You Disappear

by Christian Jungersen

  “You do have your mother. I haven’t changed.”

  “You have, you’ve turned into someone else too! God damn it, behind the hedge at the tennis club! That’s not my mother. It isn’t! That’s not who she is.”

  “Niklas, I promise you I’ll always be—”

  “You’re gone! Dad’ll be in prison soon! And our house is gone too!”

  It’s impossible to get through to him. “It’s not certain that Dad’ll go to jail.”

  “I’m not that stupid. Of course he’s not going to win this case. I’m not an idiot! Everything’s gone!”

  I get up from the couch and go over to him to give him a hug, though I know he hates them.

  He pushes me away, but I approach him again, and again he pushes me away. Normally I respect the fact that he doesn’t like me embracing him, but not today. When I try a third time, he doesn’t push me away. We stand there quietly in the living room. I wrap both my arms around him, I press myself against him and lean my head in against his shoulder.

  “I’m here, Niklas,” I say. “I’m right here. That’s one thing you can always count on. I will always be your mother.”

  The evening sun no longer reaches our apartment, but it glints off the windows of the next apartment block. Some of the neighbors are eating Saturday dinner on their patios, the clink of glasses and the sound of happy voices blending in with the background thrum of the freeway.

  Somewhere out there is his father.

  I raise my face from Niklas’s shoulder. I have an urge to tousle his hair, but I don’t.

  “Do you want to come with me to look for Dad?” I ask. “I think you’d be a lot better at finding him than I would.”

  “Can’t we let him come back by himself?” Then he thinks about it for a moment, and he says, “Yeah. I’d like to come with.”

  • • •

  We head down toward the freeway first. Up onto the high embankment that’s supposed to shield Farum Midtpunkt from the noise. I lead the way along a narrow path trampled down between high stalks of wild grass, among ripe seedpods and flowers. Now and then we have to duck to pass under a pine branch. There’s so much undergrowth here; so many places Frederik could hide. I’m thinking about what Niklas has been through. The humiliation in front of his friends. How can I ever make it up to him?

  We draw near to the long slender footbridge that crosses the freeway. It seems the most logical place to jump, but there’s no sign of Frederik. Maybe he’s not out here at all. Maybe he’s over at one of his friends’.

  I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “Why didn’t you come down here that night?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you come down here, instead of staying home so that it was me who found you?”

  I turn to him and look at his face, the warm yellow evening sun striking it from the side. I know right away what he’s talking about, but it’s too much for me to process all at once, and I can’t help repeating myself. “What?”

  “That time in the kitchen with the tequila and pills.”

  “But Niklas, there weren’t any pills! I didn’t take any!”

  Silence.

  “I didn’t want to die. As long as you’re still alive, I never want to die.”

  Silence.

  “No matter what happens.”

  Silence.

  “Who told you there were pills?”

  “I don’t know, people just said that. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

  The first time I see his small, wrinkled, blue-red face as he’s placed upon my belly; he has his friends over, in the yard at Station Road, all of them hopping with delight in the inflated kiddie pool; he runs in from the street, crying from a fall on his bike.

  “I could never think of doing that,” I say, grasping him by the shoulders as I look into his eyes. My skinny boy who’s now taller than me. “Never. I could never ever think of doing that, Niklas.”

  And then I watch as it unfolds before me. For the first time since he was thirteen, he presses himself against me. He sobs the way he could when he was a small boy. He’s shaking, and I am too. He hugs me, he hugs the woman who is his mom. For the first time in all too long. My Niklas. My son.

  YOU DISAPPEAR

  When Thorkild and Vibeke come by to pick up Frederik and everything he owns—a stuffed suitcase, four garbage bags of clothing, and three moving boxes, two of them with LPs—they’re polite. They say they understand that it’s not working anymore, and they make an effort to remain cordial.

  But they don’t want any help carrying the things down to the car. And when I notice that Frederik forgot the power cord for his laptop behind the desk and run down with it, Vibeke says thank you with theatrical surprise—as if for the entire course of our marriage, right up to this very moment, I’ve been thinking only of myself.

  As soon as Frederik moves into his parents’ basement, he’s allowed to be online all he wants, and every day he sends me an e-mail. Lots of them describe his dogged efforts to land a job.

  The tests all show that his concentration, empathy, and organizational ability are now above average, and when he declares that he’s well, I no longer contradict him. He’s been cold-calling scores of primary schools to hear if they could use a substitute, but of course no one wants him.

  He runs the risk of never joining the workforce again, but then rescue arrives in the form of Khayyat, from the neighboring staircase here in Midtpunkt. Khayyat gets his cousin to hire Frederik on a trial basis in his small corner shop in Lyngby. Frederik throws himself into it, trying to prove how dependable he is, how he doesn’t have the least trace of ludomania or brain damage anymore. Once he has a year at the shop on his résumé, he wants to apply for jobs in the school system again. Unless of course his case ends badly.

  In some of his e-mails he’s effusively affectionate, in others he’s angry that I want a divorce, and in still others he just tries to understand what happened to us and the marriage we once thought would last the rest of our lives.

  Dear Mia,

  It’s really you who disappeared this past year. Not me. You.

  The Mia I married was warm and loving. She engaged other people; she wanted to be a teacher so she could help at-risk children. She was so full of empathy and thoughtfulness for her friends, her family, and her students.

  But since my operation, you’ve come to regard all of us as if we’re no more than neurochemistry—mere brains in which everything is rigidly determined beforehand.

  Yet brains are flexible! What we experience, what we think and feel, what we read—all these things leave their traces on the brain, traces that can be as hard to alter as if we were born with them.

  That’s what happened to you. My brain’s recovered, so that I am once more myself. But after all you’ve been through, how will you ever become your old self again?

  Here in Lyngby, the leaves are falling down. I walk along the lanes and grieve for the warmhearted wife I watched disappear.

  Much love,

  Frederik

  • • •

  Bernard’s car is so tidy; ours never looked like this. By itself it doesn’t really matter, but every hour that he and I spend together, I notice these little differences that tell me we’re doing absolutely the right thing.

  Bernard is also much more daring when it comes to new music. We go to concerts by weird unknown bands, while for a long time Frederik’s been content to play the same old LPs over and over again. It’s the way Bernard breathes, without blowing loudly through his nose, the way he can actually tell the difference between my blouses. And in bed, the attentiveness and love of adventure that shine through every minute we’re together are in full blossom. There’s no question I’ve met the man I’ve dreamt of for as long as I can remember.

  So who cares that Bernard didn’t get this way until after his and Lærke’s accident. I can no longer see that it makes any difference.

  • • •

  Though we both told our families that we wa
nt divorces, there’s still a lot of juggling we need to do to keep their daily lives functioning, and so make the breakups as easy on them as possible.

  Bernard’s moved out of his lovely house in Brede, and his in-laws have moved in to take care of Lærke. That also lets them spend a lot of time with the twins, who’ve just begun gymnasium.

  Yet it’s only a temporary solution. Bernard will probably move back in with the boys soon, and Lærke will enter an institution nearby, where he says he’ll visit her every day. He’ll never stop seeing her. He just needs to have a life of his own.

  But it caught Lærke completely off guard to hear that Bernard missed having an equal partner in his marriage. The doctor’s prescribed her some sedatives, yet she still weeps and talks about him all day long at the handicapped center. Bernard’s had long discussions with her doctor and nurses about how to make everything as good as possible for her, and they’re full of advice, having encountered this situation hundreds of times before.

  And then there are the kids. We knew that if we were ever going to have a good relationship with each other’s offspring, we couldn’t just barge into their lives the day after the breakups. So Bernard hasn’t been over to our apartment yet, and I make sure I’m home every morning when Niklas gets up for school.

  Meanwhile, in the middle of this earthquake that’s turning everyone’s life upside down, Bernard and I have been like teenagers: living on cheap food, cheap wine, sex, love, and endless gazing into each other’s eyes. We savor each day in the small student apartment he’s sublet in Nørrebro, Copenhagen’s most bohemian neighborhood.

  One afternoon, I’m sitting with Andrea in a café nearby and telling her how happy I am.

  “I’ve found the man of my dreams!” I exclaim. “I could live like this forever.”

  We have an hour before Bernard meets me here to take me to the opera.

  Andrea looks tired. As usual, she isn’t wearing any makeup, and she’s at least a month overdue for a haircut. She’s been telling me how, earlier today, she drove Ian to his fifth appointment for some bronchial problems caused by his paralysis.

  “I only wish everything could fall into place for you too,” I say.

  She quietly raises her coffee cup. “But everything is already in place for me. That is, if you mean living a good life.”

  “Yes, a good life.” I don’t finish my thought. She knows quite well that what I wish for her is my form of happiness—a new man.

  She says, “Only in the old days did people think it was critically important for a woman to end up with one man instead of another. It’s the sort of thing that you once would have read in the last chapter of a novel: Ah, she finally chose the doctor instead of the aristocrat. Hurray, you’d say, a happy ending! But now we know that that’s not the key to a good life. It’s a lie, an oppressive delusion.”

  “The key isn’t whether you get one man instead of another? And that’s something we know?”

  “Yes, it’s an antiquated way of thinking.”

  “Then what is the key?”

  “Well, happiness can occur when the brain’s level of dopamine and various other neurotransmitters rises. That happens when you have sex, win the lottery, get a new house, that sort of thing. But the levels fall back down a very short time later, and then you’re no happier than before.”

  “So you’re saying that if we just think ahead a bit, nothing in life would really matter.”

  “No, that’s not at all what I’m saying. Because there exists another form of happiness—when the level of activity in your left frontal lobe exceeds that in your right. This form of happiness doesn’t run dry. On the contrary, you can train it so that it keeps increasing your entire life.”

  “So how exactly do you obtain this form of happiness?”

  “You get it by doing good deeds, meditating regularly, and dedicating your life to something meaningful. These are all things that neuroscientists have measured and verified.”

  “So you meditate and you’re happy.”

  “That’s what I do. And I help Ian, and I help my kids. And yes, I’m happy. That’s what’s so brilliant about atheism, I think: it points the way to a worldview that’s infinitely richer and more beautiful than what you’ll find in any religious book. And it points out the most ethical approach to boot.”

  And then I ask her something that perhaps I shouldn’t. “So you think I’d be happier in the long run if I went back to Frederik?”

  “That’s not something I can really say, of course. Or … no. No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that I think the difference isn’t as big as you make it out to be. Not as big for your life, anyway.”

  • • •

  I still wake at night from dreams where I’m in love with Frederik.

  He and Niklas and I are on vacation in Greece. We’re having coffee and cake in the broiling sun near some ancient Greek ruins. Frederik wants to tease me, so he sprints down the slope next to the café tables and chairs, knowing that I’ll think it dangerous and won’t like it. But then he starts running too fast and can’t stop and he falls into a deep chasm at the bottom of the slope. I scream and wake up.

  I’m always so unhappy when I wake from these dreams. Why the hell do I still love him when I’m asleep?

  I turn on the light and get up. I want to go out and pee—and more than that, to stretch my legs and try to drive the dream from my body. I open the door to the hallway and there’s Niklas, standing outside my room.

  He’s had his Kurt Cobain hair chopped off. He’s just as handsome without it, and now he looks even more like a man.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “You were talking.”

  “Did I scream?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry if I woke you. It was just a dream.”

  Of course he’s been upset that his father and I are no longer together: nonetheless, I’d say my relation to him has improved. Since our talk by the freeway, there have been days now and then when he lets me in on something he’s been doing or thinking.

  I suppose I’m still waking up as I tell him about the dream. As soon as I finish, he asks, “Do you think you might still love Dad?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  But I need to find the right balance—more openness between us, but not too much. I don’t want to get him tangled up in all my layers of doubt.

  Will I end up in a situation like last time if I go through with the divorce? There’s something within me that I don’t recognize. Last time I threw Frederik out I was happy, I wanted to paint, I wanted to meet another man. I had tons of plans. And then it all went south, and I’ve never understood why. Perhaps I simply can’t live without him. Which is precisely what Frederik says.

  And my fear of dying without him—in some solitary fit of madness in the night—feels an awful lot like love.

  Niklas shouldn’t be involved in any of this. He should hear nothing but what I’m convinced, 90 percent of the time anyway, is the truth.

  I look him in the eye, the way he and I are able to now, my son and I, the two of us alone in the dark hallway.

  “But I love Bernard even more,” I say. “I had to do it, Niklas. I love Bernard in another way.”

  He stands still, listening, his short hair above me.

  “I had to. I didn’t have any choice.”

  • • •

  It’s the day before the trial is scheduled to begin. Frederik’s fired Bernard, though I did what I could to dissuade him.

  On the news, they’re reporting an industrial fire at a factory fifty miles west of Copenhagen. Twelve workers died in the explosion that started it, and firemen have been called in from all the neighboring cities.

  I have TV2 News turned up loud while I clean so I can follow the story. They’re warning people within a three-mile radius against going outside because of the chemicals in the air. But the rest of us, they say, should go out and watch the sunset tonight. The vast quantity of soot particles in the at
mosphere won’t be visible to the eye, but they’ll act like a filter, only letting through the sun’s red rays. If the clouds dissipate, the evening sky will turn blood-red like it’s never been seen in Denmark before.

  Maybe I’ll step out for a bit to see it, but with my new life I’ve gotten behind on math assignments in all my classes. Tonight’s my last chance to correct them before the trial begins; starting tomorrow, I can’t expect to be able to concentrate on anything other than the sentence that the panel of judges will hand down.

  The phone rings. It’s Frederik, and I assume he’s worried about tomorrow too. But no. Some way or another, he’s heard about Bernard’s brain injury, and that’s the only thing he wants to talk about.

  After a short while I have to interrupt him.

  “Frederik, I’m happy to talk about your case if you want. I’m terribly anxious too. We all are. But you’re going to have to stop criticizing Bernard and running him down. I don’t want to hear it!”

  “But he’s been soaking in an artificial bath of hormones that’s turned him into a teddy bear.”

  “Frederik, if you don’t change the subject, I’m going to have to hang up.”

  “Do you really want a love robot like that instead of a real man?”

  “Bernard’s the man I’ve dreamt about for a very long time. Now let’s talk about something else.”

  “Surely you have to admit that—”

  I hang up the phone.

  • • •

  It’s early evening, and I’m actually making good headway on the assignments when there comes a knock on the door. Niklas is down by the marina with Emilie and some friends, so I think it might be him and he’s forgotten his keys.

  But it’s Frederik.

  “I don’t want to discuss it anymore,” I say right away.

  “We won’t. I understand that.”

  “So what’s up then? What do you want?”

  “To show you something.”

  He doesn’t look angry. He looks gentle, radiant, kind. Like he’s in a good mood, yet at the same time miles from the manic high spirits of his illness.