You Disappear

by Christian Jungersen

  Helena says, “I’ve thought about this. If I were attacked some night by a man who knocked me over so I couldn’t run away, you’re the woman I’d most want with me when it happened. Because you’d go after him, you wouldn’t bolt. And together we could handle him.”

  I’m so tired, so very tired. Lying on my back in the bed, knowing that I can talk as loudly as I want and Frederik won’t wake up. As soon as he falls asleep, he’s out cold.

  “Does the man have a gun?” I ask.

  “You know, if he’s holding me down on the ground, it really doesn’t matter.”

  “If he has a gun, I’d be an idiot not to run away.”

  “Sure, there’d be a thousand things racing through your head: should you risk your life by staying and fighting these men? But even while you’re thinking these things you’d stay put. For it isn’t your thoughts that decide what you do. It’s your instinct.”

  “Oh, so now there’s more than just one guy?”

  “There are three, and they don’t have a gun, and we take them down.”

  “As long as it ends well.”

  I don’t know where she got the idea of us being attacked some night by three men. Yet she’s right about how in the space of a single moment, everything in your life can turn upside down. You’re sitting in an endless teacher’s meeting yearning for it to end, or finding a blouse to pack in your tennis bag, or hurrying out to the kitchen for some chocolate ice cream while a British detective show is on the tube. The sort of moment that feels utterly dependable—a moment everything can be snatched away. If, say, a blood vessel bursts in your brain.

  I was twelve the first time my world exploded. My parents had taken pains to make their everyday lives indistinguishable from thousands of other young couples’. I was happy enough in the newly built suburb where we lived, outside Fredericia, and they managed to get everyone to think they were happy too—my father with his job as a bank clerk, my mother with her housework and her shifting part-time jobs in company canteens.

  For my father, the high point of each week was Thursday evening, when he played soccer with his friends on a field behind the school. Through his soccer friends he met a bunch of Copenhagen “freaks” who’d just started a commune in a run-down building on Prince Street. And then without warning, one Saturday morning he moved out of our house and into theirs. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened, and neither could my mother.

  Whenever I ran into my father around town, he seemed happy to see me—though not enough to make me think he missed me. He talked about the revolution they all were convinced was about to break out. He talked about oppressed peoples and about traveling to see the world, especially the Third World. One day when I happened to mention to my mother what he’d been saying, she screamed, “Don’t believe him, he’s lying! The only reason he moved in there is to ball hippie chicks!”

  She tried to find a new boyfriend, but they all left her, and I learned to block out her stifling bitterness toward my father, toward the latest man of the month, toward everyone else she knew. Today you’d say she suffered from depression, but nobody said that back then.

  Meanwhile, my father became more fun to talk to. I secretly visited him at the commune, until one day when I showed up unannounced and they told me he’d been arrested in Thailand for smuggling hash.

  Then my mother became obsessed with writing long letters to him in prison, and a year later she traveled over to visit him. When she got back home, she showed me photos of how thin he’d grown and said he shared a cell with two murderers. I wrote to him, and to Danish politicians and journalists too, so that they’d do something to bring him back to Denmark.

  When he finally returned, five years later, he looked like a concentration camp inmate. He received a disability pension on psychological grounds, and when I went by his small cluttered apartment, he often said strange things, especially about the neighbors being after him and wanting to kill him. During my visits he remained stretched out on the couch with the TV on and a foul blanket over his legs. He died before I turned thirty.

  Even though he abandoned our family for the sake of long-haired girls from Copenhagen, I never felt anger toward him—only toward my mother. She’s the one who dumped me into a sobbing swamp of adult problems, a swamp that reeked of biscuits and tea. She still lives in the same small house in Fredericia. We don’t talk on the phone or see each other very much, and I don’t miss her.

  • • •

  Three weeks after Frederik’s fall, and he still hasn’t been operated on. Thorkild and Vibeke have to be at the house while I’m at work because he ends up doing the queerest things.

  In the first days, it seemed natural that he talked only about himself. Who wouldn’t, after such a grave diagnosis? But then he didn’t stop. It was unending, and always with the same energetic, cheerful voice. No modulation in his tone, no resonance in his thoughts or feelings.

  During dinner, I’d have lunged across the table and strangled him if it would have killed just the voice. That voice gave me nightmares. I dreamt that it possessed him, that it resided in the tumor like a little spiny monster that talked and talked. The voice decided everything, and in my dream it got tangled up with a gross tennis coach in too-tight shorts whom I had when I was sixteen, and whom all the girls in the club hated.

  I go on the web every day and every night now to read about the disease, and I’ve been inhaling books on neuropsychology. I have to know everything I can about the situation I find myself in. Do the books say Frederik will survive? Will he become himself again?

  Several doctors who’ve had kids at Saxtorph call to see if they can be of assistance. I ask for their prognoses, but nobody can say. So I listen to their tone when they speak. How long do they pause before answering? How often do they clear their throats? I read everything as an omen.

  A lot of other people call too, offering help and support. They say, Normally, I wouldn’t ring up the headmaster of my child’s school, but it’s different with Frederik. In the end, Laust has to send an e-mail to “Friends of Saxtorph”: please do not call or bring any more gifts.

  In the evenings it’s me who talks and talks, and just like Frederik it’s always about the same thing, only my audience isn’t him. I call my friends and describe the mountains in Majorca and how dangerously he drove; the three lovely years we had; what the doctors said today. And Niklas, who’s out with his friends every night. My rasping monotone lament becomes an evil twin of the voice that’s laid siege to our house.

  Laust doesn’t visit us anymore, since Frederik is still furious with him. But he listens to me over the phone, asking how he can best support us, and he never whines about how the rest of the administration has to work overtime. And he often calls with questions about the school, just like before Frederik got sick, only now it’s me he rings up. In the beginning, we worked out complicated strategies to worm the answers out of Frederik, but we quickly discovered that it wasn’t necessary.

  I can just ask, without prelude, “Frederik, the last letters from the lessee of the school cafeteria are missing from the file with the other letters. Where might they be?”

  He’s unable to imagine that other people’s words are the calculated product of thoughts and feelings, so he doesn’t worry about motives, he just answers. “They’re in a folder beneath the file with our cleaning agreements. I’m planning to use them when I draw up a new contract with the cleaning firm.”

  “Aha, so that’s where they are. And something else I was wondering: What did you decide at the meeting you had in September with Fatima from the after-school club?”

  On top of everything else, there are all the public offices to get through to on the telephone, the government forms and insurance forms to fill out, and the confusing bills that Frederik used to pay. By the time I lie down it’s late. Now I have to try to relax and go to sleep with a man who snores differently, smells different, and twitches in his sleep in an unfamiliar fashion. I may as well be sharing our quee
n-size bed with some burglar.

  Will we ever be able to make love again? When he lies there pestering me for sex, I turn my back on him, squeeze my thick pillow between my breasts, and use my legs to push him away.

  And then one night I decide he’s got a point. We’re still man and wife, after all. Why keep insisting that he stay on his half of the bed? We both want the same thing, and he’s been a stranger now for five weeks.

  Besides, night after night when I’m half asleep under the comforter, I’ve been entertaining a fantasy about making him well again. I know it’ll never happen, but I’m seized by the notion of it all being some misunderstanding. Something in me says that there’s no tumor, that he’ll return to normal if I just let him have sex with me. That the last five weeks have been nothing more than a test of my love for him, and in a short while he’ll become himself again if I only let him.

  So one night I consent, and seconds later he’s on top of me, frenetically trying to grind away. There’s nothing erotic or loving about it; for him I’m not really a person, that’s abominably clear. Some creature is pawing at me and attempting to mount me, some creature without age or face, eyes or voice.

  I try to instruct him in what I like, in what we used to do. He hears me but keeps going, heedless. His rough snorting in my ear, his clumsy hands; a dog that only wants to hump. His cock bangs against me without him seeming to realize that I’m straining now to keep him out. The unfamiliar sheen of sweat on his face.

  I writhe, trying to shove him away, but his response is to pin me to the mattress. Even the smile on his face is someone else’s.

  “Stop it! Stop!”

  But he won’t.

  “Stop, Frederik! God damn it, Frederik, stop!”

  He just keeps at it, and in the end I have no choice. I butt him with my head.

  “Ow! You fucking sow!” He grabs his nose and raises himself up a little. He howls as I heave him off of me and run out to our bathroom, where I lock the door and lift the door handle, since the lock alone probably won’t hold.

  Two seconds later, he’s rattling the door in the jamb, hammering away on it, and shouting, “Come out, you whore! Come on, you know you want it. I’m going to fucking pound you!”

  I whisper through the door that he mustn’t wake Niklas. But he doesn’t care.

  “You bitch, time for some prick!”

  There’s a knock on the bedroom door.

  “What’s happening in there? What’s going on?” Niklas’s voice is high and shrill, like it used to be a few years ago.

  “Mind your own business!” Frederik yells. “Go to your room! I order you, go to your room!”

  I shout through the bathroom door and the bedroom door to where he’s standing in the hallway. “It’s okay, Niklas, it’s no big deal.”

  He doesn’t hear me. “Where’s Mom?”

  “I’m in here, Niklas! Can you hear me? I’m in our bathroom!”

  “Stick it up your ass, you little shit!”

  Niklas’s voice sounds panicked now. “Where’s Mom, I want to see her!”

  I unlock the door and rush into the bedroom. Frederik is naked, standing with his back propped against the door to the hallway. The door booms and shudders each time Niklas throws himself against it. Frederik’s erection hasn’t subsided. In the dark it looks bigger than when he was healthy.

  I come closer.

  “Niklas, it’s okay. I’m here. There’s nothing the matter.”

  The booming ceases. He must be standing still on the other side of the door. His voice becomes gentle. “I want to see that you’re there.”

  “Let me come out to you,” I say, looking for something to throw over myself.

  Frederik’s no longer leaning against the door. The tension eases for a moment, then the door flies open with a bang and Niklas tumbles past us.

  The light from the doorway falls on me standing there, just as naked as Frederik. Niklas has a wild look in his eyes and his hair is all mussed. He’s ready to fight. And then he crumples to the floor.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize.” I glance over at Frederik’s cock sticking up, as undaunted and brown-violet as ever. I don’t understand why it doesn’t droop. He doesn’t seem self-conscious in the least, though Niklas tries to look away. I hurry to the bed for a comforter to cover myself with.

  Niklas is crying with the same irregular rhythm as when he was five years old, the same deep wail broken by a sobbing whimper. “Sorry … sorry … sorry.”

  I throw another comforter over to Frederik to wrap himself in. “No need to be sorry about anything, Niklas. It was sweet of you to want to make sure I was okay.”

  I crouch down on the floor next to my son and feel a desire to hold him, to hug him, but he pushes me away.

  I get up.

  “Go back to your room,” I say. “I’ll come in to you in a little bit.”

  I gather some clothes together, give Frederik one of the motor-sport magazines Thorkild bought for him, and hurry to the bathroom to get dressed. When I come back out, Niklas is gone, and Frederik’s immersed in the magazine.

  I disappear into Niklas’s room. He’s sitting up in his bed, wrapped in his comforter. I slide his desk chair over to the side of the bed and sit down. I know I should remain calm—inhumanly calm, given the situation. His face is stiff, as if all the tiny muscles under his skin are paralyzed, and when he brushes a lock of hair off his forehead, he does so slowly and with physical effort, as if he suffers from some neurological disorder that makes him incapable of normal movement.

  I assure him that nothing’s happened to me, and that his father didn’t hit me. Then I repeat it. And repeat it again. The whole time in an artificially calm voice.

  And at some point, I feel my false calm start to seep in and become genuine. There’s also something about talking to a healthy human being. The difference is so vast.

  “Did Dad hit you that other time too?” he asks at last, and I know he means the time I kicked Frederik out.

  “Your father’s never hit me,” I say.

  It’s warm in his room. Black-and-white posters printed from his own photos hang on the walls, along with a single colored poster from a techno party in Copenhagen. The room smells of teenage boy, and his clothes lie on the floor in a heap that resembles a fat little troll.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he says.

  “Yes, after the operation he’ll become normal again.”

  “Three weeks max.”

  “Three weeks max.”

  We both stare into space, saying nothing. A weak light from a streetlamp outside casts a pattern on his cheek and a car drives past; we listen to the sound slowly die away.

  It’s become necessary for us to keep an eye on Frederik’s whereabouts at night. Three days ago, I discovered him in our living room at four thirty in the morning, just a few clicks away from e-mailing an apoplectic op-ed to our daily paper, Politiken, about a bunch of headmasters from other private schools who he said were incompetent and should be fired. There’s so much he could destroy—for himself, for us all. Someone has to sleep beside him, ready to wake up if he does.

  “I can’t sleep in there tonight,” I say.

  Niklas begins to tremble almost imperceptibly. “I can’t either.”

  “No, no! Of course not, you’re not going to!”

  His shaking becomes more pronounced. “But I want to. You should sleep in here. In here. It should be me who …”

  He buries his head in the comforter over his knees. He’s still shaking.

  “No, Niklas. You’re definitely not sleeping in there. I will. No. No. I’ll put the air mattress outside the door to the room.”

  Now we can hear Frederik through the wall, weeping loudly. Someone ought to be there with him. Someone ought to comfort him.

  “Niklas, you have to sleep in here, like you always do. Then I’ll lie down on the sofa in the living room … No, I’ll sleep outside his door … No.”

 
In the end, Niklas says it’s okay if I sleep on the air mattress on his floor. I have to work tomorrow, and I know I won’t get a wink of sleep if I have to lie down alone somewhere in the house.

  Although the air mattress is on Niklas’s shelf, all the comforters and linen are in our bedroom closet. But I don’t want to go in there, so I fetch a blanket from down in the living room.

  As I make up the mattress on the floor beside Niklas’s bed, I can’t help but wonder who I’m doing all this for. It’s obvious that Frederik doesn’t care about me now—despite being completely dependent on his parents and me around the clock, to protect him from himself. But his callousness since the seizure is due to the disease. What about back when he was himself?

  And then I let myself be tormented again by a memory that’s been plaguing me the last five weeks. In Majorca, just before Frederik fell, he was standing atop the stone wall, swinging his arms, he was shouting, and then he started to cry at the mere thought of Niklas—his paternal love so great that his weak brain could no longer hold it in.

  But toward me, it wasn’t love that burst forth.

  The black mountainsides, the brush we’d driven past, the scent of lemon. “You piece of shit, Mia! You big fat piece of shit!”

  He began thrashing about with his arms even more wildly. And then he fell.

  “Frederik! Frederik!”

  “Dad!”

  A piece of shit. Just like his love for Niklas, was that something he’d felt for a long time—but had had enough brainpower to hide till then?

  The slope where he fell. The tree that saved his life.

  • • •

  At last. A month and a half after Frederik’s seizure, the doctors finally gauge that it’s time to operate, and then it goes quickly. They schedule the surgery for two days later.

  The evening before the operation, I go to the kitchen. Niklas has been out with friends all day, as usual, and I pour myself a generous tumbler of whiskey.

  I haven’t raised the glass yet when I hear his voice behind me. “Please don’t.”

  I turn around. Niklas is standing in front of the broom closet.