SOMETHING ABOUT HIS face. It snowed again today. The sun never arrived in the sky, it was as if something were holding it down at the other end. All of a sudden she thought he looked like the few other men she had been with. She felt like there were too many of them in the apartment. And the feeling of she herself being someone else, that she likewise was a number of other women. He sits slouched over his books; she kneels beside him and grips his thigh; he swivels the chair, and she crawls between his legs. Puts her arms around him and buries her face in his crotch. He strokes her hair. The winter wouldn’t leave: every time you thought spring had come, snow came instead. No cars on the roads. Jobs made to wait. The ground is frozen: you can’t plant the bulbs, or bury a friend, all you can do is stand around and wait, for all your good intentions of getting things done, and a new face every day, no matter what.
THEY WHEEL THEIR bikes along the canal. They talk about going swimming, but know it won’t be today. It’s late afternoon, she senses an imbalance in the picture, she gets up so late, and it’s as if she’s going forward in the wrong lane. Everyone is going home from something. Her younger sister is exhausted by work; says there’s no time to be unhappy. She nods. I can see that, she says. It might be easiest that way.
Her sister is offended and hides it badly. She herself doesn’t know how it feels to be angry in that way, it’s like there’s always been this great pool of emotions and characteristics to be shared out between the two sisters, and no one has ever bothered to divide up the individual emotions, split the pile fairly into two equal portions. She says she’s convinced it’s because of her book, those scenes from home. That whole project of yours. What is, she asks. Mum having cancer, he sister replies.
That’s the sort of thing people with cancer say, she says.
The two sisters sit down on a step to drink sodas. She says nothing, puts the bottle to her lips, tilts her head, puts the bottle down on the woodwork.
Is that what you think, she says — I say — eventually. Is that what you think.
It’s what they say, says my sister. That it’s usually psychological, triggered by a depression, or some enormous grief.
I nod without knowing one way or another, rocking my head like a weaving horse.
There’s a crane on the other side of the canal, lifting rust-red plates of metal from the cobblestones onto the bed of a truck. Dangling sheets of iron, delivered like well-aimed slaps to the face. The blue sea, a blue belt dissecting the picture. The crane is a strong arm slashing the sky. And then the feeling of discarding masks, of coming home. I’d like that.
I HAVE NEVER before wanted anything, she understands that now. It’s not a competition, you say, meaning: I can’t stand to lose anything more.
THE NEW MAN
WE MEET BRIEFLY, he’s with his girlfriend and son. Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district late morning, it must have been autumn, though still with summer’s remains, making everything a matter of postponement. How long like this. Borrowed time. I’m wearing a red dress, black wellingtons. He doesn’t need to see any more than that, even in that instant he has already seen too much. His gaze, indiscriminate: seeing what soon will be possessed, and all that must thereby be renounced; images assail him like a blazing pack of hounds dropped from a loft aflame, and we are drenched, saturated by fire and body. Something on the verge of happening, something already happened, something painfully absent. He greets the musicians, leans a guitar and a saxophone case against the wall. All the time, his eyes are on me. And his girlfriend sees it all, though in reverse, a mirror image reflected in all surfaces: a gleaming eye, a polished boot; and in that way it is enfolded, in the look in his eyes, and we tear off each other’s clothing, the three of us there, inside the storm, a morning dawned upon an island from which we must depart on different ferries; no time to say goodbye, an uncertainty as to where we stand, now, and to what it means; a disenchantment, a sudden degeneration of substance, a feeling of having staked everything on a horse, only for it then to abandon the race, a sense of the entire world being a trick, everything fixed in advance. And in that same gaze I put a phone back into my pocket in the parking area outside the former slaughterhouses of Vesterbro, telling myself out loud that it’s best that way, to give him time, knowing full well that there is no time, that time is past; the beginning and ending of everything in one insane displacement, a cloudburst, the rip of an awning, its sudden deluge. This is how it is again, this is how it is that morning in the rehearsal space: some flowers whose stems you cut and place in water; the same stems are dry and withered as you break them in the middle, stuff them into an empty milk carton you then drop into the bin under the sink; something you hope for, and something you regret, a single displacement, a continuing drift toward the center. A core, that nevertheless can never be found; a reverse explosion of life, a reverse explosion of death.
He puts out his hand and introduces himself by name. I do likewise, only to realize that instead of telling him my own name I have repeated his.
His girlfriend walks up the stairs to the stage, where I am placed on a tall stool in front of a microphone. There is something wrong with the sound, a squeal of feedback as she steps up. She hesitates, tiptoes almost, ducks her head slightly between her shoulders, an apology. She comes toward me and I point the microphone away. Hi, she says, extending her hand and introducing herself. Her hand is cold, but mine is colder. Are you a singer, she asks. I shake my head. No, I say.
I smile. She smiles back. She is so warm and friendly, she takes my hand and clasps it tight. As if we’re going to have a life together. Only we’re not, I think to myself; perhaps we’re going to share one. Half for you and half for me; not a whole life for either of us, not a whole man.
When they leave, he carefully closes the door behind them. I can’t help but smile, for there’s something involuntarily symbolic about the world at that moment: him closing the door so carefully — as if you can close a door.
The body remembers.
A dead man, who will never again be alive for you, but who will continue to breathe his breath into your face without end. And all your kisses will taste of something that was.
He walks at your side, the dead one, sheet-white skin, sheet-white eyes, sheet-white orbs, apples, dangling like droplets. And snow. It is the mind that forgives; the body does not. The body bears its grudges, a maudlin procession of things past, a mourning in the streets. Marrow and bone.
YOU’RE SO YOUNG. Is what she sees the new man thinking. About her, her being so young. Later, he tells her this, though by then it is a repeat, for she has already heard him think the words. They are in her apartment: you’re so young.
She studies him. Sighs and then tells him what she feels to be the truth: that she doesn’t think it’s important. That she has tried to think it is, but simply can’t.
He nods, the same serious expression as hers, accepting the gesture of her nod, as if it were a plate being passed around for the second time, an unconscious plate.
She realizes she is smiling.
She cannot stop herself from smiling, because the thought is beautiful and so heartrendingly naive. It is like placing a sheet over a naked body, allowing friends to search the room, and then to stand there in the doorway afterward, guilt-free. Cleared by a lie: if only we are quiet, offer up our empty hands; and then to encounter this peculiar form of discretion. A will to see the island of bones on the bed through fanned-out fingers that desire not to expose, eyes that will not see, for seeing is an obligation, whose nature remains unclear. And who knows if there is time, perhaps they will prefer to leave in the interim, never to witness the grand finale, the conjuring forth of corpses.