Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

He sits down on the edge of my bed. (We’ve agreed that from now on he’s the one who sleeps on the air mattress, while I sleep in the bed.) He shows me today’s Politiken , with the headline SAXTORPH PRIVATE SCHOOL RESCUED.

And down in the article: “A group of affluent parents of former students have joined together to present Saxtorph with a large gift. In addition, after intense negotiation, Danske Bank has agreed to slash the school’s debt by several million crowns.”

“That was my plan! The school’s been saved! I’ve saved Saxtorph!”

Frederik hasn’t been so happy since his manic period.

“We’ll have to celebrate,” I say.

And even as I’m saying it, even as I’m feeling happy on his behalf, on our friends’ behalf, on my own behalf — even as I’m full of all this, I see before me Bernard’s naked body, as if an immense pornographic poster of him were plastered from floor to ceiling on our wall. As if he were plastered on every wall I turn to face.

“I’ll rustle up something special for breakfast,” I say, thinking about how incredibly happy I feel, and how my joy feels nonetheless strange; about how happy Niklas will be when we wake him, and what I should make for breakfast. And then too about whether I’m now going to be too late for my afternoon assignation with Bernard in the break room, and about Bernard’s body: his ribs, lines, and curves, his hair, his wrinkles. Always and especially his body.

The things I have in the freezer are few and cheap, but I decide to make American pancakes from an old package of cornmeal mix, and I set out some grapes and a particularly fine cheese I’d reserved for tonight, for the farewell dinner for our house that I invited Helena and Henning to.

For most of our celebratory breakfast, with a very sleepy Niklas, Frederik’s on the phone with old friends and employees. I can hear how some of them still slam the receiver down when he calls, while others now speak to him for the first time since the embezzlement came to light. They tell him things the paper’s neglected to mention: which employees the new administration has fired to satisfy the bank’s demands for austerity, and which board members are, like Laust and Anja, losing their homes and pensions.

I still don’t have any sense at all of our own financial future — or even of how long we have a future together at all — so I’ve decided that for now, we’ll rent an apartment in Farum Midtpunkt. It’s a jump straight to the bottom rung on the social ladder in our town, but it’s only temporary, which makes the thought easier to bear. In less than a week, all our things have to be packed up and out of the house.

Later, an hour before Helena and Henning are supposed to arrive, I’m toiling away in the kitchen while Frederik sits in the living room, talking on the phone again. He knows what time it is, and he can see that the table isn’t set yet, but it doesn’t occur to him to come in and offer to help.

I wait until fifteen minutes before the guests are due to step into the room and interrupt him. “Come on, it’s high time you get going! The table needs to be set and the wine uncorked.”

A short time later, Henning’s booming voice and penetrating laugh reach us from all the way out in the street. For years he’s had his own contracting firm. He’s proud of the way he gets along with the tradesmen he hires, and he evidently has a talent for earning pots of money. In any case, he and Helena live in a house twice as large as ours, with a view of the lake to boot. But the house has been for sale now for four months. The financial crisis and the drop in housing prices have meant that Henning’s lost everything he earned in the past decade.

Frederik pours out the wine, and for once I give him permission to have a glass. It’s the first time since the operation, but today, the day we learn that he’s saved Saxtorph, he deserves it.

We tell Henning and Helena the fantastic news and touch glasses ceremoniously as we listen to the shots and explosions from upstairs, where Severin, their thirteen-year-old son, is already playing a computer game with Niklas.

I’d like to take a brief moment to toast and bid farewell to the house we’ve had so many good experiences in, but Frederik interrupts me. He wants to tell us more about the school, about his brilliant rescue plan, about the book on the history of European philosophy that he’s reading. In the beginning, what he says is clever and interesting, but after a while the rest of us lose interest without him registering it.

The first time I met someone with mild orbitofrontal damage in one of Frederik’s hospital wards, I didn’t realize she was ill. I listened to her attentively, despite a couple of minor angry outbursts and some oddly out-of-place jokes in her torrent of speech. But then she kept talking. And talking. And talking.

She wasn’t speaking in any way she hadn’t already spoken during our first minutes together, and yet the mere incessancy of her speech made it obvious that she wasn’t the lively, cheerful, somewhat whacky type I’d first taken her for. She was very ill. Listening to her at length would take the wind from anyone’s sails, and I was obliged to invent some excuse to escape.

When Frederik and I eat dinner, he pretty much talks the whole time, but now that Henning’s had a couple of glasses, our guest keeps right up with Frederik. Sometimes they talk at the same time, other times Henning forces Frederik to take a breather simply by raising his voice.

There’s nothing new about seeing Henning like this, and in fact Frederik and I have always had a hard time understanding how Helena can stand being married to him. Every time the four of us are together, he drinks too much and drowns out everyone else at the table.

When we’re nearly finished with the first round of lamb meatballs and Greek salad, Frederik pours some more red wine, first for us and then for himself.

I ask, “Are you sure you want more to drink, Frederik?”

He doesn’t reply, just avoids my gaze and finishes filling his glass.

The two boys disappear back upstairs to resume their shooting. I had Niklas promise to stay home until Severin has to go to bed, since Severin looks up to him and loves spending time with him so much.

Such a lot is happening in our lives right now — and not just Frederik’s and mine. Where are Henning and Helena going to move? What’ll Henning do now that he can no longer build and sell houses? I try asking him but have to give up. And Helena tries to engage Frederik in conversation, but she gives up too.

After listening to the men go on for a little too long, we lean toward each other in order to create our own little tête-à-tête of real talk on real matters. But we have to abandon that too, for when Henning and Frederik notice that they no longer have our undivided attention, they grow even more vociferous, until they’re once more in the center.

If it’s so important for them to have our attention, why can’t they pose a couple of questions and start a conversation that we can feel we’re also contributing to? But they couldn’t care less what we think or how we’re doing — just as they clearly have no clue what the boys are doing when not in the room, and just as they don’t offer to help collect the plates from the main course or serve dessert.

Dessert is my red-currant cheesecake. Helena calls the boys down from their computer game; since they know my cheesecake, for once we don’t have to shout several times before the roar of explosions from Niklas’s room dies out.

A white dab of cheesecake is sticking to Frederik’s upper lip. I point discreetly to my own lip with my pinky. But he doesn’t notice. I do it again. Still no reaction.