Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

This past year, a wall of manhood has risen up around Niklas, and I can’t see through to his real self. My boy’s still there within the wall, I know he is — the boy who’d come running to me from the yard if he found a small animal or an oddly bent branch, the boy I could once embrace and lift into the air when he was unhappy. But now his real face hides behind a broad jaw and a coarse complexion, his real body under strange muscles.

“Yes,” Niklas says. “He can do a little of everything, that Bernard.”

I scowl into his bottomless, grey-blue man’s eyes. I do what I can to signal to my son that he should stop now.

“Yes, he can,” Frederik agrees, relieved that Niklas is finally saying something.

But Niklas doesn’t stop there. “He’s a real go-getter, eh? Throws himself into all sorts of things.”

“You shut your mouth!” I blurt.

Frederik raises his water glass and regards his son mildly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s just my impression.”

“From what I was saying?”

“Yeah …” Niklas shrugs his shoulders, letting the word slowly dissolve to nothing.

Silence once more. Till suddenly Frederik looks horror-struck and gets to his feet so abruptly he knocks his chair over. He runs toward the front door. In this moment he must be healthy. Healthy enough to understand what the rest of us are thinking and feeling.

“Frederik! Frederik!” I shout. Followed by: “God damn it, Niklas! God damn it!”

Then I take off after Frederik. But he’s gone.

I run through corridors, down stairways, back through other corridors. Around the grounds. Now he’s going to die, I think. I shout, I look for him. Now he’s finally going to do what he’s talked about for so long.

He knows the area much better than I do, and he’s disappeared without a trace. I run back to the apartment, and as soon as I’m in the door I yell, “Niklas, what were you thinking?”

“What was I thinking? What were you thinking? You think it’s fun to hear that your mom’s on her back screwing some white-haired man behind the hedge at the tennis club?”

I half fall onto the couch. My voice grows weak. “Did someone say that?”

“Of course they said it! Everyone’s been gossiping about it! But you’re totally off in your own world!”

“Yes, but … yes, I probably haven’t—”

“Now I don’t have my mother anymore either!” Niklas’s voice sounds as if it’s coming through the wall of another room.

“You do have your mother. I haven’t changed.”

“You have, you’ve turned into someone else too! God damn it, behind the hedge at the tennis club! That’s not my mother. It isn’t! That’s not who she is.”

“Niklas, I promise you I’ll always be—”

“You’re gone! Dad’ll be in prison soon! And our house is gone too!”

It’s impossible to get through to him. “It’s not certain that Dad’ll go to jail.”

“I’m not that stupid. Of course he’s not going to win this case. I’m not an idiot! Every thing’s gone!”

I get up from the couch and go over to him to give him a hug, though I know he hates them.

He pushes me away, but I approach him again, and again he pushes me away. Normally I respect the fact that he doesn’t like me embracing him, but not today. When I try a third time, he doesn’t push me away. We stand there quietly in the living room. I wrap both my arms around him, I press myself against him and lean my head in against his shoulder.

“I’m here, Niklas,” I say. “I’m right here. That’s one thing you can always count on. I will always be your mother.”

The evening sun no longer reaches our apartment, but it glints off the windows of the next apartment block. Some of the neighbors are eating Saturday dinner on their patios, the clink of glasses and the sound of happy voices blending in with the background thrum of the freeway.

Somewhere out there is his father.

I raise my face from Niklas’s shoulder. I have an urge to tousle his hair, but I don’t.

“Do you want to come with me to look for Dad?” I ask. “I think you’d be a lot better at finding him than I would.”

“Can’t we let him come back by himself?” Then he thinks about it for a moment, and he says, “Yeah. I’d like to come with.”

• • •

We head down toward the freeway first. Up onto the high embankment that’s supposed to shield Farum Midtpunkt from the noise. I lead the way along a narrow path trampled down between high stalks of wild grass, among ripe seedpods and flowers. Now and then we have to duck to pass under a pine branch. There’s so much undergrowth here; so many places Frederik could hide. I’m thinking about what Niklas has been through. The humiliation in front of his friends. How can I ever make it up to him?

We draw near to the long slender footbridge that crosses the freeway. It seems the most logical place to jump, but there’s no sign of Frederik. Maybe he’s not out here at all. Maybe he’s over at one of his friends’.

I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “Why didn’t you come down here that night?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you come down here, instead of staying home so that it was me who found you?”

I turn to him and look at his face, the warm yellow evening sun striking it from the side. I know right away what he’s talking about, but it’s too much for me to process all at once, and I can’t help repeating myself. “What?”

“That time in the kitchen with the tequila and pills.”

“But Niklas, there weren’t any pills! I didn’t take any!”

Silence.

“I didn’t want to die. As long as you’re still alive, I never want to die.”

Silence.

“No matter what happens.”

Silence.

“Who told you there were pills?”

“I don’t know, people just said that. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

The first time I see his small, wrinkled, blue-red face as he’s placed upon my belly; he has his friends over, in the yard at Station Road, all of them hopping with delight in the inflated kiddie pool; he runs in from the street, crying from a fall on his bike.

“I could never think of doing that,” I say, grasping him by the shoulders as I look into his eyes. My skinny boy who’s now taller than me. “Never. I could never ever think of doing that, Niklas.”

And then I watch as it unfolds before me. For the first time since he was thirteen, he presses himself against me. He sobs the way he could when he was a small boy. He’s shaking, and I am too. He hugs me, he hugs the woman who is his mom. For the first time in all too long. My Niklas. My son.

When Thorkild and Vibeke come by to pick up Frederik and everything he owns — a stuffed suitcase, four garbage bags of clothing, and three moving boxes, two of them with LPs — they’re polite. They say they understand that it’s not working anymore, and they make an effort to remain cordial.

But they don’t want any help carrying the things down to the car. And when I notice that Frederik forgot the power cord for his laptop behind the desk and run down with it, Vibeke says thank you with theatrical surprise — as if for the entire course of our marriage, right up to this very moment, I’ve been thinking only of myself.

As soon as Frederik moves into his parents’ basement, he’s allowed to be online all he wants, and every day he sends me an e-mail. Lots of them describe his dogged efforts to land a job.

The tests all show that his concentration, empathy, and organizational ability are now above average, and when he declares that he’s well, I no longer contradict him. He’s been cold-calling scores of primary schools to hear if they could use a substitute, but of course no one wants him.