Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  And then there’s Elisabeth. The way she keeps appearing in my mind constantly, in the face of the crown princess or random women on the street, or even in my own blurred reflection in a shop window as I rush past through the seemingly endless autumn rain. There is an element of obsessive compulsion to these appearances, like my mind is running on a loop and whatever it is I’m actually looking at, it morphs into Elisabeth. I may consider discreetly seeking out some cognitive behavioral therapy from a trusted colleague to address it. But CBT isn’t going to change the fact that I will never see Elisabeth again, that I failed her, and I can’t bear it.

  I walk aimlessly through the dark, hushed apartment. I can’t remember where Eirik is or what his excuse was for missing dinner today. I stare at the closed door of the larger of the guest bedrooms, the room in which Elisabeth took her very last breath.

  I move my gaze to the second spare bedroom, the one with the lovely outlook into the interior courtyard of our building, with its barbecue spots and sweet little playground. The room we intended for our child. I push the door open and stand for a long while in the sparse, cool space and watch the wind tear at the tarpaulin covering the summer garden furniture three floors below. Raindrops rush down the windowpane and I follow a couple with my fingertips, making myself breathe deeply. It’s just a hard day, Kristina, I tell myself. This was something my first therapist taught me, back when I had mostly hard days. It doesn’t mean that tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after will be hard. It’s just one hard day.

  I shut the door behind me and wander aimlessly into the kitchen. It’s five thirty and I suppose I could pour a glass of wine, but it’s only Tuesday and I feel a little guilty if I drink during the week, especially if I’m by myself. I consider a coffee but my sleep is broken enough as it is. I settle for a glass of water but pour it out after a couple of sips. I go through to the living room and switch on all the little lamps on each of the three windowsills, casting the big room in a lovely golden glow. I sit on the sofa and pick up an interiors magazine from the pile I haven’t gotten to yet. Elle Interiors, from April. I’m about to start reading when I realize that I am absentmindedly staring at one of Elisabeth’s paintings hung in the next room behind the dining table, visible from where I’m sitting. I look around, and there are another two smaller pieces in this room. And in the spare room, the last room Elisabeth ever saw, there’s another. I get up. They have to go. How can I move forward if I’m constantly reminded of the past?

  I swiftly unhook the two smaller ones from the wall in this room and leave them face-down on the floor. Then I go through to the next room and run a finger lightly across the largest canvas, which is almost the entire length of the dining table. To think that Elisabeth guided the brush along exactly this same spot just a few months ago is impossible to believe – in a way it’s as though she hasn’t been alive for many years. It feels as though I lost her that night so many years ago, the darkest of nights, the same night parts of myself were lost, too. With time, those lost and wounded parts began to take on disturbing shadows in the depths of my mind. Though patches of my memory were erased, I could still feel, and the shadows of that night would come back with the force of earthquakes, and with as little warning, shaking me to the core. What had once been one – one girl, one life, one mind – splintered into various broken narratives and personas and coping mechanisms, and it took years to begin to reintegrate those pieces back into a kind of whole. It was intense therapy, followed by my own psychology studies and finally, a doctorate in trauma psychotherapy that brought me to a relative peace with the past. Like Jung said, I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

  Just look at me, I think to myself. How far I’ve come. I allow my thoughts to revisit the young woman I was, when I myself first came to therapy. After all these years, the image still packs an emotional punch. I went to therapy against my will at the insistence of my parents. My attitude at the time was that it was a formality before a certain death. A waiting room for the determinedly suicidal. I was skinny and traumatized, my mind and emotions dulled with drugs from my stay at Vinderen psychiatric hospital. I’d spent two months in a residential mental health care program, where the doctors were more interested in medicating away my symptoms than attempting to understand their origins. One day I was unceremoniously released to my bewildered, anxious parents, with the promise that I ‘no longer posed a risk to myself’.

  But I did. Of course I did. I didn’t have a single tool to deal with the images in my head, or the terrifying blank patches, and I’ve yet to see the pill that can erase the past.

  At their wits’ end, my parents sent me to a psychotherapist, a woman named Ingvild. I still remember the exact moment I opened the door to her office, which was in the basement of a villa in a residential, leafy street in Bekkestua, watching my mother drive off. I was twenty years old and ready to die. Inside stood Ingvild, a small, slim woman with soft blonde curls, whose presence seemed huge and radiant in the little room in spite of her slight stature. I don’t remember what she said, nor what I said in that first session and in the many that followed. But I felt seen, and as though even the very darkest parts of me could be brought out into the light without judgment. Ingvild met me with unwavering empathy and an unconditional presence I had never known before. It was her constancy that became her legacy, and one I always aim to channel into my relationships with my own clients.

  Ingvild liked to work with colors in her therapeutic approach and sometimes asked me to describe or draw the colors of my feelings and memories. Back then, when it felt as though I had neither feelings nor memories, only a terrifying void inside, I did manage to ascribe colors to the storms in my mind, and they were invariably the waxy dark greens of forests, and the vivid rich hues of blood, both fresh and dried. I used to pray for a milky white nothingness, the pure, unbroken color of death, silence and release.

  I’d tell her I wanted to die and unlike my parents, who’d burst into tears or shame me for being broken, making it all about themselves and their own fears and their expectations of me, Ingvild would listen, unafraid. She’d speak about the lack of language for pain this intense, and how people often say they want to die when what they mean is that they can’t live with such torment. I’d insist that it was death I wanted. I couldn’t bear to be around Elisabeth, either – I knew that the haunted look in her eyes was mirrored in my own. Ingvild would ask me what the alternative to death might look like, and I said that returning to my old life just wasn’t possible. I wonder whether there could be a middle ground, she’d say, not death, and not your old life. A new normal. A life worth living, now.

  I look around my home and realize that I have really made a life worth living, now. I have a home, a stable marriage, purpose. But I don’t have Elisabeth and I can’t shake off the self-hatred I feel for what I did and didn’t do for her. Her life is a closed chapter and she will never find a life worth living, now. The only solace she found was in hard drugs and in her art, and in me, and she was equally devoted to all three, though none of them could save her.

  I unhook the huge painting from its mooring on the wall but underestimate its heaviness and it comes crashing to the floor, one sharp corner landing on my bare foot. I scream, so loud I’m sure the neighbors could hear it. The cry of pain just becomes crying and as if I have no control over myself, I grab a bronze candelabra from the table and smash it full force into the painting, effortlessly ripping the canvas. Elisabeth’s hypnotic swirls of emerald green and burgundy reds burst open and are swallowed up by great, jagged rips. When there is nothing left of it except the edges that are stapled to the wooden framework, I gather up the strips and chunks of limp canvas that once held the imagery of Elisabeth’s inner world and place them into the glass-walled fireplace. I place a couple of logs on top, one wrapped in newspaper, then set it alight. I stand in the middle of the room for a long while, listening to the crackle and hiss of the flames, breathing in the chemical smell of burning paint
, practicing a deep, slow breathing pattern to calm my nerves.

  When the canvas has entirely been engulfed by the flames, I walk slowly back through the big room to the kitchen, mindful of my bruised foot, the flames still dancing on my retina. I pour a glass of wine from a carton in the fridge and drink it straight down standing at the window, looking across the rooftops at the black bones of trees in the royal park. I hear Eirik’s key in the lock. I realize I don’t know what time it is or even whether I have had dinner. It feels as though I’ve just woken up from a nightmare – those stunned, spent moments of blinking in the dark, grateful to emerge into a world more peaceful than the one you just left behind. I move quickly now, and step into my husband’s arms as he walks through the door and he lets out a little sound of surprise at this onslaught of affection, but he holds me tight and smooths down my hair at the back of my skull firmly and soothingly, the way you’d stroke a beloved, sleepy dog.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asks Eirik, finally breaking our embrace and kicking his shoes off. I take his camel jacket and hang it in the cupboard, brushing off a few stray droplets of rain. My husband’s face is creased and pale in the low light of the hallway, and he rubs at his eyes and massages his temples.

  ‘I burned Elisabeth’s painting,’ I say. ‘The one in the dining room.’

  Eirik stares at me. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to look at it for another moment.’

  ‘But… I thought you loved that painting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps it would have been a good idea to donate it to her mother? Or to Villa Vinternatt?’

  ‘It was its very existence I couldn’t bear. I wanted it gone. It fucked with my head.’

  Eirik looks at me carefully, his eyebrows knitting together over the bridge of his nose. ‘Kristina. This sounds a little odd.’

  ‘I know. I just thought you should know. There’s some, uh, debris in the dining room. I’ll clear it up.’

  ‘Look. I know things are still quite raw. And that work is stressful. You’ve got quite a few new clients at the moment, right? But right now, up until the end of November, we just have to keep it together. I need you to keep it together. This is the most important time of our lives. We can’t let anything get in the way of this. Think about how hard we’ve worked, how much we’ve both sacrificed to get here. Less than a month to go. You have to let go, Kristina. Let it go. You did everything you could possibly have done, you—’

  ‘No. I… I see her everywhere, it’s like she’s haunting me, she’s even in my own goddamn reflection in the mirror, and it’s all my fault—’

  ‘Don’t you ever say that. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault.’ Eirik takes both of my hands in his and kisses the top of each tightly clenched fist. He pulls me close to him and raises my chin with his fingertips so I’m forced to look him in the eyes.

  ‘This is not the time for allowing irrational behavior or bad thoughts. I can’t afford you falling to pieces now, Kristina. This is the time for focus and graft and control. Okay?’

  I nod, but I know more about bad thoughts and the shadowy recesses of the mind than my husband ever will. I nod again, more firmly, and take a deep breath through my nostrils. This is a time for control. I am not what happened to me, but what I choose to become.

  10

  Leah, two weeks before

  It’s the doorbell that wakes her. It’s been one of those rare nights when she just fell asleep, without tears, without rumination, without fear. Her hand instinctively goes to the rounded bump on her lower stomach, as if to reassure herself this pregnancy wasn’t just a dream.

  She sits up in bed, drawing the cool air of the bedroom deeply into her lungs. It is completely dark and she can’t even make out the outline of the door leading to the living room. Outside, the wind rattles down the street, carrying little bits of trash and tearing the last leaves from the trees. She checks her phone, but there are no new messages. She messaged him earlier in the evening, begging. Please come, she said. Please, please, please. I need you. He didn’t respond, as usual. But he’s here now, downstairs, on the street, ringing her doorbell.

  The doorbell rings again, filling the hushed apartment with its shrill sound, and Leah moves swiftly from the bed, through the living room, to the door.

  11

  Kristina, three days later

  It’s Friday, and I’m feeling much better than earlier in the week. I’ve mentally reclaimed the driver’s seat and will not allow myself to become overwhelmed or terrorized by irrational thoughts. I’ve committed to taking care of myself this week and feel refreshed. I haven’t drunk anything since Tuesday, I’ve caught up on all my client notes, and Eirik and I have managed a couple of simple but cozy dinners together. All the stress around Elisabeth was triggered by the strange episode with Leah Iverson, but now I’m more aware of it, I’m able to place them into the compartments where they belong in my mind. Elisabeth: tragic, but gone. Eirik is absolutely right, I have to let it go now. And I did what I could. Then there is Leah – a client for whom I hold much hope, and I need to remain committed and focused on supporting her, not letting her behavior or circumstances trigger my own personal reactions.

  Arriving at the office, I’m looking forward to the day ahead. I only have three clients today as one called in sick. A fairly new client named Marisa, who struggles with debilitating anxiety and apologizes constantly for absolutely everything, at eleven thirty. Then Leah at two, followed by Siri Engevik, who feels trapped in a bad marriage, but is very obviously herself a wounded woman with a difficult character.

  It isn’t difficult to access feelings of empathy for Marisa and I listen intently as she painstakingly recounts how she feels like her family take her for granted and don’t care about her frazzled nerves. They don’t even ask why my hands are bleeding from the constant handwashing, or why I count under my breath or why I sometimes burst into tears when I’m cleaning.

  When she leaves, I pop down to the coffee shop for a sandwich and a freshly squeezed orange juice, like I sometimes do on a Friday as I have a big gap between Marisa and Leah. When I think about the fact that in just over an hour, Leah will be sitting across from me again, I feel the flutter of trepidation in my gut. Was last week just a dramatic lapse in her emotional well-being, or will she turn up even more unhinged today? I know I will look for signs of pregnancy in her, but I’ve steeled myself now, and done my work – I know that Leah being pregnant doesn’t mean I won’t also get pregnant. I just needed to reason with myself. I wonder whether she will tell me or simply never mention it and get rid of the baby. I swallow hard at the thought of Leah’s baby, snug and tiny inside the shell of her womb, becoming.

  Back in the office I relight the votive candles on the windowsill, still liquid from Marisa’s session, and replenish the tea supply. I place each tea bag equidistant from the next on the tray, organized by color. It’s incredible how soothing these tiny details can be, and performing them makes me feel like I’m realigning my internal order. Leah usually chooses green tea with lemon, and leaves the teabag in the mug until she’s finished, the swollen bag nudging at the tip of her nose for the last few sips. She drinks slowly, unlike some clients who gulp it down and then fuss about with the kettle on the table between us, trying to make another while keeping our conversation going over the screech of the gathering steam.

  I make a concerted effort to be very still and very deliberate with my clients. Predictability and transparency is what I try to convey. They will always find the same teas, arranged in precisely the same way. They will always see me drinking plain water, nothing else. I also try to wear minor variations of the same outfits and keep my hair in the same style, swept back in a high ponytail with lightly curled ends. Pretty but professional. I’m the mirror, not the person looking into it, which is where focus needs to lie.

  I scroll on my phone for a while, counting down to two o’clock. Instagram offers nothing new, only the usual wistful autu
mnal posts of children playing in leaves and choosing pumpkins to carve, and typical Norwegian gleeful couple selfies amid stark, rain-lashed mountains. VG and Dagbladet’s headlines are the usual underwhelming small, peaceful nation ones: Man Fled Bear in Trøndelag, Real Estate Up 5 % in Oslo, The Five Things You MUST Do to Prepare Your Cabin for Winter.

  I go to the bathroom and reapply my mascara and undereye concealer, and return to the office to pour some fresh water into my glass before Leah arrives. Except she doesn’t. The clock strikes 2 p.m., then five past, ten past… I remember last week and how she arrived late, but the minutes tick by and still she doesn’t arrive. At two fifteen I call her, but her phone goes straight to voicemail. I try again with the same result. I also send her a text message asking her to please get in touch. Could it be that Leah has ghosted me? It has happened before, that a client has suddenly terminated a course of ongoing psychotherapy for whatever reason, and not bothered to tell me until weeks later, perhaps feeling guilty or awkward about explaining why. I wouldn’t have thought it of Leah – she has always been vocal about the profound effect therapy has had on her life. That said, she has been showing more resistance in recent months and has more aggressively pursued my personal opinion and advice than previously. It could be that she has chosen to go elsewhere if she hasn’t felt that she is getting what she needs from my methods. I need to know what your personal feelings are about this, I recall her saying to me relatively recently, referring to some situation with whomever she was dating, and I deflected by saying that I found it interesting that she places more weight on my opinion than on how she actually feels about the situation. Could she have grown frustrated with my methods and decided to just stop our sessions? But last week, she insisted she needed to speak to me about something outside this space even though she knows that isn’t possible.