You Disappear

by Christian Jungersen

  They shouldn’t be able to see me anymore from the house; I check. What should I tell them when I return? I’ll find something—and otherwise screw it.

  “What’s going on there?” Bernard asks. “Should I not have called?”

  “Yes. Yes. You should have called. Nothing’s going on. I went outside.”

  We fall silent.

  “But I was just so … at the meeting,” I say. “After all, we didn’t do anything.”

  “You were good. You’re trying! We’re both trying. That’s something we have in common. And you seemed to me lovelier than ever.”

  There are a thousand things I ought to say. I can find no words.

  Again he says, “Was it wrong of me to call?”

  “Not at all.” I’m still tongue-tied. All I can manage is “Bernard.” It’s a new way for me to say his name. “Bernard.” I’m getting used to saying it like this. From now on, I’ll say it this way often. “Where are you?”

  “In Aumessas.”

  “Yes, but I mean where? What are you looking at right now?”

  “I’ve walked a long way from our house. An hour. It’s the first time down here that I’ve needed to be alone. Up a wooded path on the mountainside. There are chestnut and mulberry trees here, and I’m looking out across a valley.”

  On Thorkild and Vibeke’s street, the steel half-roof over the bus stop has something of the color of the sidewalk pavement, of the sky.

  “I’m looking at a bus stop three houses down the street from my in-laws,” I say. “It looks like rain.”

  We laugh. Something within me is shaking free. The little laugh at almost nothing feels so deep and right. It’s falling into place. It’s all falling into place.

  “Thank you for calling, Bernard. I’m really glad you called. Really, really glad.”

  INTRODUCTION

  In the 60 pages that follow, you will find articles addressing one of the most highly debated questions in metaphysics (which is itself one of the most controversial disciplines in 2,000 years of Western philosophy).

  Almost every major philosopher has expressed an opinion about how much we decide our own actions ourselves. If everything is predetermined by an almighty God or by the laws of nature, how then can the individual be free? Regardless of whether we conceive of our actions as being immutably arranged by a god, by our genes and upbringing, or by the fundamental physical laws governing the atoms we are comprised of, the essential nature of the question remains unaltered.

  Yet the opposition between everything being predetermined and man being master of his own actions is not so simple. Many philosophers do not consider the two ideas to be in conflict at all.

  In 1814, the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a vast intelligence that knew every natural law as well as the precise location of every constituent of the universe, and he wrote that such an intelligence would be able to calculate every event at every juncture in time, past and future.

  This thought experiment has been known ever since as Laplace’s demon, and it encapsulates the problem of free will. For someone to act freely, most people would agree that two conditions must be fulfilled:

  1. The person must have the possibility of acting differently.

  2. The person himself must choose how to act—he cannot merely be the last link in a chain of events that has already been set in motion and that can only occur in one way.

  Even if an individual attempts to wrest himself free from his upbringing and the immediate expression of his genes, the impulse to do so must itself come from somewhere. Nothing arises from nothing, for that would violate the very nature of our universe. Every single choice he makes is made in an interaction among countless influences of varying strength—and nothing more. He is in no sense master of the struggle among these influences, so how can one say that he acts freely? Or that it would be just to punish or reward him for what he chooses to do?

  Most people have an intuitive sense that they act freely and that others do so too. Yet if these same people seriously consider Laplace’s demon and the way the universe is constructed, they normally conclude that it is impossible for us to possess free will. And that it may very well be possible that what we so convincingly experience as our own freedom is in reality an illusion.

  The philosophers on the following pages are some of the most influential in the modern debate on the subject, and they represent a broad spectrum of opinions. The following diagram provides an overview of their positions.

  The individual possesses free will

  Everything is predetermined (Determinism)

  Compatibilism, or Soft Determinism Free will can exist in a deterministic universe

  (Daniel Dennett)

  (Harry Frankfurt)

  Everything is not predetermined (Indeterminism)

  Libertarianism

  Free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, but the universe is not deterministic

  (Robert Kane)

  (Peter van Inwagen)

  The individual does not possess free will

  Everything is predetermined (Determinism)

  Hard Determinism

  Free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, therefore the individual has no free will

  Everything is not predetermined (Indeterminism)

  Hard Incompatibilism1)

  The individual has no free will, regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or not

  (Galen Strawson)

  (Derk Pereboom)

  LIBERTARIANISM

  Within libertarianism, there are two major strands:

  1. Metaphysical libertarianism. The individual possesses a soul independent of the physical universe and its laws of nature. This strand is sometimes bound up with religious belief.

  2. Science-based libertarianism. This strand has found support in the field of atomic physics—specifically in Bohr’s quantum theory of subatomic particles, which states that not everything in the universe is determined. Electrons move randomly and unpredictably. Questions then arise about whether the movement of electrons can have any effect on human thought, and

  * * *

  1. Hard incompatibilists hold that the question of whether the world is deterministic or not has no bearing on the question of free will. In the diagram, this position should therefore cover both of the bottom fields.

  23

  Everything before us. Nothing behind us. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Bernard and I are twenty-one, we’re beautiful: on the street people turn around behind us, the smooth skin on his chest almost without hair, my breasts taut against him. We talk at the same time and so quickly, even folks in their thirties can’t understand us. We both moved from home to the city a few years ago, and at night we leap fences into parks and look each other in the eye, letting the sounds and gaps in our voices rub up against each other till they merge into one.

  And then we sing loud. Really loud! Because everyone at my school’s gone home. And if anyone can hear us anyway from the basement corridor that goes past the teachers’ small break room, with its cot, its large yielding cushions and pyramid poster, they’ll never be able to guess who’s singing and giggling and moaning and making the cot creak.

  For I am the very picture of virtue. Have always been. The door here is locked. And if they can guess anyhow, we don’t care, because life stretches out before us as long as Bernard’s hard-on keeps pounding away inside me. The fall from his nostril to his upper lip, the valley between earlobe and cheek, the piers of his lashes. I grasp his lower back more tightly. Our faces are so close that we’re singing into each other’s mouth:

  Twenty-one years old

  And burning gas on

  Hans Christian Andersen Way

  We put the seat back

  The window down

  The volume up

  Let summer air in

  Just me and him

  Our skin it glistens

  And damn it’s hot

  We float up from the break
room in the basement, we dive down from the cloudless sky toward the school’s squat buildings, we swim naked in Lake Farum surrounded by all our twenty-one-year-old friends. Slender tanned bodies melt into the dark. Pale buttocks catch the light in the blackness and bounce around on the bank, appear and disappear. Like us. We appear and disappear, Thursday, Friday, come and go, Saturday, Sunday, his balls against my inner thighs. Appear and disappear.

  Down the basement corridor and up the school stairway, letting the summer air in. Damn, it’s hot.

  In the parking lot behind my school, I point.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Zipper!”

  He tugs it up and laughs too.

  We don’t give a shit.

  And I just know that Bernard and Niklas will be great together, as soon as Niklas gets over the shock of it. Bernard can get along with anyone. I can see them before me, playing badminton in our new yard, bent over Niklas’s laptop and sharing computer tips, sitting by themselves in the twilight and talking about which photographers mean the most to them.

  And what about Bernard’s boys? Will I be able to get along with them? He’s shown me pictures and e-mails. They’ll still want their sick mother—just like Niklas will still want his sick father. The wrath; the desire to protect. But his boys are grown now. Just like Niklas. I’ll figure something out; we’re canoeing on the Mølle River. We live in Bernard’s house, and Lærke’s at a home where trained caregivers can see to her. She’s thriving there. And my divorce from Frederik is easy; from a legal point of view, I get everything that remains behind—the money, the car, the furniture—since the bank determined exactly what his half was and took it. But I want to be nice; I’ll give him something or other that I don’t have to.

  All the happy plans buzz around in my head night and day. And they’re buzzing there as Bernard and I cut across the parking lot behind the school on our way home from the break room. He gets a text; his alert sound is the sea, the crashing of a wave.

  “Lærke was helping make dinner and knocked the milk over,” he says. “I’ve got to buy some on my way home from the office.”

  He says this with sorrow in his voice, as if only in this instant does he realize what he’s done. If only he’d taken himself in hand and resisted temptation even longer! If only he could last another eight years without enjoying sex, intimacy, and equal give-and-take with a healthy woman. Then everything would be as it should in their little family.

  Eight years! I think again. Eight years with a wife who has multiple handicaps, eight years before he’s had the least little something on the side. And it hasn’t been due to any lack of libido, I now know.

  I want to say something to alleviate his suffering: If you’re doing well, Bernard, it’s better for her. Or something along those lines.

  But I always have the sense that if I say one wrong word about Lærke, it’ll be over. He lights up when things are going better with her—and nothing can make him more unhappy than when she’s having a hard time. He’ll never leave her. And I accept that. It’s what makes him such a remarkable human being. I don’t want to destroy anything; I just want to make their lives better. To give him renewed energy to be an even better man.

  “I know it must be hard for you” is the only thing I say.

  • • •

  Saturday morning, I’m wakened by Frederik bounding up the stairs and shouting, “It’s saved! Saved! It worked!”

  He sits down on the edge of my bed. (We’ve agreed that from now on he’s the one who sleeps on the air mattress, while I sleep in the bed.) He shows me today’s Politiken, with the headline SAXTORPH PRIVATE SCHOOL RESCUED.

  And down in the article: “A group of affluent parents of former students have joined together to present Saxtorph with a large gift. In addition, after intense negotiation, Danske Bank has agreed to slash the school’s debt by several million crowns.”

  “That was my plan! The school’s been saved! I’ve saved Saxtorph!”

  Frederik hasn’t been so happy since his manic period.

  “We’ll have to celebrate,” I say.

  And even as I’m saying it, even as I’m feeling happy on his behalf, on our friends’ behalf, on my own behalf—even as I’m full of all this, I see before me Bernard’s naked body, as if an immense pornographic poster of him were plastered from floor to ceiling on our wall. As if he were plastered on every wall I turn to face.

  “I’ll rustle up something special for breakfast,” I say, thinking about how incredibly happy I feel, and how my joy feels nonetheless strange; about how happy Niklas will be when we wake him, and what I should make for breakfast. And then too about whether I’m now going to be too late for my afternoon assignation with Bernard in the break room, and about Bernard’s body: his ribs, lines, and curves, his hair, his wrinkles. Always and especially his body.

  The things I have in the freezer are few and cheap, but I decide to make American pancakes from an old package of cornmeal mix, and I set out some grapes and a particularly fine cheese I’d reserved for tonight, for the farewell dinner for our house that I invited Helena and Henning to.

  For most of our celebratory breakfast, with a very sleepy Niklas, Frederik’s on the phone with old friends and employees. I can hear how some of them still slam the receiver down when he calls, while others now speak to him for the first time since the embezzlement came to light. They tell him things the paper’s neglected to mention: which employees the new administration has fired to satisfy the bank’s demands for austerity, and which board members are, like Laust and Anja, losing their homes and pensions.

  I still don’t have any sense at all of our own financial future—or even of how long we have a future together at all—so I’ve decided that for now, we’ll rent an apartment in Farum Midtpunkt. It’s a jump straight to the bottom rung on the social ladder in our town, but it’s only temporary, which makes the thought easier to bear. In less than a week, all our things have to be packed up and out of the house.

  Later, an hour before Helena and Henning are supposed to arrive, I’m toiling away in the kitchen while Frederik sits in the living room, talking on the phone again. He knows what time it is, and he can see that the table isn’t set yet, but it doesn’t occur to him to come in and offer to help.

  I wait until fifteen minutes before the guests are due to step into the room and interrupt him. “Come on, it’s high time you get going! The table needs to be set and the wine uncorked.”

  A short time later, Henning’s booming voice and penetrating laugh reach us from all the way out in the street. For years he’s had his own contracting firm. He’s proud of the way he gets along with the tradesmen he hires, and he evidently has a talent for earning pots of money. In any case, he and Helena live in a house twice as large as ours, with a view of the lake to boot. But the house has been for sale now for four months. The financial crisis and the drop in housing prices have meant that Henning’s lost everything he earned in the past decade.

  Frederik pours out the wine, and for once I give him permission to have a glass. It’s the first time since the operation, but today, the day we learn that he’s saved Saxtorph, he deserves it.

  We tell Henning and Helena the fantastic news and touch glasses ceremoniously as we listen to the shots and explosions from upstairs, where Severin, their thirteen-year-old son, is already playing a computer game with Niklas.

  I’d like to take a brief moment to toast and bid farewell to the house we’ve had so many good experiences in, but Frederik interrupts me. He wants to tell us more about the school, about his brilliant rescue plan, about the book on the history of European philosophy that he’s reading. In the beginning, what he says is clever and interesting, but after a while the rest of us lose interest without him registering it.

  The first time I met someone with mild orbitofrontal damage in one of Frederik’s hospital wards, I didn’t realize she was ill. I listened to her attentively, despite a couple of minor angry outbursts and some oddly out-of
-place jokes in her torrent of speech. But then she kept talking. And talking. And talking.

  She wasn’t speaking in any way she hadn’t already spoken during our first minutes together, and yet the mere incessancy of her speech made it obvious that she wasn’t the lively, cheerful, somewhat whacky type I’d first taken her for. She was very ill. Listening to her at length would take the wind from anyone’s sails, and I was obliged to invent some excuse to escape.

  When Frederik and I eat dinner, he pretty much talks the whole time, but now that Henning’s had a couple of glasses, our guest keeps right up with Frederik. Sometimes they talk at the same time, other times Henning forces Frederik to take a breather simply by raising his voice.

  There’s nothing new about seeing Henning like this, and in fact Frederik and I have always had a hard time understanding how Helena can stand being married to him. Every time the four of us are together, he drinks too much and drowns out everyone else at the table.

  When we’re nearly finished with the first round of lamb meatballs and Greek salad, Frederik pours some more red wine, first for us and then for himself.

  I ask, “Are you sure you want more to drink, Frederik?”

  He doesn’t reply, just avoids my gaze and finishes filling his glass.

  The two boys disappear back upstairs to resume their shooting. I had Niklas promise to stay home until Severin has to go to bed, since Severin looks up to him and loves spending time with him so much.

  Such a lot is happening in our lives right now—and not just Frederik’s and mine. Where are Henning and Helena going to move? What’ll Henning do now that he can no longer build and sell houses? I try asking him but have to give up. And Helena tries to engage Frederik in conversation, but she gives up too.

  After listening to the men go on for a little too long, we lean toward each other in order to create our own little tête-à-tête of real talk on real matters. But we have to abandon that too, for when Henning and Frederik notice that they no longer have our undivided attention, they grow even more vociferous, until they’re once more in the center.