You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  In the distance, a man is shouting unintelligibly in Spanish, his angry voice resounding down the halls.

  Niklas and I walk out of the room. And from the farthest end of the corridor we see an orderly approach with Frederik, sitting up in a bed.

  “Frederik!”

  We run toward him, and he smiles broadly when he discovers us.

  “Whew! It’s good you came! Such a fright,” he booms. “Good thing that’s over now.”

  The orderly begins shouting again, just as angry as before. It’s clear he wants Frederik to lie down while he wheels the bed along, but Frederik doesn’t care.

  I don’t know if I’m allowed to stop the bed in order to kiss him, or to lean over and embrace him.

  “It’s all over?”

  “Yes, they’re going to give me some medicine and discharge me today.”

  We follow the bed at a half run. “That’s fantastic!”

  Niklas and I hug each other while we timidly watch Frederik, who’s grinning broadly.

  “But what about the tumor?” Niklas asks. “Doesn’t it have to be removed?”

  “Not for the time being.”

  “Great. But … how are you doing?”

  “I’m doing super! They say they can discharge me in a little while, and that’s good. For if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves, it’s going to have to be today.”

  “Do you really think …”

  It seems crazy, but Frederik wants to keep to our itinerary. And after the orderly has parked the bed and left, we tentatively let Frederik’s optimism rub off on us. I call Thorkild and Vibeke and turn my cell on speakerphone so we can all talk together.

  “We have awakened from a nightmare,” Thorkild says.

  “You’re right,” I say. “That’s exactly what we’ve done.”

  I hand the telephone to Niklas and lie with my chest against Frederik’s, I close my eyes so I can shut out the sight of the man with the bolts coming out of his head.

  “I got so scared, Frederik,” I whisper. “I got so terribly, terribly scared.”

  “So did I,” he says.

  But he doesn’t lower his voice, even though I’m lying right next to him. He speaks in the same cheerful, almost shouting voice as when he came riding toward us in the hallway, the same voice as when he stood on the stone wall yesterday.

  I know. I know right now that this man is not my real Frederik. But he can become him again, I think. Of course he can.

  I nestle against him, pressing my face into his long white hospital gown. I don’t want to have diarrhea and nausea again, I don’t want to wake weeping in the hotel room tonight, I don’t want to be afraid.

  He is half shouting. “We’ll have to rent a new car straightaway if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves today.”

  “Yes, Frederik,” I say. “We’ll have to.”

  • • •

  Last year we decided to hold a big birthday party for Frederik, even though he wasn’t entering a new decade or anything. There were so many other years when we hadn’t had time to celebrate, so now it was time.

  We invited thirty-eight friends, and almost every one of them could make it, so there was no way we could seat all of them at a table. And we agreed that that would be okay. It would make the party more festive if some folks had to sit on folding chairs spread about the rooms and others had to eat standing, or sitting on a sofa armrest or the stairs or wherever they could find a place.

  Several of our friends had known us only at Saxtorph, and I could see that our home took them by surprise. During the long years when Frederik essentially left Niklas and me to our own devices, I became obsessed with buying and selling furniture as a hobby—especially Danish design classics from the ’50s and ’60s. On numerous weekends, I took my trailer to check out bargains I found in a weekly classified-ad paper, and from scratch I slowly traded my way up to quite an exclusive collection. But while our house and furnishings were beautiful, I also knew that I squeezed too many pieces into a place that was too small.

  From the moment the first guests arrived, the mood was exceptional. Niklas had compiled a mix of lounge music he thought we might like, and it worked like a charm. My best friend, Helena, and I had made a bunch of salads that we had put a lot of effort into, and then we had a butcher deliver some grilled free-range chickens and meatballs.

  Early in the course of the dinner, Laust Saxtorph, the diminutive chairman of the school board, stood up on a chair to make a speech, and the guests crowded in the doorways to listen.

  “Frederik, you have a secret,” he began, pausing for effect. “Somehow or other, you get the rest of us to suggest doing what you want us to do.”

  Half of our guests worked at Saxtorph, and they laughed out loud.

  “And as headmaster, you use this talent every single day—for both raising children and raising teachers … and the chairman of your board!”

  The guests laughed again.

  Before Laust became chairman, his father had held the post, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather, the school’s founder, the renowned educator Gustav Saxtorph. Besides chairing the school board, they’d also been headmasters, and in the old days the headmasters had lived at the school. So that Laust, just like his father and grandfather, had his childhood home in rooms that are now used for after-school activities.

  Ever since Laust hired Frederik, the two of them have been on the phone to each other pretty much every day, like a pair of fast-talking teenage boys. Laust lets the school take up a lot more space in his life than he ought to, given his wife and his position as section chief in the Ministry of Education. And it’s safe to say that Frederik’s boss has also become his best friend.

  Laust sketched a series of amusing minor incidents from school life, describing how he and Frederik had responded to them together. But then, late in the speech, he grew serious.

  Some years ago, a girl at the school had become quite introverted, and her PE teacher had noticed bruises on her. The girl said she’d gotten them from climbing trees, but Frederik called her mother and stepfather in for a meeting anyway. They said that they would never hit her.

  But Frederik went with his gut. Though the school had hundreds of students, he kept on the case. He arranged further meetings, and at last the stepfather admitted that he couldn’t govern his temper, and the couple elected to go into therapy.

  “Frederik,” said Laust from up on his chair, “what makes this story so typical is that at no point did the parents become angry with you. Nor did they, once they owned up to their problems, feel too humiliated to let their daughter keep attending our school. On the contrary—they thanked you for your help, and they became even more involved in school activities than before.”

  Laust must have also known the girl and her parents; he paused to take a sip of his red wine. There was something delicate in his pale skin and thin hair. He caught Frederik’s eye and was ready to go on.

  “If they hadn’t understood before why your abilities as headmaster were so highly respected, they understood now. You made a difference in that girl’s life forever, Frederik. And she is only one of many. Very very many! And you’ve made a difference in parents’ lives, and in the lives of the people who work at the school. And you’ve made an even greater difference in the lives of those of us gathered here—we who are lucky enough to be counted your friends.”

  He got down and we toasted, shouted hurrah! and applauded, and Frederik went over and gave him a hug.

  There were other speeches and songs. A friend from when Frederik worked at Trørød Elementary told about when we met. “Frederik got the young, fair-haired tennis girl that every man wanted,” he said. Later another old friend said, “And then he snagged the hot babe, Mia,” and again people laughed.

  Niklas changed the music, a couple of his friends joining him; we pushed the chairs back against the walls and some people danced, we opened the door to the yard even though it was November, and people stood on th
e back stairs and smoked. Frederik and I danced too, the light uneven on the dance floor, I flung my arms around his waist, more wine, a shelf toppled over and so what, the clock struck two, there was noise and then the music grew more mellow.

  Frederik and I were sweaty from dancing. He pulled me out the back door, down the stairs, and out into the yard, so far from the windows that we were standing in darkness. He kissed me under the black branches of the apple tree.

  It was much too cold, but we picked our way across the black lawn toward the white steel skeleton of our hanging sofa where it caught the light in the shadows. There were no cushions, and the seat’s dark springs shaded into the space and the grass beneath them. We sat down, and with the alcohol and dancing in our blood it was as if we were hovering suspended in the cold night.

  Hell, the price Niklas and I paid that Frederik might merit such a collection of speeches. It hadn’t been my vision of a marriage, to endure so many years essentially in solitude while my husband lavished his attention upon anyone connected to Saxtorph—and too much attention upon a couple of female teachers and board members in particular.

  Ever since, I’ve tried to forget how lonely I was during all those years. No one except my girlfriends and Niklas to look me in the eye, no one else to hear my trivial asides and understand how I felt just from the tone of my voice. The longing for another kind of marriage and my despairing wonder about why I stayed with Frederik. What had he done to me? Why didn’t I go out and seek the marriage I’d always dreamt of?

  A few years ago he finally came back to us. It’d been a hard struggle, but I thought I succeeded in swallowing my bitterness. And now it felt as if we’d really only been with each other the last couple of years, as if our relationship were still brand spanking new and full of possibility. A joyful feeling that his betrayal belonged to another world than this.

  There was almost nothing in the yard we could see. So it was more a sound, or a sense that something was moving in the apple branches. As if a bird were taking flight, or a dried-up winter apple were letting go of its stem.

  “Frederik, the others praise you for so many marvelous things. And I’m so proud of you. So very proud to have a man who’s so clever and so good with people.”

  I pressed myself against him, and there in the hanging sofa, in the night, in the cold, I felt in my trembling body that he and I belonged together.

  “But this is what I love you for.”

  • • •

  Another nurse enters Frederik’s hospital room. We can’t understand what she’s saying, but with gestures she makes us understand that Frederik and I are to follow her to see somebody else—perhaps another doctor.

  Frederik gets up from the bed as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Niklas remains behind, and Frederik and I are led into a large corner office where we sit across from an older doctor with an immense mustache. The exaggerated rectitude of his bearing gives me the impression that he’s been a military doctor most of his life. He speaks excellent English with great pride, an old-fashioned, British boarding-school English.

  “I can say with almost complete certitude that it is not cancer,” he says. “That means that my colleagues in Denmark can probably remove the tumor completely. Before the operation, however, no one will be able to say precisely the extent of the procedure they will be required to perform. Perhaps afterwards you will be completely as you were accustomed to being before; perhaps you will find yourself changed.”

  Frederik doesn’t say anything, so I ask for him. “Changed?”

  “Yes, for you must have already experienced changes recently. Am I correct?”

  I try to think, but my thoughts lead nowhere. I have no idea what the doctor is talking about, and yet I hear myself saying, “Yes.”

  “What you must be particularly prepared for is for your husband to lose all empathy for you and how you are doing,” the doctor says. “He will have a harder time restraining his more primitive impulses. He may have sudden fits of anger and deny every suggestion that he is unwell. Those are the most typical symptoms when there is pressure on the orbitofrontal region of the brain.”

  I stare at Frederik, still not knowing what the doctor is talking about. The doctor folds his sunburned hands on the desktop and looks into my eyes probingly.

  “But to judge by the size of his tumor, you know all about these orbitofrontal symptoms already, do you not?”

  In my head I hear myself asking Do I? but I answer, “Yes.”

  “Good. Frederik, we shall give you corticotropin to reduce the swelling in your brain, as well as some anticonvulsants so that you do not risk another epileptic seizure like the one you experienced yesterday … Frederik?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “You may return to your hotel today. And you may fly back to Denmark in a couple days. If everything goes well, they should be able to operate on you in Denmark in one month’s time.”

  Frederik appears to be chiefly interested in some red and yellow files with tables and diagrams that lie on the desk in front of us.

  “That long?” I ask. “But what if it’s cancer?”

  “They must ensure that they remove the entire tumor, but also that they do not remove more than is necessary. They can accomplish that best if they wait until the swelling of the brain itself has disappeared.”

  “Is it a dangerous operation?” I ask.

  He turns calmly to Frederik.

  “Will you be so kind as to replace those papers where they were?”

  Only now do I see that Frederik has been intently riffling through one of the doctor’s files.

  “Frederik! I do hope you’re not reading the doctor’s papers!”

  “No, pardon me.” He smiles his disarming smile and returns the folder to the desktop.

  “You must really excuse him,” I say.

  “Well, yes.” The doctor makes a deprecating wave of his hand. “I know how it is—diminished inhibition of impulses, eh?”

  Based on his examination, the doctor evidently thinks I’ve been living with a series of obvious changes in Frederik’s brain for a long time. But have I?

  Yes, I suppose he has been different in recent weeks. More self-centered, disorganized, hotheaded. But is he any worse than Helena’s husband, or my other friends’ husbands? I really don’t think so.

  The doctor gets to his feet and gives me his hand in parting. He squeezes hard.

  “You must be prepared for the corticotropin to make his personality changes gradually less pronounced in the coming weeks. On the other hand, the treatment may induce manic tendencies as a side effect. Which make it critical for you to take away his car keys. He must not drive before the operation.”

  “Yes. Thank you,” I say. “I will.” And meanwhile I wonder if Frederik is so intelligent that the pressure from the tumor might not have resulted in the usual symptoms, but merely brought him down to the level of other men.

  But how can I ask the doctor, without it sounding as if I have an inflated image of my husband?

  4

  Copenhagen Airport. I love when the doors glide to the side after customs and we push our baggage carts into the big triangle of other passengers’ friends and families. Danish faces waving flags, flashbulbing reunions, and hugging kids, spouses, and friends they haven’t seen in months.

  We look like a normal family too; there’s nothing about us that anyone can see is different. The first person I catch sight of is Laust, even though he’s so short and pale. He’s squeezed in front of the others in the crowd, and his eyes are wide and worried.

  His skin seems more transparent than usual, like the rice paper wrapped around a Vietnamese spring roll—poke him with a chopstick and muscle and guts would spill out, blue, red, and grey.

  Frederik’s parents smile, unhappy and tired, they push their way through behind Laust. Thorkild is dressed as always in a dark blazer and white shirt. Despite his retirement, he still feels most comfortable in the kind of clothes he needed as
president of the Association of Danish Private School Headmasters, and as the leader of a school that was much more conservative than Frederik’s.

  Tears run down Vibeke’s cheeks as she clasps me to her and tries to peer deep into my eyes. I quickly rearrange some suitcases on the baggage cart, and while I pretend to be occupied she naturally throws herself upon Niklas.

  “It’s so great to see you,” I say.

  And for now there’s not much more to be said. In the last two days I’ve spent a fortune calling them from my cell phone and bringing them up to speed on everything—right until the moment we were going to fasten our seat belts on the plane and turn off our phones, and then here in Copenhagen when we could turn them on again. It’s best if we postpone the tête-à-têtes until we’re not surrounded by others’ embraces.

  We hug each other silently, and then Laust leads us out to his car in one of the parking garages. Vibeke holds Niklas’s hand and weeps, and with a little burst of speed I pass them and come up beside Laust and Frederik.

  Seeing Laust has made Frederik liven up visibly. He tells Laust about the great vacation we’ve had, and after we’ve been walking for a while in the long corridors between the basement parking garages, he says, “If Dad’ll drive the rest of you home, I can borrow Laust’s car and pop by the school to grab some papers I need this weekend.”

  Despite everything I’ve told them on the phone, they’re not prepared for this. Thorkild had begun to relax during his son’s upbeat descriptions of being on holiday; now he replies slowly, deliberately. “But Frederik. You’re not supposed to drive.”

  “Ahh, that’s just something the doctor said to avoid risking a lawsuit or problems with insurance. Anyone can see that.” He spreads his arms wide. “Look at me! Of course I can drive.”