No, he says without hesitation.
Only she’s the one saying no, and he asking if he can come with her. There’s no answer.
No, is the question. No, are you coming with me. Are you coming with me, no.
She is a hunger artist, and only a single ticket sold. Her audience of one has fallen asleep. A balloon tethered to his wrist by a string, floating three meters in the air above. Inside a tent of busy stripes.
There is no solution to the riddle.
Look at me, he says, taking her hand. A month is nothing, you’ll finally have peace to write. Or maybe he doesn’t take her hand at all.
Peace and quiet.
Peace and quiet.
I THINK I am a person who sees everything that almost exists. It’s a way of remaining unhappy, incapable in every respect. To see, not what is, but what could be. That which is coming, but which never comes, that chronic postponement, things imminent, likely soon, just around the corner, etc. Only sometimes it turns out that what lies ahead does not exist, there was nothing there, and I am someone else. Almost is the same as not, at worst never. Non-births, undesires, the impossibility of something like circumstances. In any other circumstance—it doesn’t bear thinking about. I am a guest on her way home, reeling away from a party that never was. How come this intoxication, this hangover, these pangs of regret, when there wasn’t even a party. Non-places. Whatever they are. It all starts and ends in an idea you eventually have to swallow. All your ideas and good intentions, that patience, that ability to convince the eye to see: invisible. And to be, fundamentally, seen — an invisible person in the world. To another, who cannot see you, cannot see me. Because he keeps disappearing anyway. Because he can’t find the right distance: close. Because maybe he can’t.
There are people who cannot love you. And it has nothing to do with wanting. It has nothing to do with desire. It becomes a matter of economics — negotiation. Columns, lists of one thing and another. A contract of service. Salary. Or no salary, voluntary work, driven by expectation and pictures of things to come. Like negatives, I see everything as though in negative, everything dark is light, and what’s light vanishes into black. But you think you see a person. A resemblance. I see the outline.
But then it’s not a person I see at all, not a person I expect. Who am I coming home to, who will be in my bed. A person in reverse, a person who cannot. Incapable. Incapable in love. And it has nothing to do with justice or ill will or the best of intentions. Love can be an economic specter, riding you through a series of images that never develop. Into anything. Other than images, an exquisite dream by which to sleep; from which to awaken bruised; what are you complaining about; you’re almost there, at the finish line. And the excuses you’re given along the way. Bait fed to you by corrupt animal keepers.
I forgive you everything; my body remembers it all. Going on is impossible; so, seemingly, is escape. It’s already too late: when we met we died in each other’s arms, in that very place; we died by that very look.
We drank each other like semi-poisonous drinks. Unthirsty. That is, I kept you until later. A later that never came; there was always something fatal about it. The truth is: perhaps there was something else too, though who can keep such things apart. That which is fatal, and, well, how to put it, love, perhaps. Serenity, perhaps, a home. It all short-circuits, thick belts crackling across the landscape: love, and something that can hardly be called love at all.
The fatality of that.
What you saw never being what you will ever see, those tiny disappointments, a thirst in need of a throat, following after us like a pack of stray dogs. And all the time the idea of what might have been: begging dogs, whenever you move to get up from a table, or leave through a garden gate, the past is waiting there. Undead, and not even past.
How naïve I’ve been, I think to myself. Or rather: how lonely. How closely I scrutinized, how clearly I saw it all in my mind — all that nearly was. The person who could love, almost; this almost-love, forever postponed, something else in its place. What, exactly. Reality. Whatever that is. Yours, I suppose.
THE LANDSCAPE
WINTER. THE SNOW rumbling in still, without sound. Sometime after Christmas, I’m not sure.
The snow. That has laid itself upon it all, all that dares to remain exposed for more than a few seconds at a time, upon everything dead and everything living; the living and the dead; the violet stalks of the Brussels sprouts stand askew, keeping their balance in the broken rows of the vegetable garden, packed in by snow, as old wine bottles are encapsulated by melting, then stiffening candle wax, and the snow falls with the drowsy resolve of that image.
Obstinacy all around. We can’t go anywhere. We are inside a house, and the house is a giant corpse. We lie here and wait, beneath the skin. Movements are agitated and take place indoors. Outside only when something compells one of us: to fetch wood for the fire, feed the birds, clear a path. Outside there is only snow and the flies. True, the fattest of the flies are survivors.
The roasting trays are by turn hot and cold. We girls stand and stare, crane our necks beneath the ceilings. Fledgling birds. Our mother, nearly burning the bread. It can still be done, in the old oven. Her lips tighten and she winces at the sizzle of wet cloth, the only thing she has time to put between her fingers and the hot tray. She burns herself, the skin blisters: the things I do for you, she says, a wry smile. The water runs from the tap, I am horrified. The two sisters each understand more or less than me, who understands exactly what is required to see the fatality of it, in that sentence. Blisters.
Nothing to be worried about, she says, comforting me, in that way. She means it, and yet her words are a weight to haul back into the boat, the clothes of the men are heavy with water, and we must sail on. Once more an about-turn; we always comforted each other in reverse; when I need comfort, when she does.
I think I looked utterly distraught.
The warm filling runs out of the sweet Shrovetide buns. The recipe book lies open on the table, Karolines Køkken. The filling of the buns, vanilla, and these rich yolks. I spell out the words on the title page, the Dairy Association’s recipe series, the oddness of the subtitle, Oh, Freedom—someone must have been thinking of heaven, or something quite like it.
Sunday mornings at the Thorup Dairy. My eyes watering at the muslin cheesecloths, the dairymen slicing the blocks with wires. You can work in the dairy when you grow up, my father says to me. Perhaps that’s where it comes from: the idea of your parents, for all that, not knowing you better. The disappointment of them not seeing the gravity of it. He hands me a slice of cheese, draped over his fingers, and I remember thinking of dog ears, the same feeling of body about it.
I hated the smell of sour milk, the swarming cheese. An army of holes. And I wanted to go in and yet not for anything in the world, to go in. The wind from the sea across the road sweeps across the parking spaces and me, a mad dog thrashing in its chains, I shake my hair and drag a comb of fingers across its ribs before clambering into the rear seat.
The bread has risen immensely, its back split open like a wound. The bread, the comb of its broken spine.
An old friend she has forgotten and suddenly recalls. My mother. She misses him, repeatedly. I’m not sure.
My lips are cracked. My thoughts.