You Disappear: A Novel (30 page)

But the fantasies no longer open up for me. They don’t invite me in—not with Frederik beside me in the hanging sofa, not with Bernard.

In one of the basement rooms, Thorkild and Vibeke have piled up all their old junk. Someplace in the very back are buried a dining table and chairs.

“It’s great that you can use them,” Vibeke says to Frederik. “It’s a good thing we saved them. They aren’t anything special, but it’s the first table your father and I owned as a couple.”

Was I crazy when I accepted this offer? It must be possible to borrow furniture somewhere else. I sure as hell don’t want their furniture in my house after all. It’ll be torture.

The table is hidden behind so much clutter as to be invisible. Frederik brings out some chairs that stand right behind the door. Then he grabs hold of two large moving boxes that also go into the hall, then two suitcases and a food mixer.

Vibeke says, “Stop, stop. We were just going to come down here to look. The tea’s hot upstairs.”

There’s a restless energy in Frederik’s eyes. “But aren’t we going to look at the table? That’s what we came down here for.”

He starts struggling with an armchair. Then a freezer chest.

“Come, we’re going upstairs,” Vibeke says. “Frederik, come along.”

He doesn’t answer, just continues to heave on the freezer.

“
Now
, Frederik. Come upstairs!”

But he doesn’t join us, and so I have to sit alone with Thorkild and Vibeke.

“Your cake looks delicious,” Vibeke says after we’ve sat down.

“Not as delicious as yours,” I say. “Anyone can see that.”

None of us believes in Bernard’s plan for saving Frederik. Prison awaits,
and then the dole. The only one who puts any stock in the plan is Frederik. Then again, it’s impossible to know what’s really what in his inner mire of depression and antidepressants, lack of empathy and ill-timed elation.

My gaze drifts out of the dining room and into the living room, where two of the walls are covered with dark wooden shelves. I’ve paged through some of Thorkild’s books on past visits, when I was trying to disappear from these rooms. A large part of them are history books, with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Denmark. Despite a brilliant career as an educator, Thorkild sometimes upbraids himself for not pursuing a university career as a historian.

“Wouldn’t you like to try this other cake too?” Vibeke has the cake knife in hand, ready to put a slice of her cake on my plate.

“No thanks, I’m not that keen on raspberry these days.”

Again silence, broken only by the faint sounds of Frederik pottering about in the basement. He and I haven’t left home on this Sunday outing; we’ve brought the mood of our home with us.

Thorkild’s spoon clinks against his plate. His voice is breezy. “You know who your best friends are by the fact that you can be silent together.”

Vibeke doesn’t give up. “I could cut the raspberries off—”

“No!” I say it with too much emphasis, I know.

Then Frederik’s back, and he places on the table a book, on the history of European philosophy. “I found this.”

Vibeke’s already putting food on his plate. “I’m sure you can eat two big pieces.”

Frederik looks at his father and says, “Mia leaves neurophilosophy articles lying around at home, spread out everywhere. So I need something to read as a bit of an antidote.”

“
I
leave things lying around? Am
I
the one who makes such a mess? How many times have I had to take your speaker boards and—” I stop mid-sentence, despite my fury; it all seems so pointless.

But Frederik continues unabated. “She’s convinced that new brain research is going to invalidate twenty-five hundred years of philosophy. But the question of free will was the same back then as it is today. Nothing’s new. Nothing at all in twenty-five hundred years.”

Thorkild reaches for the book and grips it firmly, regarding it with fondness.

“If you’re interested, I’ve got some others you can borrow as well. How on earth did it end up in the basement? It really shouldn’t be down there.” He gently strokes the dust jacket, and it occurs to me that I’ve never seen him touch Vibeke that way. He leafs through it and leans over, suddenly engrossed.

Vibeke sets Frederik’s plate before him. “Well, what do
you
think, Frederik? Do human beings have free will?”

“It’s a complicated question. For the time being, my only thought is that one should try not to say anything stupid.”

Thorkild nods approvingly. It would be impossible to articulate his creed more precisely.

They are like three peas in a pod. The Halling family tone of voice, the conventional, frosty self-righteousness, the cultivated hostility that they’ve thrown in my face for twenty years.

What am I doing here? Why in the world have I agreed to be present at their family’s private party?

Frederik eats quickly and then heads back to the basement. The rest of us follow, and we see that he’s dug all the way through to my in-laws’ first dining table and chairs.

“I remembered this furniture being somewhat different,” I say. “I don’t think we can use it after all. But thank you so much for the offer.”

“Do take it,” Thorkild insists. “Then you can keep it until you find something better.”

And Frederik’s too ill to twig anything at all. He’s got his hands on his hips, just like his father. “Yes, we could keep it till we find something else.”

We go back upstairs with three philosophy books that Thorkild found for Frederik in the storeroom, including one by a contemporary Spanish philosopher. Then we sit down in the living room. I’m aching to get out of here.

Thorkild says, “Speaking of Spanish, Vibeke and I were wondering if there was something we could do for Niklas.”

I didn’t see that coming!

Niklas got Ds in both written and oral Spanish, but all his other grades have been good. When Frederik was a boy, Vibeke and Thorkild coached him to a top GPA; now that their son has failed so utterly, Niklas is evidently
supposed to be their next golden boy. And that means accusing me of being unable to raise my own son.

Vibeke says, “Maybe Niklas could use a little peace and quiet, what with the moving and all. Maybe it’d be good for him to live someplace else for a few days.”

I fly out of my chair. “Stop it now! How many attacks do I have to sit here and listen to before the two of you will let it rest?”

Vibeke looks frightened again. “Is it because of the cake?” she mumbles. “I was wondering if it was wrong of me to buy it, but then—”

“It’s
not
because of the cake, God damn it! Can’t you ever listen to what I say?”

I’m on my way out the door. “And Frederik! Couldn’t you for once in your life stand up for me when your mother runs me down?”

My cell phone rings. I glance at the display and find myself saying, “It’s Bernard.”

Everyone grows quiet. As if that’s what we’ve been waiting for all along. As if what we thought were life-or-death struggles were just minor distractions till we heard from Bernard again.

My fingers fumble with the button.

“Hello, Bernard.”

I can hear a faint wind, and his voice in the distance. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“Yes.”

No one moves. The others are seated; I’m standing up.

“Can you talk right now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in Aumessas with Lærke.”

“You’re in
France
?”

Surprise in the others’ faces.

“Yes.”

“But we just saw you at the office.”

“After you left, I canceled all my appointments. Lærke and I have gone to Aumessas for four days.”

“Is it your anniversary?”

“No.”

He sounds so serious, so different from how he’s sounded to me before. I have the sense that something terrible’s happened.

“Is it Lærke?”

Frederik and my in-laws are still staring at me. But they’re far away now. An old faded photo I quickly flip past in the pile.

Again his grave voice.

“It’s not going so well down here. Not as well as it usually does … It made a deep impression on me, seeing you again at our meeting.”

I don’t look at the family for long. I’ve got to get out of here. I run out into the hallway; I’ll have to come up with some story for them later. But that isn’t far enough away. I run out to the driveway. And then farther, out onto the street.

They shouldn’t be able to see me anymore from the house; I check. What should I tell them when I return? I’ll find something—and otherwise screw it.

“What’s going on there?” Bernard asks. “Should I not have called?”

“Yes. Yes. You should have called. Nothing’s going on. I went outside.”

We fall silent.

“But I was just so … at the meeting,” I say. “After all, we didn’t
do
anything.”

“You were good. You’re trying! We’re both trying. That’s something we have in common. And you seemed to me lovelier than ever.”

There are a thousand things I ought to say. I can find no words.

Again he says, “Was it wrong of me to call?”

“Not at all.” I’m still tongue-tied. All I can manage is “Bernard.” It’s a new way for me to say his name. “Bernard.” I’m getting used to saying it like this. From now on, I’ll say it this way often. “Where are you?”

“In Aumessas.”

“Yes, but I mean where? What are you looking at right now?”

“I’ve walked a long way from our house. An hour. It’s the first time down here that I’ve needed to be alone. Up a wooded path on the mountainside. There are chestnut and mulberry trees here, and I’m looking out across a valley.”

On Thorkild and Vibeke’s street, the steel half-roof over the bus stop has something of the color of the sidewalk pavement, of the sky.

“I’m looking at a bus stop three houses down the street from my in-laws,” I say. “It looks like rain.”

We laugh. Something within me is shaking free. The little laugh at almost nothing feels so deep and right. It’s falling into place. It’s all falling into place.

“Thank you for calling, Bernard. I’m really glad you called. Really, really glad.”

In the 60 pages that follow, you will find articles addressing one of the most highly debated questions in metaphysics (which is itself one of the most controversial disciplines in 2,000 years of Western philosophy).

Almost every major philosopher has expressed an opinion about how much we decide our own actions ourselves. If everything is predetermined by an almighty God or by the laws of nature, how then can the individual be free? Regardless of whether we conceive of our actions as being immutably arranged by a god, by our genes and upbringing, or by the fundamental physical laws governing the atoms we are comprised of, the essential nature of the question remains unaltered.

Yet the opposition between everything being predetermined and man being master of his own actions is not so simple. Many philosophers do not consider the two ideas to be in conflict at all.

In 1814, the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a vast intelligence that knew every natural law as well as the precise location of every constituent of the universe, and he wrote that such an intelligence would be able to calculate every event at every juncture in time, past and future.

This thought experiment has been known ever since as Laplace’s demon, and it encapsulates the problem of free will. For someone to act freely, most people would agree that two conditions must be fulfilled:

1. The person must have the possibility of acting differently.

2. The person himself must choose how to act—he cannot merely be the last link in a chain of events that has already been set in motion and that can only occur in one way.

Even if an individual attempts to wrest himself free from his upbringing and the immediate expression of his genes, the impulse to do so must itself come from somewhere. Nothing arises from nothing, for that would violate the very nature of our universe. Every single choice he makes is made in an interaction among countless influences of varying strength—and nothing more. He is in no sense master of the struggle among these influences, so how can one say that he acts freely? Or that it would be just to punish or reward him for what he chooses to do?

Most people have an intuitive sense that they act freely and that others do
so too. Yet if these same people seriously consider Laplace’s demon and the way the universe is constructed, they normally conclude that it is impossible for us to possess free will. And that it may very well be possible that what we so convincingly experience as our own freedom is in reality an illusion.

The philosophers on the following pages are some of the most influential in the modern debate on the subject, and they represent a broad spectrum of opinions. The following diagram provides an overview of their positions.

The individual possesses free will

Everything is predetermined
(Determinism)

Compatibilism
, or
Soft Determinism
Free will can exist in a deterministic universe

(Daniel Dennett)
(Harry Frankfurt)