Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

Up in the bedroom, Frederik denies everything. He insists that he knows nothing. I grasp him by the shoulders and look into his eyes, probingly.

“Can I trust you?”

“Yes.” He looks back at me with large wide eyes that show not a trace of bad conscience.

“One hundred percent? Can I trust you one hundred percent?”

“Yes.”

But I know that I can’t. He’s discovered how ridiculously good he is at lying now and he does it constantly, completely unfazed by the fact that I usually find him out a short time later.

• • •

I taught six classes today, went to school meetings all afternoon while Niklas promised to keep an eye on Frederik, had an intense but good session with my new support group, and came home to the remains of a fire still burning in my yard. Now it’s quarter to one, and I have no clue when my day will end.

At Saxtorph I enter the alarm code and unlock the front door. On countless late evenings, I’ve walked down these long corridors in half darkness. When I was in Copenhagen anyway and wanted a bit of extra time with Frederik, I’d stop by so we could follow each other home. Often I ran into Laust, and sometimes Morten, the deputy headmaster, and once in a while we sat with Frederik at the conference table in his office and ate leftovers from the cafeteria, drinking red wine and kicking back after one of their fourteen-hour workdays.

Now I open the dark mahogany door to his office and see Laust, Morten, and the school’s accountant, Benny, standing around stacks of papers spread out across the big conference table. On the walls hang the usual gloomy portraits in oil, some of them Laust’s forebears.

Laust catches sight of me. He shouts at me in a strange, shrill voice, “The school’s bankrupt! The teachers have to be fired, we have to sell the buildings, we’re finished ! Happy now?”

“What?”

“You helped him! There’s no way he could have done it alone!”

“What?”

“There had to be more than one person down at the bank.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He keeps shouting, and I don’t know how to get through to him.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about! I have no idea what you’re talking about! I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

But nothing can penetrate Laust’s hysteria, and at last I raise the bust of Gustav Saxtorph from the sideboard to smash it down on the table.

“Don’t you touch that bust!” Laust screams. He flings himself at me, trying to tear it away. I drop it and parry his attack so that he lands on the floor. It isn’t a hard fall, and he should be able to get right up. But he keeps lying there, fingers scrabbling against the smooth floorboards.

Morten squats by his side. I’d like to help too, but first I turn to the accountant. “Benny, just tell me what’s going on. I don’t have a clue.”

“Frederik has had the school stand surety for loans worth twelve million crowns.”

“But he can’t have!”

“If there’s anyone who can, it’s him.”

“But there must be some sort of misunderstanding. You know that Frederik could have never done such a thing. It’s somebody else, or a misunderstanding. It’s a misunderstanding, right?”

“Mia, there’s definitely no misunderstanding. And you know that all too well.”

My thoughts are racing. Could he have done it? I no longer know who he is. But that much money?

Yet right away I know how it could have all vanished. On a vacation in Portugal once, we went into a casino. Frederik just wanted to try. I got him out again, but not before the fierce concentration in his face had made me afraid.

“I don’t believe it,” I say. “I’ve installed passwords on the phones and the computer. And how could he have gotten to the bank by himself? It doesn’t make sense.”

I crouch down next to Laust, who’s still on the floor.

“Laust,” I say. “I’m sorry about the bust, Laust. It wasn’t on purpose.” I try to shoot Morten a worried look, but he won’t meet my eyes.

Above my head I hear Benny’s voice. “But he did this all before he became ill. It began more than a year ago.”

I get up so quickly that I momentarily lose my balance. “A year ago?”

“Yes.”

“Not a year ago.”

“I said ‘a year ago.’ ”

“Yes, but you all know that he … But back then he was himself!”

Morten gets up too, and he places himself next to the accountant.

“The papers are all here. Benny’s uncovered everything.”

I have the odd sensation that it’s me who’s lying on the floor grasping after something, while Laust is standing up with the other men.

“Yes, but you know Frederik. He wouldn’t do something like that. Not the real Frederik.”

“We thought we knew Frederik. And we thought we knew you .”

I feel as if whatever’s pressing me against the floor has grown heavier now. As if I’m scrabbling even more frantically on the floorboards.

“God damn it, I’m disappointed in you!” I yell. “Right now, when Frederik needs you more than ever, you make up a story like this! How the hell do you know it’s Frederik if the signatures have been forged anyway?”

“It required a special kind of genius for accounting, what he did,” says Benny. “I don’t know anyone besides Frederik who …”

Laust starts to get up. It feels strange, because in some way it really felt like it was me who was lying down there. I have an urge to kick him so that he falls back down.

I say, “If there’s one person you can trust, it’s Frederik. Everybody knows that! You know it too.”

One corner of Morten’s mouth begins to twitch. “Is that what you said when he was with Gitte and Dorte?”

I slam the door behind me, and after a couple of steps down the hallway I break into a run.

• • •

The lights are off in the house, so Niklas and Frederik must have gone to bed. The fire on the lawn has burned out, leaving only a black circle behind.

I let myself in and sit down on the bed next to Frederik, who’s sleeping heavily. When he’s lying like this, I can see bits of the long narrow scar that runs beneath his hair in a half-moon. My index finger gently traces its course. The real Frederik would have been so disappointed in Laust. We would have held each other, figured out a plan, come up with an explanation. We would have done it together. But the real Frederik isn’t here now, no matter how long I talk to the body in this bed, no matter how long I try to hold it or to rest my head on its shoulder.

Driving home on the freeway, I hit on the only possible explanation: that it’s all something to do with his employment contract. They want to fire him, and they can’t while he’s on sick leave. So they came up with this. On the other hand, Laust wasn’t acting, and could Morten and Benny really have staged the whole thing behind his back? I run through all the possibilities, then I discard them. There must be something I don’t know.

“ Frederik ,” I say, very loud.

I am almost shouting.

“Frederik, something’s happened. Frederik! Frederik! ”

He doesn’t wake up.

I shake him by the shoulder; no reaction. I don’t want to risk jarring his head, so I go down to the foot of the bed and start shaking one of his legs hard.

Slowly he comes to life.

“Whaaat?” he says with a plaintive moan. It’s the way he sounded at the neurointensive clinic; our week there, the despair we felt, Niklas locking himself in the handicapped toilet, and back home Vibeke taking to her bed. It’s terrible, every time he wakes up with that voice. The limp crackers in the visitors’ kitchen; the distant round eyes of the other patients’ relatives.