You Disappear: A Novel (27 page)

Andrea lets us in, and she gives me a great long hug. She’s the group member I talk most to on the phone. Every time I call her, I feel a strong desire to take care of her—to protect her from her hard life with two small children and a husband who has multiple handicaps. But in reality, she’s the one who looks after me. Despite a demanding career as a biologist, she always has time to pose the right questions, to listen, and to come up with
new suggestions about neurological research—like her tip about the Iowa Gambling Task—that might save Frederik in his court case.

While she ushers the others into the living room, I act as if I’m going to use the bathroom. She won’t mind me walking around a little and seeing what her house is like before taking my seat with the group.

Quietly, I walk to the bathroom, which is large and fitted out for a wheelchair user, with lifting equipment like in a hospital. I know that a home caregiver comes twice a day to help Ian with hygiene. Then I poke my head into the kitchen, which looks more ordinary. The walls are mustard-colored, ’80s-style, and the kitchen cabinets cheap, but Andrea has hung up lots of kids’ drawings and paper chains and photos. There’s so much color and life here that it makes you just want to sit down and hang out with your family.

The biggest picture is of Ian seated in his wheelchair and grinning, while their youngest crawls on his lap and their eldest stands at his side, thoughtfully leaning her head against the backrest.

I’d like to poke my head into the bedroom too, but Andrea has stacked two moving boxes in front of the door. They’d be easy to get past, but they may signal that she wants to keep the bedroom to herself.

In the small entryway, I stand quietly and listen through the door to the living room. Lissie’s telling them how she tried explaining to her husband this afternoon where Andrea lives. “ ‘It’s just north of Hillerød.’ ‘Ohh, in the direction of Køge?’ ‘No, up along King’s Road past Birkerød.’ ‘Do you go past Kolding?’ ”

I can hear them laughing in there, Lissie loudest of all. Kolding’s on the mainland, some three hours in a completely different direction. “ ‘You drive up along King’s Road, and then north of Hillerød you take a right.’ ‘Ah, now I understand! You head toward the airport!’ ‘No, no, toward a small town called King’s Meadows.’ ‘And then past Roskilde?’ ‘No, no, no!’ ‘Well then I’m completely confused. Do you drive toward Gilleleje?’ ‘Yes, at the start you could actually say it’s toward Gilleleje.’ ‘Okay, and then you turn off at Odense?’ ”

They keep laughing on the other side of the door. Lissie has the healthiest spouse of the group. She and her husband still see their friends, travel together, and I dare say enjoy life on his pension, but he suffers from spatial disorder and can perseverate as well. When he has a bad day, he can ask
questions about directions for half an hour at a stretch without realizing that time is passing, and in the end he gets to be tremendously annoying.

Lissie told us once that she laughs a lot with her husband. But by now I’ve heard plenty of women say the exact same thing, only to find out later that they actually laugh
at
their husbands, who laugh along without really understanding why. It might sound harsh to say that the best thing you’ve got left from a long marriage is laughing at how stupid your husband is, but if that’s the only way to keep your spirits up …

I open the door to where the others are sitting, just as Andrea says that Bernard’s been delayed a bit. I stop in the doorway. “Delayed? But I thought he wasn’t coming today. That’s what Merethe said.”

“Yes, he was supposed to have a meeting at Lærke’s day-care center, but it was rescheduled.”

Do they notice anything in my reaction? They must be deaf and blind if they don’t.

But nobody reacts, and I sit down quickly without a word, staring at the table. Bernard must think I’m not coming tonight, because I sent Andrea my regrets and only found out today that a meeting at school had been canceled.

I should leave now. I should definitely leave. Bernard’s been in the group much longer than me.

The others talk about the relationships they have with their in-laws—ancient mothers and fathers who are helping take care of sons over sixty.

The doorbell rings. Andrea gets up and the others chatter on, oblivious.

Faint noises in the hall. Is he hanging up his jacket? Andrea’s friendly chuckle. The door opens.

He catches sight of me and slumps, and hunched over he retreats backward to the hallway.

“Bernard, Bernard! What’s the matter?” the women all call in chorus.

“Nothing!” he answers from the far side of the door.

“Yes, but …”

They look anxiously at one another.

And then he enters again, erect and smiling. It took only a few seconds.

“I get stomach cramps once in a while,” he says, avoiding my gaze. “It’s the stress. Don’t worry about it.”

They fall on him. “That’s awful! You should do something about it.”
“Werner had the same thing, but he got over it.” “Have you had X-rays?” “I know a good specialist.” “Carrot juice, have you tried that?”

“Sorry to frighten you. It’s nothing, I feel better already.”

At home in bed, I’ve tried to explain to myself that he can’t really look as handsome as I remember. But he does. Silver-grey, lean, smiling broadly. And already he’s able to look at me, cheerful and energetic, as if there’s nothing between us. The others can’t possibly notice anything. I’m not sure how sincere his charm seems to me, though it convinces the others; these last few months I’ve gotten to know his facial expressions better. Tonight he inhabits the expressions in turn and then, as if he wants to withdraw into some solitary reverie, abandons them. But the others don’t see it.

We discuss differences in municipalities and how much rehab they’ll subsidize for people with brain injuries and physical handicaps. Gerda’s animated. The hair on Bernard’s hands isn’t as grey as on his head, and I wonder,
Is all his body hair dark?
I can see the vaulted musculature beneath his shirt. I think of rowers, tennis players, and hundred-meter sprinters—their shoulders, their arms, their chests. That’s how they look; and they’re not old.

Ulla talks about her doubts. “The more years we spend supporting our husbands and wives,” she says, “and the more we learn about how to do it really well, the longer the road back to what we wanted to do with our lives. Aren’t we really just helping each other veer farther off course, down some dead end?”

The fine creases in the corners of his eyes form patterns in constant motion. Kirsten tells us more about her husband’s admission to the hospital and cries. The corners of Bernard’s eyes are trees, a forest, the two of us, the hands, the slender fingers. Now Ulla’s crying too, and he drapes an arm around her. The creases become bushes in the mist, a light on the far side of a cliff.

And then the meeting’s over.

We all crowd into Andrea’s small entryway. We hug each other and look Ulla and Kirsten in the eye, and a couple of minutes later I’m sitting in my car in the dark, not turning the key in the ignition. Kirsten drives past, Anton drives past, Ulla drives past.

Bernard’s car is parked farther up a ways. It doesn’t start up either, and I can faintly make his silhouette out through the window.

I think of how Lærke was kind to me. She trusts me; and the marriage they have is a lovely one. I don’t owe Frederik anything, because I’ve already given him more than anyone could expect. But Lærke—I have to look out for Lærke. I will give Bernard energy, so he can stay with that poor sick woman even longer. I must promise myself to stop if I ever start detracting from her life instead of contributing to it.

I get out of my car and walk toward his. He remains seated. The streetlamps are intensely orange—more so than the lights in Farum or Copenhagen—and they make the outlines of the handicapped vehicles light up against the black hedges and the smooth bright pavement.

Bernard gets out of his car. I don’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. The orange light. I raise my mouth and kiss him. He collapses a bit—like when he saw me in Andrea’s living room—and his hands gather up my hips. Now we’re alone, with the cherry blossoms in the dark tree-tops above us and scattered upon the asphalt beneath our feet.

We kiss for a long time while his hands find their way under my shirt and mine find their way under his. His fingers stroke my lower back and run along the inside of my waistband; I shiver a little. His lips sink down to my throat, and I want to press him against me while I still feel the hovering touch of his lips and fingers. In the wrinkles that extend from the corners of his eyes I see once more the trees, the forest, his hands and slender fingers. He sees something in my eyes too—what? what? I want to possess it, to know what makes him smile as he slowly undoes the button of my pants and fingers the upper part of my zipper.

“Mia, Mia,” he says.

With my pants off, I sit down on the hood of the lime-colored car parked behind his. I feel the chilled automotive paint and the fallen petals from the cherry tree against the skin of my buttocks.

The streetlamp swings overhead, and its reflection bobs in the paint beneath us—or does it? And all the little yellow-brick houses of the disabled bob around us.

I look up into the light as I draw him in. The trees now a dark jungle, an elephant that stamps and trumpets to drive its enemies off.

Branches before my face. The bellowing grows harsher and quicker and still fiercer and the elephant attacks, it comes blowing toward me, trampling tree trunks and huts, villages, fences, all things in its path as if they were twigs.

And then I hear more stomping: another elephant. It likewise bellows and thunders this way. The sounds of both pounding equally loud in my ears and eyes, through my lips and my fingertips.

For a moment I feel Bernard slide out of me and the sounds vanish, I don’t have time to think.

“No!” I shriek, much too loudly.

He’s already inside again. The elephants stomping toward me again from their respective sides of the forest, the rhythmic booming, the shattered trees, and at last the all-embracing flutter as they crash down over us on the gleaming hood of the handicapped vehicle. Shards of shining ivory and splintered skulls in the moonlight.

Am I absentminded as I stand before my sixth graders the next morning, with a tender crotch and a chin abraded pink by Bernard’s stubble? Decidedly, and in high spirits. I don’t have a clue what my students are asking me.

No one complains; but then again, I’ve been absentminded for months, and at least today my distraction is cheerful.

“Yes, Molly.”

“Why’s negative times negative positive?”

“That’s because … because …”

The beam from the orange streetlamp falls upon us, lighting up the outline of his hair as he leans in over me and I gaze into his features, colossal and blurry, rubbing my face around in his and smearing him over me so he can’t be washed off.

A boy in the back row closes one eye, raises his left arm slowly, and with a quick flip of his right launches a metal lunch box that whizzes a couple of inches past my head, smashing into the wall and tumbling to the floor.

Silence.

I look at him.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” he says hastily, looking confused and a little fearful. “I didn’t know it would go that far.”

The eyes of the class: the girls waiting for him to be chewed out, the boys more inscrutable, as usual.

But I smile at him. “I know why you did it.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Do
you
know why you did it?”

“It went too far. I didn’t realize it would fly so far. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. But do you know
why
you threw it?”

“I just wanted to try—” He stops.

I’d recognized the movement, right down to the closed left eye. “You saw
Iron Man
on TV two days ago, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

It’s copycat behavior, it’s so obviously copycat behavior. That’s the way Robert Downey Jr. throws in the film, and now Mark’s done the same thing without being able to explain why.

Anna raises her hand. “Aren’t you going to scold him?”

“Mark and I will talk after class. Won’t we, Mark?”

“Yeah.”

In some respects I’ve become a poorer teacher since Frederik became ill—not as well prepared, and often distracted during class by thoughts of my miserable home life. Yet in other ways I’ve gotten better.

So much of what kids do and say takes on new meaning when you know a little neurology—for instance, that teenagers’ ability to control their impulses isn’t fully developed yet, which inevitably leads to brief episodes of mild copycat behavior, when they unthinkingly act out something they’ve seen. A watered-down version of the genuinely pathological cases of echolalia and echopraxia.

It also leads to what the textbooks refer to as
utilization behavior
. If a person with serious damage to the frontal lobes stands in a station waiting for his train, he might find himself entering the first train that stops at the platform, for he has an automated sequence of actions associated with train trips and it’s impossible for his brain to interrupt that sequence. If he sees a bed, he might crawl in under the comforter—even though he knows full well that, at this very moment, he and his wife are shopping in Ikea’s bedroom department.

The frontal lobe deficit isn’t so pronounced in teenagers, but if some cherries are sitting in a bowl they’re not supposed to take from, you risk having them eat the fruit without consciously deciding to do so—even if they’re not hungry. If there’s a ball lying on the lawn, you risk having them
kick it, even if it isn’t their ball and some glassware’s standing on a table right behind it. It’s an automated sequence of actions, and once in a while the inhibitory mechanism fails.

Last week I tried to explain this to Helena, but she cut me off. “I actually called to hear about Frederik.”

“Helena, it’s all part of how he’s doing. Don’t tell me that now
you’re
going to say I talk too much about brain research?”