Then I go back up to the guestroom without a backward glance.
A short while later he’s standing in the doorway.
I hurry over to him, close the door behind him, and kiss him while holding it shut with my foot.
The chair underneath the handle, depress it a couple of times and yes, the chair jams the door fast and then we’re onto the bed. A few minutes; the others outside. Panties off, dress up. Two in the morning and we’re in the toilet together in the rear of some small dark dive. Together in broad daylight behind a hedge at Farum Tennis Club.
We can do anything. Anything, anything, anything. We can start our own family and none of our kids will ever become like the people here. We stand with our beautiful children in our sun-drenched yard in Brede, the lawn sloping gently down toward the woods, the skies stretching wide above us, the inevitability of Nature blessing us.
Someone pulls at the door, but the chair keeps them out. It’s secure. No, it falls, landing with a quick hard bang. The door opens; a face. It shuts again.
“Shit!”
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know!”
“No, no, no!”
Someone’s feet clatter rapidly down the stairs. If Lærke hears about this … My panties on the floor. Bernard’s jacket on a chair.
We rush around the room getting our clothes back on, and as we do we can hear the conversation at the wake stop dead in the living room beneath us.
“Where are you running?” someone asks loudly in the silence. “What’s the matter?”
It remains quiet. Everyone must be looking at whoever’s rushed down the stairs. “There are two upstairs who are running!” a man shouts.
“They’re running?”
“Yes … no. They’re running! Oh … no, no!”
“They’re not running?”
“No.”
“So what are they doing?”
“They’re running! No, no! They aren’t. Running … running. That’s what they’re doing! Oh yes! They’re running! … No, no, they’re not running.”
“Who?” asks another voice.
“I don’t know. I haven’t run them before.”
“You don’t know?”
Someone asks, “Is it Rikke?”
“No, it’s not Rikke. It’s her that’s running and is Rikke, and he’s running Rikke. They’re running together!”
The man’s getting more and more worked up because no one understands him.
“Upstairs! Rikke — running!” he shouts. “No, not running. Not Rikke. They’re running! They’re not running!”
A woman’s gentle voice says, “You end up repeating the words we say, don’t you?”
“Don’t, don’t. I end up repeating them. Don’t. Running. I want to say running. No, not running. Oh, oh. Not running they’re running.”
By now, Bernard and I are out of the guestroom, but soon the man will find his way to the right words. We hear another woman’s voice; it must be his wife.
“We just have to be quiet for a bit. Then he won’t have any words to repeat, and then he’ll find the right words himself.”
And the man yells, “Upstairs they’re repeating! They’re repeating words! Rikke! Oh oh! They’re lying down and repeating words!”
30
It’s been three weeks since Torben’s wake, and I’m starting to think that Frederik might stand a chance in court after all.
The papers say that a jury’s sentenced a father who murdered his two children to psychiatric treatment instead of life in prison. In doing so, the jury went against the recommendation of the Medico-Legal Council. If it can happen to a child-murderer, it can happen to Frederik as well.
Bernard and Frederik have always thought such a verdict possible, and now I’m beginning to think so too. From the police, Bernard’s obtained logs of all Frederik’s phone calls from the past four years. He’s had an assistant enter the numbers and call times into several enormous spreadsheets to demonstrate statistical changes in who Frederik called, when he called them, and how long they spoke. The numbers should provide some objective proof that Frederik became a completely different person during these years, whose telephone habits changed radically.
The preliminary data’s quite reassuring. In the years leading up to his diagnosis, Frederik made a gradually increasing number of calls, but their average length became shorter each year. One interpretation is that he developed a greater need to call and talk to all and sundry — while at the same time his deteriorating sense of situation made people try to get off the phone more quickly when he called.
His circadian rhythms also changed, as well as his inhibitions about when he called. In the last year before his illness was discovered, Frederik ended up calling parents almost forty-five minutes later than in the earlier years. On the other hand, he completely stopped working in his home office and sending e-mails between 6:00 a.m. and when he’d leave for Saxtorph.
Over the course of four years, the mean duration of his calls fell 32 percent. The question is whether the panel of judges can be persuaded that this proves that Frederik wasn’t really himself anymore.
Frederik’s also become deeply involved in preparing the case. He’s bringing the intense energy he once used on stereo speakers — and later his new friends — to bear on the statistical analyses of his own behavior that he conducts with Bernard.
Soon they should also be able to show trends in the proportion of his conversations that were private instead of work-related — and much more. And from his bank statements, the two of them should be able to document changes in his spending habits. For instance, it looks as if his clothing expenditures rose sharply — which could be because he had a harder time resisting impulse purchases, or perhaps because he wanted to dress differently once he started becoming someone else.
Frederik’s been getting so much better. But of course there’s no knowing what he might end up doing when he’s tired or upset. After all, he seemed just fine in the year leading up to his operation.
What would he do for instance if he discovered that his wife and his lawyer were having sex almost every day? Would he show as little compunction in destroying us as he did in destroying Saxtorph’s account balance?
It’s actually somewhat of a miracle that we haven’t been found out already. Seeing Bernard requires so many lies now that the school year’s started again. We can no longer meet in the school break room, and Frederik’s grown very observant about how I spend my time. I act as if I play tennis every afternoon, but what’ll happen if he chances to talk to someone from the club?
My cell’s always on mute, so that no one can hear when I receive a text — since I get so many — and I delete every one, though naturally I’d like to keep them as reminders of my first year with Bernard.
Niklas doesn’t notice anything either. The one I feel is really on my trail is Vibeke. She and Thorkild were visiting last Sunday, and we spent the whole afternoon discussing the phone and credit card analyses. When I told them what Bernard was thinking about the case now, Vibeke looked at me with what I would almost call alarm. It’d take only a few unguarded moments — of not being conscious of my voice and facial expressions while talking about him — for everything to fall apart.
And I have yet another reason to thank Andrea. At Torben’s wake, she figured out what the man with the speech disorder was trying to say, and she ushered him out of the room before he could find the right words.
Now she knows that Bernard and I have something going, and it’s been such a huge relief to share it with someone that I’ve also told Helena.
Neither of my friends has said that Bernard and I are doing anything wrong. They know that we both give our spouses so much more than we get back.