But he doesn’t return for another attempt. He’s not that sick.
I sleep; I wake; I’m still on my in-laws’ couch. Frederik hasn’t installed all the lamps in here yet, so the room has a golden light that’s weirdly uneven. I wonder what time it is.
This is what Vibeke calls our first couch, just like the dinner table is our first dinner table. It’s a classic, upholstered in blue wool, which also covers its slender sloping arms. Here they sat almost half a century ago and played with little Frederik; here Vibeke nursed him while Thorkild smoked a pipe, listened to Miles Davis, and conversed with his headmaster friends. I can’t say that I’m comfortable lying here, yet I can tell I’ve slept deeply.
On the ceiling, I see a patch of light move. It looks like the sign on the ceiling back home on Station Road, though it can’t be the same thing. That sign came from the tree branches moving in front of the streetlight. And it appeared in the embers where Niklas lit a fire on the lawn.
It can’t be the same sign, but it is; I recognize the pattern, the smoldering sign in the embers that proclaims our curse.
Am I dreaming? I look around the living room. Everything looks unfamiliar because we’re still strangers in this apartment, surrounded by strange furniture. But it also looks real, and this doesn’t feel like a dream in any way.
I’m running down a sandy road along the Majorcan coast, away from the car accident in which Frederik and Niklas tumbled over a cliff and died.
I’m running down the sandy rainy beach in Sweden where I met Frederik, where we became each other’s fate.
I’m running down the sandy path along Lake Farum. I played tennis yesterday, I’ll play again tomorrow, the heat, the sun, the sweat on my brow and under my breasts, I’m running. I’m running.
And overhead the sign in the sky follows me, the light that throbs, that smolders, that grows in strength. Surely, everyone must be able to see it now.
But the sign grows much stronger, and its reflections in the Mediterranean, the Kattegat, and Lake Farum are so blinding I have to kneel, my bare knees pressed against the sand and pebbles.
And as I kneel I hear a voice. Booming, close at hand, a voice from the heavens. It’s like thunder, and I cannot distinguish the words it says.
“Who are you? Are you Jesus?” I ask.
“I’m not Jesus. There is no Jesus, Mia,” says the voice.
“Are you God?”
“You know perfectly well that God’s an illusion of your prefrontal cortex.”
“But who are you then?”
“I’m like you, I have no soul. I am my brain, and my brain’s a labyrinth of synapse and fat.”
For a moment I dare to squeeze open my eyes to two chinks, and in a flood of light I see a clean-shaven, grey-haired man with a round head and glasses that are much too large, the kind that were the fashion in the ’70s. I recognize him; it’s Peter Mansfield, one of the physicists who won the Nobel Prize for developing the technique of MRI scanning. He stands quite close to me in the sand, and the light radiating from him is so strong that it’s as if Heaven itself has opened. I have to squeeze my eyes shut again if I’m not to go blind.
“Now I know that I’m dreaming,” I tell myself aloud.
“Believe what you like,” Mansfield says. “But you should only hold on to your belief if you can prove it. The empirical method’s the only path to truth.”
“What do you want from me? Why have you come here?”
“I’ve come to tell you that you’re blessed by the mercy of science. This is no dream, Mia. It’s a gift of grace; all your sins and all your guilt have been taken from you.”
“But I’ve been deceiving my sick husband. I’m sleeping with his lawyer.”
“You can’t help it. If that’s what you’ve done, it is Nature’s will. You’re nothing more than atoms in motion. Anything you do is merely part of a process that Nature initiated billions of years ago. Every decision you make could have been predicted back then.”
“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.