?”

  “Oh, let him, Martin.”

  His father was smiling, but his eyes were steady on his son. “What film?”

  “I dunno.” Doorknob in his palm. “See what’s on at the Palace, maybe.” The door open to the cool sunny air. “See you later.”

  “Bye-bye, Adam!” the girls chimed, and he was out the door.

  He walked. Hands in the slash pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched, head down, scuffing through the yellow leaves drifted across the pavement, heaped in the gutters. Down through Hellerup, and he cut across the intersecting pavement of the old age home, sheltered housing. Ancient faces of people bundled in wheelchairs on tiny balconies outside their tiny apartments, staring out wordlessly at him, joyless, blank as he felt. Thinking what? Seeing what? As a seventeen-year-old kid shuffled past in the chilly sunlight? Did you have a good life, you sad old coots?

  I hate this, he thought.

  He caught the city train from Hellerup and got off on the platform at Østerport, East Port, climbed the stairway up into the station house, and went into the DSB railway station kiosk. He slipped a copy of the morning tabloid Ekstra Bladet, bare-breasted woman in one corner of the front page, from the newspaper rack and folded it face in, plopped it on the cash desk. A dark-eyed young woman, pretty, ran the bar code across the scanner—it took several swipes before it registered, and she smirked at him. “Seventeen crowns.”

  Blushing, he paid and hurried out the swing door, double-folding the tabloid beneath his arm, and waited outside the locked post office for the Oslo Plads light to change, crossed, and turned right down the street that ran parallel with the train tracks, then left into a little green square with a large sculpture of a naked woman on horseback, leaning back sensuously, sunlight glittering on her bronze breasts, head flung back and one arm raised. He paused to study the line of her body, the fork of her thighs on the horse’s back, then turned away, followed streets of apartment buildings occupied by people he did not know. He thought of the Dan Turèll poem they had read in school: “Behind every single window people live.” Who? Families. Singles. Couples. People arguing, talking, watching TV, reading newspapers, and eating morning bread with pots of coffee. People fucking in a bed. Jesus, God, he wished he could be in a bed with a woman naked, kissing her breasts, her cunt, fucking her. The bronze woman’s cunt right on the horse’s back, riding, riding … He wished he lived in one of these apartments. He wished he could live alone. Be himself, alone, in an apartment where no one was always watching him. Asking questions. Expecting something from him. Disappointed.

  He shuffled past the Russian embassy, turned in through Garnisons Churchyard, and threaded along the paths between gravestones marking where people whose lives were finished lay rotting in boxes in the earth. He envied them. Free forever. Forever.

  Past the rear wall of the American embassy and past the backs of some other old buildings he hardly bothered to look at or think about, dark stone, old dusty places, and he was out on the street again, passing in front of an apron of café tables where a few people in jackets, some with blankets on their knees, huddled in the chill sunlight over steaming cups of cappuccino, gleaming glasses of draft beer. Up along the end of the street were lakes where people strolled with children, baby carriages, fed the swans and ducks, couples with arms around each other. Ahead of him on the boulevard, a couple walked lazily, arms slung across each other’s shoulders. The woman’s palm drifted down to the man’s ass and squeezed it. Adam slowed his pace to watch, felt himself get stiff, thought, Oh no! and hunched, speeding up to get past them, away.

  Beyond the three-cornered square of Trianglen, he turned right, down a street shabbier than any in his own neighborhood in Charlottenlund. Big deal. He would rather live here. In an apartment over a shop, over a bar. Alone. With a girl who would let him fuck her and put his face between her hot, cool thighs.

  Oh no!

  He hunched, sped up again, crossed, turned a corner at random. Three dark, foreign kids were coming toward him, talking loud. One of them stared hard at Adam. He crossed the street and turned again, passed a shabby church, turned again, saw a sign that said, HOLSTEINSGADE, along a narrow street lined on either side with shabby apartment buildings, a short stout sloppy man in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. He saw a bench between two young trees and thought he might sit down and look at his newspaper, glanced to see if the man in the doorway was watching him, but then something on the bench caught his eye, a glossy smear of light, a magazine.

  He had a feeling. He knew what it was. He wanted it. But he kept walking, turned the slanted corner, and stopped, breathing heavily, back to a brick wall. He hesitated. Why was it there? What was it? He knew what it was.

  Doubling back, he scanned the street from the corner of his eye. The man in the doorway flipped away his cigarette and went inside. Adam came to the bench and grabbed the magazines—there were two of them—folded them into his newspaper, and kept walking. He turned at the next street onto an empty sidewalk, hastily unzipped his jacket, stuffed the magazines down the front of his pants, and zipped his jacket again. On the corner, he pitched the unread tabloid into a refuse basket and headed toward the city train.

  At Østerport Station, in the men’s room, in a locked toilet cubicle, he sat with his pants around his ankles and studied the magazines hastily. The one was Rapport, filled with glossy color pictures of naked women. You could see everything, their cunts and everything. There were also stories, articles he did not have time to read but scanned quickly, a lump in his throat, blood beating in his ears. The other wa
s something called The Devil’s Scrapbook and contained nothing but pictures, no text. Pictures of things that seemed to see into the corners and shadows of his own mind. He stopped turning pages and stared at one picture, a woman with a teasing, mocking smile and eyes that seemed to stare directly from the page into his own eyes and to know him. I know who you are, her eyes said. I know what you want. I know you and all your secrets.

  The men’s room door opened. Through the space beneath the cubicle he saw sloppy black shoes pass to the urinals. He held his breath, heard the sound of a zipper. With trembling hands, he flushed the toilet to cover the sound as he stuffed the magazines behind the bowl, stood and raised his pants, and flushed again, let himself out. The sinks were parallel to the urinals, and from the corner of his eye, he saw a man standing there. Was it that same man from the doorway? The man stood back from the urinal, and Adam could see his penis. He was shaking it. He sighed loudly. Then he looked at Adam and asked, “What’s your name?”

  Adam hurried out the door, jogged down the stairway to the platform, and hurried to the far end. Were there footsteps behind him? He didn’t dare look. The train was just sliding into the station. Adam opened the door and stepped in, sat quickly in a corner seat with his back to the car, hunched low, staring at the dirt and paper scraps on the floor.

  Now, in his bed, savoring his ninety minutes, he cursed himself for having discarded those magazines. All of these things had been discussed in school, in sex ed, but nothing of what he felt, nothing of these images, their power, could surface there. There, it was jeering and jokes and feigned disinterest and vague, embarrassed teachers. What he wanted was secret, had to be secret. That magazine had been a treasure. He would never have another like it. He didn’t dare to buy one, to risk revealing his most private thoughts and dreams to the person at the cash register.

  He took hold of himself now beneath the blanket, and in the current of pleasure that coursed through his skin, his blood, an intense joy enveloped him. In the dark behind his eyelids, he saw that woman’s smile, those knowing eyes, and felt the smile opening across his face, in the pit of his chest, his belly, up!

  And then he slumped, wiped his hand on the sheet, disgusted with himself.

  That’s all it was. Those few moments. Then the gloom. Disgust. Here in his bed. In this room. This cage. As his time alone, his little eternity, evaporated. He checked his watch on the night table. Seven. Half an hour left. At best.

  He threw back the covers and rose, went to his computer to check his e-mail. There they were again: Virgin pussies first-time sex. Tiny girls huge cocks. Hot young pussy girls. Horny ebony teens waiting for you. Dirty sluts on film. Add inches to your cock now. Girls giving head to strangers. I need to feel a huge cock. Hi, watch me suck cum out of his cock. Produce stronger rock hard erection. Cum-covered girls. Nasty cum sluts. We like it up the butt. Doctor-approved instrument enlarges your penis. Need a stool softener? Adam K: Want a big penis?

  They even had his name! One by one he deleted them, then deleted his delete box. He was convinced that the reason he received this porn spam was that one day he had discovered there were sites on the Web that contained all manner of interesting things and he spent several hours with them. Then, by a fluke, he accidentally hit some combination of keys whose function he did not understand, and a list of the sites he had visited appeared on the screen. They were recorded there. He had left fingerprints. Anyone—his father, his mother—could log on and see where he had been. They shared the same server. They could even log on to his e-mail by switching IT identities. So he had the Sisyphus task each morning before school and evening before bed of deleting and then deleting the deletes. He didn’t dare open any of the mails for fear of what kind of trail that might leave.

  All deletes completed, he sat slump-shouldered before the glowing screen in the still dark room. He felt weary again. The crumpled bedclothes drew him. He crawled back in beneath them, found himself thinking about those magazines again, about the tabloid he had discarded without even reading the pages he had bought it for. The classifieds. All those women offering to sell what he wanted. Some of them even showed addresses. He had seen one with a Holsteingade address: I got whatever you want, baby, and I know what you want.

  He started thinking about Holstein Street then, about the bench, about the man smoking in the doorway and the man in the train station men’s room. Was it the same person? Did he see him take the magazines, watch from behind the windows of that door, follow him? Did he leave those magazines there? Was it a trap? Did he follow him afterward? Could he have followed him all the way home? Was he watching the house?

  He turned onto his belly, buried his face in the pillow. Was he going crazy? He remembered then last night in the dark as he lay waiting for sleep he had suddenly felt there was someone in the room with him. Someone standing with his face just in front of him. He thought that all he had to do to dispel the fear was to open his eyes and see that no one was there, but he couldn’t. He didn’t dare. If he opened his eyes and a face was there, peering into his, he feared his heart would explode. He would die. Of fear. Shock. Who could it be? Who did he fear could be there, staring at him? That man? What’s your name? Standing back from the urinal. Shaking his penis. Fat.

  Then he got it into his head that there were snakes under his bed and that one had coiled and risen over the edge and was staring at him with a red glowing eye but would hurt him only if he opened his eyes to look. He knew it was nonsense, but he was too frightened to open his eyes and end it. What if it didn’t end? What if someone really was there, staring at him? That man. Forcing his penis. Into his mouth. Adam moaned. He was stiff and ashamed of his stiffness. What did it mean? Am I gay?

  There was a tap at the door. His mother. He recognized the way she tapped. With the tips of all her fingers, drumming lightly at the wood.

  “Adam!” she called gently. “Honey? Time to get up.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “What’s wrong, honey? Can I come in?”

  “No! Don’t. I’ve got a stomachache. I couldn’t sleep all night.”

  “Shall I call the doctor?”

  “No. I just have to sleep a little more. I’ll get up later.”

  “You’ll miss a class.”

  “The first two classes are canceled.”

  Silence. Then: “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, of course I’m sure!”

  “Well … Okay, then, I’ll ask Jytte to wake you at nine, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Oh, Adam, honey, would you do me a big favor today and make copies of the house keys for Jytte?”

  He groaned.

  “It’s important, honey, she needs to have them, and I don’t have time. I’ll lend her mine for today, but she’ll need her own. I’ll leave a note so you remember. And a hundred crowns. You can keep the change, okay? Buy yourself a hamburger and a Coke.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Don’t forget now, honey, okay?”

  “I said yeah!”

  Then peace at last. Another ninety minutes! He closed his eyes and felt the ease again, a little hideaway of time, eternity, drawing him down toward the place of peace. There were dreams this time, good dreams, though he didn’t really experience them, only as some sense of well-being, warmth, so when the knock on the door came, it seemed part of that distant warmth and goodness, and he woke smiling. Until he opened his eyes and saw his room, daylight blurred around the edges of his curtains and the gloomy air pressing down all around him. Missed classes. He’d already missed so many. His average had already fallen to a B. And that man in the men’s room. Shaking it at the urinal. Then he remembered the dream. It was about Jytte. She looked into his face and said, You’re an old pair in a soft stool. She was naked, smiling—that dimple—and she was holding a condom that was full of come, which she raised up above her mouth as though she were going to swallow the whole thing, smiling. Don’t you eat the condoms over here? she said, and he woke, feeling g
ood. Why would that make him feel good? Was he gay?

  Another knock. “Adam?” Again. “Good morning, Adam! You awake?”

  Was he gay?

  The door opened slowly and Jytte’s pretty face peered in. That smile. Dimple. The room filled with her light. Adam blinked.

  “So sleepy,” she said, smiling. She wore a long-sleeved turquoise T-shirt that clung to her breasts and followed the trim line of her shoulders and chest and waist. Her nipples were clearly outlined against the green blue cotton. His penis stiffened.

  “Are you awake now, sleepy-John?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She crouched threateningly, fingers curled into claws, smiling. “You want me to tickle you awake?”

  “No!”

  His response was angrier than he’d meant it to be, and he was disappointed to see her drop the game at once. She moved closer, and he saw her eyes look at the place in the blanket that had lifted. Could she see? He turned on his side and feared that had only given him away all the more. Her smile was owlish. She seemed about to speak when there was a crash down the hall and one of the twins hollered, “You stole my phone!”

  “Did not!”

  “Did so!”

  There was the sound of thumping footsteps followed by thumping footsteps in pursuit and a scream of terror, and Jytte was out the door with a flash of her butt and long legs in tight beige jeans.

  Adam could hear her out in the hall reasoning gently with the twins while he squeezed his stiff prick in agony and began to pump it rapidly. Come back come back come back and see see see see see!

  She looked in briefly—“There’s coffee downstairs”—and was gone again, and it seemed to him her blue Jutlandic eyes had taken it all in at a glance, surveyed and registered his hopeless emptiness. How he wished he could tell her how he felt. But he didn’t really know how he felt. I love her. God, I love her. But he didn’t trust her, certain things. He loved her dimple. What could you do with a dimple? He could just look at her dimpled face for hours, just look. She was almost a year younger than him, but she seemed older, more sure of herself, her blue gaze so steady and direct when they spoke, and her energetic politeness, her warm eyes and smile, her readiness to laugh and joke. Did she know what she did to him? What would she think if she knew? Once in a while, when she laughed, she opened her mouth wide, and the look on her face, the clumsily rhythmic rise and fall of the laughter, seemed to reveal a profound stupidity concealed behind the lovely country-girl mask of her face. Her body!