Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

And the sound of flesh, rotting. And a picture of a doorstep one morning. And the picture of a breakfast table with juice. Images from an abandoned circus. There will be days like that.

THEY LIVED TOGETHER, there was hardly any skin, most of the time there was a confusion surrounding their bodies, where one stopped and the other began; one body may be switched off, the other pumps life into the unconscious body while it is unconscious. I know nothing about you, she thinks; she knew nothing about him, but maybe it wasn’t true. The opposite is always a part of the picture as well .

Transillumination.

Love as a kind of transillumination.

Everything is very clear. Woods, with darkness falling. Looming silhouettes, all too distinct. The sky, turning completely pale at the prospect of something like night. The crowns of the trees, milking the sky with their eyes, their thoughts, stamping about the landscape, trying . To do what, exactly. To find a home there. In the midst of what is most unwilling: nature, rejecting its young, ejecting them from the nest, over the cliff. And there you stand, worming your way and trying to blend in .

For years she thought she had succeeded in doing just that.

And not for his sake. To become a part . To belong in a landscape, a family somewhere. But then maybe it was never like that at all. Maybe it was he who was right. Her serenity was just a cynical acceptance of that condition of never finding home. Certainly not in nature. Certainly not in love, where all the time you’re — well, what, exactly. Exposed in love; in its neglectful custody. On your way somewhere else, and always another.

HOW LONG HAVE I known exactly, she may find herself thinking.

Some weeks later: she is standing on the street, trying to smoke a cigarette, trying to become addicted to something. She coughs, her nose runs. She doesn’t know if it’s the cold or her having been left, her feeling more together by being totally left on her own. But everything is weeping, everything a collapse, a crashing down around her ears, a gash in her head, and she is as peeled; the sky descending around her, her skin. Utterly exposed in that way: imperiled . Her head feels heavy, she bends backward and thinks: nothing lies heavy.

Nothing anyone can see.

She lies down on the flagstones, puts the cigarette down on the ground, from where it sends a thin coil of smoke into the air. She decides to lie there until the cigarette goes out. Or burns up. One of the two. And then she will let herself into her apartment again; and she lets herself in and finds warmth; she lets herself in, having managed to get to her feet, and then she lights her cigarette, and says: I’ve never smoked before, then speaks her name, and another man speaks his. Movements of that kind, taking place all the time, the kind of movements that can start going in reverse. Behind one’s back. All of a sudden you’re here again, or else you’ve never been here before. There you are; held upright by the suspicious cone of light from a lamppost.

THE WIND BLOWING in through the open windows smells like the sound of envelopes being opened with a knife. Seasons are nonexistent at the moment, in the days following the death of a friend. She gathers the shards, in her thoughts. The days cannot be told apart. Tomorrow already yesterday. She meets him for the first time. It is summer; I have finally come to say goodbye.

The keys of the apartment are as shiny as eyes too young for their face. I have lived inside you since I was eighteen.

Your face, when I am no longer there to see it.

I don’t believe it.

A light, like darkness, all around you.

I let myself into the apartment. I lie down beside you on the bed. Or else I get into the bed between two sleeping figures. I push the other woman out. Sorry.

WE’RE JUST NOT happy, he told her. She went against him instinctively: yes, we are.

You’re not listening to what I’m saying.

Yes, I am, I listen to everything you say. You’re just not saying anything.

It was winter, he was lying with his back against the cold wall in her apartment. The apartment was on the third floor, on Løngangsstræde, backed up to the church, Vartov Kirke, sharing its spine. Sunday morning, and the room trembled, the clinking of the little candle holders and vases in the windowsill. The circular movement of the water in those vases, emanating outward from the stalks of the flowers; from the round eye of the vase, inward to the middle, a sky of new year — geometric patterns, tiny explosions without sound. The submarine rumble of the organ in the room. The hymn ran down the walls, Grundtvig’s “Påskeblomst,” the coldness contained in that. She thought of pushing him through the brick. He would plunge through the church like a beast. Or a bird with clipped wings. Landing heavily on ancient stone. Only the smell of vanilla and timber would discover his body.

Vast areas of loneliness, and of alone here . The edgeland, where the last houses in the village stand and rock their heads to the point of nausea, looking out upon the void, halted just in time — before the fields, plundered and plowed, made ready for, well, for what, exactly. Open land. A cry that may reach out across the landscape, and yet return to hit you full in the back. You will fall, perhaps, and then, perhaps, the houses will fall, too.

But they stand.

Trembling on the edgeland. Alone. A shift has taken place. They leave a party, and walk through the city. I’m cold, she says. The way he stops there, on the bridge. Takes her hands and pulls off her gloves, holds her hands up in front of his, in front of your, fleshy lips, fleshy and cracked, blowing warm breath against my fingers. Behind you, the tracks as they run beneath the bridge; your breath is moist and warm, and sheaths my white fingers like water.

We say nothing.

A car goes past. A train crosses beneath us, on the tracks under the bridge, it forms a crucifix, and we are in the middle. Your dreadful face is a caring face. What broke it.

When do you realize what these signs mean, a crucifix drawn beneath you. My eyes begin to water, it’s the cold. You think I’m crying, and kiss me. There’s a moment of togetherness there. We walk home, these two people walk home, a man and a woman, without speaking. Before they let themselves into the apartment, he holds her head in both his hands. She can hear herself breathing. The snow can do that: amplify sound. He leans in close, puts his face to hers, and places a kiss below her eye. The feeling of his lips as they touch, before he opens his mouth and licks the skin below her eye, licks the tears from her face, first one cheek, then the other; that kind of moment in time, the fact they exist. And that shift: toward something like words. We have emptied out, she thinks to herself. The noise of a bucket, jarring against the sides of an empty well. A horse, scraping the gravel, putting its muzzle to the ground and blowing, a cloud of dust, a hand feeling inside a dark box when someone has taken the last of the coins and there’s nothing left for anyone. And one day it’s like this: words in abundance, landscapes of them; a face dissolving into syllables: here underneath your nose is the apple tree from the garden at Agri, here is Svinkløv, here are the warm flagstones, everything drawn in outline, laid bare, the dots connected, the face a map: a picture book in which something is revealed, made visible. A person. But all the lines are stiff as wire; you move as if your clothes are still in the cupboard, in a pile: a slide, or a fall, perhaps, a body able — and then again: a body that doesn’t even know what it wants, if it wants, anything other than to talk about — talk about what, exactly. Nothing. Most of what she tells him dissolves as it drifts from her body.