The Helios Disaster

by Linda Bostrom Knausgaard

  ‘I’ll show you where you’re going to stay. In room four; you’ll share a room with Sara. She’s just a little older than you and she’s quite calm, so it should work out nicely.’

  Artan led me into a room with pale-blue walls, and there were two beds there and one half of the room was bare, with just the bed and the nightstand and an empty wardrobe and the other half was sort of decked out with decorations: a moose and a stag, whose antlers had to hold this Sara’s rings and jewellery, stood on the windowsill; there were drawings of a tree and a face with red cheeks and a blue mouth on the wall, and on the nightstand were piles of magazines.

  I had to stay here? With someone else?

  ‘No,’ I screamed. ‘No. No.’

  I screamed and threw myself to the floor, beating my head against the floor until Artan grabbed me and held me, simultaneously backing up and pressing the alarm button. Suddenly the room was full of staff and I was given an injection and it was like being hit in the back of the head, or kicked is what I was, again and again.

  I woke up because I couldn’t move. I was strapped down and Urban was there.

  ‘Anna,’ he said. ‘You have to believe. You mustn’t do anything else.’

  Artan was sitting in the room too. Why did the thought come to me that he looked tired?

  ‘I brought chocolate and grapes,’ said Urban. ‘I want you to eat them and do as they say, do you hear me? Do it for my sake, if you can’t do it for your own. I’m here, and I won’t leave you. But you can’t live at home right now. You’re a danger to yourself.’

  A danger to myself? Did Urban know something about the thread I was planning to break off? You never knew with Urban. I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but listen to what he was saying. There was something inside me that calmed down immediately and it wasn’t like when they took away the giant’s foot with the medicine; instead it was as if I found my footing.

  Bengt, the senior physician, came into the room. It was clear that he was in a hurry, but he pretended that he wasn’t. He sat down on a chair beside me.

  ‘Anna, we can’t have things this way. We don’t want to restrain you, and you won’t do anything like that again. You won’t hurt yourself, you and I are going to agree to that right now. Right? Let each day follow the next, and don’t worry about what you should do. You’ll get better. We know that. You have to trust that. A period of depression always passes.’

  A period of depression? Was that what I had?

  ‘Anna, I’m going to take off the straps now, and then you’re going to follow Artan and Urban to your room and you’ll stay in there until it’s time to eat.’

  I felt Artan loosening the straps, first the ones across my arms, and then the ones across my hips and ankles. Urban helped me get up. I followed him into the room with the stag and the moose and I sat down on the bed.

  Urban opened the box of chocolates and removed the gold paper from a Belgian praline and moved it toward my mouth. I opened my mouth and he placed the piece of chocolate on my tongue. I chewed it and felt the filling run down my throat with the chocolate. Together we ate one piece of chocolate after another. We didn’t say anything to each other. We just chewed, swallowed, and ate, until the box was empty.

  I lay in my bed, looking at the ceiling. A water stain unfolded like a flower and my thoughts were nowhere, because I had taken the medicine. Sara was lying in the other bed, paging through magazines, but I thought, If I look at the water stain it will probably work. It was snowing outside; I could see that, even though the windows were made of plastic so they couldn’t be broken. Big, dry snowflakes fell from the sky and I didn’t think about my skis or the family that would soon be eating dinner together, because I couldn’t be there anymore. I hardly remembered how they moved around there, in that house. Birgitta and Sven and Ulf were so distant, as if they belonged to another life. Only Urban could move between the worlds. I pictured him before me. How he would row out to the island I imagined the hospital to be on. Maybe he had several lives, I thought, and I pictured the ferryman as he took Urban’s hand to help him into the boat. Maybe Urban came here with death itself. Maybe he paid with his life, a little at a time, to come here. I had to ask him not to come, I thought, turning toward the wall. The textured wallpaper made the wall feel crumby, and I was blind and read it with my fingertips:

  You shall die a death.

  You shall die a quiet death.

  You shall die a death.

  ‘You’re the girl who doesn’t talk.’ The voice tore a hole in the room. It was Sara with the stag antlers, and she was talking to me. ‘Is there something wrong with your voice?’

  I put my head under my pillow to keep her out. I can’t be here. That was all I knew, but there was nothing in front of me, no path to walk on. The path ended on the island. It was the end of the line, and here I was. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the colours move from yellow to orange and then red behind my eyelids. I fell down through a hatch and lay in the well along with the ancient well serpent. We would meet each other and look each other in the eye. I treaded water and waited for the slippery body, like a single muscle, which would come out of the deep in the well, and it would be decided who would live and who would die. Because I knew who I was. The doctor had asked and I hadn’t been able to pronounce the name in that room with the plastic flowers, green with red berries, the vinyl chairs with the little table between them, so that you would know who was sitting where, who was healthy and who was crazy. Crazy? Was that what I was? No. No. Not like that. Not in that way. Was I sad, the doctor had asked. He noticed the flash at the word ‘sad’ because right away he leaned forward and asked what I was sad about.

  I didn’t answer. He didn’t get anything out of me as we sat in his room with the typewriter and the little icon that hung on the wall. Was the senior physician a believer? Did he too believe in God’s love like the congregation I couldn’t think about? He had small, red, piggish eyes, I thought, and chapped skin. Dandruff rained onto his lapels, settling there like a white powder.

  He leaned back and said, ‘I know you can do it. You can speak and you will come to speak. Right now there is darkness around you, and it’s as if you’re living with your eyes closed, but you must let us carry the hope. We’ll meet again in a week.’

  In a week. Was I going to be here for an entire week, or even longer? Was this the second or third day? It felt like a whole life.

  There, I felt the slippery body of the well serpent. So now we were going to meet. The serpent wound itself around me, pulling me down, and the serpent’s eyes were green and we sank down to the bottom of the well, which was covered in brush and seaweed. We looked each other in the eye and it was like looking in a mirror. I saw myself at the instant I was born, I saw who I was without everything that had been placed upon me later, I saw my naked life; but it wasn’t my father’s eyes I was reflected in, it was the serpent’s, and this was my last moment, the serpent told me, this is what death looks like, as quiet as a caress, as frank as a birth. I am going to kill you now, said the serpent, and I gave my consent. Kill me. Kill me.

  Perhaps it was because I wanted it so much that the well serpent disappeared. Suddenly he was gone and I was lying in bed again, staring at the wall and listening to Sara.

  ‘I’m going home soon. My mom misses me so much. It’s driving her completely nuts and I feel well. The doctor says I’m stable. I know he and I aren’t together anymore. I had trouble letting it go, you see. I like didn’t accept that it was over. I had pictures of him on the wall here before, but I took them down with Micke. He helped me. Oh, Micke is in charge of my treatment. He sends me postcards sometimes when he’s travelling. He’s so great, Micke. Who’s in charge of your treatment? Artan, right? He’s really far too cute to work in a ward like this. It’s kind of provocative. Don’t you think?’

  I stared at the water stain on the ceiling and tried to keep her out. The
stag girl with the antlers and rings. Her blond hair and snub-nose. Her slippers that looked like bunnies. Artan wasn’t there; you could sense it in the whole ward, whether he was there or not. If Artan had been there, he would have rolled in a screen so no one could see me.

  I was still alive. Breathing in and out. It surprised me that life made room for itself there, far down in the darkness. That my heart continued to beat even though there was no room for it because the darkness surrounded it and held it in cupped hands. Hands which could close around its final beat at any moment. The darkness could do anything. So did that mean that there was a gleam of light somewhere inside me? Was it Urban? I would ask him to stop coming. I had to remember to tell him today. That it had to stop. He would understand. He would release me to the darkness if I asked him to. He would do what no one else could do.

  There was a knock at the door and Sara’s mom stepped in, along with a nurse.

  The mom was blonde like Sara, and she was wearing makeup. Her mouth was a red sea. She went over to Sara and embraced her. The nurse, whose name was Susanne, said that they would go to the therapy room and leave Anna alone. Sara looked at me triumphantly, as if to say that she had a visitor and she was loved and then they walked out of the room as a group and left me alone.

  Alone. I was alone and at the word alone there was a twinge of pain; it plucked a string deep inside and I felt the pain before the tears came. The tears went with the hope, I knew, and I tried to beat them back again, the tears, back to where it was quiet inside me. I didn’t want anything to do with tears.

  There were a few grapes left on the nightstand, and I peeled one until only the flesh was left; then I carefully put it in my mouth and pressed it against my palate with my tongue so the grape fell apart in my mouth. I could do that. I could eat these grapes, although I wouldn’t think about Urban, who had bought them and brought them with him. I would just eat one after the other. I peeled the grapes and placed their weary skins on the nightstand in a little pile and ate and ate. I ate the grapes until Sara came back. It was clear she’d been crying because she had black stripes under her eyes and her whole face was bloated. Her mom was nowhere in sight, but Susanne was with her and she sat down on the bed beside Sara and hugged her for a while.

  Why did I feel sorry for Sara? Why had she found her way into me? I didn’t want her there. Her homesickness and lovesick revelation.

  Was it the light in me that embraced Sara?

  I asked Susanne for a screen. Could I have one? ‘Yes, maybe,’ Susanne answered. ‘I’ll bring it up on rounds.’

  *

  There was breaded fish for dinner. Fish with potatoes and peas. I was still looking down at my plate and keeping the others out. The fish, with its greasy breading, tasted like almonds and butter. I mashed the potatoes in butter like I usually did at home. At home. Had I ever had a home? Wasn’t I really just living in someone else’s home? I wasn’t like them, was I? We weren’t like one another.

  This was a thought I avoided more than all other thoughts. It was a thought I wasn’t ready for, and I buried it as deeply as I could inside me, deep in the darkness. The question of my father.

  Had he battled with the well serpent and taken the boat out to the island? Even though I knew that there was a road all the way here and that you just had to dump your prey in the waiting room like a piece of dead meat. A moose you had shot. I didn’t ask myself that question. I mashed my peas and mixed them with the potatoes, chewed and swallowed. If I didn’t eat I had to lie in bed with an IV, and this was still better than that. Susanne handed out knäckebröd sandwiches too. They crumbled between my teeth and were hard to swallow, but I washed them down with water. Swallowed and swallowed.

  After dinner there was TV in the common room, or games down the hall, but I went straight to my room and lay on my bed. I was alone because Sara always watched TV. The sheets had stripes in different shades of blue, light and dark blue, and the pillowcase was snow-white and smelled good, like detergent. I stared at the rough wall and suddenly I missed my map of the Mediterranean.

  My longing was like a sudden wave that slammed over me and I whirled around in its eddies under the surface. Torn here and there until I found the ground with my feet and I was walking on the bottom, I was running, until the next came. Yet another door to close. I closed it and shut my eyes. I didn’t see anything behind my eyelids; it was all black and that’s the way I wanted it. Being with the darkness that didn’t say anything, didn’t rip and tear, just let me sink, all the way to where the silence was like a grey sea, without waves, with a surface shiny like metal. I was bathing in that sea when there was another knock at the door.

  It was Artan, who walked into the room without asking permission. He came in and sat on the bed.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re going to take a walk, you and I. We’ll walk around the hospital park. I’ve asked Urban to bring clothes. It’s cold out now,’ said Artan.

  I looked at Artan so he would understand that I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I battled the well serpent and read the writing on the wall. I would die, just because I wanted to so much.

  ‘It will just be you and me,’ said Artan. ‘It will be good. Do you want your evening snack in here?’

  He brought a tray with tea and a cheese sandwich and I ate as he sat beside me on the bed.

  ‘My dad died last night,’ he said. ‘We were all there, and he got to see his newborn granddaughter. We put her on his chest and he held her. A few minutes later he was dead.’

  What did he say? His dad had died? Left life and the others behind him in the room. Where had he gone? Had he stayed with them in the room and watched them close his eyes and place his hands together, or was he just gone? What had happened to Artan? His own father. Dead. He had taken the step across to the dead, where nothing existed, or was there something waiting for him there? Why was Artan here with me and not with his family? I tried to say something, pulling the strings that gathered my words, straightening out and separating.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I finally whispered, but he heard me and he looked at me calmly and said thanks, and the tears I didn’t want anything to do with came and they ran down my face; they streamed out because of this death with Artan and his wife and the little baby, who knew nothing of it of course, but who lay there on the dying man’s chest as he drew his last breath and how his heart stopped like the pendulum of a clock, from one beat to another. Existing and not existing and Artan’s face; he was crying too. The tears came and we cried together until our tears were gone and our breathing had calmed.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

  ‘I need the money. Plus, I want to work.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes. I’m going to go now,’ said Artan. ‘Soon night will come and then it will be morning and then we’ll go out for a walk.’

  Artan left. I lay in the darkness, feeling the emptiness he had left behind. He had left emptiness and death behind him. I realized that everything I’d believed about death before was wrong. That death wasn’t something you could ask for. It came to you, if you didn’t seek it out yourself and throw yourself off a cliff or take too many pills. Then it would be there and shut off your heart the way you shut off the lights.

  Artan’s father was dead and I was alive. Artan was alive, and Urban. My father was alive. I counted the living and gathered them within me and the light that broke through embraced all the life that I had within me, even though I didn’t want it to. There’s not much you can do with the light and the darkness. They’re there and they take up the space they’re allowed. It’s impossible to control the light and the darkness. Wasn’t it strange that Artan’s father’s death spread light over me? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

  I thought for a long time about how Artan was fatherless now. How he had had a father and now he didn’t anymore. I couldn’t understand it. Was it
because I had a father myself and couldn’t imagine a life without him, even though I had only seen him at my birth?

  Night fell, and the medicine and IVs and Artan’s father disappeared and I sank through my bed and anchored myself there. I lay perfectly still and looked out across the dark landscape. I saw the mountains and the stars hanging there and the sea taking its deep sighs over everything. I didn’t want to move because then Urban would show up with his eyes and ask me to return to life, which I was no longer familiar with. The skis and the temperance, the congregation that scared me to my very core. I could never go back there. I’d rather listen to the sea and know nothing. I’d rather feel the wallpaper with its die a death until my breaths switched places with consciousness and sleep and I was carried out on the river, all alone, following its winding curves, and I broke up through the foaming water like a log that has torn itself loose.

  It was the middle of the night when I awoke. I was very dizzy and my whole body was heavy, but I had to pee so I reeled toward the door and opened it. An aide, who was sitting and reading a magazine, stood up right away and grabbed me before I fell down and helped me to the bathroom. I peed and reflected on the fact that I was hungry. That it was the middle of the night and I was hungry. I wiped myself and held onto the sink so I could wash my hands. The aide met me outside the door and held onto me and started for my room. I resisted. No. No. I have to say I’m hungry, that I have to eat, but I couldn’t so I ended up in bed again and the aide, I’d never seen him before, tucked me in and said good night. I could probably manage it if I crawled, I thought, and I put both feet on the floor and started toward the door on all fours and then the aide was there again with his zeal for stopping me and I whispered, ‘I’m hungry. Hungry,’ so he could hear me.

  He helped me to my feet and I leaned against him.

  ‘Once is nothing,’ he said, ‘twice is habit. You can have the evening snack. Sit down. I’ll give you a sandwich.’