“Here we are.” Søren squeezed my arm. I had completely lost track of the route. He opened a glass door and we climbed a narrow flight of stairs to a white landing. At the top were two white doors. Søren went to the one marked ø.
“Apartment zero?”
“Oh, the eu,” He made a little guttural sound. “Perhaps a joke from my uncle.”
A joke? “How does the mailman know where to bring letters?” The panicky feeling I had been smoothing away rose in tense vibration. I’ll need to send letters, I thought. I’ll have to. As if ever in my life I had sent a letter.
“Letters are addressed to the side of the landing.”
“As in left or right?”
“Something like that.” Søren flipped through his ring for an ornate gold key with smooth rolling teeth and a perfectly circular top. The key to apartment ø.
He led me into a room with pale wood floors and a high white ceiling. Two tall windows showed the gray street in which we had so recently stood. A pale blue couch wedged beneath the window in the far corner faced a small television on a dark wood stand. I trailed him into the small hallway that connected the front room to two more—on the left a narrow blue-tiled kitchen, on the right a tiny brown bathroom. There was a toilet and a sink, but no tub or shower stall.
“Is there another bathroom? Where’s the shower?”
Søren pulled a white hose down from a mount on the wall that faced the door and stood between the toilet and the sink. “Hold it over your head, get wet. Turn it off, wash. Turn it on again to rinse.”
“Doesn’t the toilet get wet?”
“Obviously.”
“And you turn it on and off to wash? Instead of just leaving it on like a normal shower?”
“Instead of just leaving it on as in an American shower,” he corrected. “Yes.”
He turned off the light and left the room. In the dark I squinted up at the white hose, imagining myself with perpetually greasy hair.
I found Søren in the bedroom, a white box with a low bed made with two gray duvets and two small pillows. A thin rectangular window stretched across the hall behind the bed, directly above the headboard. That was it. Nothing on the walls. The only other furniture in the room was a small wood dresser and a freestanding closet with a semitransparent front made of a material I could mark with my thumbnail. I had seen the closet before, in the apartment of one of Sylvie’s older friends in the city.
“What do you think?” Søren’s neck was flushed from the effort of hauling the bags, a vein showing on his forehead. He had changed into a shirt I hadn’t seen before, a dark blue button-down with a wide collar.
I went to him and kissed him. He stroked my neck with his thumb and pushed his tongue into my mouth, taking me out of the room, out of my thoughts, out of time. I unbuttoned his shirt and pants. There, again, was his shrunken white chest, the pale pink nipples like coins. The light fluff of ash hair leading down into his white briefs.
I thought of Hunter’s boxers, blue-and-purple plaid. My happiness then, a tiny flinty thing, multiplied now, stronger.
I felt Søren’s erection. He was not a little boy. His heart beat right there, under my hand. I kept my hand against the head as I trailed kisses across his cheek to his ear. Søren reached into my bra and twisted my left nipple hard. My vision hazed over. I felt like I might cry. My chest bloomed magenta, fluid and hot. The pain; another kiss.
With him behind me it was almost like being alone. My arms and legs moved in my periphery. I couldn’t see his face, could only hear his voice mispronouncing my name. He hooked an arm over my belly and walked me over my edge with his fingers. I fell into the thick meatiness of my orgasm, viscera, tissue. When it was his turn, Søren pushed me onto my stomach, pulled out, and came on my back. Warmth oozed down the sides of my torso, a shock. He leaped from the bed and returned with damp toilet paper.
“Oh, Roxana.” He wiped me off. “Was it too much?” I felt as if I had slept for hours, but it was still light outside. Søren snored under his gray duvet. I slipped out of bed and walked naked to the living room, a ghost. The translucent curtains drawn over the front window glowed blue and silver. Across the street, the closed faces of buildings. I parted the cloth, pressed my body to the deliciously warm glass, and shut my eyes. How fine to be a body against a smooth plane.
When I opened them again, a man stood watching me in the street below. Only one floor up, I could see him as clearly as if we stood in the same room. He was tall, with curly black hair and a beard that grew down against his neck, around which a green bandanna was tied. In his right hand he carried a red cap. The legs of his khaki coveralls were dirty with muck, the metal toes of his boots scuffed. His eyes were gray, his thoughtful expression some kind of smile.
Step away from the window, I thought, but I did not. I stared back until the man dropped his gaze and walked away.
I put on my sweatpants and Søren’s discarded T-shirt to unpack while he slept. There were no hangers in the closet, so I folded my clothes into the top two drawers of the dresser. I stacked my books on an edge of the coffee table between the two couches, set my toiletries on the shelf in the bathroom, joined our toothbrushes in a glass on the edge of the sink, and arranged my notebook and pens on the table in the kitchen. I found the large heart-shaped rock Sylvie had given me at the bottom of my backpack and left it there.
Søren’s uncle had left a quart of milk, a package of spreadable butter, and some cucumbers and tomatoes in the fridge. I took the tomatoes out and put them on the counter. In the cabinet above the counter were a few cans of sardines and a bag of dried yellow beans. A dark loaf of rye bread sat inside the wooden breadbox next to the sink. I was hungry, but not for any of these things. I thought about trying to make a meal of them, but I had no idea how. Besides, Søren would probably want to go out to eat when he woke up. Would the bars in Farsø would be like the ones he had taken me to in Copenhagen? I liked being a person who went out to bars.
I banged around the kitchen, closing cabinets and rearranging mugs, hoping Søren would rouse. When no sound came from the bedroom, I drew a tall glass of water from the porcelain sink and went into the front room. I watched out the window, wondering if the bearded man would return. The idea both frightened and excited me.
He did not. I turned on the TV.
There were only four channels. The first was a scrolling line of text on a black background. The next was a news broadcast narrated by two men whose Danish sounded like anxious muttering to me. They cut to a diagram of complicated farm equipment and then to a clip of an old lady talking in front of a giant tire. The third channel aired a Danish sitcom. A man and woman in big sweaters had a comical fight, clinked beer bottles, and made up, earning appreciative canned laughter.
The last channel was showing an American movie with Danish subtitles, a science fiction epic about a family that travels to a faraway planet. Scientist parents and their three children, a seventeen-year-old daughter and fourteen-year-old boy and girl twins, all born on the spaceship. The parents homeschool—spaceshipschool—them and the twins are science geniuses. The elder girl plays musical instruments, paints, writes poetry, and dances for several hours a day, in a studio that transforms to meet her needs.
The sixth member of their family is an android designed by the parents. He is smart, funny, and very handsome. Exactly like a person in every way, except that he doesn’t have any fingernails or toenails. He does everything the family cannot. He repairs the ship’s exterior, anchored to the hull by his magnetized feet. He navigates the ship by speaking to the system in its special language. While the family sleeps, he tends the hydroponic farm. He is programmed to care deeply about the family. He knows this and in an early scene gives a speech about understanding that the sensations he feels are close to but not the same thing as love.
Unlike the rest of her family, the elder daughter has always struggled with her relationship with the artificial man. She finds his childlike curiosity creepy and turns awa
y from the sight of his nail-less hands and feet. The android doesn’t have a name. Everyone just calls him the android.
As their ship nears their destination, the twins develop special powers. The girl becomes telekinetic, the boy telepathic. Their parents disappear into the laboratory with the twins to test their powers. Left alone, the elder girl and the android discover a shared love of cinema and then of each other. But can it truly be love when the android is not a real person? In a moving scene, the android convinces her of the authenticity of his ardor.
“I feel as if I have been rebuilt with all-new parts,” he tells her as they lie together on her bed, holding hands. “Some so tender and precious it is as if they have come from your body, my love. When I feel this way, I think that I am no more artificial than any lover in the long span of human history.”
Immediately after this confession, they kiss. The elder daughter is happy. The android says that he is too. She falls asleep in his arms, and his body glows blue, lighting her face.
The next morning, the android loses control of the ship and it crashes onto a nearby planet. In the moments before impact, the android covers the elder daughter with his body, protecting them both. The twins’ powers do not save them. Everyone dies except for the elder girl and the android. She watches him pull the bodies from the wreckage.
“I am very sad, a sensation I have never experienced before,” he says, holding her as she cries. “I want to power down and never reboot, and I would, if not for you.”
The planet is heavily forested and seemingly uninhabited. The android holds his mouth on the girl’s in a long kiss, filtering the air for her until he determines that the atmosphere can sustain human respiration. They bury the family and leave the wreckage in search of help, crossing dense woods full of strange friendly animals but no people. The girl is inconsolable. The android gathers food and builds a shelter for her every night. He makes her smile by playing old films on the screen in his chest.
Sylvie and I had gone to see the movie the previous October. We each had a crush on the actor who played the android, a Swiss man with a perfect face and ropy limbs. The actress who played the elder daughter had never been in a movie before. They plucked her from some town in North Dakota for her big dark eyes and open face. This was the kind of thing, Sylvie and I agreed, that was always happening to other people, never to us.
I loved the movie from the first scene, but Sylvie hated it. She ticked off the film’s flaws on her fingers as we walked into the long twilight, wet fall leaves squeaking underneath our feet. It was a waste of the actor’s talent, the special effects were ridiculous and stupid, the plot made no sense, she complained. “At least he looked super hot,” Sylvie said. “He has Egon Schiele hands. Did you notice that?”
I nodded, but I had no idea what she was talking about.
“How are you supposed to feel sorry for people in a spaceship? And why did they introduce the kids with the special abilities if they were just going to kill them off?”
Sylvie loved to fight and hated to lose. Given an opportunity, she was happy to argue me into exhaustion and claim victory by default. I wanted to protect the movie, so I kept my thoughts to myself, voicing minor critiques I didn’t actually have: the actress who played the scientist mom was annoying; the spaceship was ugly.
“God, what a bore,” Sylvie said as we got into her car.
Tinted orange by the streetlights, the raindrops on the windshield slid one by one into the wipers’ trough. There was no rule that we had to love the same things.
“What are you watching?”
I jumped. Søren stood behind the couch. How had I not heard him come into the room? On the TV was one of the twins’ experiments. The boy has read the girl’s mind without permission. She traps him naked in a net and watches him struggle.
I picked up the remote and turned off the television. “Nothing.”
Søren rubbed his face, yawning. “You must be hungry. And bored.” He bent over the couch and gave me an upside-down kiss. “Already I have been a bad host.”
Three days removed from home and everything felt like make-believe. I imagined the face of the bearded man in the street. He did not leer or gape. He saw me.
“Don’t be silly,” I told Søren. “I haven’t been bored at all.”
For dinner Søren made open-faced sardine, tomato, and cucumber sandwiches on rye bread. He produced a bottle of red wine and poured it into two short tumblers. We ate at the kitchen table, the never-ending day beaming through the windows, everything new and delicious. Afterward, we brushed our teeth, washed our faces, and went into the bedroom.
Beside the bed Søren stripped to his underwear. The sun’s glow had taken on an otherworldly violet quality and in the weird light, Søren looked otherworldly too. I undressed, a new smell rising from my crotch. Søren peeled back the covers and I climbed in. He covered me with my duvet and got under his own, separating us with a margin of mattress.
“You don’t have to sleep naked just for my benefit.”
“I always sleep naked,” I lied.
“Come here.”
For a moment I thought we would have sex, and I was excited to do it twice in one day, to see what that was like. But when I scooted closer, he simply wrapped his arms around me and closed his eyes, cocooning me with his body.
I had always had trouble falling asleep. Yet I was gone that night before I could recognize my exhausted, confused happiness, so delicate it could crumble under my touch.
2
SØREN BUTTONED A GRAY SHIRT, STEPPED INTO A PAIR OF DARK GREEN PANTS, AND THREADED A BROWN LEATHER BELT THROUGH THE LOOPS, HIS HANDS BRIGHT AGAINST THE DARK FABRIC. It was a cold morning; I didn’t know what time. I watched him for a long while before I said hi.
He bent and brushed his lips against my cheek. “Good morning, little sleeping Roxana.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“The library.” I looked for a nonexistent clock. White walls, white light. “To work on my thesis. Why we came here. Remember?”
I sat up and the duvet fell away, exposing my breasts. “Will you be back soon?”
Søren covered me. “In the evening, around six. A true workday.”
He pressed his lips to my forehead, another brief, dry kiss—a peck, now I understood what that was—and left again, stopping in the doorway. “Are you upset?”
“No.”
He sighed. “You are.”
“I’m not! Of course I understand you have to go work. I just thought we were going to spend the day together.”
Søren put a hand to his head. “I am sorry, Roxana. I thought this might be a problem, and I apologize. Perhaps—”
He was going to say that I should go back to Copenhagen. “It’s fine! Just tell me how to get to a restaurant or a coffee shop or something. I’ll go exploring.”
Søren winced. “I must tell you.” He withdrew the large key ring from his pocket and dangled it from his left hand. “That will not be possible. There is only one key. And I need it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The door downstairs is open, always,” he said. “But the door to the apartment locks automatically, to secure it.” He smiled at me. “To secure you. One must have a key to enter.”
“Can you get another key made?”
“I will try. But for now there is only one.”
It was Tuesday. Søren jiggled his knee, looking pained.
“I must keep my work schedule. I am behind. I have not been productive for several weeks, with life in Copenhagen being what it is.” He put the keys back in his pocket, avoiding my eyes. “Things must be different here.”
Then why had he brought me? I wanted to ask but didn’t. “Okay,” I said, not meaning it.
Søren sighed and sat back down on the bed. “I apologize, Roxana. It has been such an event, meeting you. I have felt happy, powerful even, for the first time in so long. For the first time ever, perhaps. It seems so natural to have you here with me.
Almost as if it has always been this way.”
“I think so too!” I said automatically, my mind working. Søren was complex I thought. He had many layers. I wouldn’t immediately understand him. I had to be patient to have what I wanted, to be here with him. Everyone always said relationships were hard work.
“Unwittingly I have involved you in my oldest fantasy,” he said in a low voice, looking at me sheepishly. “You see, since I was a small boy, I have had one dream of adult life. I saw myself working, although I hardly knew what that work could be. All it meant was that I must leave home, my most beloved place. But in my fantasy I did not leave my home empty. I had within it a lover who waited for me. A special woman occupied by her own affairs. Keeping the home fires bright, as they say in your country.”
Oh. Under the quilt I relaxed my legs. Opened them.
“This dream has been with me so long I forgot it was mine alone. And now I have subjected you to it. I am sorry. I will not work today but find a way to make another key. Of course you should not be trapped here.” He nodded firmly, as if accepting the right course of action despite his own desires.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Go to work.”
He lifted an eyebrow. The light from the window made his eyes translucent.
“I like your dream,” I said. “I want to make it come true.”
It felt simple, as if I held the fantasy itself in my hand, a blind cephalopod in need of my protection. This was a kind of bravery I could manage.
“You are certain?”
Before I could answer he covered my mouth with his and kissed me until my assent was a moan. Then he rose. “You are wonderful. Wonderful!” He sped out of the room and returned with a thick older-model laptop. “This is my computer, my first one,” Søren explained, placing it beside me on the bed. “It is yours while you are here. So you can find the Internet.”
Open Me Page 9
