You Disappear: A Novel (33 page)

“I could put them there, of course,” he says. “But if I put the tall glasses there instead, they’ll be easier to reach.”

I pull aimlessly at the dust rag I happen to have in hand. “Yes, that’d be better. Will they all fit on the shelf?”

“Hmm. What do you want on the shelf underneath?”

“Plates.”

He sets down the box and squats, holding the top edge of the cupboard door with one hand. A lovely hand, and so close.

“But the plates won’t take up all the space, will they?” He peers into the cupboard, and I know that he’s making an effort not to look directly at me.

“Then we can set the plates on the right,” I say, and I realize I’m speaking too quickly. “And the rest of the tall glasses next to them.” I’m blabbering, I need to pull myself together. “No, we’ll put the tall glasses over here instead.” It’s completely impossible to dial it down. “And the globe glasses here. And any glasses we don’t have room for, we’ll set all the way over there.”

“And then the small plates here?” He’s pointing to the side of where the large plates will go, but I find myself looking at his arm instead of where he’s pointing. I know what it’s like to bite into that bare wrist, to rub the thin pale skin on its inner side against the sensitive skin of my belly.

“Exactly, exactly. The small plates should go there.”

Exhausting! If I could only sit down on the kitchen floor next to him. For just one moment.

Niklas pokes his head into the kitchen. “Dad and I are going to bring up the speakers now.”

Bernard says, “I’ll go with you.”

Then they’re gone, and I sit down on the floor as if he were still here.

If we’d moved any place other than Farum Midtpunkt, we couldn’t have afforded for Frederik to have his own room, and I saw how I’d have to put up with even more of a mess with electronic widgets and sawdust than in the house on Station Road. But now we have an apartment with three bedrooms; Frederik will sleep by himself in one of them, and all his speaker-building clutter will move in with him.

Yet building speakers doesn’t play the same role in his life that it once did. He rarely talks about it anymore—though on the other hand, he won’t admit it was the illness that got him started on it either. When once in a while he does work on the speakers, it’s easy to think he’s merely trying to maintain his dignity and preserve the illusion that something about these last months has been positive.

The men’s voices return to the hallway and I hurry to get up.

“I can understand,” Bernard is saying. “It must be wretched not being able to enjoy music. Naturally, you’d want to do anything you could to get that pleasure back again.”

There’s a bump as they set the one speaker cabinet on the floor in Frederik’s room. Frederik sounds so calm, he sounds oddly like the old Frederik.

“If you contrast what other people do to make their homes
look
good, what I’m doing to make my home
sound
good is actually not that much. All the emphasis on visual appeal—what’s with that? Gorgeous mansions with unpleasant odors and awful-sounding stereo systems?”

I’ve heard him deliver this little lecture on good sound before, but his voice sounds so sensible now. Bernard brings out his most coherent and healthy side, talking to him as if they’re equals. And Bernard apparently knows a great deal about speakers too.

“Have you considered building ribbon speakers or electrostats instead?” he asks.

“Yes! I certainly have!” Frederik isn’t so well that he can control the urge to raise his voice in excitement when posed a concrete technical question. “It’s a difficult decision, and it may be that I’ll come to regret mine. But there have been a lot of advances in the field of dynamic drivers during the past ten years …”

Then they’re out the door and heading down the stairs again. I can hear from their footsteps that Niklas is with them. This is the kind of male conversation I’d like to expose him to. Men formulating themselves cogently. He shouldn’t be soaking up the side of his father that Henning brings out.

I drop the kitchen, though it’s far from finished, and go into the living room. Here’s where the men have set most of the things they’ve hauled up, but they haven’t put them where I think they should go. As I place a small bowl holding ballpoints, loose change, and other pocket detritus in a cabinet, I find a wad of thin white paper that looks as if it’s gone through the wash. I unfold it. It’s a supermarket receipt, with all my usual purchases—plus a tray of sushi and some filled chocolates.

It’d take so little. I could talk my way out of having bought some sushi that Frederik remembered nothing about, but at some point it’ll go south:
Niklas or Frederik will answer my phone when it rings, and then I’ll yell at them with terror in my voice to just let it ring. And as soon as they don’t trust me anymore, it’ll all come tumbling down.

What else is there that could flush us out? Hundreds of things, if you think about it—and that’s exactly what Frederik’s doing, more and more with each day that passes.

Perhaps more than anything, there’s my mood on a day like today. Why don’t I seem devastated by having to rip my life up by the roots and move here? For the same reason that our seventeen-year-old son isn’t: because I’m somewhere else entirely, so head over heels that it’s only on the outermost surface that I register anything that’s happening.

So mostly it’s my smile. It’s revealing. It reveals everything if you think about it.

My smile, which is like Niklas’s, like Bernard’s. The only one who isn’t in love is Frederik—and he’s clueless.

• • •

In someone else’s house, the party is over.

It’s three thirty a.m., and the last exhausted guests hang about the empty rooms, unable to move, ghosts who can find neither rest nor life. Light sifts slowly through the windows and exposes the dust where people once danced, the empty spaces where furniture stood before being moved out of the way.

That’s how it looks at twilight in our old rooms on Station Road, though it’s not three thirty in the morning but ten in the evening. Bernard has long since driven off, Niklas has gone over to Emilie’s, and Frederik and I walk around the house and stare at the naked walls and the traces on the wallpaper of where a picture once hung or a bookcase once stood. The light doesn’t sift into the rooms, it recedes. In the trunk of the car are a broom, a vacuum cleaner, and a couple of small items. Our last night here.

I walk out into the garden, which is about to lose all color to the incipient dark. I take a farewell tour, stopping before each of the plants I’ve nourished, cultivated for years. Will the new owners let the yard sink back to wilderness?

I start when I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Frederik, who’s followed me outside.

I say, “There’s no need for you to pretend you understand.”

“But I do understand.”

“Haven’t you finally gotten well enough to recognize that both your empathy and your emotions are impaired?”

“I’m trying to—”

“Frederik, your brain makes it so that you can’t really be here.”

“I really
am
here!”

“That’s what you say, of course.”

“I
am
!”

“The inability to acknowledge one’s illness, Frederik.”

“But I
am
here.”

“You’re perseverating.”

And then I watch his face disintegrate. How these crying jags wear me out, how they’re rammed down my throat! Far beyond what any human being could tolerate. In a second he’s going to dissolve into bestial sobs and make me feel even more isolated.

Quickly, I usher him into the empty living room and close the door behind us. He collapses blubbering on the floor by the wall farthest from the window.

I have absolutely no desire to hold him; absolutely no desire to comfort him. But I try to stroke his back as best I can, simply because I am, after all, his wife—or in any case, I was married to the man he used to be. I don’t know how to, but I strive to be for him what he can’t be for me.

The room grows dark. Almost all the lamps are in the new apartment now, but a pair of wall sconces we don’t need are still mounted in the hallway. I go and turn them on, leaving the door ajar so that the living-room floor is lit indirectly.

“Why don’t you just become Bernard’s girlfriend?” Frederik asks, weeping. “Then the two of you can be happy, and I can just kill myself. Then
everyone
can be happy.”

I take a deep breath. Here we go again. I hesitate perhaps a fraction of a second too long. “You mustn’t say such things!”

“You’re well matched. I can see that. The two of you suit each other remarkably well.”

“Stop saying that!” It feels weird to say this while at the same time feeling I already need to talk to Bernard again, and planning how to best steal away and call him.

Later, when Frederik’s crying has abated, he says, “I really understand if you don’t feel you can ever sleep with me again.”

“Well, let’s just see how—”

“What I did that night was awful. And then Niklas coming in … I don’t know how I could have. I can remember it, but I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”

“No, you won’t. I know.”

“It was terrible. Just like what I did to Saxtorph. That was so awful, wasn’t it.”

We’ve talked a lot about his embezzlement, but this is the first time we’ve talked about the night I had to lock myself in the bathroom.

And it’s the first time he says, “We have no future. We don’t, do we, Mia? The things I’ve done. To you in bed. And the money. And soon I’ll probably go to prison. I just want to die.”

His eyes are huge as he gazes into mine.

“You’ve got to leave me! I’m dragging you down.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” I say.

“ ‘We’ll talk about it later’!” he shouts. “You say, ‘We’ll talk about it later’! But then you
have
decided to leave, haven’t you! You’re doing it, you’re getting ready to leave me!”

“No, no—I’m not!”

He rolls over on his stomach and hides his face from me. As if he’s only talking to himself, he mutters, “You have to leave me. It’s the only right thing to do. And I can just die.”

“But I don’t want you to die.”

“It couldn’t be any worse than this.”

“Yes it could. You can have a good life. A very good life.”

While I try to dissuade Frederik from killing himself, a fantasy begins to run through my head about what Vibeke will say when he’s well enough for me to leave him. In the fantasy we argue, and she shouts that I’m a self-obsessed egomaniac; that that’s what I’ve been our entire marriage.

No doubt Frederik noticed that I said
You can have a good life
and not
We can have a good life
. But he acts as if he didn’t, and I tell him again and
again that I’ll stay with him, until maybe he can believe there’s a small chance that that’s what’ll happen.

“You’re right, we should talk about it later,” he says at last. “Now isn’t a good time. Not tonight when we’re moving. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, Mia. Sorry!”

“You couldn’t help it.”

“No, I couldn’t help it.”

We lie there in the darkness, in a spot where once there was a rug, and on top of it a floor lamp and a coffee table.

One out of every eight people over 45 has a brain injury without realizing it, according to a Dutch study reported in
The New England Journal of Medicine
. Two thousand healthy subjects took part in the study, in which researchers from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam scanned their brains. The researchers found a surprisingly high number of undetected brain lesions.

The most common form of lesion was what is known as a brain infarct—dead tissue arising from an insufficient supply of blood to the brain cells. Other abnormalities included aneurysms, minor cerebral hemorrhages, and benign tumors.

However, the researchers do not recommend that healthy persons be scanned at the present time. The procedure is quite costly, and doctors cannot treat most of the injuries anyway.
(MLJ)

I’m back in our home on Station Road. The colors in the kitchen sparkle like a Christmas tree: the glint of the cabinet handles, the golden stain of the wood shelves, the red and light blue of the plastic bowls. I’m setting the dishes we’ve eaten from back in their places, and the sugar bowl we inherited from Frederik’s grandmother catches my eye, with its chased silver and its blue glass so dark, it’s impossible to see through.

And then suddenly it’s late evening and Niklas is still up, unloading the dishwasher with Frederik and me. We’ve been putting things away and washing the serving dishes and glassware after a dinner with Laust and Anja and some of the others from Saxtorph. The three of us joking around and enjoying ourselves after the guests have left.

Once that was something we did often, having our friends over for dinner. It’s been a long time. I have a vague sense of why we don’t do it anymore; I step over to Frederik and embrace him from behind. I hug him longer and harder than I normally would, resting my head against his back and shoulders.