You Disappear

by Christian Jungersen

  I’ve heard him deliver this little lecture on good sound before, but his voice sounds so sensible now. Bernard brings out his most coherent and healthy side, talking to him as if they’re equals. And Bernard apparently knows a great deal about speakers too.

  “Have you considered building ribbon speakers or electrostats instead?” he asks.

  “Yes! I certainly have!” Frederik isn’t so well that he can control the urge to raise his voice in excitement when posed a concrete technical question. “It’s a difficult decision, and it may be that I’ll come to regret mine. But there have been a lot of advances in the field of dynamic drivers during the past ten years …”

  Then they’re out the door and heading down the stairs again. I can hear from their footsteps that Niklas is with them. This is the kind of male conversation I’d like to expose him to. Men formulating themselves cogently. He shouldn’t be soaking up the side of his father that Henning brings out.

  I drop the kitchen, though it’s far from finished, and go into the living room. Here’s where the men have set most of the things they’ve hauled up, but they haven’t put them where I think they should go. As I place a small bowl holding ballpoints, loose change, and other pocket detritus in a cabinet, I find a wad of thin white paper that looks as if it’s gone through the wash. I unfold it. It’s a supermarket receipt, with all my usual purchases—plus a tray of sushi and some filled chocolates.

  It’d take so little. I could talk my way out of having bought some sushi that Frederik remembered nothing about, but at some point it’ll go south: Niklas or Frederik will answer my phone when it rings, and then I’ll yell at them with terror in my voice to just let it ring. And as soon as they don’t trust me anymore, it’ll all come tumbling down.

  What else is there that could flush us out? Hundreds of things, if you think about it—and that’s exactly what Frederik’s doing, more and more with each day that passes.

  Perhaps more than anything, there’s my mood on a day like today. Why don’t I seem devastated by having to rip my life up by the roots and move here? For the same reason that our seventeen-year-old son isn’t: because I’m somewhere else entirely, so head over heels that it’s only on the outermost surface that I register anything that’s happening.

  So mostly it’s my smile. It’s revealing. It reveals everything if you think about it.

  My smile, which is like Niklas’s, like Bernard’s. The only one who isn’t in love is Frederik—and he’s clueless.

  • • •

  In someone else’s house, the party is over.

  It’s three thirty a.m., and the last exhausted guests hang about the empty rooms, unable to move, ghosts who can find neither rest nor life. Light sifts slowly through the windows and exposes the dust where people once danced, the empty spaces where furniture stood before being moved out of the way.

  That’s how it looks at twilight in our old rooms on Station Road, though it’s not three thirty in the morning but ten in the evening. Bernard has long since driven off, Niklas has gone over to Emilie’s, and Frederik and I walk around the house and stare at the naked walls and the traces on the wallpaper of where a picture once hung or a bookcase once stood. The light doesn’t sift into the rooms, it recedes. In the trunk of the car are a broom, a vacuum cleaner, and a couple of small items. Our last night here.

  I walk out into the garden, which is about to lose all color to the incipient dark. I take a farewell tour, stopping before each of the plants I’ve nourished, cultivated for years. Will the new owners let the yard sink back to wilderness?

  I start when I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Frederik, who’s followed me outside.

  I say, “There’s no need for you to pretend you understand.”

  “But I do understand.”

  “Haven’t you finally gotten well enough to recognize that both your empathy and your emotions are impaired?”

  “I’m trying to—”

  “Frederik, your brain makes it so that you can’t really be here.”

  “I really am here!”

  “That’s what you say, of course.”

  “I am!”

  “The inability to acknowledge one’s illness, Frederik.”

  “But I am here.”

  “You’re perseverating.”

  And then I watch his face disintegrate. How these crying jags wear me out, how they’re rammed down my throat! Far beyond what any human being could tolerate. In a second he’s going to dissolve into bestial sobs and make me feel even more isolated.

  Quickly, I usher him into the empty living room and close the door behind us. He collapses blubbering on the floor by the wall farthest from the window.

  I have absolutely no desire to hold him; absolutely no desire to comfort him. But I try to stroke his back as best I can, simply because I am, after all, his wife—or in any case, I was married to the man he used to be. I don’t know how to, but I strive to be for him what he can’t be for me.

  The room grows dark. Almost all the lamps are in the new apartment now, but a pair of wall sconces we don’t need are still mounted in the hallway. I go and turn them on, leaving the door ajar so that the living-room floor is lit indirectly.

  “Why don’t you just become Bernard’s girlfriend?” Frederik asks, weeping. “Then the two of you can be happy, and I can just kill myself. Then everyone can be happy.”

  I take a deep breath. Here we go again. I hesitate perhaps a fraction of a second too long. “You mustn’t say such things!”

  “You’re well matched. I can see that. The two of you suit each other remarkably well.”

  “Stop saying that!” It feels weird to say this while at the same time feeling I already need to talk to Bernard again, and planning how to best steal away and call him.

  Later, when Frederik’s crying has abated, he says, “I really understand if you don’t feel you can ever sleep with me again.”

  “Well, let’s just see how—”

  “What I did that night was awful. And then Niklas coming in … I don’t know how I could have. I can remember it, but I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”

  “No, you won’t. I know.”

  “It was terrible. Just like what I did to Saxtorph. That was so awful, wasn’t it.”

  We’ve talked a lot about his embezzlement, but this is the first time we’ve talked about the night I had to lock myself in the bathroom.

  And it’s the first time he says, “We have no future. We don’t, do we, Mia? The things I’ve done. To you in bed. And the money. And soon I’ll probably go to prison. I just want to die.”

  His eyes are huge as he gazes into mine.

  “You’ve got to leave me! I’m dragging you down.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I say.

  “ ‘We’ll talk about it later’!” he shouts. “You say, ‘We’ll talk about it later’! But then you have decided to leave, haven’t you! You’re doing it, you’re getting ready to leave me!”

  “No, no—I’m not!”

  He rolls over on his stomach and hides his face from me. As if he’s only talking to himself, he mutters, “You have to leave me. It’s the only right thing to do. And I can just die.”

  “But I don’t want you to die.”

  “It couldn’t be any worse than this.”

  “Yes it could. You can have a good life. A very good life.”

  While I try to dissuade Frederik from killing himself, a fantasy begins to run through my head about what Vibeke will say when he’s well enough for me to leave him. In the fantasy we argue, and she shouts that I’m a self-obsessed egomaniac; that that’s what I’ve been our entire marriage.

  No doubt Frederik noticed that I said You can have a good life and not We can have a good life. But he acts as if he didn’t, and I tell him again and again that I’ll stay with him, until maybe he can believe there’s a small chance that that’s what’ll happen.

  “You’re right, we should talk about it later,” he says at last.
“Now isn’t a good time. Not tonight when we’re moving. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to apologize.”

  “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, Mia. Sorry!”

  “You couldn’t help it.”

  “No, I couldn’t help it.”

  We lie there in the darkness, in a spot where once there was a rug, and on top of it a floor lamp and a coffee table.

  Many suffer hidden brain damage

  One out of every eight people over 45 has a brain injury without realizing it, according to a Dutch study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. Two thousand healthy subjects took part in the study, in which researchers from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam scanned their brains. The researchers found a surprisingly high number of undetected brain lesions.

  The most common form of lesion was what is known as a brain infarct—dead tissue arising from an insufficient supply of blood to the brain cells. Other abnormalities included aneurysms, minor cerebral hemorrhages, and benign tumors.

  However, the researchers do not recommend that healthy persons be scanned at the present time. The procedure is quite costly, and doctors cannot treat most of the injuries anyway. (MLJ)

  25

  I’m back in our home on Station Road. The colors in the kitchen sparkle like a Christmas tree: the glint of the cabinet handles, the golden stain of the wood shelves, the red and light blue of the plastic bowls. I’m setting the dishes we’ve eaten from back in their places, and the sugar bowl we inherited from Frederik’s grandmother catches my eye, with its chased silver and its blue glass so dark, it’s impossible to see through.

  And then suddenly it’s late evening and Niklas is still up, unloading the dishwasher with Frederik and me. We’ve been putting things away and washing the serving dishes and glassware after a dinner with Laust and Anja and some of the others from Saxtorph. The three of us joking around and enjoying ourselves after the guests have left.

  Once that was something we did often, having our friends over for dinner. It’s been a long time. I have a vague sense of why we don’t do it anymore; I step over to Frederik and embrace him from behind. I hug him longer and harder than I normally would, resting my head against his back and shoulders.

  Niklas looks up at us happily, and it’s obvious that Frederik really enjoys the attention too. He sounds a little shy when he asks, “Now what have I done to deserve this?”

  But I don’t know yet. I only feel the warmth, the joy of the three of us together.

  Frederik’s tipsy and quite silly now, the way he can get after a party. He says, “Did either of you notice I have an extra willy?”

  I lean around him and see a large, oddly shaped bulge in his trousers.

  He says, “I got it when I was out peeing.”

  Then he takes out of his trousers an empty beer bottle that he must have stuffed down there. He laughs happily; he finds this funny.

  We continue taking things out of the dishwasher and putting them away. In the living room, we wipe the tables and set the chairs back in their usual places.

  And in the meantime I begin to weep, for I’m slowly analyzing this dream as I dream it. I’m dreaming that I understand why our dinners and parties are now a thing of the past. Why we can never be together again as a family.

  I dream that I’m drying off glasses the dishwasher didn’t get completely dry, that I don’t utter a word, that the tears just run down my cheeks. At some point Niklas sees me. He asks what the matter is, and I say, “He’s dead, of course! This isn’t real at all! We’re having such a lovely time, but of course he’s dead. In reality he’s no longer here. Tonight he’s just visiting.”

  • • •

  The teachers’ break room at my school was furnished in the ’70s. The walls are still covered in burlap, the cot’s still a captain’s bed, and the poster next to the door even depicts a pyramid. Who in the last twenty-five years would even think of buying a pyramid poster? It’s as if the room was simply forgotten by the administration. But it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by amorous colleagues when the annual Christmas party takes place upstairs, or by the odd teacher who seeks refuge here after a bad class. There are so many downward-spiraling fates bound up with this room, so many teachers who failed to get a grip in the months before they were fired or quit, or who did their best to reconcile themselves to a disability pension on psychological grounds.

  Since Bernard and I are here every day, now that summer vacation’s begun, I brought in a vase yesterday and a bouquet of flowers I picked by the ditches beside the bike paths. Last week I took thumbtacks and hung up some unused postcards of fine photographs. And in the closet I’ve hidden a locked suitcase with linen and a quilt of our own, so we don’t have to lie directly on the old spread.

  Here we lie, naked and still a bit sweaty, Bernard resting his brow against my cheek. And he tells me once again about Lærke.

  I doubted before whether he really understood how serious her brain damage was. But he knows. He’s fully aware how little of her remains.

  During these past months, he’s described the real Lærke as a remarkably charming and generous woman. Every single weekend, she’d take the family on some new adventure. Treasure hunts in the woods that took as their theme the last cartoon the boys had seen; long songs with lyrics of her own invention; forts they built together of old cardboard boxes for the boys’ toy monsters. I have a hard time believing that anyone could be so relentlessly full of fun and passion for family; it must be an idealized memory. Yet what can I say? Perhaps I do the same thing myself in the way I conceive of the Frederik I once knew.

  “I still enjoy being with her,” he says. “It’s difficult to explain exactly why. But she’s still my Lærke.”

  “I understand that,” I say, though it’s not true.

  He lifts his brow from my cheek and rolls over beside me on the narrow foam mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

  “It’s odd how one can find people who make really clever remarks so terribly boring. And yet love to spend time with people who speak only in banalities. So what is boredom anyway?”

  We discuss this. We have the strangest long conversations while lying half on top of each other and eating the pastry and fruit we bought on our way here. And then we look again into each other’s eyes, not talking, or we explore each other’s bodies.

  It’s hard to say which classroom lies directly above the break room, as there are no windows here, and you can only get here through the maze of shelving in the textbook storeroom. But as far as I can tell, we’re lying entangled and sweating right beneath one of the eighth-grade homerooms.

  Ten days after Bernard and Lærke’s accident, Lærke still hadn’t come out of her coma. Bernard sat by her side. The nurse he confided in most told him he should lavish all that attention on their eight-year-old boys instead. They needed every hour he could give them, while for the time being, Lærke wouldn’t notice the difference.

  He knew that the nurse was right, yet he couldn’t keep himself from staring all day long at Lærke’s unmoving face behind the oxygen mask. He held her hand, he stroked her forearm where there weren’t any tubes or tape. And also where there were tubes and tape. He spoke to her, trying to say calming, cheery words.

  Jonathan and Benjamin weren’t with us in the car, he’d say, since she probably wouldn’t be able to remember what happened right before the accident.

  They’re doing well, he’d tell her. Your mother’s taking care of them. You’re in the hospital, sweetheart. We’ve been in a car wreck. We weren’t the ones at fault. He suddenly changed lanes. There was nothing we could do. I’m well—and you will be too. It’ll all work out. We’ll be fine.

  And when she still showed no signs of life, he’d say, Yes, that’s good. You shouldn’t let me wake you. That makes the most sense. Just rest. That’s the best thing you can do.

  But in fact it hadn’t been going well for their eight-year-old twins. The fourth time they visited their mother in the hospital, Jo
nathan screamed so convincingly about stomach pains that the nurses called a doctor in. Jonathan was positive he was going to die, and when the doctor’s examination didn’t calm him or get rid of the pain, Bernard had to take him down to the emergency room, while his father-in-law drove Benjamin home and Winnie stayed with Lærke.

  The consultation in the emergency room didn’t turn anything up either, and when Jonathan continued to yell about his stomach, the older female physician asked Bernard if she could give Jonathan a sedative on top of the painkillers.

  At that, Bernard’s brain seized up. He couldn’t say yes or no or I don’t know; he couldn’t utter a single word. And he wasn’t able to give his son any of the support he needed either. The emergency room staff had to ring up to the neurointensive ward and ask to speak with Winnie. She immediately told them to give Jonathan the sedative, then rushed down to the emergency room, got Bernard and Jonathan into a taxi, and rode home with them.

  There were so many decisions to make about the boys during those long days: Should they return to visit their unconscious mother again? Where should they stay when they weren’t at the hospital? What was the best way to protect them from the desperation that everyone around them was feeling? All decisions that depended on whether Lærke was going to die in the next few hours. Or whether she might wake in the next few hours. And every one of them, a decision that made Bernard miss terribly being able to consider it with Lærke.

  The doctors had told him waking from a coma doesn’t happen like in the movies, from one instant to the next. It’s a sluggish affair, and every single patient must fight their own way back to life.

  “Look forward to it—it’ll be an amazing moment,” said a nurse, who appeared to be completely convinced that things would be looking up for Lærke now.

  Half past five in the morning. Not a sound to be heard on the ward except for the faint hum of machines. The sky outside the tall windows beginning to lighten a pale blue. It was Day Thirteen, and in the last couple of days Lærke had had recurring convulsions while still comatose. Now her right leg and arm went into spasms. Bernard held her hand as it twitched between his hands. He whispered that there was nothing to fear, that he was there to take care of her; that he loved her. For she always looked so terrified when she went into convulsions.