“But I battered him. I hit my sick husband with a stainless-steel bowl from the coffee table. No one could forgive that.”
The light from Peter Mansfield is so strong that it hurts my eyes, even though they’re closed. I fear I’m going to go blind and want to raise my arms before my eyes, but I can’t move them. I want to move my knees off the sharp pebbles beneath them, but I can’t move my legs either.
“Nothing escapes the laws of Nature,” he replies. “Nothing comes into being unless the laws of Nature want it to. And that also applies to the things that you do to your husband.”
“But Niklas—that’s the worst. He found me on the floor when he was thirteen. I was drunk, I could have been dead. That’s something no son should see.”
“If it happened, it was Nature’s will for it to happen. Do you believe anything exists that is higher than the laws of Nature?”
“No.”
“Do you believe anything has more power than the laws of Nature?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then you know that if your son sent you to the hospital to have your stomach pumped, it is nothing to blame yourself for. You couldn’t do anything else. It was Nature’s will; the laws of Nature compelled you to do it.”
“Yes, the laws of Nature.”
“You may rest now, my child. You are blameless. Nature bears the blame for you, and you are innocent once more.”
• • •
I fall forward upon the sand, unable to catch myself with my immobilized arms, and I kiss the stones on the path, knowing that the spirit of Nature resides in each and every one of them. Just as it resides in me. I can open my eyes now, and I look up into the dust motes that dance in the light of the sign in the sky, knowing that the spirit of Nature inhabits every single speck of dust upon the earth; just as it inhabits me. I know that the motes of dust have no soul, just as I have no soul. We are all children of Nature, and I have been set free.
29
I’ve been in the support group for half a year now, and this is our second death. I didn’t attend the first funeral; at the time, I didn’t feel like I knew the widow or the dead man well enough. But Solveig, the brilliant retired woman whose husband died last weekend, has been a font of intriguing thoughts about the situation we all find ourselves in, and I speak with her often on the phone. Several times I also met her goofy, confused husband, Torben, who was a department head in the Ministry of Justice before he suffered brain damage and started piling up trash in their yard.
Actually, we all thought that our next funeral would be Kirsten’s husband, who’s been hospitalized for months now. But sometime during the night on Saturday, after a dinner party that three of the women in the group had with their sick husbands, Torben had another stroke. When Solveig reached for him the next morning in bed, he was dead.
Lots of us from the group are attending the funeral, and Andrea’s been kind enough to offer me a ride. She and Ian have a converted van with a wheelchair lift in the back, so that he can get in the van without having to be lifted out of his wheelchair first, and when she pulls up outside our entry, he’s in the back, strapped down in his chair.
Ian’s brain injury affects his hormone balance, and one of the hormones must do something to his skin, for it has a strange pink sheen, and it looks as if it’s lost its elasticity and might split at any moment. As always, his motionless legs are gathered and hidden beneath a blanket, along with his catheter and colostomy bag. I don’t know if he even has two legs; perhaps they were destroyed in his mountaineering accident in Norway two years ago. Although I’ve met him a few times now, I still feel the urge to avert my gaze when I’m with him; I always make an effort to govern myself, and now I wave and smile at him through the windows.
I hop into the passenger seat and feel Ian and his wheelchair looming up behind me. It’s like being watched by a gigantic half-boiled prawn.
“Love … krrr … ly to see … krrr … you,” he says.
He’s got a PhD in biology, just like Andrea, and while he has no problem finding the right word, his muscular control’s so compromised that it can be exhausting for him to speak.
We talk about Torben and the hymns Solveig has selected for the ceremony, and we talk about what we think Torben must have been like before his strokes. The obituaries have described him as a powerful figure in the Ministry of Justice under Erik Ninn-Hansen, playing a key role in the Tamil Case that brought down the Conservative government in 1993. It’s difficult for us to imagine, as we’ve only known him as an affectionate klutz.
We also talk about Frederik’s coming court case. Andrea’s been convinced of his innocence from the start, and her support used to be very important to me. But I didn’t quite know what to think of it later, once it became clear to me that she believed all criminals were innocent. She’s definitely the intellectual in our group, always able to raise discussion to a higher plane. Now she says, as we drive to the church, “Four hundred years ago, people believed that the mentally ill had made a pact with the devil—meaning they were witches—and so they burnt them alive with the entire village looking on. Episodes like that from our past offend modern sensibilities, because now we take it for granted that of course the poor wretches shouldn’t be burnt or imprisoned because they’re mentally ill.
“But it won’t be very many years before people look back on our time now and think exactly the same thing about how we punish those who are cruel and violent and make foolish choices that end in crime. It’s medieval to think that these people want to be the way they are. Their brains just don’t function that well, and it’s obvious that they should enter treatment. They shouldn’t simply be locked up for years like another Natascha Kampusch.”
Ian chimes in from the back of the van. “In just twenty years … krrr … we’ll look back … on this time … as … krrr … utterly barbaric.”
They both laugh, but I don’t understand what’s so funny. Perhaps something we drove past?
“We’re living in a second … second … krrr … a second Renaissance, you know.”
“I’ve read that,” I say without turning to look at him.
Andrea parks in one of the handicapped spots close to the church and the three of us get out, but after she busies herself for a while in rearranging the blanket over Ian’s legs, she tells me to go on ahead. I get the sense that there’s something they’d like to deal with by themselves, so I make my way toward the church.
Solveig’s been very active in the Brain Injury Association, and several of her friends from there have come. Out in front of the church door I step to one side, to make room for the walking-impaired, and I say hello to Anton from our group. He’s come with his wife, who I haven’t met before. Both of them hold themselves upright and sport golf tans, fastidious hair, and expensive taste in clothes.
Anton introduces us, and his wife gives me a friendly smile, gathering her long elegant coat about her and saying, “I’ll nip in and take one of them … those things you use when … with the … that you eat with … you eat and you … here in … when you’re going to … sing with it … I’ll take one of those.”
It took a couple of days at Frederik’s rehab center for me to discover that if I wanted to chat with a patient while waiting for my husband to finish his treatment session, I should approach one of the ones who looked the most severely brain-damaged. Sometimes the ones with serious physical handicaps were brighter and more articulate than the personnel, while the patients who moved about without difficulty always had major problems with language or cognition.
After another two wheelchairs have gone in, Anton and I follow his wife into the church, and it takes my breath away. It always does: the vaulted ceilings, the carved woodwork, the chalk paintings. I can’t walk into a medieval Danish church without feeling Christianity calling to me. And I’ve been that way for as long as I remember.
For centuries, people have prayed and grieved here, suffered and celebrated, and I still can feel
traces of their presence. In the churches, they abide with us still: the wives of farmers who keeled over in the field, the wives of fishermen who drowned in the storm. All the children and parents of the centuries’ departed. They begged and wept before God because their own lives were over now too and maybe they’d have to enter the poorhouse, maybe they’d starve, maybe they’d have to wed some rich old man.
And the joys, the centuries’ joys: the christenings, the weddings, the Sundays in August when the harvest was abundant and everyone could feel safe for the winter.
Poverty in Europe till a hundred years ago, less than three of my lifetimes ago—the tattered clothes and the teeth yanked out with no anesthetic, the diseases you got when you shared a straw pallet with rats. Back when there were no toilets, when backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk gave even young people the pain of arthritis all night long. The way life was until just a few years ago; I still feel it, here in the dark.
Christ gazes down from the cross, and Solveig’s nephew switches his iPhone to mute. For centuries, spaces like this framed Europe’s dreams and hopes and spiritual life, and now it’s all kaput. Regardless of how the chalk paintings and ancestors call to me, I know this funeral is mere show, like when Native Americans perform an ancient rain dance for tourists but no longer believe in a rain god. I’m looking around at something that’s disappeared because the fundamental delusion of God and Paradise can no longer convince us.
Is it wrong for me to be here and act as if I believe in God, now that I’ve converted to atheism? After all, that’s idolatry. Is it wrong for me to enjoy it, to let myself steep in Christendom’s seductive lies for the interval of an hour? I don’t know.
Anton sits beside his wife, and I sit next to him. Seven years ago, she was diagnosed with a tumor and required surgery in her left temporal region, which the doctors said lay on the edge of her brain’s language areas. The evening before the operation, they both knew she might never be able to speak again. In support group, he told us how she held him in their bed, looked him deep in the eye, and said, “After tomorrow, I might never be able to tell you I love you again.” They both wept. “You’re the only man who’s ever meant anything to me,” she said. “If I can never tell you that again, will you always remember that I told you tonight?”
“Yes,” he said.
And only in the group did he say that as he held her and wept, even as he knew that he’d remain with her till one of them died, he couldn’t avoid a poison droplet of suspicion that she said what she did because she might become completely dependent on him the next afternoon, and she wanted to chain him to her.
I’m turning around a little too often, looking back toward the door. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but then Bernard and Lærke enter, and I remember.
I can’t imagine that anyone notices anything—we exchange a brief innocent glance as he walks past, and we nod our little funeral nod. Others have lowered their eyes and are leafing through their hymnals to find the right page, while I shift about restlessly on the hard wooden pew.
Bernard and Lærke sit down several rows in front of us. His short grey-white hair pokes up above the other people sitting around him, and I also catch a glimpse of Lærke’s impressive locks. I know how his hair feels against my palms, against my cheeks, my belly and breasts, my crotch. I know the feel of his chest hair, the hair on the top of his hands, the hair on his legs.
After we returned from Sweden, Bernard didn’t call me, and I felt I couldn’t let myself keep contacting him. I had to let him dissolve our relationship, since he was obviously fighting so hard to be faithful. Since he thought it’d be best for Lærke.
But then I had that experience by Lake Farum. I have no clue what happened, but the likeliest explanation has got to be an epileptic seizure in my temporal lobes. It’s been well documented that temporal lobe epilepsy can create the sensation of booming voices, blinding light, and paralysis.
Naturally, I’ve spoken to my doctor about it. But several months ago, I insisted on neurological scans for both Niklas and myself, because our personalities had changed more than I thought was reasonable to expect from a crisis. Nothing showed up on the scans, however, and since then my doctor’s refused to spend any more tax money on our brains.
If you approach it with an open mind, there is also of course the possibility that I did experience a genuine revelation—that Peter Mansfield really did reveal himself to me and initiate me into the pursuit of beauty and truth in the true atheistic life.
And the one explanation need not preclude the other. Wouldn’t it be consistent with the spirit of atheism if such a revelation respected the laws of nature? If it revealed itself to initiates through something so scientifically ordinary as an epileptic fit of the temporal lobes? Researchers have posited that temporal lobe epilepsy is the source of many well-known revelations throughout history.
Regardless of what it was, I now knew that Bernard and I were predestined to meet each other and fall in love. There was nothing we could do about it.
So I called him, and I was such a compelling evangelist on the phone that we met up that very evening, and since then we’ve seen each other almost every single day.
• • •
One of the other users at braindamage.com posted a comment saying that women have a harder time than men when their spouses suffer frontal lobe injuries. She said she’d even met men who were thriving with wives who had such damage. True, a brain-damaged wife may not be able to read her husband’s feelings anymore, but she’s finally stopped nagging him when he’s messy, and she’s completely forgotten that she’s bitter about something he did in the distant past, or that she can’t stand being in a room with his sister and mother. And on some things—especially in bed—he finds she’s less inhibited and easier to get along with.
The women lose so much more. In particular, they have to live with loneliness; it’s draining when their husbands can no longer share their feelings, when they become even less emotionally nuanced than they already were.
Nevertheless, it’s usually a woman who will stay with a sick spouse and spend the rest of her life as a round-the-clock nurse, while a man with a sick wife will find a healthy woman to run off with.
There’s a wake at Solveig’s after the funeral. Lots of people come, and in the throng in front of the hors d’oeuvres, I see Lærke hanging on Bernard. I position myself on his other side. Does she know what a unique man she has? Does she realize?
Yes, you only have to catch a glimpse of them together to see that she thinks he’s the most wonderful man in the world, thinks he’s lovelier beyond compare; that in fact he’s the only wonderful man there is. But that’s how I feel too. He really is the only one.
Lærke tugs on his sleeve. “There are those ones with lox, and those ones with something white, and then there are those with that … it’s pâté, right? Is it pâté, Bernard?”
“Yes, it’s pâté. It looks delicious, don’t you think?”
“But should I pick the one with pâté?”
“Yes, pick that one.”
She sets an hors d’oeuvre with pâté on her plate and looks around. “But the others are taking two pieces at a time, two different pieces.”
“You can do that too.”
“But what other one should I pick?”
I consider this other woman whom Bernard loves. Even before we began our relationship, he told me that Lærke had a hard time making decisions, so she needed help. For instance, her mother made a deck of index cards with different combinations of clothes and shoes, and every morning, Lærke draws a new card from the deck and puts on the clothing listed on the card. That way, she doesn’t end up wearing clothing that clashes, plus she saves a lot of mental energy that she’ll really need later in the day.
And whenever they’re at a restaurant, Bernard’s trained her to choose the first entrée on the menu. With dozens of little tricks like these, their everyday life has become more normal.
But there’s
no menu here. “You could take the tuna salad,” I find myself say a little too loudly as I point across the table.
She immediately does what I suggest, without answering or looking at me. And without another word, she hands her plate to Bernard, so that she can move away from the buffet on her crutches.
What did I just do? I hold my breath, not daring to look at Bernard. Was I nice to Lærke? Was I mean? Did I cross some line?
I skirt my way around retired department heads from Justice and their wives, around Solveig’s and Torben’s family members, and around the very different sorts of friends that Solveig and Torben have acquired in recent years: brain-damaged men and their wives.
One woman, who I know is from the Danish Stroke Association, is helping her husband sit down in a corner of the sofa; his injury must have affected his appetite regulation, for his sport coat hangs off him like a flag. Another woman, whom I’ve seen twice at the Center for Brain Injuries, holds her husband’s glass while he drinks from it.
Without Bernard, Lærke’s world would crumble. So would mine.
I go up the stairs, peer into Solveig and Torben’s large bright bedroom—the queen-size bed with a cream-colored spread, still made up for two—and continue on to the room that was once Torben’s office. The walls are lined with dark wooden bookcases, filled with books and folders on politics, economics, and law. But the books have all been shoved to the back, and in front of them on the shelves stands trash that Torben’s discovered on his walks around the pleasant residential streets of this neighborhood. On the floor squat some filthy plastic supermarket bags, filled to the brim. In one corner there’s a sundial, and on the desk a potted fern that takes up a third of the desktop and clearly doesn’t belong. And on the seat of the dark overstuffed leather sofa, he’s placed an old TV set.
There’s also an empty guestroom up here. Can the door be locked from inside? No, but I try placing a chair so the backrest blocks the handle from turning. It works. I shake and pull on the handle; the door won’t budge. Then I remove the chair, open the door, and walk back downstairs.
You Disappear: A Novel Page 31
