You Disappear: A Novel (7 page)

I try to instruct him in what I like, in what we used to do. He hears me but keeps going, heedless. His rough snorting in my ear, his clumsy hands; a dog that only wants to hump. His cock bangs against me without him seeming to realize that I’m straining now to keep him out. The unfamiliar sheen of sweat on his face.

I writhe, trying to shove him away, but his response is to pin me to the mattress. Even the smile on his face is someone else’s.

“Stop it! Stop!”

But he won’t.

“Stop, Frederik! God damn it, Frederik, stop!”

He just keeps at it, and in the end I have no choice. I butt him with my head.

“Ow! You fucking sow!” He grabs his nose and raises himself up a little. He howls as I heave him off of me and run out to our bathroom, where I lock the door and lift the door handle, since the lock alone probably won’t hold.

Two seconds later, he’s rattling the door in the jamb, hammering away on it, and shouting, “Come out, you whore! Come on, you know you want it. I’m going to fucking pound you!”

I whisper through the door that he mustn’t wake Niklas. But he doesn’t care.

“You bitch, time for some prick!”

There’s a knock on the bedroom door.

“What’s happening in there? What’s going on?” Niklas’s voice is high and shrill, like it used to be a few years ago.

“Mind your own business!” Frederik yells. “Go to your room! I order you, go to your room!”

I shout through the bathroom door and the bedroom door to where he’s standing in the hallway. “It’s okay, Niklas, it’s no big deal.”

He doesn’t hear me. “Where’s Mom?”

“I’m in here, Niklas! Can you hear me? I’m in our bathroom!”

“Stick it up your ass, you little shit!”

Niklas’s voice sounds panicked now. “Where’s Mom, I want to see her!”

I unlock the door and rush into the bedroom. Frederik is naked, standing with his back propped against the door to the hallway. The door booms and shudders each time Niklas throws himself against it. Frederik’s erection hasn’t subsided. In the dark it looks bigger than when he was healthy.

I come closer.

“Niklas, it’s okay. I’m here. There’s nothing the matter.”

The booming ceases. He must be standing still on the other side of the door. His voice becomes gentle. “I want to see that you’re there.”

“Let me come out to you,” I say, looking for something to throw over myself.

Frederik’s no longer leaning against the door. The tension eases for a moment, then the door flies open with a bang and Niklas tumbles past us.

The light from the doorway falls on me standing there, just as naked as Frederik. Niklas has a wild look in his eyes and his hair is all mussed. He’s ready to fight. And then he crumples to the floor.

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize.” I glance over at Frederik’s cock sticking up, as undaunted and brown-violet as ever. I don’t understand why it doesn’t droop. He doesn’t seem self-conscious in the least, though Niklas tries to look away. I hurry to the bed for a comforter to cover myself with.

Niklas is crying with the same irregular rhythm as when he was five years old, the same deep wail broken by a sobbing whimper. “Sorry … sorry … sorry.”

I throw another comforter over to Frederik to wrap himself in. “No need to be sorry about anything, Niklas. It was sweet of you to want to make sure I was okay.”

I crouch down on the floor next to my son and feel a desire to hold him, to hug him, but he pushes me away.

I get up.

“Go back to your room,” I say. “I’ll come in to you in a little bit.”

I gather some clothes together, give Frederik one of the motor-sport magazines Thorkild bought for him, and hurry to the bathroom to get dressed. When I come back out, Niklas is gone, and Frederik’s immersed in the magazine.

I disappear into Niklas’s room. He’s sitting up in his bed, wrapped in his comforter. I slide his desk chair over to the side of the bed and sit down. I know I should remain calm—inhumanly calm, given the situation. His face is stiff, as if all the tiny muscles under his skin are paralyzed, and when he brushes a lock of hair off his forehead, he does so slowly and with physical effort, as if he suffers from some neurological disorder that makes him incapable of normal movement.

I assure him that nothing’s happened to me, and that his father didn’t hit me. Then I repeat it. And repeat it again. The whole time in an artificially calm voice.

And at some point, I feel my false calm start to seep in and become
genuine. There’s also something about talking to a healthy human being. The difference is so vast.

“Did Dad hit you that other time too?” he asks at last, and I know he means the time I kicked Frederik out.

“Your father’s never hit me,” I say.

It’s warm in his room. Black-and-white posters printed from his own photos hang on the walls, along with a single colored poster from a techno party in Copenhagen. The room smells of teenage boy, and his clothes lie on the floor in a heap that resembles a fat little troll.

“It’ll be over soon,” he says.

“Yes, after the operation he’ll become normal again.”

“Three weeks max.”

“Three weeks max.”

We both stare into space, saying nothing. A weak light from a streetlamp outside casts a pattern on his cheek and a car drives past; we listen to the sound slowly die away.

It’s become necessary for us to keep an eye on Frederik’s whereabouts at night. Three days ago, I discovered him in our living room at four thirty in the morning, just a few clicks away from e-mailing an apoplectic op-ed to our daily paper,
Politiken
, about a bunch of headmasters from other private schools who he said were incompetent and should be fired. There’s so much he could destroy—for himself, for us all. Someone has to sleep beside him, ready to wake up if he does.

“I can’t sleep in there tonight,” I say.

Niklas begins to tremble almost imperceptibly. “I can’t either.”

“No, no! Of course not, you’re not going to!”

His shaking becomes more pronounced. “But I want to. You should sleep in here. In here. It should be me who …”

He buries his head in the comforter over his knees. He’s still shaking.

“No, Niklas. You’re definitely not sleeping in there. I will. No. No. I’ll put the air mattress outside the door to the room.”

Now we can hear Frederik through the wall, weeping loudly. Someone ought to be there with him. Someone ought to comfort him.

“Niklas, you have to sleep in here, like you always do. Then I’ll lie down on the sofa in the living room … No, I’ll sleep outside his door … No.”

In the end, Niklas says it’s okay if I sleep on the air mattress on his floor.
I have to work tomorrow, and I know I won’t get a wink of sleep if I have to lie down alone somewhere in the house.

Although the air mattress is on Niklas’s shelf, all the comforters and linen are in our bedroom closet. But I don’t want to go in there, so I fetch a blanket from down in the living room.

As I make up the mattress on the floor beside Niklas’s bed, I can’t help but wonder who I’m doing all this for. It’s obvious that Frederik doesn’t care about me now—despite being completely dependent on his parents and me around the clock, to protect him from himself. But his callousness since the seizure is due to the disease. What about back when he was himself?

And then I let myself be tormented again by a memory that’s been plaguing me the last five weeks. In Majorca, just before Frederik fell, he was standing atop the stone wall, swinging his arms, he was shouting, and then he started to cry at the mere thought of Niklas—his paternal love so great that his weak brain could no longer hold it in.

But toward me, it wasn’t love that burst forth.

The black mountainsides, the brush we’d driven past, the scent of lemon. “You piece of shit, Mia! You big fat piece of shit!”

He began thrashing about with his arms even more wildly. And then he fell.

“Frederik! Frederik!”

“Dad!”

A piece of shit
. Just like his love for Niklas, was that something he’d felt for a long time—but had had enough brainpower to hide till then?

The slope where he fell. The tree that saved his life.

• • •

At last. A month and a half after Frederik’s seizure, the doctors finally gauge that it’s time to operate, and then it goes quickly. They schedule the surgery for two days later.

The evening before the operation, I go to the kitchen. Niklas has been out with friends all day, as usual, and I pour myself a generous tumbler of whiskey.

I haven’t raised the glass yet when I hear his voice behind me. “Please don’t.”

I turn around. Niklas is standing in front of the broom closet.

“Where’d
you
come from?”

He stares at me, a disagreeable tightness around his eyes, and I don’t know where to look.

“It’s just one glass. It’s not—”

He doesn’t budge. “Then I’m moving over to Mathias’s.”

I don’t know where to go. I can’t stand to be in the kitchen anymore, or in the front hall either. I rush into the living room, where Frederik is stretched out on the sofa, watching TV, and I throw myself into his arms, just as if he were well. Lie there and press myself to him. He doesn’t take his gaze from the screen. There’s auto racing on Eurosport.

We’re quiet for a little while, and then I say, “I’m so unhappy.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Frederik! Can’t you say anything? Can’t you ask me why I’m unhappy?”

He looks at me with a big grin. “Yes, I will. I’ll ask you. Why are you unhappy, dear?”

“It’s because I’m so scared of your operation tomorrow.” The words come out in a rush. “It’s because you mustn’t die or get any sicker.”

“Well, is that all. It’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about it.”

He turns back to the cars whizzing around and around. And I just lie there with him. I could probably squeeze more of a response out of him, say that I’m also unhappy about my conversation with Niklas, but instead I get up and go over to the other end of the room and call Helena through the engine noise from the TV.

She only has to hear the sound of my voice before she’s offering to spend the night at our place. And she can hear how relieved I become once I say yes.

Standing in the kitchen, I swallow three scoops of chocolate ice cream so quickly that they burn against my palate, and then I go upstairs and knock on Niklas’s door. He opens it halfway and stands there blocking the opening.

“Helena’s coming over,” I say.

He makes a sort of humming noise in response.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask.

“No thanks.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just sitting and watching some videos.”

I don’t have anything to base it on, but I get the feeling he hasn’t heard me. I find myself repeating my words. “Helena’s coming over, to sleep. I’m really glad she’s going to.”

“Okay,” he says.

“I’m really glad that you’re so … 
manly
,” I find myself saying. And then I repeat myself. “Do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to talk about, anything I can do for you.”

But apparently there isn’t. I’m stranded on the Swedish beach where I met Frederik twenty years ago. Everybody else has gone home, they’ve gone on with their lives and I’m still here, half buried in the sand, the waves washing over me, cold as a corpse.

I return to the kitchen and put some water on for tea, for Helena. Maybe I really died then on the beach, I don’t know. I go to set out a couple of tumblers and the fifth of Scotch too—maybe she could use a little whiskey.

But the bottle’s gone. I look in all the cupboards. It and the cognac bottle have both disappeared.

Frederik
doesn’t
have cancer. He
won’t
die from his disease.

But the meningioma sits directly in his brain’s median plane, which makes it much more difficult to remove. As a result, I spend so much time in the short week after the operation at the National Hospital’s neurointensive clinic that I practically live there, and after that three weeks in the neurology department of Hillerød Hospital, where Frederik totters around, taking small steps like a dying dog.

And then he comes home to our house. He slowly fights his way back to being able to remember and speak and walk. Each week he improves, but after four months, he seems just as alien as he was in the month before the surgery. Perhaps his progress will stop here, perhaps he’ll continue to get better for a few more months. Nobody can say. But he’ll never completely be himself again.

When fury overcomes him, it distorts his face exactly like Niklas’s when Niklas was three: the same knitted eyebrows, the same hollow in his cheeks; the same quiver in the skin and arch to the lower lip. And now Frederik’s fits of rage are rubbing off on Niklas. The pettiest things set them off. They yell at each other and slam doors throughout the house, two spitting images divided by thirty-two years and an unforeseeably complex brain operation, while I run around after them trying to calm Niklas down. The only one who mustn’t get angry is me. If I succumb, everything will fall apart.

• • •

My first meeting with the support group for spouses of people with brain injuries was supposed to take place at the house of someone called Kirsten. But her husband was rehospitalized this morning, so at the last minute the meeting was moved.

At Gerda’s apartment, the scent of sugar and vanilla hangs in the air; she’s baked cookies. We squeeze in around her dining room table. Six women, five of them looking at least twenty years older than me, and a single lean, grey-haired man.

The thermostat has been turned up for old ladies’ bones. The furniture consists of antique reproductions in dark wood, and atop a high vitrine there perches a stuffed condor with outspread wings. Gerda warned me about the condor on the phone earlier today. “Don’t be alarmed. When new guests come for the first time, they often find it unsettling, but my husband purchased it from a good friend before we got married.”

Gerda is retired, and she had plenty of time to talk on the phone. “We argued about that foul monstrosity for almost fifty years. Now he doesn’t give a fig about it! I could throw the bird away, or our vacation slides, or whatever. He just isn’t attached to anything anymore.”