Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

She hadn’t taken any medicine since they left Dombås, even though a doctor there had let her have two whole boxes—and not suppositories either. Up here, she felt there was more room for her senses, letting them reach out freely into a world of nothingness. But her abstinence and the thickening mist combined into a feeling that reminded her of being young and having a migraine in a totally quiet bedroom on a Sunday afternoon. Ulf’s arm around her waist seemed to hold her inside that feeling.

She caught the reflections in his glasses as his lips searched for hers. She turned away, not in conscious, thought-out rejection of him, but instinctively, as one instantly wipes cobwebs off one’s face while moving about in a dark attic. She had visualized the two of them kissing and even, at times and for whatever reason, wished that they would. But it felt quite different now, when it was about to happen.

She crawled out of the tent. Wandering off anywhere wasn’t an option because the whiteout had obliterated the landscape. She used up five matches to light a cigarette. When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that Ulf was still inside the tent, lying on his belly and making notes in a spiral-bound notepad.

“I just wanted to see them standing in a circle,” she said loudly enough to be heard above the wind.

Ulf made a lot of noises intended to communicate strong feelings.

“You didn’t think we would actually do that? You didn’t think we would try to provoke that behavior?”

Even with her back turned, she could sense Ulf shaking his head.

“Perhaps it hasn’t struck you that it would be a dangerous thing to do? Indicated, for instance, by the words defensive formation ?”

Admittedly, she hadn’t considered this. Not in her state of Musk Ox aquavit–induced delirium that first evening. Nor at any time later. It had only been an image in her mind: animals in a circle.

“This summer alone, the air ambulance service had to pick up two tourists who hadn’t observed the recommended safe distance.”

She threw the cigarette butt into a gust of wind and watched as it shot away like a small projectile.

“Musk oxen can get to sixty kilometers an hour at full speed,” Ulf pointed out.

“Kilometers an hour” was pretty meaningless to her, and she must have been visibly unimpressed because Ulf added, “Usain Bolt can get to thirty-seven kilometers an hour over a short distance.”

“Perhaps he’d run faster if he were chased by a musk ox?”

Ulf turned back to his notes.

“Are there no warning signs?” she asked.

Ulf said while carrying on with his work, “When they feel provoked, they start snorting and striking the ground with their horns.”

“Fine.”

“No, it’s very much not fine,” Ulf said. “Don’t believe that these behaviors are kind of optional. One thing always follows another.”

She looked like a weary question mark.

“Imagine a large ship that’s about to move away from the quayside. Two warning blasts and they’re not saying: I might or might not be reversing now.”

“True. They mean: Out of my way!”

“Correct, Jane. But you don’t usually move at sixty kilometers an hour, do you? At least, I haven’t seen anything of the sort.”

“Fuck you, Ulf.”

“And you, Jane.”

JULIE WAS ELEVEN.She used to say especially pleasing words inside her head. Sometimes, when she thought she was alone, the words became just audible, like whistling with cracked lips: Engelbert Humperdinck. Hang Seng in Hong Kong.

Julie filled the windowsill in her room with tubes of flavored lip gloss.

Julie became sarcastic when her blood sugar was low.

Julie played the piano with the straight back of a piano-playing girl of long ago.

Julie sat in the back of the car and let off a loud, bleating burp and said, “Oh dear. I’m so sorry.” Looking at her in the rearview mirror, it was obvious that a miraculous rebalancing was under way: the size of her front teeth and her mouth were more in keeping with each other, her head was no longer a ball balanced on the sticklike body of child.

Julie, all of her four feet eleven inches, curled up in your arms and breathing warmly into your ear.

Julie laughed a lot.

Julie cried a lot.

Some of Julie’s traits had jumped several generations: the Miss Teen looks of her father’s mother, the dark-blonde hair of an Askeland woman who left the poverty of Norway behind in the nineteenth century.

Julie was persnickety.

Julie swept her ponytail up high, pushed some hair forward to make short bangs, and mimicked a callow boy: “Do you love me unconditionally?”

Julie danced as if she were the only one alive in the world.

Now and then, Julie was allowed to choose her own clothes: Jeans that looked as if they’d been painted on her legs, tops that left her belly bare. Frills! It was impossible to work out if her choices were alarmingly sexualized or if the alarmist adult gaze added that special charge.

Julie was eleven but slept as if she were an infant, one hand protectively against her neck. Greg whispered, “Remember, she did that even at St. Mary’s?”

Of all that Jane remembered from that time, her most distinct memory was the light. A light, as if painted in oils, was there every time she woke. Light falling on the roofs of the houses, snow-covered even though it was March, flowing in through the family room’s two tall windows whose blinds could be raised electronically using a remote control so that, from her bed, Jane could regulate them according to how much light her heart could hold.

She lay there looking at Julie, after having been through a world of pain so implausibly overwhelming that she was already well on her way to forgetting it. Instead, there were Julie’s domed, gummed-up eyes below little bumps that would, with time, grow into her eyebrows. And Julie’s nose, no larger than the tip of Greg’s little finger but still the most outgoing feature in a face that shouted: Get me back in there where I came from! In an instant, Jane realized that her own inner darkness was not the same as her mother’s, and that she would never come to prioritize her own emotional needs over the needs of this child. Although she had hardly talked to a child since she was one herself and thought her friends’ children, despite appearing to be imitation human beings, were actually small trolls whose goal was to block all decent conversation, she found it very easy to love her own daughter. Watching Julie, Jane felt herself becoming the light, as if at any moment she might change from being a person into no more than the radiance illuminating her baby’s face.

Among the mass of information made available to her before the birth—the Lamaze classes, the women’s magazine articles, the pregnancy checkups—nothing had been said about this light. All the factual knowledge, so much more than one could possibly wish for, was nothing but a cover-up for everyone’s failure to describe it.

The staff at St. Mary’s circled around them, offering every kind of postnatal support. Jane didn’t respond with her usual edginess to gentle-voiced professional insistence, not even when a woman with large glasses and a floral blouse introduced herself as a lactation consultant and told her that she, the consultant, was available on a special white phone line so that Jane could air her breastfeeding issues at any time. Jane’s urge to categorize, to distance herself, to resist—all was calmed by the light. This became very obvious when Robert and Dorothy visited. She listened smilingly to her mother’s advice and interpreted her father’s lack of engagement as just awkwardness (he stood by the window and argued about access to parking).