The raindrops weren’t falling close together, but each one was large and fat and crashed against the hood of my raincoat. I lagged behind the group more than I needed to, and when I finally made it out of the trees, I found myself alone.
The beach was endless and deserted except for the children, who were already a fair distance away. Not a single plant, not a patch of light in the sky, and the sand beneath my rubber boots was sodden and monochromatic lead-grey, only a shade darker than the sky.
In the distance, the teachers and children in their flame-colored rain suits became a bag of bright candy that someone had dropped in the clumpy sand and kicked open. The cold wet wind tore at my face. Then one colored blob detached itself from the others. A little later he stood before me, raindrops dripping from his nose.
He didn’t move, just looked at me inquiringly. And I looked at him.
“Maybe I shouldn’t become a teacher at all,” I said.
He didn’t answer. I looked into his eyes, which were wide open under his rain hood.
We talked, and walked down toward the water’s edge, and gradually the monotonous rumbling of the water gave way to the rhythmic boom of each individual wave. No stars, sun, or moon. No ground beneath us. And yet that sound. The world still uncreated. No light or darkness, time or children. Just a roaring snore from the waves, from some creature who rests before the world is to be formed.
I don’t know how it happened, but I started telling him about my good friend who’d died two months earlier. Her boyfriend had been unfaithful for months with one of our mutual friends, and finally he moved out from my one friend and in with the other. And Hanne leapt from a high-rise.
“The weird thing is, I have the sense that she’s still here,” I said. “She floats beneath the ceiling of the rooms I enter. And she’s out here in the rain. She’s following me.”
Frederik stood with his back to the waves, the white edges crashing behind him. “Does she say you’ll be glad you became a teacher?”
“Just a moment …” I closed my eyes for a few seconds. “Yes. She does.”
“Do you think she’s right?”
I paused again to consider. “Yes.”
“And maybe she knows why you started to doubt that?”
“She knows,” I said. “It’s because I’m so unhappy. Because I miss her.”
Already then I felt a desire to push my arm under his, so we could walk linked together back to the other teachers.
As we approached the others, with a suitable gap between us, I said, “I don’t really believe in ghosts, of course. You don’t know me, but I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t think so.”
That evening we took a flashlight and snuck back down the forest path to the beach, which was now pitch-dark. It was no longer raining, but there were still no stars or moon.
“What then?” I remember him asking. “Do you think we have a soul that lives on when we die?”
It ended up being a lovely school camp. Frederik had unusually bright pale-brown eyes with a fine dark ring around the outside of each iris and a long thin nose. There was something cultivated, something elegant about him. On two evenings we slipped out into the forest, Hanne’s ghost vanished, and I became more convinced than ever that teaching was the right job for me.
When we returned home, we tried to keep our relationship secret at the school. We didn’t succeed, of course, and some of our female colleagues became annoyed, with Frederik and especially with me.
Exactly as predicted, Frederik became headmaster of another primary school four years later. He was appointed to a seat on the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Committee, and he threw himself into writing a series of textbooks that sought to introduce philosophy as an independent subject in the higher grades.
When he was thirty-five, he was headhunted to lead Saxtorph — the private elementary school in Copenhagen where he’s been ever since, and where in the course of thirteen years, he’s almost doubled enrollment.
• • •
When Niklas and I walk through the enormous hotel lobby with its furnishings from the ’80s, three Danish tourists yell after us. We talked with them earlier by the pool, though they’re people we’d never have been friends with back home. From a distance, we can tell they’re drunk.
“Well, it’s been a late evening, eh Mia? Have you guys had fun? Where’d you go?”
Neither Niklas nor I reply. We make a beeline for the long, ugly corridor going to our rooms. I stop in front of his door.
“Come over to my room if you don’t want to be alone tonight.”
A moment’s hesitation, perhaps. Then he looks at me.
“You should knock on mine too, if you …”
He’s never said anything like that before. Then again, no one knows whether tonight he’ll become the only man in the family.
The gilded wall lamps, the landscape windows facing the Mediterranean. A faint breeze through the nearly closed sliding doors to the balcony. Frederik’s trousers lie on a chair, and on the floor are three magazines he bought on a sudden whim at the kiosk, as well as his snorkel and belt and a T-shirt too. On the table are his towel and sandals.
He didn’t use to be messy. It’s one of the things we argued about — also during the last few weeks back home.
I walk out on the balcony in a T-shirt and panties. I feel the wind, listen to the suck of the sea, watch the water the few places it’s lit by the hotel lights. I stood here last night with Frederik and we held each other, we kissed, we thought we were healthy. It’s as if I feel him now at my side, his armpit against my shoulder, his lips and breath against my cheek. For a second I wonder if this is the instant of his death, at the hospital. Is that what I feel? Is he visiting me?
They said it was safe for us to go home tonight, that nothing would happen.
I have to try not to think too much. Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day. I have to empty my head of thoughts and lie down.
I don’t manage to stay very long in bed. My gut rumbles, it is tense, churning. I run out to the bathroom at the last moment. There I start feeling nauseous, my body contracts and I lose control at both ends. My skin glistens with sweat.
Shaking, I collapse on the toilet, and there I die of food poisoning from the lunch we had at that small restaurant in the mountains. My soul flies out relieved, suspended beneath the ceiling and watching the next morning when Niklas gets the hotel staff to unlock the door and they find my cold stiff body. The stench of caustic toilet cleaner, of my feces, my death.
Or.
I do survive the food poisoning during the night, but I have a brain tumor. I die quickly all the same; Frederik’s infected me, and in half a year, a doctor administers the final morphine in a hospice after weeks of pain, seizures, and nonsensical ranting.
Or.
It’s not me who dies, it’s Niklas. Tomorrow morning there’s no answer to my knock on his door. I run down to reception, and the clerk and I find him dead in the bathroom.
He’s lying like I am now: the stench of the cleaning agents and feces, his death and my despair. All families are one body. The tumor has long tentacles, red filaments, it resembles an octopus, a red jellyfish, it spreads from Niklas to me to Frederik. It grows from Frederik and Niklas to me.
I wake up with my head on the toilet seat, thinking I’ve slept only a few minutes, but the nausea is almost gone. I get up, bent over on wobbly legs. Rinse my mouth, drink water, rinse my face and look in the mirror.
I have to find out how Niklas is doing. Perhaps he has food poisoning too. It must be those little fried fish, I think.
In a white hotel bathrobe I walk out into the hallway. I knock, but he doesn’t answer.