Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

That’s it, he says, and takes up various positions, viewing the arrangement from all angles. It makes her think of cattle auctions, or just the horse trader from Femmøller, this act of appraisal, though without their sceptical point of departure, with an enthusiasm instead that seems to her like a tribute to everything there is, but which perhaps in actual fact — this is the feeling she has — is the exact opposite. A way of not seeing what is. He claps his hands together, a crack of sound. So what do you think, he says, already on his way to the kitchen to make coffee; and everything is already the same.

THERE ARE TWO tight bundles of images and recollections; have I told you this before, he asks. Yes, you have. He slows down, holding up the traffic, leans over and points: that’s where I used to live. And that’s where I worked once. The warehouse, how hard was that, a warehouseman, and he tells her once again about their fingers in winter, having to wear those gloves with the fingertips cut off, never exactly knowing if it was so they could work the machines more safely or because the gloves would wear out at the fingers anyway. She stares stiffly through the windshield. She wishes they could drive quickly through a landscape that is unfamiliar to her. A fleeting face without history. This disinclination toward him, that in actual fact is an allegiance to the love she still awaits.

SOMETHING ABOUT HIS face. It snowed again today. The sun never arrived in the sky, it was as if something were holding it down at the other end. All of a sudden she thought he looked like the few other men she had been with. She felt like there were too many of them in the apartment. And the feeling of she herself being someone else, that she likewise was a number of other women. He sits slouched over his books; she kneels beside him and grips his thigh; he swivels the chair, and she crawls between his legs. Puts her arms around him and buries her face in his crotch. He strokes her hair. The winter wouldn’t leave: every time you thought spring had come, snow came instead. No cars on the roads. Jobs made to wait. The ground is frozen: you can’t plant the bulbs, or bury a friend, all you can do is stand around and wait, for all your good intentions of getting things done, and a new face every day, no matter what.

THEY WHEEL THEIR bikes along the canal. They talk about going swimming, but know it won’t be today. It’s late afternoon, she senses an imbalance in the picture, she gets up so late, and it’s as if she’s going forward in the wrong lane. Everyone is going home from something. Her younger sister is exhausted by work; says there’s no time to be unhappy. She nods. I can see that, she says. It might be easiest that way.

Her sister is offended and hides it badly. She herself doesn’t know how it feels to be angry in that way, it’s like there’s always been this great pool of emotions and characteristics to be shared out between the two sisters, and no one has ever bothered to divide up the individual emotions, split the pile fairly into two equal portions. She says she’s convinced it’s because of her book, those scenes from home . That whole project of yours. What is, she asks. Mum having cancer, he sister replies.

That’s the sort of thing people with cancer say, she says.

The two sisters sit down on a step to drink sodas. She says nothing, puts the bottle to her lips, tilts her head, puts the bottle down on the woodwork.

Is that what you think, she says — I say — eventually. Is that what you think.

It’s what they say, says my sister. That it’s usually psychological, triggered by a depression, or some enormous grief.

I nod without knowing one way or another, rocking my head like a weaving horse.

There’s a crane on the other side of the canal, lifting rust-red plates of metal from the cobblestones onto the bed of a truck. Dangling sheets of iron, delivered like well-aimed slaps to the face. The blue sea, a blue belt dissecting the picture. The crane is a strong arm slashing the sky. And then the feeling of discarding masks, of coming home. I’d like that.

I HAVE NEVER before wanted anything, she understands that now. It’s not a competition, you say, meaning: I can’t stand to lose anything more.

WE MEET BRIEFLY, he’s with his girlfriend and son. Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district late morning, it must have been autumn, though still with summer’s remains, making everything a matter of postponement. How long like this. Borrowed time. I’m wearing a red dress, black wellingtons. He doesn’t need to see any more than that, even in that instant he has already seen too much. His gaze, indiscriminate: seeing what soon will be possessed, and all that must thereby be renounced; images assail him like a blazing pack of hounds dropped from a loft aflame, and we are drenched, saturated by fire and body. Something on the verge of happening, something already happened, something painfully absent. He greets the musicians, leans a guitar and a saxophone case against the wall. All the time, his eyes are on me. And his girlfriend sees it all, though in reverse, a mirror image reflected in all surfaces: a gleaming eye, a polished boot; and in that way it is enfolded, in the look in his eyes, and we tear off each other’s clothing, the three of us there, inside the storm, a morning dawned upon an island from which we must depart on different ferries; no time to say goodbye, an uncertainty as to where we stand, now, and to what it means; a disenchantment, a sudden degeneration of substance, a feeling of having staked everything on a horse, only for it then to abandon the race, a sense of the entire world being a trick, everything fixed in advance . And in that same gaze I put a phone back into my pocket in the parking area outside the former slaughterhouses of Vesterbro, telling myself out loud that it’s best that way, to give him time, knowing full well that there is no time, that time is past; the beginning and ending of everything in one insane displacement, a cloudburst, the rip of an awning, its sudden deluge. This is how it is again, this is how it is that morning in the rehearsal space: some flowers whose stems you cut and place in water; the same stems are dry and withered as you break them in the middle, stuff them into an empty milk carton you then drop into the bin under the sink; something you hope for, and something you regret, a single displacement, a continuing drift toward the center. A core, that nevertheless can never be found; a reverse explosion of life, a reverse explosion of death.

He puts out his hand and introduces himself by name. I do likewise, only to realize that instead of telling him my own name I have repeated his.

His girlfriend walks up the stairs to the stage, where I am placed on a tall stool in front of a microphone. There is something wrong with the sound, a squeal of feedback as she steps up. She hesitates, tiptoes almost, ducks her head slightly between her shoulders, an apology. She comes toward me and I point the microphone away. Hi, she says, extending her hand and introducing herself. Her hand is cold, but mine is colder. Are you a singer, she asks. I shake my head. No, I say.

I smile. She smiles back. She is so warm and friendly, she takes my hand and clasps it tight. As if we’re going to have a life together. Only we’re not, I think to myself; perhaps we’re going to share one. Half for you and half for me; not a whole life for either of us, not a whole man.

When they leave, he carefully closes the door behind them. I can’t help but smile, for there’s something involuntarily symbolic about the world at that moment: him closing the door so carefully — as if you can close a door.

The body remembers.