You Disappear Read online

  He wakes up enough that I can get him to sit up in bed. And slowly he tells me what I tentatively have to accept as true.

  Frederik secretly borrowed money from the school’s accounts to gamble on international commodity indexes. Of course he was going to repay it, but then he lost a few hundred thousand crowns when copper slumped and coffee spiked. He took more money so that he could recoup the school’s losses. He set up three private firms to siphon the money away from the school in a series of obscure transactions, falsifying documents and sureties and signatures. He lost even more money. And it just grew worse.

  “I would have gotten everything back again and earned millions, both for us and the school. There’s no question. It’s only because Laust shut me out. It’s only because you installed passwords on the computers. It’s your fault.”

  There’s no way the real Frederik could have embezzled from Saxtorph; it goes against everything he stands for. The tumor had been growing slowly, which the doctors say is normal. Already a year ago it must’ve been changing his personality. Before it occurred to anyone that he’d become somebody else—and that’s normal too, the doctors say.

  Laust is still awake when I call.

  I apologize, as emphatically as I apologized to Niklas when my stomach was pumped out. More than I apologized any other time ever. I start crying for the school and hope he will cry with me. But he’s silent.

  “I’m your friend, Laust! I knew nothing! Nothing! We must be able to find some of the money in his accounts, maybe coffee prices have fallen since then—or copper gone up—whatever it needs to be. There has to be something! Some way or another. I’ll do anything I can to help you.”

  Laust continues to say nothing.

  “I really understand if you’re angry with him,” I say. “I get angry with him a lot too. And then I forget that it’s the illness. That’s what it must’ve been back then too. It’s the illness and not Frederik himself that dictates how he acts.”

  Still saying nothing, Laust hangs up the phone.

  8

  I’m lying on the air mattress at the foot of our bed. The streetlight through the trees casts a glowing pattern on the bedroom ceiling. The tree branches vibrate and the pattern comes to life: the sign’s the same as the one in the embers on the front lawn.

  Thus are we branded everywhere; thus will healthy people walking down the street know not to stop. Here live the sick people. Enter a house marked with this sign, and you renounce all claim to protection and safety. Expect no help if the poor devils savage you and tear you to pieces.

  Before I lay down, I decided I wouldn’t wake Niklas, but after I stare at the sign on the ceiling for a couple of hours, I realize I was wrong: his future’s at stake. Will his father go to jail? Will we have to sell the only house he’s known? Will the papers call his father a swindler?

  I pull on a pair of sweatpants. I knock on his door but he doesn’t wake up. I go in and sit on the edge of the bed, whisper his name.

  “Niklas. Niklas.”

  He sits up with a start, and I touch his arm.

  “Nothing’s happened, Niklas. Easy now, quiet; nothing’s happened.”

  This is the worst part: telling Niklas. Because now I have to say it.

  “Or actually something has, Niklas. Something has happened.”

  His pale face; the streetlight’s glowing sign on his cheek.

  “It’s Dad,” I say.

  “What? Is he dead?”

  “No, he’s … they say at the school that he …” And I tell him what I know.

  “I don’t believe it!” he exclaims, with the same conviction I had. He lets himself fall back on the bed.

  “I didn’t believe it either,” I say.

  It takes but an instant for all the thoughts I have when I talk with him to run through my head: Niklas as an old man, grey-haired and distinguished, perhaps a headmaster, perhaps minister of education, in a suit; Niklas as a baby on the changing table, peeing up in the air with his tiny penis, so I have to dry him and table both; Niklas running around in the yard playing with a wheelbarrow; Niklas’s photos on exhibit in the gymnasium library and us so proud.

  “But Dad’s confessed,” I continue. “And they think I’m involved too.”

  “Confessed? You?” He sits up again.

  They aren’t so much thoughts as glimpses, and not individual glimpses so much as a state of mind: he falls on his bike, scrapes his smooth little knees; he plays in the sand on the beach.

  “Yes. So the police will probably question us tomorrow,” I say.

  “Yeah but of course you guys haven’t … of course you haven’t—”

  “I haven’t done anything. And Dad only did it because he was sick. The police will understand that, and so will Laust, when he’s no longer so angry.”

  The air in here is warm and pungent—and the room’s a terrible mess, something I’ve stopped commenting on. In the darkness, I see something catch the light in his pile of dirty clothes; from here it looks like a bra. A white, almost luminous bra among the worn jeans and shirts. I can’t go any closer to be sure.

  “You have to stop now, damn it!” he shouts. “Don’t you two ever think of me? You keep doing one crazy thing after the other!”

  I must accept his anger, I tell myself. I have to give his emotions room.

  “Of course I think of you. All the time. And I’ll do anything. You just have to—”

  “You don’t think of me at all, and that’s the truth! Both of you have gone totally whack!”

  Room for his anger. It’s a state of mind: he’s overnighting at a friend’s for the first time, but at midnight the parents call, they say he’s crying, and I drive over to get him. His first year of gymnasium, and two girls and a boy from his new homeroom wait for him out on the street, they’re going to the beach with mats and a cooler bag.

  “Niklas, you know it isn’t me who embezzled from anyone. I haven’t done anything.”

  “But you’re the one I can never trust!”

  I tell myself that it’s important not to yell. I answer him calmly.

  “You can trust me now, Niklas. Now.”

  “The hell I could! You’re the one who should have been watching out! You! That’s what you should have done!”

  I don’t say Watch out for what? I say, “I can understand this is hard for you, Niklas.”

  “Shut the fuck up! You don’t hear one single …” He shouts, “Get out!”

  And that, finally, is what I do.

  Alone in the kitchen, I feel good about letting him give his emotions free rein. I can take it. A glimpse, a state, his little hand in mine as I walk him home from first grade.

  Maybe I’ll be able to get a little sleep tonight if I eat something heavy. The best thing now would be some cold oatmeal with skim milk and banana. I look down into my meal. The color of ghosts, I think, of something unreal: semen.

  • • •

  When I open the front door for them, I feel oddly relaxed. I know it’s not the real Frederik they’re coming for. And it’s as if it isn’t the real me who invites them in either.

  The two polite young men walk into the living room, where Frederik is sitting at the dinner table, reading from a stack of advertising circulars.

  “Frederik Halling?” one of them asks. “It is 10:15 a.m. You are hereby under arrest, charged with embezzlement and falsification of documents. It would be best if you remained seated while we go through the house.”

  Frederik says nothing and, equally silent, I sit down in the chair next to him and hold his hand.

  After listening to the front door open and shut a couple of times, I can hear the policemen rummaging around in Frederik’s office. I get up and go in there. His computer lies in a moving box with a pile of DVDs and two external hard drives. The officers put files and folders and all kinds of papers into boxes, while they allow me to stand there and watch.

  An hour later, they turn their attention to Frederik again.

  “
Now then, sir. We would like to ask you to accompany us to the station.”

  Frederik gets up, and I put some crackers and apples in my bag. I put on my coat and am ready to go when the first officer says, “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t come with. Only Mr. Halling.”

  “But Officer, they think I helped embezzle the funds. They’ve accused me too.”

  “We don’t know anything about that.”

  The second policeman takes over. “We suggest you wait here at home. Later today, we’ll call and tell you whether he’s going directly to jail.”

  “Directly to jail?”

  “Yes ma’am. With a charge like this, one doesn’t go home to sleep.”

  Something breaks inside of me. I see Frederik in a fight with other inmates; I see him attacking policemen in an uncontrollable burst of anger and being beaten with batons.

  “But he’s sick! His brain is sick! I have to come. You don’t know how to talk to him.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “But you don’t understand! He gets fits of anger, he’ll start hitting you!”

  “We’re sorry.”

  “You can’t just do this, the man isn’t well! You’ll end up having to charge him for assaulting an officer!”

  “Ma’am, it can’t get any more serious than it already is.”

  I make an effort to breathe calmly, but the air comes in long noisy gulps as I plead with them and follow them out to the cruiser. They won’t budge. Meanwhile Frederik sits peacefully in the car, looking blankly at the seat in front of him and eating the package of crackers I gave him.

  As soon as they’ve driven off, I run into the house and call Laust, who doesn’t answer. I leave a message on his machine about him being a psychopath who’s killing his best friend.

  I call Helena, but she doesn’t pick up either.

  I call Thorkild and Vibeke. They’ve had time to digest the news, since I already called them this morning at half past six. Vibeke answers and hands the phone to Thorkild.

  “You need a lawyer,” he says.

  Of course we do. I call Gerda from the support group and ask if anyone in the group knows a lawyer who’s familiar with brain injuries.

  “You should call Bernard,” she tells me.

  “He knows one?”

  “He’s a lawyer himself, and in that field he’s the best there is.”

  Bernard’s the only member of the group that I didn’t feel completely at ease with, but of course I call.

  “Your husband has the right to have counsel present during questioning,” he says. “The police should have informed you. If you want, I can be at the station in twenty minutes.”

  “I’d be tremendously grateful if you could do that. He might start hitting people, and he’s—”

  “Okay. I’ll call you later.”

  I collapse on our bed, but it smells wrong—of Frederik’s new smell. I try to rest, but I cannot. So I lie down on the air mattress instead, pull the comforter over my head, and hope I can drift off.

  • • •

  Niklas comes home from school early; he skipped his last classes. I tell him I understand, and give him a quick, watered-down version of what happened.

  “Are you very upset?” he asks.

  “Yes.” It feels oddly still here in the entry. “Yes, I am.”

  “But not as upset as … that other time?”

  “No! Not at all. You don’t have to worry about that, I’ll never do that again.”

  He clears his throat. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, it’s not really you who’s got to … you don’t really have to …”

  It’s hard to believe how considerate Niklas can be, especially since he’s been on my case so much these past few weeks. Angry about the most trivial things. Now we converse as if he never yelled at me last night, as if he never screamed at me three days ago when his bike lock wouldn’t open, or before that, when Frederik put a Danish essay Niklas hadn’t turned in yet at the bottom of our pile of already-read newspapers.

  On the debate forum at braindamage.com, I’ve read that if Frederik does get better, he’ll go back and forth between being affectionate and normal, and being irrationally testy and emotional—“like a teenager,” they say. There will be good moments, but they will disappear instantly without warning.

  Niklas says, “I could show you my new pictures.”

  He knows that I love to look at his photos with him. And lately I haven’t been allowed to.

  I hug him and fetch a chair from Frederik’s office so we can sit next to each other in his room.

  Whenever Niklas does come home, he sits at his computer and edits pictures and videos. Mathias composes the most unbelievable electronic music, and their latest plan is to project Niklas’s photos on a screen above the stage while Mathias’s music plays as a warm-up for a concert at the gymnasium.

  There’s no bra in the laundry pile—I checked while he was in school—nor was there anything else white that might look like a bra in the dark. Niklas quickly exits a bunch of programs as I sit down, and I think I see the name Sara listed as sender in a bunch of chat messages, but they fly by too fast to be sure. I do know who Sara is: she’s in Mathias’s homeroom, pale with long dark hair and freckles, and she used a lot of bookish phrases during the few moments we spoke at Niklas’s sixteenth birthday. He’s changed the subject the couple of times I’ve mentioned her name since then.

  Niklas brings up Mathias’s latest composition and clicks PLAY. A wave breaks against the coast. It breaks again. And then again. And with each crash, it sounds more and more like a person falling down a flight of stairs. Heavily; she must have broken a bone. The falls—the wave-crashes—come more quickly, a great dance rhythm. A melody wriggles in on a piano, and then the wind on the beach in Sweden.

  “Our theme is water,” Niklas says, showing me a sequence of enigmatic black-and-white patterns. “What do you think this is?”

  “No idea.”

  “You see something round, don’t you?”

  “It looks like the entrails of a dead animal,” I say, thinking it could be a brain, though I don’t want to say that out loud.

  “It’s a glass of water with ice cubes, with the light playing on it. It was standing on the kitchen counter one day, and I took a whole series.”

  He goes through the pictures explaining them, almost as if I were a little kid and he were reading to me. As if he were my dad. His hands dart quickly across the keyboard; there’s hair growing on them, a thin patch from the base of the pinky to the wrist. Lots of men would fantasize about what Niklas and Sara might be doing with each other. Would dwell needlessly on them in their fascination. That’s the way men are: they want youth, they think they can screw themselves younger, or marry themselves younger. Yet no matter how much they humiliate themselves, they’re just poor wretches, halfway to death. Just like me …

  The heat’s always incredible in this room. I’ve got to take off my blouse if I’m not going to sweat too much. The water pours down over the screen and up across the screen and presses against us and disperses like steam. Mathias and Niklas are adults now, they’re artists.

  I slip into Mathias’s sea of sound and Niklas’s drenching photos, and my son may be doing the same. When my phone rings, we both start. We would laugh if we weren’t so frightened.

  9

  It’s Bernard on the phone: the hearing went well. Frederik wasn’t jailed after all. They’re in Bernard’s car now, headed home.

  Niklas has turned off the music and is watching me expectantly. I tell him what Bernard said, then turn my attention back to Bernard.

  “Thank you so very, very much! What did they say, did he lose his temper? How serious are the charges? What did they say about him being sick?”

  Surrounded by the sounds of urban traffic, Bernard’s voice is composed. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything—client confidentiality. Frederik will tell you whatever he chooses to himself. I’m handing him the telephone now
.”

  “Frederik, tell me! How’d it go?”

  “It went fine.”

  “What did they say?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Frederik, are you tired? How are you doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re probably real tired now, aren’t you?”

  Still no answer.

  “Isn’t there anything you want to tell me about your hearing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something, Frederik, just say something. Are they planning to take you into custody at a later date? Was Laust there?”

  Again he says nothing. Then Bernard gets back on the line.

  “A long hearing’s always rough; anybody would be exhausted. We’ll be back at your house soon.”

  Niklas and I hurry down the stairs and out to the street, while I describe for him Bernard’s word choice and tone of voice. During the course of the afternoon, it’s turned into one of the first mild days of spring. The sun’s starting to warm everybody up, and our leafy street is just as seductive as the first time Frederik and I met a realtor to look at the house. We stood at precisely the same spot on the sidewalk; the realtor arrived in his red car, a young man, and a few moments later this was the only house I could imagine living in. Now Bernard’s white station wagon comes driving toward us, and through the window I can see Frederik sleeping on the passenger side.

  We help him out of the car, and he leans on Niklas and me on the way upstairs, where we lay him on the bed, fully dressed. I kiss him on the forehead but get no response, and then we go back down.

  Bernard’s sitting on the sofa in the living room. Nearly invisible blue pinstripes run along his creased grey trousers; the top buttons of his white Oxford, with its slightly thicker stripes of light blue, are unbuttoned. He is grasping the couch’s arm and appears to be studying a seam in the leather. This Wegner sofa was never put into regular production and it’s quite rare, my greatest treasure. He must understand furniture.

  Niklas and I remain standing. “Bernard, thank you again. I know that they would have kept him in custody for months if you hadn’t made some sort of special effort.”