You Disappear: A Novel (3 page)

Then they packed us off to school camp, five classes and twelve teachers for a week together in a small group of log cabins, deep in a Swedish forest.

Our departure was delayed, of course, and the buses had to stop several times en route because of carsick kids. After I’d been on the bus five hours, the stench of puke was stinging my nostrils and I was exhausted from the constant shouting, hooting, laughter, and tears—and by a massive drop in blood sugar from the banana bread we’d shared two hours earlier.

We finally reached the cabins. It was still early afternoon, but the clouds and rain were so heavy and low that, hours before sunset, they lent the day an air of twilight. We got the kids in their rubber boots and rain gear, and
the teachers who’d been there before led them down to the ocean. I went last to make sure no one was left behind on the path through the pine forest.

The raindrops weren’t falling close together, but each one was large and fat and crashed against the hood of my raincoat. I lagged behind the group more than I needed to, and when I finally made it out of the trees, I found myself alone.

The beach was endless and deserted except for the children, who were already a fair distance away. Not a single plant, not a patch of light in the sky, and the sand beneath my rubber boots was sodden and monochromatic lead-grey, only a shade darker than the sky.

In the distance, the teachers and children in their flame-colored rain suits became a bag of bright candy that someone had dropped in the clumpy sand and kicked open. The cold wet wind tore at my face. Then one colored blob detached itself from the others. A little later he stood before me, raindrops dripping from his nose.

He didn’t move, just looked at me inquiringly. And I looked at him.

“Maybe I shouldn’t become a teacher at all,” I said.

He didn’t answer. I looked into his eyes, which were wide open under his rain hood.

We talked, and walked down toward the water’s edge, and gradually the monotonous rumbling of the water gave way to the rhythmic boom of each individual wave. No stars, sun, or moon. No ground beneath us. And yet that sound. The world still uncreated. No light or darkness, time or children. Just a roaring snore from the waves, from some creature who rests before the world is to be formed.

I don’t know how it happened, but I started telling him about my good friend who’d died two months earlier. Her boyfriend had been unfaithful for months with one of our mutual friends, and finally he moved out from my one friend and in with the other. And Hanne leapt from a high-rise.

“The weird thing is, I have the sense that she’s still here,” I said. “She floats beneath the ceiling of the rooms I enter. And she’s out here in the rain. She’s following me.”

Frederik stood with his back to the waves, the white edges crashing behind him. “Does she say you’ll be glad you became a teacher?”

“Just a moment …” I closed my eyes for a few seconds. “Yes. She does.”

“Do you think she’s right?”

I paused again to consider. “Yes.”

“And maybe she knows why you started to doubt that?”

“She knows,” I said. “It’s because I’m so unhappy. Because I miss her.”

Already then I felt a desire to push my arm under his, so we could walk linked together back to the other teachers.

As we approached the others, with a suitable gap between us, I said, “I don’t really believe in ghosts, of course. You don’t know me, but I’m not crazy.”

“I didn’t think so.”

That evening we took a flashlight and snuck back down the forest path to the beach, which was now pitch-dark. It was no longer raining, but there were still no stars or moon.

“What then?” I remember him asking. “Do you think we have a soul that lives on when we die?”

It ended up being a lovely school camp. Frederik had unusually bright pale-brown eyes with a fine dark ring around the outside of each iris and a long thin nose. There was something cultivated, something elegant about him. On two evenings we slipped out into the forest, Hanne’s ghost vanished, and I became more convinced than ever that teaching was the right job for me.

When we returned home, we tried to keep our relationship secret at the school. We didn’t succeed, of course, and some of our female colleagues became annoyed, with Frederik and especially with me.

Exactly as predicted, Frederik became headmaster of another primary school four years later. He was appointed to a seat on the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Committee, and he threw himself into writing a series of textbooks that sought to introduce philosophy as an independent subject in the higher grades.

When he was thirty-five, he was headhunted to lead Saxtorph—the private elementary school in Copenhagen where he’s been ever since, and where in the course of thirteen years, he’s almost doubled enrollment.

• • •

When Niklas and I walk through the enormous hotel lobby with its furnishings from the ’80s, three Danish tourists yell after us. We talked with
them earlier by the pool, though they’re people we’d never have been friends with back home. From a distance, we can tell they’re drunk.

“Well, it’s been a late evening, eh Mia? Have you guys had fun? Where’d you go?”

Neither Niklas nor I reply. We make a beeline for the long, ugly corridor going to our rooms. I stop in front of his door.

“Come over to my room if you don’t want to be alone tonight.”

A moment’s hesitation, perhaps. Then he looks at me.

“You should knock on mine too, if you …”

He’s never said anything like that before. Then again, no one knows whether tonight he’ll become the only man in the family.

The gilded wall lamps, the landscape windows facing the Mediterranean. A faint breeze through the nearly closed sliding doors to the balcony. Frederik’s trousers lie on a chair, and on the floor are three magazines he bought on a sudden whim at the kiosk, as well as his snorkel and belt and a T-shirt too. On the table are his towel and sandals.

He didn’t use to be messy. It’s one of the things we argued about—also during the last few weeks back home.

I walk out on the balcony in a T-shirt and panties. I feel the wind, listen to the suck of the sea, watch the water the few places it’s lit by the hotel lights. I stood here last night with Frederik and we held each other, we kissed, we thought we were healthy. It’s as if I feel him now at my side, his armpit against my shoulder, his lips and breath against my cheek. For a second I wonder if this is the instant of his death, at the hospital. Is that what I feel? Is he visiting me?

They said it was safe for us to go home tonight, that nothing would happen.

I have to try not to think too much. Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day. I have to empty my head of thoughts and lie down.

I don’t manage to stay very long in bed. My gut rumbles, it is tense, churning. I run out to the bathroom at the last moment. There I start feeling nauseous, my body contracts and I lose control at both ends. My skin glistens with sweat.

Shaking, I collapse on the toilet, and there I die of food poisoning from the lunch we had at that small restaurant in the mountains. My soul flies out relieved, suspended beneath the ceiling and watching the next morning
when Niklas gets the hotel staff to unlock the door and they find my cold stiff body. The stench of caustic toilet cleaner, of my feces, my death.

Or.

I do survive the food poisoning during the night, but I have a brain tumor. I die quickly all the same; Frederik’s infected me, and in half a year, a doctor administers the final morphine in a hospice after weeks of pain, seizures, and nonsensical ranting.

Or.

It’s not me who dies, it’s Niklas. Tomorrow morning there’s no answer to my knock on his door. I run down to reception, and the clerk and I find him dead in the bathroom.

He’s lying like I am now: the stench of the cleaning agents and feces, his death and my despair. All families are one body. The tumor has long tentacles, red filaments, it resembles an octopus, a red jellyfish, it spreads from Niklas to me to Frederik. It grows from Frederik and Niklas to me.

I wake up with my head on the toilet seat, thinking I’ve slept only a few minutes, but the nausea is almost gone. I get up, bent over on wobbly legs. Rinse my mouth, drink water, rinse my face and look in the mirror.

I have to find out how Niklas is doing. Perhaps he has food poisoning too. It must be those little fried fish, I think.

In a white hotel bathrobe I walk out into the hallway. I knock, but he doesn’t answer.

I knock again. Harder. Should I go down and get someone?

The door opens. His face isn’t swollen in the least, not by sleep or heat or grief. It’s untouched, as young people’s faces are.

I ask, “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“I thought there might have been something you ate.”

“I’m not sick.”

He looks at me and wakes up a bit.

“What’s wrong? Other than, of course … Dad.”

A few years ago, after a harrowing day like this, it would have been only natural for him to crawl into my bed, or for me to get into his. There wouldn’t have been the least thing odd about it: falling asleep as I embraced my son. A few years ago.

“Mia. We talked to him.”

Immediately I’m awake, and I recognize the voice of Thorkild, my father-in-law, on the telephone.

“Talked to him?”

“Yes, on the phone here in Denmark. He seems lively enough. And cheerful! We called the hospital, but now they’re going to run some tests.”

Half an hour later, Niklas and I are sitting in a taxi on the way to the hospital. Yesterday I called my in-laws from the emergency room. Now I try the hospital one more time, in vain, before calling Thorkild again—just to hear him repeat the last thing he said. “Frederik seems to be in good spirits. He doesn’t have any pain or paralysis or speech difficulties, and he feels well. I think we’ve been lucky—this time around.”

The neurology department is in a cubic metal-clad addition to the old hospital. It is more modern and better maintained than many Danish hospital wards, and the contrast with the emergency room in which we spent yesterday is striking.

On the other hand, not everyone here can speak English. We present first Frederik’s passport and then our own, and at last a smiling nurse’s aide leads us into Frederik’s room without us understanding what she’s saying.

There’s an empty place where Frederik’s bed must have stood, and once again, there’s nothing for us to do but sit and wait. We try not to stare too much at the patient next to us, but it is hard. He’s a thin man in his early thirties with a white bandage wrapped around the upper part
of his head. A square rack of steel pipes presses against the bandage from several directions, probably to immobilize his head, yet it looks as if big metal bolts are screwed directly into his skull on every side. He can blink, but his face registers no expression. He stares up at the ceiling while his cheeks hang loose. Doors open and shut, nurses talk in the corridor, two nursing students come in and drag out some large apparatus—he reacts to nothing.

In the distance, a man is shouting unintelligibly in Spanish, his angry voice resounding down the halls.

Niklas and I walk out of the room. And from the farthest end of the corridor we see an orderly approach with Frederik, sitting up in a bed.

“Frederik!”

We run toward him, and he smiles broadly when he discovers us.

“Whew! It’s good you came! Such a fright,” he booms. “Good thing
that’s
over now.”

The orderly begins shouting again, just as angry as before. It’s clear he wants Frederik to lie down while he wheels the bed along, but Frederik doesn’t care.

I don’t know if I’m allowed to stop the bed in order to kiss him, or to lean over and embrace him.

“It’s all over?”

“Yes, they’re going to give me some medicine and discharge me today.”

We follow the bed at a half run. “That’s fantastic!”

Niklas and I hug each other while we timidly watch Frederik, who’s grinning broadly.

“But what about the tumor?” Niklas asks. “Doesn’t it have to be removed?”

“Not for the time being.”

“Great. But … how are you doing?”

“I’m doing super! They say they can discharge me in a little while, and that’s good. For if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves, it’s going to have to be today.”

“Do you really think …”

It seems crazy, but Frederik wants to keep to our itinerary. And after the orderly has parked the bed and left, we tentatively let Frederik’s optimism
rub off on us. I call Thorkild and Vibeke and turn my cell on speakerphone so we can all talk together.

“We have awakened from a nightmare,” Thorkild says.

“You’re right,” I say. “That’s
exactly
what we’ve done.”

I hand the telephone to Niklas and lie with my chest against Frederik’s, I close my eyes so I can shut out the sight of the man with the bolts coming out of his head.

“I got so scared, Frederik,” I whisper. “I got so terribly, terribly scared.”

“So did I,” he says.

But he doesn’t lower his voice, even though I’m lying right next to him. He speaks in the same cheerful, almost shouting voice as when he came riding toward us in the hallway, the same voice as when he stood on the stone wall yesterday.

I know. I know right now that this man is not my real Frederik. But he can become him again, I think. Of course he can.

I nestle against him, pressing my face into his long white hospital gown. I don’t want to have diarrhea and nausea again, I don’t want to wake weeping in the hotel room tonight, I don’t want to be afraid.

He is half shouting. “We’ll have to rent a new car straightaway if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves today.”

“Yes, Frederik,” I say. “We’ll have to.”

• • •

Last year we decided to hold a big birthday party for Frederik, even though he wasn’t entering a new decade or anything. There were so many other years when we hadn’t had time to celebrate, so now it was time.

We invited thirty-eight friends, and almost every one of them could make it, so there was no way we could seat all of them at a table. And we agreed that that would be okay. It would make the party more festive if some folks had to sit on folding chairs spread about the rooms and others had to eat standing, or sitting on a sofa armrest or the stairs or wherever they could find a place.