You Disappear Read online

  I put my arm around his waist and give him a reassuring squeeze. “Frederik, I can drive you. Then everyone else can go home. Or we could all drive past the school.”

  “You’re not really going to listen to what that fellow said? Then I wouldn’t be able to drive for a month. That’s obviously out of the question.”

  Laust shifts his weight uncertainly from one foot to the other before breaking in. “Frederik, there’s something else we need to talk about.”

  Frederik is so happy that his smile borders on laughter. Laust continues.

  “It may be that it’s a good idea to take a break from work until you have a clean bill of health again.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that … if there’s the least chance of the illness affecting the choices you make, then it would probably be for the best.”

  “What!”

  I release my hold on Frederik’s belly and look around. His shout echoes in the concrete garage, but nobody else is down here.

  Laust has a muted, solicitous way of focusing on his friend. “I merely think … if you end up making a couple of wrong decisions … It’s a foolish risk to run.”

  “I’m not going to make any wrong decisions!”

  “It’s just for safety’s sake. Until we’re one hundred percent certain you’re in top form again.”

  Frederik’s voice breaks. “But Laust, you’re not really going to shut me out from the school, are you?”

  Laust always looks so small standing next to Frederik, who towers above him by more than a head. “Frederik, you would be the one who would regret it most if you were to misjudge—”

  “But I won’t misjudge anything! I won’t!”

  Thorkild interposes in his husky voice. “Perhaps you should take a little time to consider—”

  “You want to shut me out of the school!” Frederik yells.

  His fist strikes Laust’s face, and then he shoves him down onto the asphalt.

  “Frederik! Frederik!” we shout.

  Without thinking, I throw myself upon the two of them and try to grab Frederik’s arms to pin them behind his back, while he rains blows down upon Laust. I get hold of one arm but he pulls free, I get the same arm again and he bites me on the hand.

  I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but two deep breaths and I can focus. With both hands I grab Frederik’s right arm and wrench it behind his back as quick as I can so he can’t bite or hit me. I shove him forward facedown against the concrete floor and sit on top of him, holding him in an armlock. He’s the one who’s sat behind a desk most of his life, while I’m six years his junior and a PE teacher to boot. He screams in pain.

  And keeps on yelling. About marital violence, about the school, about how we’re all shitheads.

  “Shut up!” I shout. “Shut up!”

  Laust manages to crawl out from under Frederik. I twist Frederik’s arm even harder, up toward his neck. Another scream. His brain, his poor sick brain: all that fat and blood in there, and furrows and fissures and something that’s growing—the fetuses I lost, so that we never had any more children.

  I glance up at Niklas, his long blond hair against the concrete ceiling of the parking garage. He’s bowed slightly forward, ready to fight, my pale boy, albeit with eyes confused. Whom should he fight?

  “Lie still, damn it,” I say.

  But Frederik continues to thrash whenever I’m not pressing on his arm and back. Vibeke squats down in front of his face.

  “Frederik,” she says, in a tone she might use to talk to a puppy that’s been mischievous. “Frederik, how could you?”

  Laust’s nose is bleeding and he has abrasions on one cheek. He sees my inquiring look.

  “I’ll be okay,” he says.

  The sound of his voice makes Frederik start to struggle again. “You want to shut me out of the school! From my school! My school!”

  I grip the hair on the back of his head and let my weight press his skull down against the concrete, but I let go as quickly as if I’d been shocked—I don’t want to press on the tumor.

  “Is this what it’s like?” asks Laust. “Is he really like this?”

  “We haven’t had any physical fights before,” I say, panting.

  The only one who keeps a cool head is my father-in-law. He gently lays a hand on Laust’s arm.

  “You know it’s not Frederik who’s doing this,” he says. “You know that. It’s the tumor.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are police everywhere out here, and they may have a hard time understanding that. I trust you won’t mention this to them.”

  “No, of course not.” Laust looks almost alarmed by the suggestion.

  Thorkild’s mild voice and confidential tone are exactly like the voice Frederik uses in crisis situations. It’s so familiar. Even Frederik seems to grow less tense beneath me.

  “Perhaps you should go,” Thorkild says quietly to Laust. “Then I think he’ll become himself again more quickly.”

  Laust nods. He takes leave of us silently, walks over to his car, and drives away. Once he’s gone, I want to release my tight grip on Frederik, but I don’t know if it’s too soon.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  Vibeke speaks from her position by Frederik’s face. “Not to tell you what to do, Mia, but aren’t you being a little rough in the way you’re handling him? I think you’re hurting him.”

  • • •

  Until three years ago, Frederik got up every day at five thirty to answer e-mails in his home office. Then we ate breakfast, he left, and the next time I saw him would be late at night. He would be tired and we seldom had sex. Then a new day would begin. On weekends too, he often spent most of the day in the home office, and all too many Sunday evenings passed with me grousing.

  One day when I was complaining to Helena, she said, “A lack of love would drive anyone crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Yes. Not that you’re crazy, of course. But it’s not strange that you react the way you do.”

  When we’d been married eight years, I found in his bag a note to a female English teacher. The note looked like all the little love notes he’d left in my mailbox in the teachers’ lounge, during the months after we came back from the school camp in Sweden. The note said that he was eager to see her that evening.

  I arranged for Niklas to sleep at Thorkild and Vibeke’s and took the train into Copenhagen, where I used his spare key to let myself in a back door. Frederik was alone in his office, and he denied everything. But as I was on my way out of the office, the English teacher came walking down the hall.

  I was ready to do anything—and not just for my sake, but for Niklas’s too. I made a humongous scene, screaming that if she didn’t get a job at another school, I’d contact the parents of all her students and bring her affair with Frederik before the school board and make her life miserable any way I could.

  She quit, and Frederik promised once again to change. And so began another week when I stayed with him, and when I hoped he would show a little interest in Niklas and me, the following weekend perhaps or the next vacation or the vacation after that.

  Three years ago it happened again. This time it was a woman on the board I discovered him with, and this time I threw him out. First he stayed a week in a spare room in Laust and Anja’s big apartment in Copenhagen, and then he moved into a one-bedroom sublet fifty yards from the school.

  The first week was tough for both Niklas and me. But after that I was ecstatic. I wanted to start to paint, and I wanted to have a real husband, one who wanted to share a life with me. For years I’d dreamt about having the courage to make this leap. Now I wouldn’t be so damn lonely; now I’d no longer overwhelm Niklas with my attention. And from the moment it got out that I was single, lots of men began to approach me, both married and unmarried, men who’d apparently been holding back only on account of Frederik.

  For the first time in many years I was free, I was exultant, and everything w
as slated to begin, everything was looking up.

  I still can’t comprehend what happened then: Niklas found me unconscious on the kitchen floor with an empty tequila bottle. What was that about? It was so far from who I was. Where did it come from? I couldn’t remember anything, only waking up in the emergency room with Frederik and Niklas looking at me in my hospital bed.

  I’ll never forgive myself for letting my son see me that way. Did I go insane for one night? Had freedom come to me too suddenly? Was it impossible for me to live without Frederik?

  After that he moved back in—maybe to take care of Niklas, maybe to take care of me. And I let him, because I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

  I distinctly remember one of the first dinners Frederik and I had together when we were both back home. Niklas was at a friend’s, and Frederik had brought me a large bouquet of flowers. He set the table with the cloth napkins we never used, and with candles that we did use, but only when I set them out. From the kitchen I could hear him uncork a bottle of red wine, even though his mother thought I should stop drinking.

  As soon as we sat down, he said, “Isn’t there something we can do to make this romantic?”

  “Candles, wine?”

  “No, not that.”

  His lips touched the edge of his glass; they were dry despite the fact that he had just drunk. He went on.

  “There are two lovers and one almost dies, and so they learn that deserting each other will never be an option. That’s how it goes in the best love stories. Aren’t we in the middle of a story like that?”

  I wanted to shout It was only me who was about to die. You were out screwing! Maybe you know some love stories where the woman would have drunk herself to death if her son hadn’t found her on the floor! But I said nothing.

  He was looking at me with unwonted intensity.

  “Can’t we learn from this how impossible it’d be for either of us to live without the other? That has to be the most romantic thing in the world, Mia! We’re meant for each other, with all our failings. That’s the essence of love, is it not? You and me.”

  I deeply admire Frederik’s ability to find something positive in even the direst situations. And he was right, of course—though I was furious with disappointment, though he’d kept me out of his life year in and year out, though our relationship had become something radically different from the one I’d first known. Despite all that, he was right. The two of us were meant to be. We were meant to be, from the moment we first met on that beach in Sweden—to when I forced his first lover to quit her job, to when I nearly drank myself to death, to this dinner and on till we die.

  And then he finally settled down.

  He no longer stayed at school every evening. He finally began to relax, and I felt I could engage him. He ate at home and we watched TV together, visited friends together. He spent time with Niklas, and the two of us talked about our son, our house and yard. All the things that other couples enjoy doing together.

  Again and again, my friends had told me that you cannot change a man. They advised me to get a divorce. But I fought and persevered.

  And it turned out they were wrong.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, we’re on our way home in my in-laws’ car. Thorkild handled the conversation with the two airport cops who showed up, and he’s also the one who’s driving now, with Vibeke seated beside him and the other three of us in back.

  I said a lot of sweet things to Frederik, and I have to say that they worked. He’s asleep now, with his head up against the window.

  On my other side, Niklas sits erect. He looks so lovely and fragile. In the dim light through the thin clouds and the light rain he looks almost like a girl, a wistful model, and I cannot stop thinking that it would have been easier on him if it were me who was ill, instead of his father.

  For our son’s sake, Frederik would have sometimes been able to transform the depressing daily round with a sick mother into a Help Our Crazy Mother game. Of course they would still feel sad, but they’d also have fun—and Niklas can’t live without humor. It’s not the same with me; when I’m unhappy, my sorrow eclipses everything. And he knows that.

  Niklas gazes insistently out the window. I take my eyes from his neck and look out the other window, through the small vibrating drops that the wind presses across the glass.

  And I resolve with myself that I don’t owe Frederik anything. On the contrary, he owes me, for all the years when I trusted him and suffered so terribly from him never being home. I thought I was sacrificing myself for the students of Saxtorph, while in reality he had something going on with other women in Copenhagen. Year after year. The years of my youth.

  If I became seriously ill, he ought to care for me for a long, long time to answer for that.

  And I decide, as I’ve already done several times in the last few days, that if the operation doesn’t cure Frederik, I’ll stick with him for a year and a half, maximum. Only until he’s gotten as far as he can with rehab; after that it’s over. It feels good for me to think that. It’s necessary to have an emergency exit.

  Frederik’s head shifts over, so it no longer rests against the window but on my shoulder instead. Warmth, the soft press of his ear, the little sounds of his halting snore.

  I start to cry, muted and still. For that’s not the way it’ll be; I know that. In the end I won’t leave him. Not after a year and a half. It’ll be Frederik and me forever.

  Will he keep hitting people after the operation? Will I have to quit my job? Will we have to move? I throw him to the concrete floor of the parking garage and pin his arm behind his back, I strike him in the supermarket when he attacks me for not letting him decide what to buy, I hold him down while he struggles on the patio of Thorkild and Vibeke’s summer cottage.

  “Thorkild, could you please pull over? I’m not feeling well.”

  My father-in-law stops on the freeway shoulder, and I tumble out onto the strip of overgrown grass along the roadside. I sink to my knees and raise my hands to my forehead.

  I want to throw up, but nothing will come. Sweat trickles down my back. I try to hawk something up. Again. And again. Then I feel a warm hand upon my brow. It’s Niklas. He learned it from me, that’s the way I always placed my hand against his forehead when he threw up as a little boy.

  It should be me who’s taking care of him. I want to get up and press my hand against his brow. It should be him who’s throwing up. When I finally do rise, he embraces me; he’s taller than me, his arms are strong, he pats me on the head.

  Orbitofrontal Injuries

  The orbitofrontal cortex coordinates emotions from our limbic system with our overarching control systems.

  The limbic system sends strong signals to the rest of the brain with messages to flee, fight, mate, feel sadness/pain, or grow angry—survival signals that we share with other animals. The orbitofrontal cortex is the region that modulates these all-or-nothing signals and gives them a more nuanced, human expression.

  Orbitofrontal damage results in the injured person losing the unique, personal way he modulates his emotions. He possesses only two levels of emotion: quiescence and maximum strength. There is no middle ground.

  The injured person will often experience pathologically high spirits and feel strikingly uninvolved with and indifferent to what happens around him. The personality and subtlety in how he reacts to his surroundings have disappeared. Instead, when he cries or is angry, he cannot govern the strength of his emotions—just like an infant.

  Frequently, an isolated orbitofrontal injury will not affect intelligence, memory, or language. Yet it will lead to a fundamental personality change, in which the injured person’s sense of what constitutes a good or bad choice is nullified. He becomes a more fearless, “simple” person, who has a hard time controlling his immediate impulses and making long-term plans.

  It is characteristic of frontal-lobe syndrome that the person who suffers from it mistakenly believes he is healthy and comple
tely unaffected. No test or argument can convince him otherwise. The absence of empathy for others, and of a sense for when he is about to make a poor choice, often leads to a radically altered way of life for a person with orbitofrontal damage—even one whose injuries are so minor as to be undetectable by conventional psychological tests.

  Introduction to Neuropsychology

  The orbitofrontal cortex sits in the very front of the brain, just over the eyes.

  Some people with orbitofrontal injuries may exhibit only a few of the following characteristics, while others develop most of them:

  • lack of empathy for and interest in other people

  • recklessness, tactless behavior, unacceptable sexual advances

  • unnatural jocularity involving trite, childish jokes

  • fearlessness and emotional callousness, with minimal capacity for self-criticism

  • distractibility and a tendency to give up when confronted with any difficulty

  These symptoms can manifest themselves without any evident sign of neurological illness, such as paralysis. Moreover, the injured person experiences virtually no sense of being ill. As a consequence, he is completely uninterested in consulting a physician or psychologist.

  5

  “Of course you’re going to stay with him,” Helena says on the telephone when I call her at three in the morning because I can’t sleep. “You’ll stay. Because that’s the way you are.”

  An eternity ago, we were three girls from the same dorm studying architecture together: Hanne, who died shortly before I met Frederik; Helena, who with her iron will was the only one to finish the degree; and myself. Helena and I also played tennis together, which we’ve done ever since. Perhaps she doesn’t have quite the finesse in her game that I do, but she’s a tall woman with slightly masculine features and well-defined muscles, so we’re an even match. After five years as a more-or-less unemployed architect, she took up my suggestion to get a second degree in primary education. And then she got a job at my school, so now we’re colleagues as well as tennis partners.