Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  That day, you didn’t go up. You stood a while outside number 11, staring up at the building. Your finger hovered at one of the buzzers, then you changed your mind and rushed away, passing just meters from where I stood on the other side of the road, partially hidden by a white van. Tears were streaming down your face, and when you’d crossed Bogstadveien, you headed down a less-crowded side street and broke into a run, your hair flowing behind you on the soft breeze like contrails from a jet.

  That evening, I began to understand that something had shifted in me. Something big. I could barely follow the conversation with my girlfriend at dinner; I had the sensation of sitting there trapped in my body, but my mind was far away. It was with you. All I wanted was to see you and talk to you and talk about you – it was as though anything other than you had just faded into uninteresting shades of gray. I was so worried about you and what I’d observed that afternoon. I was also feeling the first stirrings of anger, though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. It was like a dull ache in my stomach, that feeling you get when you’ve eaten something you know disagrees with you and you have no choice but to wait and see what happens. I was angry that you were more than what you showed to me, that you had a life outside of the therapy room, that you were affected by the highs and lows of life, like everybody else. It made me feel so anxious that someone who emanated such calm, such gentle compassion, was actually as intensely vulnerable as me. I’m over it now and that anger grew into an even deeper love, and a fierce need to protect you, and ultimately, to set you free.

  33

  Kristina

  I want to howl and throw the laptop across the room. My face is wet with tears. I feel tired to the bone and highly agitated; it’s as though an electric feeling of nervous energy rushes through me. I remember that day she’s referring to. Elisabeth had taken another overdose and had just been released from hospital to another bleak women’s shelter, and I was desperately trying to get in contact with the director at Villa Vinternatt, an old colleague of mine from when I did my psychology doctorate residency at a private hospital specializing in treating addicts like Elisabeth. He’d gone on to found Villa Vinternatt, and I believed its progressive arts program could be exactly the kind of thing that could bring lasting change to Elisabeth’s life, so I tried to convince him to take her on the program. Instead, it led to her death.

  I couldn’t bear to sit across from the Rickards that day in their clammy overheated apartment, eating dry cakes and sipping sherry, which they always insist upon. I couldn’t bear to listen to their reminiscing, their exaggerated stories of their only child’s remarkable achievements, their musings about all the ways she’d be changing the world, if only she’d lived. I couldn’t bear to sit there and look at the framed pictures the Rickards keep everywhere, on the walls, on the windowsills, on the kitchen counter, even on a shelf in the bathroom. Everywhere you’d look, Trine Rickards would look back at you, suspended in time, young and alive. Sometimes it feels good to be there with them, and speak of their beloved daughter as though she had only just left the room, even though she’d been dead for almost two decades. But that day I just couldn’t bear it.

  Out of the three of us, Trine, Elisabeth and me, I was the lucky one. I’ve had years of trauma therapy and built a good life for myself. My traumatized brain shielded me from reliving what happened and I have made my peace with it. Elisabeth wasn’t so lucky – though she escaped, she didn’t really; she was held hostage by trauma, and instead of facing it, Elisabeth tried to run from it through her addictions until she couldn’t outrun it anymore and it ultimately cost her her life.

  And Trine… No. I’m not going there. I never do.

  So much grief, so many dark corners, so many things lost forever. I allow myself a few thoughts that never fail to center me. The view of the royal palace gardens from our kitchen windows, and the way being in my home makes me feel so held and so safe. The feeling of my husband’s arms closing around my waist from behind, drawing me close. These are mindfulness techniques I use to select the thoughts I allow – I see my thoughts as floating past in little boats on a river. It’s up to me which ones I pick up. If there are too many dark ones, I remain patient until a good thought comes floating downstream. It doesn’t mean that dark thoughts are suppressed; it means that they are observed, acknowledged and released. I do it now, and it takes me a long while to build the image, because tonight the river runs red with blood and all the little boats are overflowing and jostling each other, snapping this way and that on a churning current. When my mind is finally calm, I keep reading.

  34

  Supernova

  There was a day I remember later that spring when I felt particularly unhinged. I already lived for Fridays by then, but it was increasingly obvious that one hour a week just wasn’t enough. I wanted more. It was midweek, and like I had started to do on a few occasions, I made my way over to Kaffebrenneriet when I took a break for lunch. I stood outside your office for a while, feeling numb with jealousy at the thought of someone else up there with you, bathing in your irresistibly soothing presence. I wished I could go up there and shove that person out of the door so I could sit across from you. Standing there, I felt tinged with bitterness – the more I knew about you, and the more I saw, the more I wanted. It’s normal to get attached to your therapist; I’ve read all about it. But I knew that what I was doing wasn’t normal. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop.

  I went across the street and bought a coffee. I sat in the window seat and waited for you to appear. I’d learned by then that you finish at four on Wednesdays. Four o’clock came and went and you didn’t appear. Maybe a client had canceled and you’d left early and I’d missed you. I could have screamed. All I wanted was a quick glimpse. But in that moment, I had an idea. I would try to find out why you kept going to Rosenborggata, it would be like uncovering a mystery. And I would go to your house.

  35

  Kristina

  My blood runs cold at Leah’s mention of my house. My home is my sanctuary, the physical container for my life, the hub of my marriage. To think that she repeatedly followed me on Fridays to Rosenborggata, observing me as I weighed up whether or not I could face going up that day, is bad enough. The idea that she could have gone to my home is unthinkable, that she might have stood in my living space among my personal photographs and possessions, drinking them in and storing them in her illicit bank of information about me.

  My head is throbbing and my stomach feels liquid and strange. I have to fight the urge to just flee from this disturbing place and Leah’s increasingly insane narrative, but the need to read just one more section is too powerful. I have to know what she’s done. And what she knows.

  36

  Supernova

  A few days before I went to your house, on a Tuesday, I waited at Kaffebrenneriet from three thirty. I’d finished my tall white Americano by the time you arrived, just after four. By then, I knew that Tuesdays were exhausting for you, with clients back-to-back from ten until four, which is why I chose that day because I knew that you always stopped for a coffee after work, drinking it in the café instead of taking it to go like you normally do. It was a beautiful, hot day in late spring and I worried that you’d choose to sit outside on one of the little wrought-iron tables; one was free, but you didn’t – you chose your usual seat at the back of the café, a barstool facing the wall. Your face was peaceful, serene, unsuspecting. I had a watertight plan I’d run through in my head over and over in the event of you suddenly glancing over to where I sat at a table just behind you. I’d simply smile shyly and say, ‘Hi’. After all, why would it be strange that we should bump into each other there, at a popular café equidistant between your office and my house? It would only seem strange if I made it seem strange.

  You didn’t look over. Not then, nor any of the other times I observed you from less than two meters away at that same coffee shop. As far as I’m aware, you only ever saw me once outside of the therapy room, an episode I�
��m sure you’ll recall. And even then, it didn’t seem like you were remotely suspicious; you acted discreet and professional, like I knew you would, most likely assuming that us both being in that particular place was just a coincidence, albeit a big one.

  You read the previous week’s A-Magasinet and ate an oat cookie alongside your coffee. On the floor, next to your barstool, stood your Louis Vuitton Neverfull bag. It was exactly identical to my own, purchased especially for that reason. Extreme, I know. But I’m sure I’m not the first client who has tried to emulate your style; after all, it’s quite the conformist Oslo West look you go for – inoffensive, quietly expensive, discreet. Like you. Tailored Prada, classic Louis, a glimpse of Hermès on your wrist.

  Back to those moments. You’d placed your bag on the floor. Who would do such a thing, some might ask, but that’s Oslo West for you. Nobody would steal your Louis Vuitton bag, because they all have their own. Lol. I pushed my identical bag close to yours very slowly. I’d endlessly rehearsed what I would do if I got caught, of course. It would be very obvious that I hadn’t taken your bag on purpose, it was an honest mistake.

  You seemed engrossed in an article, and I watched your back for a long while. You were close enough for me to be able to see the rise and fall of your chest as you breathed. And I copied even that, syncing my own breath to yours. I got up to leave, while scrolling through Instagram on my phone, no doubt appearing distracted if anyone happened to be watching. I looped my hand through the straps of the Neverfull bag, yours, not mine, of course. Then I walked out. My heart thundered in my chest and my mind raced as I stepped outside into brilliant sunshine. No one said anything. Why would they?

  I’d taken the car that day to ensure a swift getaway, and I reached it within seconds – I’d driven around the block at least ten times when I arrived to snare a parking space on Grønnegata, a stone’s throw away from Kaffebrenneriet. My hands were slick with sweat on the steering wheel. I wanted to roll down the window and sing at the top of my lungs. It suddenly made sense to me in those moments why some people choose a life of crime. I fought the urge to laugh hysterically but settled for a smug smile at my own reflection in the rearview. The bag stood on the passenger seat next to me, just like its doppelgänger had done earlier that afternoon as I drove the few hundred meters home. Nothing appeared different, and yet everything was. Before I drove off, I fished your phone out of the bag. It had several notifications – WhatsApp, Messenger and Outlook, but Face ID was activated and there was no way I could access it, as I’d anticipated. I turned it off, and then I dropped it into a storm drain on the street.

  At home, I carried the bag sagely and nonchalantly up the stairs like I had done every day for a couple of weeks. When I first bought the bag, the annoying flat-sharing girls on the ground floor had cooed over it when I bumped into them in the entrance hallway. Oh, my God, they’d chanted, it is, like, soooo cool. So, nothing new if I bumped into them again, but I didn’t. I made myself wait for my cup of tea to brew, ginger and turmeric, what I imagined you’d choose. I took the bag through to the bedroom and upended it onto the bedsheet. Your keys, bingo. Your wallet. Louis Vuitton, too. Nice. And predictable. Like you, I thought, back then.

  I slipped your driving license out and studied your photo for a long time. Like most people’s, your expression was serious and unsmiling, like you feared they wouldn’t let you drive otherwise. I took a picture of the photo with my phone; back then, I didn’t have many pictures of you and I thought it would help to look at it when I craved your closeness between sessions. It did, for a while, but I assume you are familiar with the law of diminishing returns and how, once you get what you want, you always want more? I wanted more.

  The bottom of the bag was surprisingly messy – I didn’t have you down as a messy lady and I felt a stab of annoyance at this discovery. I had to scramble around amid old receipts, loose change, parking slips and empty chewing gum wrappers to reach the last few objects underneath. But, oh boy, it was worth it. There was a small, burnished-orange leather-bound journal. I opened it, assuming it was a calendar, so imagine my delight when I realized it was much more personal than that. It was almost full – page after page of your innermost thoughts and musings. I swear, my heart somersaulted. I put it aside, knowing I’d spend my evening drinking in your words, and that I’d cherish the little book forever. I was right about that.

  I also found a Dior lip gloss, which I instantly applied to my own lips, and this, too, was an intensely satisfying moment. Several times, I ran the little wand up and down the length of my lips, thinking about how it had also touched yours. I closed my eyes and allowed myself an imagined scene in which you kissed me passionately, your lips slick with that same gloss, passing it from your lips to mine. You’d slip your tongue into my mouth and hold me close, so close I could feel the beat of your heart and the soft contour of your breasts. Back then, I often had fantasies like that, when the only language I had to describe feeling that close to someone was sexual or romantic.

  With time, my attachment to you grew from the perceived sexual to the frenzied, obsessive friendship feelings of young girls, and then it deepened into a gentle, parental kind of bond, and that’s when things really went wrong. In my mind and heart you were the very incarnation of perfection, though, like I’ve said, I knew you were human just like everyone else. But to the child inside, to little Leah who craved a stable, predictable, unconditional adult, you were perfect. So it hurt like hell to discover that you were its very opposite. That you were as hollow as Swiss cheese, vast parts of what makes a whole person, just gone. The rage I felt at first wasn’t rational, I know that. But I feel it, still, when I revisit the memory of your persona disintegrating before my very eyes. I didn’t stop loving you, in my basic childlike way. I never will. Now, I’m telling you this because I want you to know that there was a reason for my behavior, for all the questions I asked, for everything I did.

  It was selfish at first, this need for you to be like a perfect hologram, so that I could feel safe. Naturally I felt angry when the bubble burst, but then as things progressed, I realized that you need me as much as I need you and the real healing, for both of us, will happen when all the cards are on the table. Mine, and yours. I need to fix you to fix me.

  37

  Kristina

  I hold myself entirely still. There’s a throbbing pain in my temple that burns and insists itself into my very brain. I steel myself to let in one thought at a time. It was Leah that took my bag and I try to take in the enormity of that fact. The lengths she went to. The depths of betrayal of the bond between us. At the time, I had no choice but to write the missing bag off as an honest mistake, the one that was left behind on the floor next to my chair was exactly identical to my own. There was no phone in the bag, no credit cards or any other identification. There was a generic set of keys and a cheap wallet with a couple of hundred-kroner bills, and some make-up. I handed the whole thing in to the police, and assumed that the person who’d taken my bag by mistake would do the same thing. But they never did. I bought another Neverfull bag with the insurance money and eventually forgot about the whole strange incident.

  *

  To think that Leah sat that close to me, close enough to smoothly exchange the bags, and I didn’t notice her, is profoundly disturbing. But I know all too well that we don’t often see what we’re not looking for. I try to recall whether I ever felt like I was being watched or like someone was following me. I do remember the episode she referred to, and it is the only time I can remember ever seeing Leah outside of the therapy room. It was during the winter, months after the episode with the handbag, so by then, she must have been playing this game for close to a year. Eirik and I went skiing in Geilo, a rare weekend away together, and treated ourselves to a stay at Dr Holm’s Hotel. On the second evening, we were at the after-ski hotel bar, drinking champagne and reminiscing about how we used to go away like that together all the time. We vowed to do it more often. We were just about to st
art our third round of IVF and were in that phase of really believing it was going to work this time. Third time lucky, we said and gently touched our thin champagne flutes together and smiled at each other in the soft light from the fireplace. Eirik had just been elected second in command in his party and the demands of a political career at that level were beginning to show. But I remember how close I felt to my husband that evening, how I noticed the new sprinkles of gray in his hair and how it only made him more handsome.

  At one point in the evening, I realized I’d left my phone upstairs in the hotel room and went to get it – I wanted to take a few pictures of Eirik and me. I bumped into Leah in the corridor leading to our room and at first I couldn’t instantly place her – this happens to me often when I see a client out of context. Then I matched the woman in front of me with the pretty Swedish writer I see every Friday at two. I smiled at her as she came toward me and as always, allowed the client to decide whether or not to acknowledge me. Leah looked shocked to see me there, but smiled shyly and whispered, ‘Hi’, and then she disappeared around the corner. I didn’t give the episode another thought. I would have just assumed that she was there for the weekend like us; there wasn’t anything particularly strange about that – Dr Holm’s is a very popular weekend destination for the Oslo West crowds.

  Thinking back, I realize she must have followed us there. That whole weekend, she must have lurked in the shadows, watching.

  38

  Supernova