Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

More likely than not, his anger has nothing to do with Frederik or me and it’s something with Emilie, or maybe Mathias or another friend. And regardless of what it is, his day can’t possibly be as wretched as mine — I’m sure he hasn’t just found out that Emilie’s brain-damaged like his dad.

When I turn on the water, he still hasn’t turned the music down. His music feels more unbearable than ever, pounding an alien beat into my body. I twist the handle, test the water temperature, and gaze at the halogen spot in the ceiling, all the while a foreign beat thudding inside me. As if his music has taken my heart out and installed another in its place. The rhythm pounds and pounds, the heart no longer mine, the blood no longer mine.

Back out of the shower stall. I throw on my bathrobe and return to the hall.

Again I bang on his door, hard. He doesn’t open up. I pull on the knob but the door is locked.

“Open up! Come out here! Turn it down and open up! Come out!”

At length he opens the door a crack. “What!”

“Niklas, please turn it down!”

“And what’ll you do if I don’t?”

He’s never spoken to me like this before. He wants to take the fight to a new level. And today of all days. He’s challenging me, and I just don’t have the energy. Then I ask myself: what right do I have to order him around? I, who have cheated on his father?

Does he know? I have a sudden strong hunch that I’ve been found out. Something’s clearly changed, and I have no idea what it is. I don’t dare make a stand against him just now, and instead I hurry back toward the bathroom, yelling, “I said I’ve had a hard day! You’re so self-centered!”

“ I am?” he shouts. “Am I the one who’s self-centered?”

The techno pulse continues as the shower’s hot hard stream strikes my forehead, my throat, my breasts. Is he turning it down yet? I stand still and wait.

No.

Something’s very wrong.

• • •

It’s impossible to hear myself think in the apartment, so I go outside to one of the common areas and find a distant bench where I can be alone.

Will Niklas tell Frederik about Bernard and me? Does he realize how fragile his father is? Thorkild, Vibeke, and I have agreed that Niklas shouldn’t hear about his father’s suicidal thoughts, but maybe I need to start telling him.

Maybe it’s already too late. Or is he actually ignorant about Bernard and me — am I just imagining things? I call and text Niklas several times, but he doesn’t answer.

And then new messages arrive from Bernard. Should I reply? Does it make any difference whether it’s his real self that I’ve fallen in love with? His hormonal changes could be a gift. In fact, I may be the luckiest woman in the world, to find a man who’s brain-damaged in precisely the remarkable way that Bernard is.

I can’t deal with any of it.

I read his texts for what seems like hours. I don’t send him any myself.

Frederik calls around seven to say that dinner will be on the table soon.

When I return, Niklas’s music has stopped. I check my appearance in the hall mirror. Nothing to see. And Frederik seems calm and happy, so Niklas can’t have told him anything.

I sit down quietly at the dinner table. A little later, Niklas comes in; he doesn’t say anything either. I try for a bit of eye contact, just some form of recognition, but it’s a lost cause.

Frederik’s spread a cloth and done a nice job of setting the table; he’s been making an effort every day to win back my love and respect.

“Now let’s enjoy ourselves!” he says with a bright smile. I watch Niklas, who looks just as angry as this afternoon, though more tight-lipped than ever.

Neither Niklas nor I answer.

One beer stands next to Frederik’s plate and another next to mine. Seeing his I say, without really thinking, “That’s not very good for you. And we can’t afford it either.”

He gets up and takes both beers back to the fridge. Halfway there, he stops and holds one out toward me. “Do you want it?”

“No thanks.”

He knows that if he claims he’s no longer sick, it can be interpreted as not acknowledging his illness. And the inability to acknowledge his illness is such a key symptom of his injury that an even longer time would pass before I let him go online without sitting beside him, or go shopping without checking all the receipts.

We’re having homemade moussaka and salad. Frederik’s really made the dinner into something nice — as much as he can, considering there isn’t much money and he basically never cooked before a few months ago, when I gave him responsibility for all the household work.

When Niklas and I don’t say anything, he looks at us with disappointment. “What’s the matter?”

Niklas doesn’t answer.

“I thought we could enjoy ourselves tonight,” Frederik says. He looks over at me. “Did you have a good run with Andrea?”

I finally have to tell him. “Niklas and I were fighting about his music.”

“Oh, so that’s why.”

How did Niklas find out about Bernard and me?

The other day, he barged into the bathroom while I had my tennis clothes in the sink to make them wet before hanging them up to dry. They were supposed to look as if I’d been playing tennis all afternoon. But did he really know that was what I was doing?

Or did one of his friends see Bernard and me swimming in the sound the other day? What went wrong?

Niklas gets up without saying a word and walks out to the kitchen. I hear him open the fridge, and he returns with two beers.

“I don’t think you should …” I start to say. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.”

And then for the first time tonight, he looks me in the eye. It’s not a pleasant experience. He comes closer, sets one beer in front of his father, and opens the other for himself.

Frederik hesitates, and I can see that he’s thinking about showing his solidarity with me by telling Niklas to listen to his mother. Perhaps he wonders why Niklas can twist me around his little finger today.

“Is this okay with you?” he asks me.

I sigh resignedly, and Niklas takes a big gulp of beer.

“You should listen to your mother,” Frederik says in a subdued voice.

Other than that, not a sound.

Frederik doesn’t open his beer.

He says, “Well, I for one have no idea what’s going on around here.” All too quickly he corrects himself. “Or yes — of course I do. Obviously, you’ve been fighting about Niklas’s music — that’s clear.”

Silence.

“Yes, it’s difficult,” Frederik says. “We all have to live here, don’t we?”

In the end, I make an effort to pull myself together.

“What have you been up to today?” I ask Frederik in my most controlled voice.

He lights up. “Well, I was trying to find more evidence in my old bank statements.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Yes, in fact I was looking forward to telling you. Just one new thing: in the years before my tumor was discovered, I signed up twice for fitness classes without ever going to them. And once for fencing, which I never went to either. Before that, I never signed up for exercise. It was my impaired inhibitory mechanism that let me sign up, of course — and my inability to focus that kept me from following through.”

Niklas looks up at the ceiling, as if to say he thinks we’re hopeless.

I find myself sounding a little grumpy, though I don’t mean to. “There are tons of people who sign up for all kinds of things that they never end up doing.”

“But that’s where Bernard is fantastic. We’re gathering lots and lots of these sorts of facts.”

What goes through Niklas’s mind when he hears his dad use the word fantastic about the man he knows to be my lover?