You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  “But it’s not today that’s the most important day, is it? You just said that it isn’t until—”

  “But maybe today’s the day that decides it. Maybe it’s the day that determines that Dad’s innocent!”

  “Then of course I’ll come home. I will. We ought to …” I can hear from his tone that he’s changing his mind again as he speaks. “But you did just say it isn’t the actual report. It’s only maybe … And besides, all of us who did something for the spring concert were going to meet tonight.”

  “So you’ll just have to cancel your plans and celebrate with your mother and father. This is something worth commemorating.”

  After we’ve hung up I call Bernard, but he’s in court. I must sound a bit silly in the message I leave on his phone, yet if Frederik can be as well as I saw today, anything is possible. Then I ring up my in-laws, Helena, and some of the others in the support group. They all sound happy for my sake. I feel so exuberant I even leave a message on my mother’s voice mail.

  It feels wrong to force Niklas to stay home, so I’ll make an extra effort to ensure that his evening with us is a special one. After driving Frederik home, I shop for Niklas’s favorite meal: large steaks and then chocolate macaroon meringue from an old fattening recipe of Vibeke’s. We agreed that he’d be home at seven. I start waking Frederik half an hour before and try to get him into some festive clothes.

  It’s seven thirty when Niklas shows up, but I don’t mention the time. I serve virgin cocktails in the living room, and I almost feel like clanging a spoon on my glass and making a speech. We’ve won two major victories today in the struggle for Frederik’s health and freedom.

  But Niklas is grumpy. I try to get him to laugh, I compliment him, ask how he’s doing, fill up his glass; apologize for pressing him to stay home. And I explain once more that since a family’s forced to weather the worst times together, it’s important we remember to enjoy the best times together too.

  Maybe he’s trying to be nice—because surely he can see all I’ve put into the evening, with the fine cloth and the silver candlesticks on the table. But he doesn’t succeed. I wonder if there might be something wrong between him and Emilie, but I know it’s not worth asking. Are they girlfriend and boyfriend now? Have they quarreled? Instead, I ask how his committee meeting went, and I tell him about the other patients in the waiting room today, trying to make it as funny as I can.

  In the end, I say I’ll leave the two men by themselves in the living room for a few minutes while I see to the last things in the kitchen. In truth, I don’t need to do anything except broil the steaks, but once in a while Niklas has more fun being alone with his dad.

  It seems to work. From the kitchen, I can hear them talking about some boxing clips they’ve seen on YouTube. A week ago, Frederik suddenly stopped being interested in motor sports. Now he’s into boxing, and he gets annoyed if someone starts talking to him about race drivers.

  When we’ve seated ourselves at the table, Frederik wolfs down his steak in a couple of minutes—that’s how he eats when he’s tired. As soon as he finishes, he gets up and walks away without a word. I could shout after him, but nothing good usually comes of that.

  I wonder if Niklas is going to say, When he leaves, I leave too. I prepare myself to answer him, but he doesn’t say it. Yet my brain keeps coming up with needless reasons for why he shouldn’t go. It won’t stop picturing our argument.

  We have a standing agreement that dinners are to be cell-free, but his phone emits a TEXT RECEIVED beep and he starts tapping out a reply.

  He’s managed to keep me at a distance from Emilie since I called her Sara out on the street, yet I imagine all kinds of things about her. At night before I fall asleep, I wonder what she’s like. She must be gifted since Niklas is in love with her, and she must like the sort of art films that Niklas and Mathias do. Yet she doesn’t take photos, she said, and she doesn’t make sound collages or music like Mathias. Other than that, I don’t know anything about her except what I’ve nosed out online: that during her first year of gymnasium, she was already on the editorial staff of the school paper, and that she’s written a good article about a school in Burma that their student charity supports, as well as three short poems about her best childhood friend, who developed multiple sclerosis.

  Sometimes at night when I’m dozing, I confuse her with the beautiful pale long-haired girls from my time in gymnasium. If she’s a poet, she must also be sad and alone at times; maybe she has a difficult relationship with her parents, maybe I could be the kind of mother neither of us has had. And again I think of the children—the ones I lost after Niklas. Daughters, sons, siblings. The tumor we had instead.

  “Why doesn’t Emilie come over tonight?” I ask. “It’d be really nice if she did.”

  Something detonates overhead. We both start but remain seated, even though it feels like the house and the whole street continue to shake. Frederik’s managed to knock over one of his great big sheets of high-density fiberboard again, onto the floor of the workshop directly above us.

  “I think it’s fun that you and Bernard are interested in the same photographers,” I say. “He’s got a book on Denis Darzacq that I borrowed. I thought we might look through it together. Then I can hear what you think about it, as a photographer.”

  Niklas isn’t interested. And I thought I was so clever bringing the book home.

  The ceiling booms above us again. I can’t understand why Frederik can’t see that the sheets will fall over. Niklas is texting again, and I slowly compose myself to say what I’m about to say. I’m sure he doesn’t notice anything, since it was already quiet here before.

  When I see that he’s clicked SEND, I take a deep breath and say, “Niklas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about something.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I think that we need to talk about our anger.”

  “What anger?”

  “The anger we’ve been feeling.”

  “I don’t feel angry.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

  “I’m not angry!”

  “Listen to yourself. You’re shouting at me.”

  “God damn it, Mom!”

  “It’s okay to be angry. I’m angry too. In fact I’m furious about everything. Both of us have a great deal to be angry about.”

  “Aarghh!”

  “It just shouldn’t come between us. It doesn’t have to come between us. That’s too sad, all too sad.”

  He sighs loudly and stares down at the table. “I’d really like to go to that meeting tonight.”

  “Do you think I like to talk about this? Do you?”

  Niklas’s voice grows calm again, and for a moment he’s the old Niklas. “No.”

  “I told you about the twelve appointments you can get with a psychologist, if someone in your family—”

  “So you think I should go to a shrink because I don’t want to stay home with you tonight?”

  “No. But because you’re so clearly full of sorrow and anger. Because you run away from me. And because something goes wrong every time I try to talk to you about it.”

  “I just wanted to go to the meeting.”

  “When I say psychologist, maybe it makes you think about your grandmother, because of the training she’s doing. And so you think that it wouldn’t be anything for you. I’d feel the same way. But a real psychologist is something completely different.”

  “I’m not thinking about Grandma.”

  “Did I ever tell you that when my father left us, I was angrier with my mother than with him?”

  “Yes, you’ve told me a thousand times!” He gets up from the table. “Dad isn’t well! And there isn’t any psychiatric report that says he isn’t going to jail! There’s nothing at all to celebrate, and there’s nothing nice about being here! I’m going now!”

  “Won’t you please just stay for five minutes?”

  “But five minutes alway
s becomes an hour, and then the whole evening.”

  “You’re not really going to go before we’ve become friends again?”

  “Stop saying that I’m angry at you!”

  “But you are shouting.”

  “I’m shouting because you say that I’m angry.”

  “Let’s just talk until we’re good friends again. Just five minutes.”

  “Mom, you’re lying to me! It won’t be five minutes. It’s never five minutes.”

  “Five minutes!”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Five minutes, Niklas! This time I swear.”

  “Mom, it won’t be five minutes. Because things’ll never be fine in five minutes. They won’t be fine even if we sit here and talk all night long.”

  He runs up to his room and slams the door.

  I hear Frederik storm out into the hall, shouting that he can’t concentrate with the noise. Niklas yells back that just a couple of minutes ago he was banging his fucking fiberboard on the floor. I don’t have the energy to go up and sort it all out. I turn on the TV and boxing comes up on Eurosport. Frederik must have been watching it today. I surf around until I find a program with some beautiful happy American women.

  A few minutes later, Niklas comes down. He’s changed clothes and mussed up his hair; he obviously wants to leave now.

  “Sorry about yelling at you,” he says.

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you too.”

  I’m allowed to give him a silent hug.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  I recognize the look he gives me. It isn’t love, but a bitter worry I might do something dumb. He’s probing, to see if he can go and join his friends. He casts a brief sidelong glance at the wineglass on the coffee table.

  I lie. “I’m fine.”

  I’m sure he sees that it’s not true, but he also must see that I’m not on the edge of a breakdown.

  “I’ll be at Kira’s,” he says. “I’ll be back before eleven.”

  From the kitchen window I watch him ride off.

  And so you ride away from us; from Frederik and me. It feels so decisive, like it marks the end of an epoch, this very minute. How I envy your ability to find out how not to stay those five minutes that always turn into more. That’s what I never figured out—or dared to do—with my own mother. I envy your ability to bike away from me.

  The beautiful women on TV get to be too much in the end, so I click back to boxing. The Mexican’s penalized for ramming his forehead into the Romanian. Sweat, the clang of the bell, towels and bloody lips. I ought to go up to Frederik, try to talk with him about Niklas. But I can’t summon the energy that would require. So many things we ought to do; we ought to be able to trust each other. We ought to be able to support each other. And he ought to be completely different, so that I might feel the smallest fraction of desire for him.

  Instead I prop my feet up on the coffee table. Boxing’s never caught my interest, but Frederik’s been forcing me to watch it these last few days, and I’ve started to develop a taste for it. They pound away at each other—I can see the pleasure in that. And then there is their technique and speed, their fantastic physiques.

  I’m enjoying the fight and the men’s grunting, gently relieving a bit of stress, when the phone rings. I quickly turn off the TV and yank my hand from my pants.

  I hear Bernard’s voice. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “Uh-uh. No.”

  “I just wanted to say congratulations.”

  “Well thank you.”

  “Such a great day.”

  “That’s just the way I feel.”

  In no time, I’m transported to the festive evening I’d been dreaming of. We congratulate each other again warmly, and Bernard tells me that he also has something major to celebrate. The doctor from Lærke’s day-care center confirmed what he saw the other day on the lawn: Lærke’s still improving, the coordination in her right leg is better, and her willpower’s getting stronger.

  “In fact, I’m sitting here pouring myself a glass of wine,” he says. “Lærke’s gone to bed. Do you have a glass so we can toast?”

  “I do. Good idea.”

  Frederik isn’t allowed to drink, so I settled for buying myself a half bottle for our celebratory dinner. I raise the glass before me.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  We talk about how much better both Frederik and Lærke might get. I’m half reclining in the armchair with my feet up on the coffee table, and as I listen to Bernard, I turn the boxers back on, this time on mute. I ask him whether he knows anything about neurophilosophy—Dr. Lebech’s word—mostly so I can listen to him some more without having to talk myself. The better sculpted of the two boxers, the Mexican, sits down in his corner, sweat sheening his torso. His abdominal muscles bulge beneath his skin, nicely defined, and he gasps for air. I slide down in my chair even farther, work my hand back into my pants, and start relaxing again to the sight of the boxers—and especially now to Bernard’s deep voice.

  After his neurophilosophical review, he says, “This has been very hard on you, but you haven’t been thinking about leaving your husband. I find that admirable. It’s one of the first things I noticed about you. Your loyalty is really remarkable.”

  “And the same with you, Bernard—I feel it’s amazing how you always support your wife and take her part. It’s unusual for a man.”

  “I just feel that once you’ve chosen each other—”

  “My feeling exactly.”

  I take a swallow from my glass and can hear that he does the same. It seems like we’ve said everything there is to say on the subject, but he continues. “That’s something you and I have in common. Lots of other people wouldn’t have been as faithful as we’ve been.”

  I start to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Neurophilosophy

  Neurophilosophy is a rapidly advancing branch of philosophy that uses neurological research to shine a new light on classical philosophical problems.

  The 1986 publication of Patricia Churchland’s modern classic, Neurophilosophy, was the first major breakthrough in the field. Since then, a number of prominent philosophers and neurologists have contributed to new knowledge of the subject. Among them, Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error), Daniel Wegner, and Benjamin Libet have had the most impact.

  They all base their research on the scanning technology developed in recent decades, which gives us the ability to peer into the brain while it works. The ongoing revolution in neurological monitoring equipment enables us to observe and measure fear, love, substance dependence, empathy, egotism, decision-making, daydreaming, and numerous other mental phenomena as they manifest themselves in the human brain.

  In Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (2002), Churchland writes:

  … if we allow discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive science to butt up against old philosophical problems, something very remarkable happens. We will see genuine progress where progress was deemed impossible; we will see intuitions surprised and dogmas routed. We will find ourselves making sense of mental phenomena in neurobiological terms, while unmasking some classical puzzles as preneuroscientific misconceptions. Neuroscience has only just begun to have an impact on philosophical problems. In the next decades, as neurobiological techniques are invented and theories of brain function elaborated, the paradigmatic forms for understanding mind-brain phenomena will shift, and shift again. (p. 32)

  A New Renaissance

  The most radical neurophilosophers believe that the next 30 years of neurological research will bring about greater changes in our shared notion of what it means to be human than what has been achieved by the last 300 years of philosophy.

  A comparison with the late-European Renaissance and the scientific revolution is germane. Until 500 years ago, physics, biology, and chemistry were considered part of “natural philosophy,” not “natural science.” Great minds wh
o wanted to explore the natural order of the universe had no other means to do so than logic and reason, since their observational equipment was extremely limited. The major philosophers had concluded that the world consisted of four fundamental elements: fire, earth, air, and water. They were also of the opinion that the earth lay at the center of the universe, while around it floated the planets and stars, and beyond that the angels and God. Their entire system of thought comprised a cosmology that was complex yet logically coherent.

  The rapid development of telescopes and microscopes around the year 1600 changed everything. Suddenly, one could observe and measure many aspects of the world that had been previously hidden. Essentially every explanation that philosophers had arrived at for the physical world through the exercise of pure reason turned out to be wrong. And not wrong in a trivial sense, but in fact tremendously misleading.

  Today we have witnessed the arrival of machines that can monitor the brain as it functions. New instruments and methods are being developed each year at lightning speed, with enormous consequences for our understanding of classic philosophical concepts such as free will, responsibility, determinism, consciousness, language, identity, and the mind-body problem.

  Our time’s new instruments will usher in a wholesale upheaval in everything that philosophers, psychologists, and scientists think they know about human beings, corresponding to a new Renaissance. In time, this changed conception of humanity will spread to the judicial system, education, literature, art, and the very way we conceive of ourselves and others.

  17

  “The acoustics would be perfect except for this wall. It’ll create reflections that might diminish the stereo perspective, but we can just hang up some Rockfon sound batts.”

  Frederik beams with delight, contemplating the possibilities of the claustrophobic apartment the realtor is showing us. I hate being in here. “You mean blankets of rock wool on the inside wall?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want rock wool hanging on our wall!”

  “Ha-ha!” He laughs his noisy mechanical laugh at the thought. “Is that so? Well it won’t really be that way! I’ll wrap the batts in felt, so they look almost like lawn-chair cushions.”