You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  Is he glancing at the phone now? If I’m lucky, I’ve got three minutes left. I want to swallow them whole—to suck them into my grasping, guilty soul, which laps up egotistical pleasures and neglects my son and husband while stealing a sick woman’s future.

  “What’s up?” he asks. He’s remarkably good at noticing if I’m not fully present.

  “I’m just thinking about that painting in the parlor.”

  “She has a dreamy expression, doesn’t she?”

  The painting he refers to is hardly the largest in the room, but he’s absolutely right: That’s the picture that’s made the biggest impact on me. He’s been figuring me out.

  He asks, “Do you think it might portray the grandmother of one of the women who looks after the place now?”

  “Well, some of the things aren’t original. They must have been bought for the place later.”

  He says, “The napkin ring here …”

  Don’t look down! Don’t look down! I lift up the ring, away from its position by the side of his phone. “Oh yes,” I say, unnecessarily holding it up to the light. “I do like it.”

  “But it was definitely a recent purchase.”

  That’s it: nothing! We’ll talk about absolutely nothing at all. Denmark and the rest of the outside world can just vanish. I will make love to him, I’ll dunk him in the waters of the Kattegat and raise him up again, I’ll bike with him down from Halland Ridge with the air blowing into our cuffs and puffing out our sleeves.

  “There must be someplace up on the ridge where we could lie down, just you and me,” he says. “Just like yesterday. You know—off the beaten track.”

  He spreads Nutella on one of the croissants and glances down.

  “Somebody called.”

  28

  Frederik and I are watching a Danish crime show. It’s a rerun, and if I’d cared enough to remember when I saw it the first time, I’d know right now who the killer was.

  Frederik made dinner tonight. He set candles out on the table, he asked about the seminar and wanted to hear all about the other participants and what we learned. He spoke affectionately to me all day; leaned over the table toward me and looked me in the eye. I know what he’s up to—he’s told me more than once. After all, we’re still man and wife, he says. We need to make it work again.

  Now he’s set the coffee on the coffee table in front of the TV, along with our half-drained glasses of red wine. He scoots closer to me on the couch so that our thighs nearly touch.

  But I have Bernard on my mind.

  When he called Winnie back, during breakfast at the guesthouse, she told him that Lærke had disappeared. But we couldn’t just rush back home, because they still thought he was in Aalborg. Then a couple of hours later he got a call from Tivoli’s security office.

  Although Bernard and his in-laws had explained to Lærke a hundred times that he was taking a business trip, she got it in her head that he was off having fun somewhere without her. And she thought that that somewhere must be Tivoli, the old amusement park in Copenhagen. She went down to the station in her wheelchair and took the train to the city. She managed to get into Tivoli, but once she was inside, the battery on her wheelchair died, and one of the security guards found her in her chair under some low-hanging branches on a path by the lake there.

  Our vacation was never the same after that. Bernard spoke to her on the phone for an eternity, and when the two of us were alone again, I could feel he was elsewhere. Late that afternoon, I suggested that we go back home, and he didn’t object.

  On the couch I can feel Frederik’s hand on my shoulder. He says, “Pretty soon Lars Brygmann will turn up, won’t he?”

  “He might.”

  “That scene where they chase him in the mall?”

  “Yeah …”

  If I turn my head, I’ll find myself looking straight into Frederik’s eyes. I don’t, but I can feel the weight of his gaze.

  I need to leave him at some point, but how do I do it so that Niklas will suffer as little as possible? And how do I keep Frederik from committing suicide? And will I ever be able to take Lærke’s place in Bernard’s life? Then there’s the finances of a divorce. I’ve been trying to calculate my income and where I can afford to live. And to calculate what Frederik will have for rent from his disability pension each month.

  “See, here comes the mall,” he says. “Is your coffee too cold?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “I can put it in the microwave and zap it for twenty seconds.”

  “It’s just fine, Frederik. No need to bother.”

  “Should I make a new pot? I could do that too.”

  “Frederik, it’s okay. Why don’t we just watch the program?”

  I’ve never seen so much TV as I have this summer, as I try to get some clarity about the best way to leave my husband. I’m nearly up to the national viewing average.

  Once darkness falls on Farum, the multicolored light of the TV screen flickers in the window of every single home where a married couple over forty lives. I finally understand why: before all those screens, in solitary silence, men and women are taking out their questions and calculations, holding them close to their chests, rocking them back and forth—questions and calculations they mustn’t voice out loud. Should they leave their partners or not? How should they tackle a divorce, practically speaking? The finances and what people will say, the family, the kids?

  In front of their screens they ponder the options, year after year.

  Tonight I decide to wait till next summer. Niklas needs to be done with gymnasium, and Frederik needs to be more involved with his new friends, so I can feel sure he won’t kill himself. And now we have a court date. The trial will start in a month and a half, which means that a couple of months from now, Frederik will probably be behind bars. If I want to ever look myself in the mirror again, I’m going to have to support him until then, and through his initial time in prison too.

  I’m the only person now who’s 100 percent certain that Frederik’s not the man I married. A few times he’s said—in jest, I suppose—that I act as if I have Capgras syndrome, a syndrome in which a person’s convinced that her closest friends and relations are no longer themselves but have been replaced by impostors.

  When the crime show’s over, Frederik reaches for the remote and resolutely presses the power button, as if he’s been waiting for a long time to do so.

  “I’d like to see the news,” I say.

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes our wineglasses from the table, handing me mine as he raises his own and gazes into my eyes.

  “I’m a very lucky man,” he says, his voice calm and tender. “I’m married to a woman who made a tremendous effort on my behalf while I was sick. That’s something I’ll always remember. And as if that wasn’t enough, you’re just as beautiful and sexy as when I met you more than twenty years ago. I look around at other women and how they’ve changed, and believe me—I don’t take it for granted that you’ve gotten so much lovelier.”

  “Is that really the best you can come up with?” I scoff. “How full of clichés can one man be?”

  He smiles crookedly at me. “Cheers, darling.”

  I feel compelled to raise my glass, but I can’t stand looking him in the eye and quickly focus on the rug again.

  “I’ve been watching you when you go out on the balcony with the watering can, when you set your purse on the table like in the old days and let yourself fall back in the armchair—all the little things, the things that are you. I look at you, and though I don’t say anything, I have such a desire to touch you, to kiss you.”

  I get up. It’s impossible for me to remain seated so close to him.

  “Can you remember what I told you that time?” he continues. “How it’s impossible for us to live without each other—because we’re meant for each other?”

  Right away I know the night he’s talking about. The dinner we had just after I was hospitalized.

  I grab a cu
shion from the couch and swing it at him. “So you thought you’d mention the time I had my stomach pumped. Just something we ought to remember, eh? You think it’s a good thing to bring up? It won’t put me in a bad mood, not at all!”

  The wine’s knocked out of his glass.

  “All your powers of empathy, Frederik, could fit on the head of a pin!”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just wanted—”

  “You want this and you want that! I’m so tired of being married to a sick man who can’t help anything that he does!”

  “But Mia, it was only because I was hoping that—”

  “That’s enough! It’s simply beyond the pale! I can’t stand it!”

  He doesn’t say another word, just gets up and goes to his room. He can’t even deal with it anymore; he’s gotten to be such a wuss.

  I storm up and down the length of the room, waving the cushion in the air, and then I hurl it against the wall. It springs back and knocks his glass off the coffee table and shatters it. Shit!

  What’s he doing in there? I go over to his room and throw open the door. “Now what? What?”

  He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, doubled over, his head buried in his hands. “It’s true,” he mumbles. “And I understand. I do understand. How will you ever again be able to …? And Saxtorph, and Laust, Niklas and our house and—”

  “Don’t start blubbering about suicide again!” I yell. “I won’t hear it! It’s not fair!”

  I slam the door and go back to the living room, where I start pacing up and down again.

  I go back to his room and fling open the door once more. “And how am I ever supposed to have any desire for you when you’re such a wimp?” I shout.

  He hasn’t budged. He sits on the bed in the same curled-over position as before, hiding his face, not answering my question.

  “The real Frederik wouldn’t act like this! You claim you’re healthy—then pull yourself together! Be a man, God damn it!”

  I slam the door again and go back to the living room. I fling myself into the armchair, turn on the TV, watch it for maybe ten seconds, then turn it off.

  Later he comes back out and positions himself across from me, standing with legs slightly spread and arms akimbo. He affects some sort of mechanical, military voice. “You have no right to speak to me in that manner. I was only trying to be friendly. I must ask you to govern your emotions the next time.”

  In his stocking feet, he looks like Niklas and his friends would in the old days when they put on grown-up clothes and played theater. They thought they were saying adult things and spoke with great gravity and conviction, but that just made the performances all the more grotesque. This is the same thing; it isn’t Frederik’s real self, and I can’t control my laughter. “This is your idea of what a man’s like? This is your best effort? Ha-ha-ha! Really? You have no clue, do you. No clue at all!”

  “I was just trying to say something nice to you before.”

  “Yes, and you can bet that you did an excellent job of it.”

  He continues with the same feigned briskness. “What we need now is for you to be constructive for a moment—”

  “Ha-ha! You come across as even more ridiculous when you take yourself so seriously. But it’s a long mile from this circus to the real Frederik.”

  For a moment his sergeant’s voice seems authentic; his anger animates it, and he actually sounds a bit like a man. “Mia, the reason you can’t work things out with me is that you’re sick in the head! You have Capgras syndrome!”

  “You’re the one who’s sick in the head!”

  He walks toward the wall.

  “Watch out, Frederik. There’s broken glass there!”

  But he doesn’t listen.

  “Ouch! Damn it!”

  “Oh Frederik!”

  “And I didn’t say anything about suicide! I didn’t!” he whimpers as he hobbles out to the bathroom.

  I follow him there, where he seats himself on the toilet lid and raises his wounded foot. I take hold of it to examine it—and he lets me. There’s just a small cut on the ball of his left foot, just a little dome of dark, thick blood. I find tweezers. And I grasp him gently by the heel, softly stroking his arch, the ball of his foot. There is a glass splinter there, and I remove it.

  It’s the oddest thing to kneel on the bathroom floor with Frederik’s foot in my hand. His long, delicate, thin-skinned foot, with its prominent network of blood vessels on the upper side. A foot I know so well.

  I put an adhesive bandage on it and look him in the eye, smiling at him. I run my finger across the bandage. For a few moments I am nice to him. Once I was that way to him for month after month, and in this moment I am like that again.

  He alternates between looking at me inquiringly and looking shyly away. He tries to smile at me, yet I see the weeping there as well. His muscles lose their tension, they relax, but I also see how he gets a grip and pulls himself together. Everything in his face blurs together, like an ink-jet print in the rain, and I feel the same way. Our faces are sludge, both of them, the very same sludge.

  I can’t help myself; I take care of him. And at the same time I can tell it’s been a long time since I’ve had the energy to.

  • • •

  I lie twisted on Thorkild and Vibeke’s wretched couch, alone in the half darkness, my torso slung against the stiff armrest, my eyes pressed to my forearm. The roof of my mouth hurts from yelling and crying. And I’m so tired; I can no longer shout, and my muscles are all achy and tender, as if I’d been marinating in my own bitter juices.

  Maybe Frederik could come back and take me now … I don’t know. I might strike him much harder, this time without a cushion. Or maybe I would yield, and that might be the best thing that could happen for all of us—more than twenty years ago, meeting on the broad sand beach near the school camp, having Niklas … I don’t know.

  But he doesn’t return for another attempt. He’s not that sick.

  I sleep; I wake; I’m still on my in-laws’ couch. Frederik hasn’t installed all the lamps in here yet, so the room has a golden light that’s weirdly uneven. I wonder what time it is.

  This is what Vibeke calls our first couch, just like the dinner table is our first dinner table. It’s a classic, upholstered in blue wool, which also covers its slender sloping arms. Here they sat almost half a century ago and played with little Frederik; here Vibeke nursed him while Thorkild smoked a pipe, listened to Miles Davis, and conversed with his headmaster friends. I can’t say that I’m comfortable lying here, yet I can tell I’ve slept deeply.

  On the ceiling, I see a patch of light move. It looks like the sign on the ceiling back home on Station Road, though it can’t be the same thing. That sign came from the tree branches moving in front of the streetlight. And it appeared in the embers where Niklas lit a fire on the lawn.

  It can’t be the same sign, but it is; I recognize the pattern, the smoldering sign in the embers that proclaims our curse.

  Am I dreaming? I look around the living room. Everything looks unfamiliar because we’re still strangers in this apartment, surrounded by strange furniture. But it also looks real, and this doesn’t feel like a dream in any way.

  I’m running down a sandy road along the Majorcan coast, away from the car accident in which Frederik and Niklas tumbled over a cliff and died.

  I’m running down the sandy rainy beach in Sweden where I met Frederik, where we became each other’s fate.

  I’m running down the sandy path along Lake Farum. I played tennis yesterday, I’ll play again tomorrow, the heat, the sun, the sweat on my brow and under my breasts, I’m running. I’m running.

  And overhead the sign in the sky follows me, the light that throbs, that smolders, that grows in strength. Surely, everyone must be able to see it now.

  But the sign grows much stronger, and its reflections in the Mediterranean, the Kattegat, and Lake Farum are so blinding I have to kneel, my bare knees pressed against the sand and pebbles. />
  And as I kneel I hear a voice. Booming, close at hand, a voice from the heavens. It’s like thunder, and I cannot distinguish the words it says.

  “Who are you? Are you Jesus?” I ask.

  “I’m not Jesus. There is no Jesus, Mia,” says the voice.

  “Are you God?”

  “You know perfectly well that God’s an illusion of your prefrontal cortex.”

  “But who are you then?”

  “I’m like you, I have no soul. I am my brain, and my brain’s a labyrinth of synapse and fat.”

  For a moment I dare to squeeze open my eyes to two chinks, and in a flood of light I see a clean-shaven, grey-haired man with a round head and glasses that are much too large, the kind that were the fashion in the ’70s. I recognize him; it’s Peter Mansfield, one of the physicists who won the Nobel Prize for developing the technique of MRI scanning. He stands quite close to me in the sand, and the light radiating from him is so strong that it’s as if Heaven itself has opened. I have to squeeze my eyes shut again if I’m not to go blind.

  “Now I know that I’m dreaming,” I tell myself aloud.

  “Believe what you like,” Mansfield says. “But you should only hold on to your belief if you can prove it. The empirical method’s the only path to truth.”

  “What do you want from me? Why have you come here?”

  “I’ve come to tell you that you’re blessed by the mercy of science. This is no dream, Mia. It’s a gift of grace; all your sins and all your guilt have been taken from you.”

  “But I’ve been deceiving my sick husband. I’m sleeping with his lawyer.”

  “You can’t help it. If that’s what you’ve done, it is Nature’s will. You’re nothing more than atoms in motion. Anything you do is merely part of a process that Nature initiated billions of years ago. Every decision you make could have been predicted back then.”