It was more like that.
An almost physical pain at waking up and seeing a new day rise up out of the sea, as it were, and she, coming home after running through the woods to the bathing jetty, after swimming, after, in that way having conspired with the sun, having risen up out of the sea — that was how he looked at it. That she was like vigor incarnate, as simple as that. All the serenity of her body on that account. All the things you cannot attain, only see; never have a part in, but wish for, year upon year. She bends down and messes up the pile so the various items are spread once more. An indication of her slackness, her rummaging about in the world.
Transilluminated, the rooms, on a morning like this.
You’re a detector, he says, meaning: I’ve read what you wrote, and if you could see everything so clearly, how come you, or we, have assembled all that, that whole idea of how it was. How I was. And you, you as well.
Indeed, she thinks. Indeed, I think, I suppose loving someone is like that. Half the time you’re frightened to death. The perspective. The shunting about, from seeing everything — to seeing nothing at all. That you can never go back and be met for the first time: seen. Differences outstanding, everywhere, piles of — well, what. Just piles.
THERE ARE TWO rooms.
There is him, sitting there, slowly ceasing to live; and there is her, banging her head back against a closed door. She is attempting to begin living. Later she thought it was the right thing to do. The fact that one of them had to say something, and that it could never be her.
He sits behind the door. Who knows what he feels. Perhaps he is ceasing to live. Death is there, on the other side of the door. Perhaps we see it all from above. The door between the two bodies is just a thin line someone has drawn in the picture. Later, this is what he told her, later he thought it was the biggest mistake he had ever made.
Maybe it’s that simple, too.
Two rooms.
She may never have loved him more than she did that night, when she thought there was no more love left inside her. When she thought that was that.
And the sound of her head, banging against the door.
And the sound of flesh, rotting. And a picture of a doorstep one morning. And the picture of a breakfast table with juice. Images from an abandoned circus. There will be days like that.
THEY LIVED TOGETHER, there was hardly any skin, most of the time there was a confusion surrounding their bodies, where one stopped and the other began; one body may be switched off, the other pumps life into the unconscious body while it is unconscious. I know nothing about you, she thinks; she knew nothing about him, but maybe it wasn’t true. The opposite is always a part of the picture as well.
Transillumination.
Love as a kind of transillumination.
Everything is very clear. Woods, with darkness falling. Looming silhouettes, all too distinct. The sky, turning completely pale at the prospect of something like night. The crowns of the trees, milking the sky with their eyes, their thoughts, stamping about the landscape, trying. To do what, exactly. To find a home there. In the midst of what is most unwilling: nature, rejecting its young, ejecting them from the nest, over the cliff. And there you stand, worming your way and trying to blend in.
For years she thought she had succeeded in doing just that.
And not for his sake. To become a part. To belong in a landscape, a family somewhere. But then maybe it was never like that at all. Maybe it was he who was right. Her serenity was just a cynical acceptance of that condition of never finding home. Certainly not in nature. Certainly not in love, where all the time you’re — well, what, exactly. Exposed in love; in its neglectful custody. On your way somewhere else, and always another.
HOW LONG HAVE I known exactly, she may find herself thinking.
Some weeks later: she is standing on the street, trying to smoke a cigarette, trying to become addicted to something. She coughs, her nose runs. She doesn’t know if it’s the cold or her having been left, her feeling more together by being totally left on her own. But everything is weeping, everything a collapse, a crashing down around her ears, a gash in her head, and she is as peeled; the sky descending around her, her skin. Utterly exposed in that way: imperiled. Her head feels heavy, she bends backward and thinks: nothing lies heavy.
Nothing anyone can see.
She lies down on the flagstones, puts the cigarette down on the ground, from where it sends a thin coil of smoke into the air. She decides to lie there until the cigarette goes out. Or burns up. One of the two. And then she will let herself into her apartment again; and she lets herself in and finds warmth; she lets herself in, having managed to get to her feet, and then she lights her cigarette, and says: I’ve never smoked before, then speaks her name, and another man speaks his. Movements of that kind, taking place all the time, the kind of movements that can start going in reverse. Behind one’s back. All of a sudden you’re here again, or else you’ve never been here before. There you are; held upright by the suspicious cone of light from a lamppost.
THE WIND BLOWING in through the open windows smells like the sound of envelopes being opened with a knife. Seasons are nonexistent at the moment, in the days following the death of a friend. She gathers the shards, in her thoughts. The days cannot be told apart. Tomorrow already yesterday. She meets him for the first time. It is summer; I have finally come to say goodbye.
The keys of the apartment are as shiny as eyes too young for their face. I have lived inside you since I was eighteen.
Your face, when I am no longer there to see it.
I don’t believe it.
A light, like darkness, all around you.
I let myself into the apartment. I lie down beside you on the bed. Or else I get into the bed between two sleeping figures. I push the other woman out. Sorry.
WE’RE JUST NOT happy, he told her. She went against him instinctively: yes, we are.
You’re not listening to what I’m saying.
Yes, I am, I listen to everything you say. You’re just not saying anything.
It was winter, he was lying with his back against the cold wall in her apartment. The apartment was on the third floor, on Løngangsstræde, backed up to the church, Vartov Kirke, sharing its spine. Sunday morning, and the room trembled, the clinking of the little candle holders and vases in the windowsill. The circular movement of the water in those vases, emanating outward from the stalks of the flowers; from the round eye of the vase, inward to the middle, a sky of new year — geometric patterns, tiny explosions without sound. The submarine rumble of the organ in the room. The hymn ran down the walls, Grundtvig’s “Påskeblomst,” the coldness contained in that. She thought of pushing him through the brick. He would plunge through the church like a beast. Or a bird with clipped wings. Landing heavily on ancient stone. Only the smell of vanilla and timber would discover his body.
Vast areas of loneliness, and of alone here. The edgeland, where the last houses in the village stand and rock their heads to the point of nausea, looking out upon the void, halted just in time — before the fields, plundered and plowed, made ready for, well, for what, exactly. Open land. A cry that may reach out across the landscape, and yet return to hit you full in the back. You will fall, perhaps, and then, perhaps, the houses will fall, too.