You Disappear Read online

  Could he hear me fall?

  “It’s awful, I know,” he said. “Really awful, but you’re going to have to do it.”

  Around me stood the furniture I had bartered and haggled for and restored and pampered over the course of fifteen years, starting from scratch. They’d probably take the coffee table that my feet rested upon. The carpet beneath the table, the lamp that lit it. Everything. Everything.

  I needed to clear my throat, but Bernard cleared his first.

  “Mia, I know you can do it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because it isn’t as hard as supporting your sick husband—and you do an amazing job of that.”

  When I spoke on the phone with Helena, she became quite insistent. “At the very least, you’ve got to hide the Wegner sofa at my place before they come. You need something you can count on. Something in your situation. Would anyone blame you if you hid a couple pieces of furniture?”

  “Actually, I think a lot of people would.”

  “Just let me come over and get something. The lamp! The Arne Jacobsen lamp, I can take it with me in the car.”

  Again I had a desire to flop down in my armchair, land on the hollow under my right buttock, finger the nick in the arm. But I was sitting there already.

  • • •

  They are nothing if not precise. At the stroke of nine, Bernard and I receive two men out in the scorched front yard. The sofa and the lamp are still both in the living room, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m honest or because I’m tired. The school’s new lawyer is young and dark-haired, with a broad jaw and a shiny pink tie. He couldn’t be more different from the previous one, the chubby man whom I danced with for years at Saxtorph parties.

  The assessor is someone I could run into on the street a couple of days from now and not recognize. His clothes, his features, his haircut—everything—run together in my mind with those of other men who don’t want to be noticed or remembered. He probably picks up hookers, I think as I proffer my hand. The papers always say that johns are completely ordinary men, and he’s so without character as to be almost striking.

  “Is this your car?” It’s just about the first thing the lawyer says, extending his hand toward the blue Mercedes parked in front of our house. I can already see the delight in his eyes.

  “No, ours is over there.” I point down the street.

  We start walking over to our little orange-red Alfa Romeo. It’s sunk down to the asphalt, the tires flat and spreading out to the sides.

  “What happened?” asks Bernard.

  “Somebody slashed the tires.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You should report it,” he says. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “We’re married.”

  “That’s no crime. You don’t deserve this.”

  Perhaps I feel a fury somewhere inside myself. I think I do. And I wonder whether it’s kids who slashed the tires, or a teacher—maybe one of our former friends. But I observe the fury with an overwhelming exhaustion. Lazy and passive, as if I had one of the brain injuries I’ve read about, just a notch higher up behind my forehead than Frederik’s. The car’s stood this way for a week, and I haven’t done anything about it.

  Frederik no longer cares about the car, despite the progress he’s been making. The interval between angry outbursts is getting longer, yet he still weeps a lot—and what makes him most unhappy is that he no longer derives any pleasure from music. The notes don’t add up to melodies for him; they’re simply sounds, without any glint of beauty.

  Which is why he’s become obsessed with the principles of speaker construction and with building speakers that are better than the ones we have. I took him over to the neighbor’s so he could hear that the problem doesn’t lie in our stereo system. But he just ran their system down while they stood there and listened. Niklas also tried to play music for him on his computer headphones, but Frederik thought they sounded terrible too.

  In the evenings, I enter the access code to our computer so he can visit online forums where they discuss optimal crossover frequencies and the control of impedance curves—and more generally, how to construct the ultimate speakers. Meanwhile I sit next to him and correct math assignments or fill out new forms from public agencies about his illness. In this way I can monitor him and make sure he doesn’t go onto sites where he can make investments or other kinds of trouble.

  The day before yesterday, he went with Vibeke and Thorkild to a building supply outlet, where they bought some immense sheets of fiberboard. The two men cut them into pieces with Thorkild’s circular saw in Frederik’s office, which they’ve refurbished as a workshop. Since then, he’s been holed up in there by himself with his sketches, calculations, glue, and dowels.

  Out by the car, the school lawyer asks, “Do you want to keep it?”

  “We want to keep everything.”

  “Yes, but what I mean is, we’re going to have to sell the house. But this here doesn’t look to be worth more than ninety thousand, max, so—”

  “They can certainly afford to keep the car,” Bernard interposes, “and they’d like to keep it.”

  “Fine. Good,” the lawyer says. “We’ll send an expert out to appraise it, but we won’t put it up for sale.”

  Once we’ve gotten back to the house and I open the door for the men, the lawyer asks, “Is your husband home?”

  “Yes, but he’s busy.”

  “Just to be clear, our meeting today will determine how much money you will have, from now on through the rest of your lives. The things we decide here cannot be renegotiated.”

  “I know that.”

  “And your husband knows that too?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  The lawyer coughs slightly and tenses his broad chin, as if he’s making an effort to look away from me and not ask anything else.

  I lead them into our living room. The anonymous-looking assessor sighs with relief and smiles, as if he wants to turn on the TV and sprawl out on my sofa with a beer. “You always get a good sense about whether a house is sellable by asking yourself, Could I imagine living here?” he says. “With this one, I certainly could.”

  The lawyer also appears pleased. “The location is ideal, isn’t it, considering that it isn’t any larger. I’d think that there are a lot of young couples who are looking for something charming—”

  The assessor interrupts him, saying, “But there isn’t as much light as young people like these days.”

  “Yes, we’ll have to remove some of the furniture before we have the pictures taken for the listing. That’ll create more of a feeling of light and space.”

  The lawyer raises the small stainless-steel bowl from the coffee table, examining the hallmark on the bottom. I place myself in front of my costly sofa and stand there perfectly still, watching.

  “You people sure live the life of Riley,” the assessor says.

  The lawyer lets his thumb slide appreciatively over the leather on the backrest of my armchair. “Fantastic furniture. Is there any of it you want to keep?”

  I glance hesitantly toward Bernard. “As much of it as we can,” I say.

  I remember distinctly when I bought the armchair. I’d just guided a ninth-grade class through their final exams. It’d been the first time I’d been homeroom teacher for a graduating class, and it had gone swimmingly. They were so happy, their enthusiasm infectious. So this is how it’ll be, I thought, and I embraced my life and my calling and felt satisfied—felt in fact ready to resign myself to Frederik’s absence. And then in the online classifieds that week I found a worn old armchair that sounded promising. I drove the seventy-five miles to Korsør with the trailer to see it, and it was just as I’d hoped: it had been made in the late ’40s by a furniture designer from Funen who was essentially unknown, but whose style I’d already fallen in love with.

  “This chair here,” the lawyer says. “Have you had i
t appraised?”

  “No, but it’s not by a name designer.”

  I glance up at the wall, where there’s a luminous suggestion of a rectangle next to the shelves with Frederik’s LPs. Until recently, a drawing hung there that Niklas had made in third grade. When he entered gymnasium, he insisted that it no longer hang there, and now all that remains is the light patch of wallpaper.

  Where are we going to end up living? It’ll probably be an apartment building full of welfare recipients and mental patients—just like us. Far from Old Farum.

  “My husband worked in the evenings and on weekends,” I explain. “So I had lots of time to deal in furniture. It was my hobby, mine alone. Buying and selling. He didn’t have anything to do with it. You’ll see that all the receipts are in my name.”

  The lawyer positions himself on the exact spot where, less than a year and a half ago, Laust stood on a chair and raised a toast to Frederik at his birthday party.

  “Yes,” he says. “Let’s talk then about how we’re going to divide this up. If your husband worked on those evenings and weekends, and the two of you were using his larger income for your daily expenses, then Saxtorph Private School also has the right to half of what you earned during those same working hours.”

  Instantly I feel adrenaline pumping through my veins. I manage to speak calmly though I start gasping for breath. “But it’s furniture that I’ve traded my way up to, on my own. It’s taken me years.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that my client has right to one half—at least—if your husband was earning other money that you used.”

  “But surely you can’t just—”

  Bernard steps in front of the lawyer and says, very evenly, “Shouldn’t we wait and take this up later?”

  And so the confrontation is postponed, apparently. Bernard smiles at me. I exhale noisily, ready to fight but no longer having an outlet for my belligerence.

  The assessor sits down in each of the chairs, examines the tabletop, studies the books on the shelves, kneels and turns up the corner of a rug. The lawyer stands still, watching him; I stand and watch Bernard.

  Is this what it feels like when someone looks out for you? When’s the last time someone looked out for me? The three years before Frederik’s seizure were peaceful—there wasn’t really anything he had to protect me from. Then there were our first years together, before Saxtorph swallowed him whole, back when I felt he wanted to take care of me. Before that I’d have to go all the way back to when I was twelve, in the years before my father moved out.

  Bernard sticks his hands in the pockets of his jacket, then he takes them out, then he puts them back in. Two weeks ago, when I met him for the first time, I felt something wolfish in the combination of his evident solitude and his grey-haired physical presence.

  But now I see everything differently. After nearly twenty years, it’s clear that he’s still besotted with his wife. More than any other man I’ve met. And now I can see that it’s not a wolf he resembles so much as a family dog who can’t find its way home. The prominent cheekbones, the intense eyes belong to a dog who restlessly roams the winter streets, hunting for the family and the warm hearth it once knew, while each day its bones grow more and more visible beneath its fur.

  We all go up to the second floor and enter the bathroom. There’s no sawing or drilling noises from the workshop; Frederik must be marking cutting patterns on the fiberboard. I’ve been slowly finding traces of personality in the assessor’s features. He’s a bit more round-headed than most men; his lips are a bit thicker, his eyes a bit smaller. If I bump into him on the street in a couple of days and don’t acknowledge him, it’ll no longer be because I mix him up with all the others in my mind, but because I don’t want to.

  Our bathroom’s too small, and it feels even more cramped because we don’t have anywhere else to put the stacked washer and dryer.

  “Hmm; hmm. Well, this is disappointing,” the assessor says. “It could easily knock a couple hundred thousand off the price.”

  “But we’ve just redone it!”

  “I hope you haven’t paid a lot of money for it. This remodel only reduces the value.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Look at this row of tiles. A buyer would want them straight.”

  “Well, that’s part of the charm—after all, the tiles are sitting …”

  Suddenly I realize: the man who laid the tiles was definitely not the real Frederik.

  Two years ago, Frederik and I spent a lot of weekends here. We had perhaps the best time of our best years—flirting and laughing and puttering about among the tools, grout, and tiles. Frederik’s never been good at maintaining the house, that’s more my department, but he wanted to put up the row of green glass tiles himself, and every time I sit on the toilet and stare up at them, their skewed aspect recalls our happiness.

  But the real Frederik would have kept at it till everything was perfect—especially with something he wasn’t good at. The real Frederik would never have tolerated anything crooked.

  The play of light from the halogen lamps on the tile surface merges with the smell of the open packages of laundry powder, the humid air, and the odor of Frederik’s wet towel. I feel like vomiting on the bulging linoleum, with its uneven cut in the corner. Two years ago, the temperament of the sick Frederik was unfamiliar to me—the temperament in which everything is uncomplicated and fun, in which nothing has depth. I must have let his humor rub off on me because I didn’t know any better.

  • • •

  “Let me stay here for a minute,” I say when the assessor and the lawyer are ready to go out and survey the rest of the upstairs.

  Bernard looks at me—an inquiring look, straight in the eye. He wants to know if I can manage. Right away he’s able to see that I can’t, but what can he do? He asks, with a carefree air that I can hear doesn’t come natural, “Do you think you’ll be here for a while?”

  “Nah.”

  I lock the door behind them and sit down on the toilet lid, my head in my hands. How I detest the stench of our wet towels, laundry soap, and standing water.

  Does Bernard and Lærke’s bathroom smell like this? I can’t imagine it does. Does it smell in a way that’s even reminiscent of this? Without being conscious of it, I must have sniffed Bernard during the course of the morning, for to my surprise I have a clear sense of how he smells—and therefore of how his bathroom smells. It smells good.

  When I come out, the others are in Niklas’s room. The assessor has Niklas’s camera bag in one hand, and he’s about to root around in it—just as he roots through everything else.

  “Don’t open that!” I exclaim from the doorway. “It isn’t ours, it’s our son’s.”

  “Do you have a receipt?”

  I rush over so I’m standing right in front of his face. “Could you leave my son’s bag alone! It’s his, you can’t take it!”

  But he’s not supposed to care about what I say. “Then you need to have a receipt in your son’s name,” he says. “Gosh, it’s a splendid camera.”

  Bernard’s voice is soothing. “They’re not going to take it, Mia. It’s not Frederik’s. They just need to know …”

  He falls silent, and the other men do too. They’re looking toward the door in back of me.

  Frederik’s come out of his workshop.

  “Frederik, they want to take Niklas’s camera!” I shout.

  “That’s not really what they want,” says Bernard quietly. “What they want …”

  Frederik studies the three of them, then he ignores them and looks at me. I gaze right into his cheerful eyes. That blank expression. That indifferent pleasure—just like when he’s lying to me. Just like when he takes a walk, when he watches TV, when he eats.

  “Mia, we have to go out and buy more fiberboard.”

  “We don’t have to go out and buy more fiberboard. They want to seize Niklas’s camera. So can’t you see that—”

  “But I need more fiberboard. I�
��ve revised the construction plans.”

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying? They want to take your son’s camera!”

  “I think we should go out and buy it this afternoon. Then I can take a nap first.”

  “God damn it, Frederik! Can’t we focus for two seconds on someone other than you?”

  Something shifts in his eyes. As if a personality is emerging somewhere within. Tentative attempts to figure out how he can get his way. To figure out how I’m thinking and feeling, and what he has to say to get that fiberboard. It’s the same look, deeply focused and oddly distant at the same time, as when a little boy—the new neural pathways forming—practices sitting on the pot.

  “And if I don’t let you decide for me, then you’ll just start hitting me, won’t you?” He looks hesitantly at all four of us. “Then you’ll just beat me hard on my back, right? If I don’t let you decide, then you’ll beat me with that bowl from the coffee table.”

  Iowa Gambling Task

  It has long been a riddle why people with orbitofrontal brain injuries make such disastrous choices in daily life, when the same people can appear normal in conversation and on conventional psychological tests.

  The phenomenon can be explained if we assume that we utilize different areas in our brains when we are going to make an important decision than when we are going to choose between a cappuccino and a café au lait.

  We must also assume that there is a marked difference between the brain areas we use when we talk about critical life decisions, and the brain areas we use when we actually decide.

  Orbitofrontal damage is easiest to discover when the affected person has the freedom to make his own decisions. However, such injuries can be quite difficult to observe in situations with well-defined rules—which is precisely why traditional IQ tests and ordinary conversations do not register them.

  In addition to satisfying scientific curiosity, the development of an effective test for orbitofrontal injuries is of critical importance in determining how the affected people are treated by doctors and social workers, whether they can qualify for accident insurance and disability pensions, and a host of other practical issues.