Borderliners (9 page)

below
us. Generally speaking, you never heard him say a word
except if a teacher asked him a question, and even
then only what
was absolutely necessary.

Fredhøj taught physics and
chemistry. He used a number of
charts:
the periodic table, Bohr's atomic theory, means of propul
sion from the steam engine to the V6 engine, the
major scientific developments. They were kept in the chart lockers—boxes of
white-
painted wood five feet high, five feet long, and fairly shallow,
with
a puny
furniture lock.

Fredhøj always went around with his keys in full view,
hanging from the ring finger of his left hand on a good-sized key ring. The
keys lay across the back of his hand. The keys to the chart lockers
were on this ring.

It came out of the blue. It was a
period no different from any
other; the
unfortunate incident in the engineering tunnels lay six
months back.

Fredhøj asked one of the bright girls, Anne-Dorthe
Feldslev, who
was physics monitor, to
fetch the periodic table. The class had its
own
ordinary monitor, who fetched the milk. It was something you took turns at, it
was nothing special. But then there was a physics
monitor who helped with the setting up of
experiments and the like, whom Fredhøj selected from among the mathematically
gifted. Just then it was Anne-Dorthe. She was not very strong and was excused
from gym, so at first you did not notice anything.
Fredhøj asked
her to fetch the
periodic table and gave her the keys. She went out
into the corridor and opened the locker. Then she
closed it again and came in and took her seat and put the keys down. Then she
threw up. She did it all over the desk, where
others might have tried
to reach the sink or the wastepaper basket. But
she never got up without permission.

Fredhøj must have realized that something was wrong. He
stepped outside and lifted the
lid. It was just outside the door.

In the locker sat Axel, looking
up as though he had been waiting
for someone to come and lift the lid. He had tried to cut
out his
tongue with
a razor blade. He had got pretty far. The details did not come out until later,
and then only some of them, but we saw

the
razor blade. Later on, somebody said he had doped
himself up
beforehand.

What happened was that Fredhøj acted with assurance
and pre
cision, as with anyone else who hurt
themselves, or needed first aid
and
an ambulance at once. Only our class was sent home, and as early as the next
day it was announced at assembly that Axel was
out of danger.

We never saw him again. There was
no inquiry of any kind, it
was never mentioned again. But everybody knew, three weeks later,
when it was Easter and the
teachers' children did not come back to school after the vacation, that this
was the reason. It was absolutely
obvious.

I told August
about this, in the toilets, to explain the letter.

"If it was so
obvious," he said, "then why is she asking?"

He was a head shorter than me, besides which he was always
hunched up, like now. All hunched up, he looked up at me,
across
the toilet. He smoked a little bit at
a time,
then
he put out the
cigarette by very carefully pinching the tip and
removing it, so as
not to waste any
tobacco. A little while later, he lit it again.

He smoked the way you only ever saw grownups smoke, and
then only very seldom.
Hungrily.
It was a weird sight.
The tiny
body,
and the hunger.

He was two years younger than me, one year younger than
all
the others in
the class, because I had been moved back a class when
I came from Crusty House. They had
never said where he came
from. It was clear that he had trouble keeping up, even though
he picked everything up fast.
Even so, they had moved him up a
class.

There was no chance to answer
him. The outer door was opened,
slowly,
as if by a teacher. We had been in there awhile and maybe
we had been missed. We brushed away every speck of
ash, flushed,
and left the toilets.

That evening he
asked for an extra Mogadon but it was refused.

He said nothing and only walked
around for a short while, then
lay down as though he was sleeping.

It was not
convincing.

Even so I almost did not hear him.
We had been lying there for
an hour—I could see by the alarm clock—when the door opened. Not that
you could hear anything, but you felt the draft. He had
moved very softly.

The exit was left unlocked at night. He made his way
along the
corridor to
the basement stairs. The kitchen was in the basement. I thought he must be
hungry, in which case he need not have both
ered. There were padlocks on the refrigerators and
freezers.

But that was not it. He did not switch on the light. It
was as
though he
could see in the dark, like an animal. I stood at the top
of the stairs. First there was
silence,
then
the oven was opened. Then
I went down after him and
switched on the light.

He had opened the oven door and stepped up onto it. He
looked
like he was
asleep, with the side of his head resting on the grille
over the stove top. He supported
himself with one hand, gripped
the knob with the other. He had closed his eyes. At first he did not
notice the light. While I stood
there, watching, he turned on the
gas, just a little, and sort of drank from the tap. Then
he shut it off
again.

He opened his eyes
and looked at me.

"I couldn't
reach," he said.

"It's an industrial stove," I said.
"It's eighteen inches taller than
household ones."

His legs would not carry him. I gave him a piggyback. He
was so
light, even
going up the stairs. There was a smell of gas from his mouth.

I put him down on
his bed.

"I've got it taped," he
said. "I sleep in the living room. When
they've fallen asleep I go into the kitchen. You
just have to have enough to get to sleep. But not so much that you can't get
back to
bed."

For some time the child has been talking about the space around
her. She uses words like
"in there" and "outside," "inside," "un
derneath." She goes into
detail about her surroundings. She is
twenty months old.

But not about time.
As yet "tomorrow,"
"yesterday," "in a
month's time"
hold
no
meaning for her. She says "someday," by which she means all forms of
future.

We grasp the idea
of space before we grasp that of time.

But soon she will begin to talk about time. And then she
will say
of it that
it passes.

We say that time passes. That it flies. That it is like
a river. We picture it as having a direction and a length; that it can be
described
in the
same way as space.

But time is not space, is it? What I am doing now, in
the labo
ratory, I also did yesterday. The
two events belong in the same
place,
they are not
separated in space. But they occupy different
times.

And there is another difference. Thinking in terms of
space is something you can do just like that. But thinking about time always
carries pain in its wake.

Maybe
it is the other way around; maybe the pain is there first.
Because that is something one will always try to
explain away. Un
accountable pain overwhelms.
So one
tries to explain it away by
means of time.
That was what one had to say to oneself when one
sat
on the bed and August smelled like he was full of gas. One had
to say to oneself that it was because it was hard
for him to fall
asleep. That in itself was not disturbing; it was just a
difficult time
of the day for him. Time was
the problem, one said to oneself.

As
though that explained it.

Sometimes the
child comes to see me, even though I am shut away
in the laboratory. That is as it should be. It is part of an arrange
ment we have come to. Sometimes she talks to me;
sometimes she says nothing, just comes close, hesitantly, aware, without
aversion.
Sometimes she touches me.
She puts out a hand, or leans against

me
. It is not a caress, like you see grownups exchanging. It
is more
as though,
also through her sense of touch, she wants to confirm
that I exist.
Or
as though she has a message for me.

I stayed by August's bed until he fell asleep. I hunkered down so
that it would not feel as though
I was crowding him.

It took him a while to drop off; even now it took a while.
As
though part of
him needed to sleep, while another part was too
scared to give in.

His hands lay on the quilt. They were clenched
tight. Then I had
an
idea. I lifted one hand and opened it out, and then closed it over mine. He had
tiny hands, so I closed it around three of my fingers.
That way I would be able to tell
when he fell asleep. His hand
would fall open.

Like a message.

ELEVEN

          
A
t
Crusty
House, if you had any personal prob
lems you
could consult your class teacher. That was Willy Øhrskov,
who was popular and respected. He had a red MG and
drove like
a madman. When I had been
there for six months he was killed in
a
car crash. And besides, talking about
yourself
to a
teacher had always been considered a bit lax.

A consultant psychologist had been assigned to Biehl's,
an elderly
man with
whom I had two interviews. He had difficulty remembering
my name. After the second
interview he said that, on the whole, everything seemed to be in order. After
that I never saw him again.

Nine months went by. Then I received word that from now on I
would have a regular appointment once every two weeks,
during school hours, preferably in a storytelling period. You were fetched by
one of the
teachers, who let you out onto the south
staircase—
which was
out of bounds. Then the door was locked behind
you
and you ascended to the fifth floor, and then farther up a narrower
staircase, to the school psychologist's clinic.
And there was Hessen.