You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  I remember how Niklas was then. It’s only a few years ago, but he wasn’t that big, just thirteen. He was wearing his orange hip-hop hoodie when he came to see me in the hospital. Frederik was there too. Who was I that night? Niklas’s thin fair hand in mine, his pale face. How could I have? That wasn’t me, was it? Hardly the “real” Mia. Was it because Frederik and I have always been “meant for each other,” like he said? Was it because, dream as I might about slipping free from his grasp, in truth I’m nothing without my unfaithful, criminal, brain-damaged husband?

  I struggle to concentrate on the documents in front of me, deciding as I do that tonight I’ll google the combination of water, symbol, and psychoanalysis, perhaps neurology too.

  Someone opens the front door of the apartment. Just a few months ago, I could distinguish between Frederik’s and Niklas’s footsteps, but lately they’ve started to sound the same.

  “Niklas, is that you?”

  No reply. Small steps, small heavy steps; he’s lugging something large into the apartment, my stifled unhappy son.

  “Niklas?”

  Frederik enters the living room. He’s bearing an enormous wooden box and smiling broadly. “See what I got from Sergei?”

  “What?”

  “Rabbits!”

  “Rabbits?”

  “Sergei and Tonya raise rabbits in their apartment. They breed them and sell them. They earn more than seven hundred crowns a month. And he’s given me five rabbits because we’ve gotten to be such good friends. So then we can also—”

  “You want to breed rabbits, here in the apartment?”

  “Sergei says it’s easy and fun, and I’d really like to start pulling my weight around here. Abdul and Nasira from down on the third floor, they’ve got an allotment garden and raise almost all their own vegetables. One can really save a great deal of money.”

  “I don’t want you keeping rabbits here, not under any circumstances.”

  “But Sergei and Tonya—”

  “I don’t want it! Period! End. Of. Story. There’s no need to discuss it.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “It’s not going to happen!”

  “You can’t just decide! I’m allowed to have rabbits if I want!”

  “It doesn’t help to yell.”

  “But how can you—”

  “Frederik, here I was thinking that soon you could have the car keys again, and the password to go online, maybe even a credit card. But you’re certainly not as well as I was hoping.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Frederik.”

  “Everyone else is raising something! Why can’t I? We don’t have any money!”

  I let myself fall against the back of my chair and shut my eyes. “I’m just going to have to let go of this,” I say. “I really thought you’d made more progress.”

  He stomps off to his room and slams the door. A few minutes later he comes out and, not saying a word, gets the box with the rabbits, hauls it into his room, and slams the door again. A little while later it’s the front door that slams, so violently the whole apartment echoes. He’s headed back to his new friends.

  We’ve only been living in Farum Midtpunkt for two weeks, and already it’s as if Frederik’s lived here for years. He’s joined a bunch of people on welfare or disability who hang out on the lawns and in the other common areas all day long. Unconcerned and unself-conscious, he’s told them his whole life story and all his favorite jokes. He eats lunch with Sergei and goes fishing with him, sits at home with Abdul and Nasira or Khayyat and Sheza, drinking tea and watching Al Jazeera. Every day he comes home with new stories about our neighbors and their kids and grandkids, and already we’ve been invited to two big weddings.

  Back to the pension papers. Now I can’t concentrate. I try calling Bernard, but he’s in a meeting.

  • • •

  Both Niklas and Frederik are eating at friends’ tonight, but it actually suits me just fine to eat alone. I’m beat. Besides everything that’s going on here with the three of us, I’ve taken a summer job working for Helena’s sister at her shop in Ordrup, spending almost every day of vacation selling fabrics and household knickknacks.

  At ten thirty, Niklas lets himself into the apartment, and for the first time in eons he comes into where I am without being prompted. It’s just a couple of minutes before the killer’ll be revealed on the British crime series that I’m kicking back in front of, but I turn off the TV immediately.

  There are a thousand things I want to ask him about, a thousand things I want to tell him. He looks at me a bit shyly and sits down on my in-laws’ old couch. I want to say that he doesn’t always have to act so brave about his father’s illness, that he can tell me what he’s thinking, that I won’t be nosy—I know he doesn’t like that—but will listen. And I want to say that I’m always there for him.

  And as these things are running through my mind, I find myself, oddly enough, measuring the gap between our knees and the gap between our bodies—his on the couch, mine in the armchair. Why am I doing this? I’m much too conscious of the distance. Of our bodies. Is this consciousness the water that’s choking him? Am I being too much, too intense?

  I cross one leg over the other, fold my hands and separate them, glance at Niklas, glance down. How can I set him at ease? Maybe I should start by saying something like I just want to tell you, I feel like you’ve done a remarkable job of dealing with your father’s illness. From there we can proceed to what’s been hardest for him, and maybe he’ll even want to share a drop of his sorrow with me.

  But he beats me to the punch, and before I say anything, he asks, “Why can’t Dad have rabbits?”

  “What?”

  “Why can’t Dad have rabbits?”

  “Did he ask you to talk to me about that?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” I’ll let it slide for now. “Niklas, we can’t just have a bunch of small animals running around everywhere. To begin with, there’s still all this clutter from moving, and then on top of that I have to take care of you and a sick husband. There’s just a lot to deal with—an incredible amount.”

  “But Dad’s not really sick anymore, is he?”

  “When he comes up with ideas like raising rabbits, you can bet he’s not quite right in the head.”

  “I think they’re a good idea.”

  “You think it’s a good idea for us to turn our new apartment into a rabbit farm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what’s so good about this idea?”

  “Well, he’s at home all day long anyway. He really wants to help you earn some money, and he can’t get a job. It’s perfect—he has time, and we need the money.”

  “How much has your father been talking to you about this?”

  “Not much.”

  He looks away, and I try to figure out if he went over to eat at Abdul’s, or if perhaps Frederik called him from Abdul’s phone.

  “You probably don’t understand,” he says, “but it’s humiliating for a man when his wife earns all the money.”

  “I probably don’t understand? Ha! But you do?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stare at him and can’t help but laugh. “Want a piece of cake?” I ask.

  “Yes, please.”

  So I walk into the kitchen to cut two pieces of cake and make myself a cup of coffee. Niklas isn’t allowed to drink coffee at night.

  “And some black-currant juice,” he says from the living room.

  “You obviously think Dad’s gotten better,” I say as I cut the cake. “Dad’s become a teenager, and you don’t realize that living with a teenager can be a little trying.”

  I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “If I were a boss somewhere, I’d definitely give him a job, now that he’s so well.”

  I don’t answer. To avoid admitting how thoroughly changed Frederik is, Niklas and his grandparents have become acrobats of self-delusion. All day long, Thorkild and Vibeke try to come up with little epis
odes from Frederik’s boyhood to prove he isn’t sick, since their anecdotes all show that he’s always been the way he is now. Thorkild will call, totally hopped up, to tell me how once in a canoe on summer vacation in Norway in 1979, Frederik insisted on telling a certain joke over and over again, though everyone told him to stop. The next day it’ll be something else, and I can’t even tell if the stories are real or if they’re just making them up.

  But no one—not any of Frederik’s new friends, not Niklas, not Thorkild or Vibeke—is with him enough to know the truth. I’m the only one. And there’s no question that he still has problems taking initiative. Again and again, I have to remind him about things that need taking care of in the apartment when he’s there alone. And when they don’t get done, it’s not just because he lacks initiative; there’s also evidence of self-centeredness and deficient long-term planning, since he certainly can make the effort to go out with his new friends.

  And then there’s his impaired inhibitory mechanism. If he’s used the last piece of toilet paper, either he forgets to replace the roll, or instead of just taking one roll down from the cabinet, he takes three and stacks two of them on the floor beside the toilet, even though I’ve told him I don’t like him doing that. When he opens a bag of muesli or something else in the kitchen, he makes the hole much too large, and when he’s supposed to buy groceries, using the list I write out for him in the morning, he buys too many packages or packages that are too large of whatever it is I’ve asked him to get, even when I explicitly write a reminder not to on the list.

  At least Niklas has been brought up well enough that he comes into the kitchen without being asked, and carries his juice and cake back to the coffee table.

  Last week I saw him sitting with some friends down on Williams Square. I was driving past, and Niklas had an arm around Emilie as if they’d just been kissing. Something in their body language told me that they were the alpha pair in the group. And why not? They’re both attractive, well dressed, intelligent, they’ve got everything. They must be the couple the other couples all want to be—sick father and all. So has Niklas shifted his whole life, his whole world over to his friends now? Is he actually happy now? If only I could discover a little bit more about how it’s going with Emilie; that must be what takes up the most space in his life these days.

  Niklas says, “You also say we can tell Dad is sick because he’s over at the neighbors’ so much. But in the old days he was always working, right? He didn’t have any time to talk to the neighbors. Being at the neighbors’ now doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with him being sick. In fact I think it’s a good thing; there just wasn’t anybody who did that on Station Road. Now we’ve moved, and he’s adjusted to the fact that people live differently here, that they’re more involved with each other’s lives. You’re the one the neurologists would call rigid. And the same thing goes for the rabbit business.”

  “Well, I guess I can see that,” I say, wishing that for just five minutes, Niklas could be on my side.

  But he won’t let up. “If you gave Dad his car keys back and let him go online again, it’d also be a lot easier for him and Khayyat when they get old LPs and stuff from people’s homes and sell them down by The Square.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I really like Khayyat. He sets out the things he gets by the parking lot in back of the mall, and Dad helps him sell—”

  “Your father is not going to sit in some parking lot and hawk junk! All our friends pass by there! He’s a headmaster! Not one of those people who—”

  “He just wants to help. To earn some money.”

  “But he earns squat! In any case I haven’t seen any money.”

  “Right now there’s only enough for candy and cigarettes. But later—”

  “He’s started smoking?”

  “Not that I know of.” Niklas answers too quickly, clipping the words off.

  “Have you started smoking too?”

  “No.”

  “But Dad has.”

  “No, I definitely don’t think so. He just buys them for his friends.”

  “Oh God damn it, Niklas! Why are we talking like this? Why can’t we just be honest with each other, you and me?”

  “But I haven’t started smoking!”

  “That’s not what I mean!”

  What have I done that’s so terrible? Why are my husband and son both being taken from me like this? I feel awash in self-pity, and that makes me despise myself even more.

  But I’m the adult here. Three deep breaths. No sniveling; I pull myself together.

  “Niklas, I just want to tell you, I feel like you’ve done a remarkable job of dealing with your father’s illness.”

  “Really?” Why does he already look so bored and dismissive?

  “Yes, you have. But there’s no call for you to be brave all the time. It’s all right for you to have feelings too, just like—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, you’re human too, and even though you probably have a great time with Emilie, I’m sure you also must be affected by …”

  I hate myself as I speak, I sound like such a cliché. It feels as if it’s not just him, but also me who’s being crushed and suffocated by all this water. I can’t tell where Niklas is right now, but I’m deep inside his photographs, I’m sinking, gasping for air, drowning.

  Storytelling’s Crutch Is Broken

  Signe Riis Gormsen

  Twentieth-century narratives have become inextricably intertwined with psychoanalysis in their use of structure, characterization, and symbol. Meanwhile, psychiatric research in recent years has exposed psychoanalysis as an unscientific superstition on a level with astrology and numerology.

  If the art of narrative in literature, TV, and film does not develop the strength to stand on its own feet without leaning on psychoanalysis, storytelling will be doomed to play a role in our time like that of a dictatorship’s doddering old head of state: a decidedly antimodern force that must be circumvented or killed if any form of real cultural development is to take place.

  One essential characteristic of the well-told tale is that elements introduced along the way in the story subsequently turn out to have been introduced with a purpose.

  Every reader has an intuitive narratological feeling that she obtained from fairy tales, among other things, which enables even a child to distinguish a sequence of random events from a “telling.”

  I’m reading “Silly Hans,” the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, to my 7-year-old nephew, who has never heard the story before. I read about Silly Hans’s two brothers riding to the king’s castle on horseback to propose to the princess, while Silly Hans rides a goat. I ask my nephew if he thinks the story is over yet.

  No.

  I read to him how on the way to the castle, Silly Hans finds first a dead crow, then a wooden shoe, and at last some mud, all of which he takes with him. Is the story over yet?

  No.

  I read how the princess at the castle says that it is hot because the king is roasting chickens. “Then I should be able to roast this crow,” Silly Hans says and pulls out the crow. The princess tells him she has nothing to roast it in. “But I do,” says Silly Hans, pulling out the wooden shoe. The princess says that she doesn’t have any sauce. “I’ve got so much sauce that I can spill some of it,” says Silly Hans, and he pulls some mud up out of his pocket.

  “I like that!” says the princess, and so they get married.

  Is the story over now?

  Yes. Now it’s over.

  A series of random events doesn’t become a story until the events have been shaped into a meaningful pattern and the narrative’s various threads have finally been braided into a rope. This sense of elementary narrative structure resides so deep in us that even a 7-year-old can distinguish a story from a recitation of personal descriptions and actions.

  Let us turn now to the twentieth century’s fairy tale for grown-ups: the psychological novel. Let us im
agine an ideal type of this novel, a hodgepodge of the hundreds of thousands of psychological novels published in the Western world during the past century.

  A man lives in the small port town where his father worked by the harbor and his mother died from her job in the glassworks. He beats his children. The man’s oldest son grows big enough to confront him about the violence in their home, and the reader follows the man on a journey back to his childhood. The harbor and the threatening dark water take on a symbolic cast, and the man relives the traumas that continue to plague him—the death of his beloved mother and his own father’s violence, which he is involuntarily repeating. He encounters resistance on this journey of realization, and this resistance makes him even more aggressive. But he also experiences inspirational turning points that alter his understanding of himself. By the end of the book, he has recognized the overall pattern of his life. This recognition is sufficient to transform him; at last the violence can cease, and he is liberated.1

  Regardless of how clichéd this plot may be, it is clearly a coherent narrative and not a chance collection of people and events. As readers, we feel that we get to know new aspects of the characters. We take an active interest in the turning points of their lives and follow along as, by degrees, their self-knowledge develops. The story has an abundance of symbols connected to the traumas as well as their resolution, and readers can feel themselves heartened and enriched in reading the novel by the profound insight they acquire into their fellow human beings.

  The author doesn’t even need to be particularly skillful in her understanding of structure or composition, as the psychoanalytical worldview automatically structures episodes that would otherwise appear disjointed and unresolved. It makes them into a story.

  Everything contributes structurally to this story. There is only one problem, albeit a major one: The novel is one great big lie! It confirms for the reader an antiquated view of humanity that psychiatrists (and others who have advanced degrees in the human psyche) have long since abandoned. That means that the novel can be considered an indifferent diversion at best, and at worst a patent stultification.