You Disappear Page 20

  AT THE SAME TIME, the matter is more complicated than that. If no pharmaceutical treatments have been developed yet for the neurologically abnormal man, we will do everything we can to keep him away from our workplace and prevent him from marrying into our circle of family and friends. For his brain will not permit him to get any better.

  The opposite is true of the neurologically normal man. Maybe he speaks the truth when he says that he deeply regrets the way he has been and that he has turned over a new leaf. We cannot know, for the brain he has could get him on the right track. Should he not have a chance?

  In this way, our society risks becoming much more callous in its treatment of deviants—and only because we are learning more about ourselves and our brains. On the surface, this inevitable evolution in our view of human nature is making us more generous. Yet underneath it we risk becoming merciless and incompassionate. If we no longer consider some people to have free will when it comes to beating or not beating their spouses and children, do we still think of them as human at all? Can’t we just expel them then from all social contexts—families, workplaces, etc.?

  GRADUALLY, as we become accustomed to new ways of looking at ourselves and others, it also becomes natural for us to think that there must be some hidden reason for why the second man hits his wife and children. No one really wants to be that way voluntarily, does he? Might he be a victim of childhood trauma, a personality disorder, or some neurological deviance that science simply isn’t capable of showing on a brain scan yet?

  And aren’t the two men subject in the same degree to neurological processes beyond their control, even though the processes can only be detected in one of them? Surely that must be the case. Don’t both of them deserve the same forgiveness and compassion?

  And what about us?

  Aren’t even the most apparently healthy people simply unwilling

  (cont. on p. 64)

  19

  I’m on my way home from school. In a little while, I’ll find Frederik in our bed. He’s been lying there for more than a week with the curtains drawn. He might lie like that for months or years to come.

  As soon as I get home, I’ll drink a couple of cups of tea, eat a couple of open-face sandwiches, and lie down beside him. That’s what I’ve done every day of the past week, and every day I remain there until the world forces me to get up again.

  But I’m not home yet. My car is stopped for a red light on Mayor Jespersen Road, and I’m thinking about the days Bernard and I have spent together: the phone conversations, the texts, the brief meetings.

  One day we walked through Østerbro from the office of the public prosecutor for serious financial crimes. The sun was low and the light sharp and red, making the quarter’s monotone rust-brown high-rises seem luminous. Why does everything light up that way? That’s what I remember wondering. Why isn’t it just reds that get a boost of color from the afternoon light? The wrapper of a chocolate bar, a dark green bench, the remnants of a dandelion between the paving stones—why does everything glow?

  Bernard was wearing one of his grey suits, and he talked about his twin sons. At the boarding school they were attending for the final year before gymnasium, one of them had developed a passion for astronomy. There was a telescope at the school, and three of the boys and the math teacher were using a computer program to look for signs of life in the universe.

  While Bernard spoke, he forgot all about Frederik’s case, he forgot about me, he forgot the streets. There was no doubt in my mind that he was a good father.

  And besides the things we talked about, besides the luminous buildings around us, there were our bodies. Their harmony as we walked together down the sidewalk at an inconspicuous distance. The even rhythmic click of our heels on the paving stones. The feeling that spread throughout my body: that it was good to walk like this, next to his body.

  Just think if Niklas had had a father like Bernard. Then I wouldn’t have needed to keep secrets from him when he was small, about his father’s lechery at school. I wouldn’t have needed to throw his father out on his ear or drink myself blind. Niklas wouldn’t have found me and had to call to have my stomach pumped. It’s impossible to imagine what our relationship could have been like.

  I’m on the overpass that crosses the freeway, almost home now, and I recall another time sitting here in the car on my way from work, talking to Bernard on the phone about my day. He told me about his own day, on his way home to Lærke in his car, and just as I reached Station Road, we started talking about a trip he’d taken once as a student. Three law students traveling together, staying in a cottage in some community garden outside East Berlin. They were into the local raves, which were huge back then in the years after the Wall fell.

  “I was pretty wild when I was young,” he said.

  “Wild?” Perhaps I sounded startled. “But you were already with Lærke back then, weren’t you?”

  “Well yeah. Not wild in that way.”

  • • •

  I throw my school bag onto the small table in the entry and call out, “I’m home!” like I usually do.

  Frederik doesn’t answer. I turn on the electric kettle and go upstairs.

  The bed’s empty. I walk quickly, almost at a run, to the workshop. He isn’t there either.

  “Frederik! Frederik!”

  Has he left a note behind, a letter? I run back to the bedroom, down to the living room, back to the kitchen, out into the yard. No letter, no Frederik.

  On our patio I stand completely still, listening to sounds from the neighboring yards, feeling the pulse in my temples. Will today be the day I’ve been fearing, ever since he began lying in bed and moaning for hours at a time? Since he first said that he’d destroyed everything and just wanted to die?

  The yard’s as still as I am. The silver-white undersides of the leaves on the tall poplars next door don’t so much as stir.

  And just the way you always hear cops state the exact time when they arrest someone, I hear the basic facts being recited in my ear: There is no wind, it is cooler than normal for the season, there is moisture in the air. I am standing on the patio of our silent yard. Frederik is dead.

  No one can know how it must’ve felt for him, for the first time in ages, to reproach himself for something. For the first time since a tumor changed everything. How does guilt feel the very first time? Or empathy for another person? How does it feel to realize in a blinding flash that you’ve ruined the lives of everyone around you?

  I call Niklas, who is at Mathias’s with some friends, but he hasn’t seen or heard from his father. I manage to sound calm on the phone, though I can hear the thudding of my heart. Niklas sounds calm too, and I don’t think it’s an act. He has no sense of the danger; he hasn’t been home during the afternoons when Frederik’s at his most inconsolable.

  Then it’s my in-laws’ turn.

  “Is it possible he might do something to himself?” Vibeke asks.

  I hesitate too long, and Thorkild has to take the receiver. “We’re coming over there now,” he says.

  “I’d rather you wait. If I don’t find him in the next half hour, I’ll call you again.”

  Back to the yard. I shout his name and get no answer.

  And just then—at the same time that I’m searching and calling and feeling desperate—just then, it’s not simply despair I feel. What was it that Ulla said at my first support group meeting? It would have been better if Kirsten’s husband had died this time. The group smiled afterward; we all felt a bond.

  I run down the wooded path toward the lakeshore. No sign of him on the small pier that extends from the woods out into the water.

  Thorkild calls again. I tell him they should wait another hour before they come, but he says they’re already in the car and on their way.

  I call the police. They haven’t heard anything.

  Vibeke calls again from the car, and while I have my weeping mother-in-law on the phone, I hear the beep of another incoming call. I hang up and suddenl
y Laust is on the line. “Will you come and get your husband!”

  “He’s at your place?”

  “He just shoved his way in, and I can’t get him to leave.”

  Relief. And then not, after all. What was it Ulla said? And everyone smiled. I’m relieved. I am relieved.

  I picture Frederik standing erect and sobbing in Laust and Anja’s classy Copenhagen home, his thin body amid their vintage furniture of Swedish birch, with its lovely patinated stain. The moose in the forest.

  “May I speak to him?” I ask.

  He comes on the line, but he isn’t crying. “There’s nothing to say,” he says in a pinched voice before falling silent. He sounds like a lonesome hero in an old western.

  “But you’re not going to leave?”

  “No.”

  “You have to. It’s Laust’s apartment.”

  “It’s him who needs to talk to me. There are two of us. He’s being so unconstructive.”

  “How did you get all the way over there?”

  The receiver’s torn from his hand and Laust is back. “I’m calling the police if he isn’t out of here in two minutes.”

  I try to convince Laust to wait and I run back to the house and car. Once I’m on the freeway I call Niklas and then Thorkild and Vibeke, who are headed toward me on the same road.

  Frederik and I have been to lots of parties and dinners in Laust and Anja’s apartment, which lies a few hundred yards from Saxtorph. I know where everything is, in their rooms and kitchen cabinets. I know which photos of their kids hang by the door in the living room and which ones hang in their bedroom. I know the reflection of the window onto the long white dinner table, and the bookcases with Anja’s blue-grey folders of teaching materials for her gymnasium English classes. And I know, from one of the few Saxtorph teachers who side with us, that Laust and Anja have to move. The board’s personally responsible for the school’s finances—something that nobody gave much thought to because the finances were always rock-solid, but now four of the board members have to sell their homes.

  All my life, whenever I’ve encountered men who are grieving, I’ve observed a certain restlessness in my body. Unhappy women weep and talk and spew their sorrow over everything. Grieving men, on the other hand, shuffle dumbly about and seal up all the chinks in their houses until they’re ready to gas themselves or ignite some catastrophe for whoever happens to be nearby. They commit suicide and murder and monstrosity, while we only make sobbing attempts that aren’t really meant to succeed. The grief of men is a vast, silent world that’s never revealed itself to me.

  And yet I may be starting to understand a little anyway. These last few days in bed, as I’ve finally begun to glimpse my new future, my eyes have been completely dry.

  • • •

  Laust opens the great carved oak door of his and Anja’s apartment. He looks just as I expected, his pale round head bleak and brooding. And Frederik, standing in the hall behind him, looks the same way. Not a peep. There’s nothing to suggest that they’ve been talking to each other at all.

  I don’t know what to say to Laust, who until a few months ago was one of my best friends. Now I don’t even want to talk to Frederik in front of him. Lacking a better alternative, I decide to be like the men: I hold my tongue and look annoyed. The three of us proceed silently into the large corner living room, with its stucco ceiling and the view over Saint Thomas Square. Then we just stand there.

  FOR SALE signs block part of the windows. Several of the old paintings are gone; perhaps Laust and Anja had to sell them. The ceramic bowl I picked out for Anja’s fortieth, as a gift from us and some friends we had in common, is also gone from the dinner table, though probably not to be sold.

  Why is Laust home in the middle of the day? Is he on sick leave?

  At last Frederik speaks up. “You change your accounting methods the way I’ve told you; you sell the gym, and the other premises that we rent out after school hours, to an independent firm, and the school can lease them back during the school day.”

  He speaks quickly and coolly, summarizing something he’s evidently already been arguing for.

  “You contact the sixteen parents of former students whose names I wrote down on that list. You speak with Aksel at the bank about dealing directly with him and Jørgen—not with Anette on any account. And I’ll e-mail you the letter for the Friends of Saxtorph.”

  He can sound so persuasive. If anyone can rescue the school, it’s him of course.

  I find myself blurting out, “Is this a plan, Frederik?” I turn toward Laust. “Is that what it is? A plan?”

  “Naturally, we’ve tried everything like that,” he mumbles, not looking me in the eye. “We aren’t idiots.”

  Frederik’s agitated, but it might not be just his illness, since he’s also dedicated his life to the school. “That’s not true!” he shouts. “I talked to Kim yesterday, and he hasn’t heard from you!”

  Laust finally raises his voice too, and it’s as if I needed him to. “We’ve tried everything. Everything! To save us from all the shit you dumped on us! The party’s over, like I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  “You haven’t talked to Kim! Have you talked to anyone else on the list I gave you? They’re precisely the people you should be talking to.”

  Something now about how to position myself—body language and facial expression—I should show that I’m backing up my husband. Or should I? Should it be the opposite—should I show Laust that I know Frederik’s a nut the two of us have to appease?

  Laust enters a short number on his phone, no doubt the police. “Your coming here didn’t do much good, eh Mia?”

  Frederik continues, undeterred. “It has to be them. All sixteen.”

  I don’t know if I should step toward Laust, or back, or … “Laust, will you let me talk to him alone? Two minutes?”

  He doesn’t answer, just turns his back on me and puts his phone in his pocket. He’s giving me a chance.

  After Laust has gone out in the hall to the kitchen, I slowly get Frederik to sit down on the sofa, seated at my side. He’s still worked up; I hold his hand. “Frederik, what’s this plan?”

  “I’ve figured out how we can rescue the school.”

  Laust sticks his head back in the room. “Mia, I’m holding you responsible if he smashes anything.”

  Then he’s gone again.

  Assuming my gentlest voice, I ask, “Why didn’t you just ask to call Laust and suggest your plan on the phone? Wouldn’t that have been a lot easier?”

  “I did call him. Often. But he hung up on me every time.”

  Now I know he’s lying again. Shit. Only Niklas and I know the codes for the phones. Why do I keep having these moments where I believe him? They just wear me out.

  Softly, I say, “Fine. Come along, Frederik, we’re leaving now.”

  “I’m not going before Laust says he’ll save the school.”

  “Yes you are. Come, we’re leaving.”

  “No.”

  I’m used to him fighting me tooth and nail until finally he does what I say anyway. I get up. “Come Frederik, we’re going now.”

  “I won’t. I’m not leaving.”

  “But you never called Laust, damn it. You can’t, after all.”

  “I got permission to borrow Niklas’s phone, as long as I let him hear what I said.”

  Right away I know he’s telling the truth. And the repercussions of what Niklas has done are enormous. “But we’re involved in a court case, God damn it! Neither of us is supposed to talk to Laust unless we’ve agreed with Bernard first about what we’re going to say.”

  Frederik looks up at me. “Bernard? But he’s not our lawyer anymore.”

  “No no, I know that. Not Bernard. The new … Neither of us is supposed to talk to Laust unless we’ve agreed with the new lawyer …”

  It comes to me in a flash: the strong urge to be done with it all. As if it were unfolding before me, I see how I take quick long strides out to Laust and
Anja’s kitchen without letting anything distract me. How I find Laust’s carving knife on the left side of the fourth drawer from the top. How I—before I myself or anyone else has a chance to think or feel a thing—draw it across my throat. Freedom. Joy. It’s over.

  The silence, the sense of purpose, the knife.

  One of Frederik’s psychiatrists told me that when she’s making a diagnosis, it’s important for her to listen to her own feelings. If a patient makes her nervous, it might be because the patient is afraid and can ease his fear by spreading it. Or if a patient makes her confused, perhaps it’s because he finds life chaotic.

  Frederik sits at my side. He’s tensed like a boxer waiting for the fight bell to ring for the next round, but I have to take these suicidal impulses seriously. Only by listening to them will I be able to understand him.

  And it comes to me that when we get out of here, we need to drive to the psychiatric emergency room at Hillerød Hospital. I’ll have to put up with sitting by myself again in some sad waiting room while he’s being examined—this time for life-threatening depression. But if he’s going to give me such vivid fantasies, I don’t dare shoulder the responsibility for him alone.

  • • •

  It’s Sunday. For four days, Frederik’s been in the hospital, under observation for depression. I’ve lain in bed since Friday afternoon. The curtains are drawn. The blackbird outside the window lacerates my ears, and nothing’ll stop it.

  In another hour and a half, the realtor’s coming by with three families to see the house. Everything’s a mess, and I need to wash my hair before going out. I can’t put it off any longer.

  While I’m standing under the showerhead, I hear my cell phone ring. Could it be Bernard, wanting to take on our case and see me again? I run to the bedroom and find the phone on the dresser, but the display doesn’t show any calls. For a moment—perhaps longer—I sit naked on the edge of the bed, though it makes the mattress wet.

  Back in the shower. It smells bad in here, I think. I need to air it out before the buyers come—better that it’s too cold than that it stinks. Now the cell’s ringing again. Or is it? There’s an echo of distant melody, my ringtone, but it might just be the shower water splashing on the floor and the crooked green tiles. The tones could be arising spontaneously.