“But I didn’t lie!” He raises one hand a little, as if to place it on me to calm me down.
I do my best not to shout. “You said you’d never been with anyone else!”
“And I haven’t—not the person I am now. That was someone else, Mia. You have to believe that! And I don’t like that man. I hate that man! He isn’t me.”
Mia Halling
From: Solveig Jansen
To: Mia Halling
Date: Mon, August 22, 2011, 3:09 pm
Subject: Our recent phone conversation
Dear Mia,
Now that we’ve been together in support group for half a year, and you met my family and friends at Torben’s funeral, I feel we’re close enough for me to send you this e-mail.
Ever since you joined the group, I felt we thought the same way about many things, and I found it very troubling that I made you hang up on me so quickly the other day. I suppose you tried to control yourself because it’s only a few weeks since my husband died, but I could tell in any case how much I upset you.
Let me try to explain what I meant.
I know you think that Frederik was free when he was healthy. And that he wasn’t free when he was ill and embezzled from his school. But you should remember that the sick Frederik was no more inhibited in his thinking than lots of normal people who’ve never been diagnosed as sick. They just weren’t born with Frederik’s exceptional abilities.
Do you really think that these people are free, when Frederik wasn’t?
Who says the ability to think clearly is developed to the same degree in every adult? That can’t possibly be true. For example, even though the intelligence of teenagers is fully developed, their frontal lobes are still deficient. That means they have a hard time pulling themselves together and doing what they’ve decided to, and they’re too easily distracted by short-term temptations. And surely adult brains don’t all attain the exact same level of development beyond the teenage brain.
Which means that, biologically, the amount of free will varies from person to person. That’s the “nuancing” of the free-will debate I was talking about. Only a small number of especially gifted people are 100% free.
Before Torben fell ill, he and I often discussed this question with his best friends from the Ministry of Justice.
Take China for instance: the reason it’ll achieve world domination before long is their one-child policy, plus the way they’ve kept their exchange rates so low that the ordinary Chinese live in utter poverty. When it comes to the country’s long-term interests, these decisions are absolutely the right ones to make—but can the man on the street think that far ahead? Hardly; only the Chinese politburo can do that. If China had been a democracy, it wouldn’t be on its way to owning most of the Western world.
In the U.S. it’s the opposite. Millions of people who lack the necessary qualifications have the right to vote—which means that politicians have to allocate so much to tax relief and spending that in fact, because of the national debt, the country’s already doomed to fail. If it had been ruled by a council of experts instead, things would never have gotten to this pass. And again, there’s no question that that would’ve been in everyone’s interest—from the poorest to the richest.
It’s distressing to watch the U.S. being run into the ground by the majority—people who in point of fact have no more free will than Frederik when he was sick—when the country could be governed by a small committee of people who are as free in their thinking as Frederik when he was well.
I had the sense that what really set you off was when I said it was theoretically possible that free will might be less developed among certain races or in one gender. I did NOT say that that’s the way it is—I only said that it’s a possibility.
Remember, Mia, I’m not saying this to be a bad person. I want the best for us all, just as much as you. You should know that when you use a word like “fascist” in connection with my positions, which are carefully thought out and scientifically based, it can be very upsetting to a woman of my age, who is old enough to have experienced the all-out war on fascism in Europe.
I still think that, in time, your way of looking at the world will inevitably bring you around to my position. Then perhaps you’ll want to take part in some of the meetings we hold with the most intelligent of the retired department heads from Torben’s ministry.
With hope for a good, long friendship—and a more positive conversation next time,
Solveig
32
Now I have no one.
• • •
Of course, I had seen that photo in their hallway. Bernard’s hair has gone white since the accident—also due to the hormones. And he’s gotten thin, losing his appetite like so many other brain-damaged men. Lærke looks like herself, but Bernard’s unrecognizable.
Finally I found a good person, I thought. A person who deserved to be trusted. And then it turns out it wasn’t Bernard who was self-sacrificing—it was his sickness. I was head over heels with a brain injury instead of a man.
I start running the entire distance home from the argument. I receive the first text before I get very far: Mia, I know I was being unreasonable. You haven’t deserved this.
And as I run through Vaserne, the bird sanctuary that lies about half the way home, I get more. I’m sorry I yelled at you. I do understand that you had to come see me. I swear I haven’t lied to you about the man I am now.
But I suppose it’s the brain injury talking. I don’t know that much about vasopressin, but I seem to recall that besides making a man more faithful, having lots of vasopressin receptors would also make him less aggressive.
It’s obvious that Bernard’s sick. I only need to think about my father, about Frederik, about Hanne’s boyfriend and the whole fetid herd of men, with their long ugly feet and bony bodies, their pricks the color of entrails and their backs covered in long black hairs. Bernard’s a freak.
I gasp for breath, shoving my legs forward harder and harder. As if with each step, I’m kneeing someone’s belly. Sweat pours down my brow and temples, it runs into my ears and I can’t get it out, even when I shake my head—and even after I stop, leaning forward with hands on thighs till my head’s horizontal and I’m shaking it like a lunatic.
I resume running, but the sweat stopping up my ears makes my pulse sound much too loud. As it booms, I see before me Frederik in prison and can almost smell the sour reek from beneath the foreskins of the other male inmates—the stabbers and child-murderers, the rapists and school swindlers.
Up the stairs to our floor and then down the hall; I can already hear Niklas playing techno inside the apartment. Our front door buzzes in time to the bass; I unlock it and noise fills the corridor.
I hammer away at his door, on the offbeat so he can hear me banging over the bass. As soon as he opens it a crack I say, “I cannot deal with that today.”
“Oh, it’s you,” he says, shutting the door.
I hammer away again and shout, but he doesn’t open up. “Hey! Don’t you talk to me that way!”
As a rule, when I ask him to do something, he lets a few minutes go by before finally doing it. That way, he can act as if it’s something he’s decided to do of his own accord. I figure that today as well he’s sure to turn it down after a little while, and I go out to the bathroom, thinking about Bernard whom I’ve lost, Bernard who was never anything more than a hormonally modified dick.
I wonder what’s wrong with Niklas. He usually uses his oversize headphones when he plays that kind of music. The times when he decides to use his speakers instead, he’s angry about something, and he finds comfort in annoying us.
More likely than not, his anger has nothing to do with Frederik or me and it’s something with Emilie, or maybe Mathias or another friend. And regardless of what it is, his day can’t possibly be as wretched as mine—I’m sure he hasn’t just found out that Emilie’s brain-damaged like his dad.
When I turn on the water, he still hasn’t turne
d the music down. His music feels more unbearable than ever, pounding an alien beat into my body. I twist the handle, test the water temperature, and gaze at the halogen spot in the ceiling, all the while a foreign beat thudding inside me. As if his music has taken my heart out and installed another in its place. The rhythm pounds and pounds, the heart no longer mine, the blood no longer mine.
Back out of the shower stall. I throw on my bathrobe and return to the hall.
Again I bang on his door, hard. He doesn’t open up. I pull on the knob but the door is locked.
“Open up! Come out here! Turn it down and open up! Come out!”
At length he opens the door a crack. “What!”
“Niklas, please turn it down!”
“And what’ll you do if I don’t?”
He’s never spoken to me like this before. He wants to take the fight to a new level. And today of all days. He’s challenging me, and I just don’t have the energy. Then I ask myself: what right do I have to order him around? I, who have cheated on his father?
Does he know? I have a sudden strong hunch that I’ve been found out. Something’s clearly changed, and I have no idea what it is. I don’t dare make a stand against him just now, and instead I hurry back toward the bathroom, yelling, “I said I’ve had a hard day! You’re so self-centered!”
“I am?” he shouts. “Am I the one who’s self-centered?”
The techno pulse continues as the shower’s hot hard stream strikes my forehead, my throat, my breasts. Is he turning it down yet? I stand still and wait.
No.
Something’s very wrong.
• • •
It’s impossible to hear myself think in the apartment, so I go outside to one of the common areas and find a distant bench where I can be alone.
Will Niklas tell Frederik about Bernard and me? Does he realize how fragile his father is? Thorkild, Vibeke, and I have agreed that Niklas shouldn’t hear about his father’s suicidal thoughts, but maybe I need to start telling him.
Maybe it’s already too late. Or is he actually ignorant about Bernard and me—am I just imagining things? I call and text Niklas several times, but he doesn’t answer.
And then new messages arrive from Bernard. Should I reply? Does it make any difference whether it’s his real self that I’ve fallen in love with? His hormonal changes could be a gift. In fact, I may be the luckiest woman in the world, to find a man who’s brain-damaged in precisely the remarkable way that Bernard is.
I can’t deal with any of it.
I read his texts for what seems like hours. I don’t send him any myself.
Frederik calls around seven to say that dinner will be on the table soon.
When I return, Niklas’s music has stopped. I check my appearance in the hall mirror. Nothing to see. And Frederik seems calm and happy, so Niklas can’t have told him anything.
I sit down quietly at the dinner table. A little later, Niklas comes in; he doesn’t say anything either. I try for a bit of eye contact, just some form of recognition, but it’s a lost cause.
Frederik’s spread a cloth and done a nice job of setting the table; he’s been making an effort every day to win back my love and respect.
“Now let’s enjoy ourselves!” he says with a bright smile. I watch Niklas, who looks just as angry as this afternoon, though more tight-lipped than ever.
Neither Niklas nor I answer.
One beer stands next to Frederik’s plate and another next to mine. Seeing his I say, without really thinking, “That’s not very good for you. And we can’t afford it either.”
He gets up and takes both beers back to the fridge. Halfway there, he stops and holds one out toward me. “Do you want it?”
“No thanks.”
He knows that if he claims he’s no longer sick, it can be interpreted as not acknowledging his illness. And the inability to acknowledge his illness is such a key symptom of his injury that an even longer time would pass before I let him go online without sitting beside him, or go shopping without checking all the receipts.
We’re having homemade moussaka and salad. Frederik’s really made the dinner into something nice—as much as he can, considering there isn’t much money and he basically never cooked before a few months ago, when I gave him responsibility for all the household work.
When Niklas and I don’t say anything, he looks at us with disappointment. “What’s the matter?”
Niklas doesn’t answer.
“I thought we could enjoy ourselves tonight,” Frederik says. He looks over at me. “Did you have a good run with Andrea?”
I finally have to tell him. “Niklas and I were fighting about his music.”
“Oh, so that’s why.”
How did Niklas find out about Bernard and me?
The other day, he barged into the bathroom while I had my tennis clothes in the sink to make them wet before hanging them up to dry. They were supposed to look as if I’d been playing tennis all afternoon. But did he really know that was what I was doing?
Or did one of his friends see Bernard and me swimming in the sound the other day? What went wrong?
Niklas gets up without saying a word and walks out to the kitchen. I hear him open the fridge, and he returns with two beers.
“I don’t think you should …” I start to say. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.”
And then for the first time tonight, he looks me in the eye. It’s not a pleasant experience. He comes closer, sets one beer in front of his father, and opens the other for himself.
Frederik hesitates, and I can see that he’s thinking about showing his solidarity with me by telling Niklas to listen to his mother. Perhaps he wonders why Niklas can twist me around his little finger today.
“Is this okay with you?” he asks me.
I sigh resignedly, and Niklas takes a big gulp of beer.
“You should listen to your mother,” Frederik says in a subdued voice.
Other than that, not a sound.
Frederik doesn’t open his beer.
He says, “Well, I for one have no idea what’s going on around here.” All too quickly he corrects himself. “Or yes—of course I do. Obviously, you’ve been fighting about Niklas’s music—that’s clear.”
Silence.
“Yes, it’s difficult,” Frederik says. “We all have to live here, don’t we?”
In the end, I make an effort to pull myself together.
“What have you been up to today?” I ask Frederik in my most controlled voice.
He lights up. “Well, I was trying to find more evidence in my old bank statements.”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Yes, in fact I was looking forward to telling you. Just one new thing: in the years before my tumor was discovered, I signed up twice for fitness classes without ever going to them. And once for fencing, which I never went to either. Before that, I never signed up for exercise. It was my impaired inhibitory mechanism that let me sign up, of course—and my inability to focus that kept me from following through.”
Niklas looks up at the ceiling, as if to say he thinks we’re hopeless.
I find myself sounding a little grumpy, though I don’t mean to. “There are tons of people who sign up for all kinds of things that they never end up doing.”
“But that’s where Bernard is fantastic. We’re gathering lots and lots of these sorts of facts.”
What goes through Niklas’s mind when he hears his dad use the word fantastic about the man he knows to be my lover?
This past year, a wall of manhood has risen up around Niklas, and I can’t see through to his real self. My boy’s still there within the wall, I know he is—the boy who’d come running to me from the yard if he found a small animal or an oddly bent branch, the boy I could once embrace and lift into the air when he was unhappy. But now his real face hides behind a broad jaw and a coarse complexion, his real body under strange muscles.
“Yes,” Niklas says. “He can do a little of
everything, that Bernard.”
I scowl into his bottomless, grey-blue man’s eyes. I do what I can to signal to my son that he should stop now.
“Yes, he can,” Frederik agrees, relieved that Niklas is finally saying something.
But Niklas doesn’t stop there. “He’s a real go-getter, eh? Throws himself into all sorts of things.”
“You shut your mouth!” I blurt.
Frederik raises his water glass and regards his son mildly. “What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s just my impression.”
“From what I was saying?”
“Yeah …” Niklas shrugs his shoulders, letting the word slowly dissolve to nothing.
Silence once more. Till suddenly Frederik looks horror-struck and gets to his feet so abruptly he knocks his chair over. He runs toward the front door. In this moment he must be healthy. Healthy enough to understand what the rest of us are thinking and feeling.
“Frederik! Frederik!” I shout. Followed by: “God damn it, Niklas! God damn it!”
Then I take off after Frederik. But he’s gone.
I run through corridors, down stairways, back through other corridors. Around the grounds. Now he’s going to die, I think. I shout, I look for him. Now he’s finally going to do what he’s talked about for so long.
He knows the area much better than I do, and he’s disappeared without a trace. I run back to the apartment, and as soon as I’m in the door I yell, “Niklas, what were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking? What were you thinking? You think it’s fun to hear that your mom’s on her back screwing some white-haired man behind the hedge at the tennis club?”
I half fall onto the couch. My voice grows weak. “Did someone say that?”
“Of course they said it! Everyone’s been gossiping about it! But you’re totally off in your own world!”
“Yes, but … yes, I probably haven’t—”
You Disappear: A Novel Page 34