You Disappear: A Novel by Christian Jungersen

their prognoses, but nobody can say. So I listen to their tone when they speak. How long do they pause before answering? How often do they clear their throats? I read everything as an omen.
    A lot of other people call too, offering help and support. They say,
Normally, I wouldn’t ring up the headmaster of my child’s school, but it’s different with Frederik
. In the end, Laust has to send an e-mail to “Friends of Saxtorph”: please do not call or bring any more gifts.
    In the evenings it’s me who talks and talks, and just like Frederik it’s always about the same thing, only my audience isn’t him. I call my friends and describe the mountains in Majorca and how dangerously he drove; the three lovely years we had; what the doctors said today. And Niklas, who’s out with his friends every night. My rasping monotone lament becomes an evil twin of the voice that’s laid siege to our house.
    Laust doesn’t visit us anymore, since Frederik is still furious with him. But he listens to me over the phone, asking how he can best support us, and he never whines about how the rest of the administration has to work overtime. And he often calls with questions about the school, just like before Frederik got sick, only now it’s me he rings up. In the beginning, we worked out complicated strategies to worm the answers out of Frederik, but we quickly discovered that it wasn’t necessary.
    I can just ask, without prelude, “Frederik, the last letters from the lessee of the school cafeteria are missing from the file with the other letters. Where might they be?”
    He’s unable to imagine that other people’s words are the calculated product of thoughts and feelings, so he doesn’t worry about motives, he just answers. “They’re in a folder beneath the file with our cleaning agreements. I’m planning to use them when I draw up a new contract with the cleaning firm.”
    “Aha, so that’s where they are. And something else I was wondering: What did you decide at the meeting you had in September with Fatima from the after-school club?”
    On top of everything else, there are all the public offices to get through to on the telephone, the government forms and insurance forms to fill out, and the confusing bills that Frederik used to pay. By the time I lie down it’s late. Now I have to try to relax and go to sleep with a man who snores differently, smells different, and twitches in his sleep in an unfamiliar fashion. I may as well be sharing our queen-size bed with some burglar.
    Will we ever be able to make love again? When he lies there pestering me for sex, I turn my back on him, squeeze my thick pillow between my breasts, and use my legs to push him away.
    And then one night I decide he’s got a point. We’re still man and wife, after all. Why keep insisting that he stay on his half of the bed? We both want the same thing, and he’s been a stranger now for five weeks.
    Besides, night after night when I’m half asleep under the comforter, I’ve been entertaining a fantasy about making him well again. I know it’ll never happen, but I’m seized by the notion of it all being some misunderstanding. Something in me says that there’s no tumor, that he’ll return to normal if I just let him have sex with me. That the last five weeks have been nothing more than a test of my love for him, and in a short while he’ll become himself again if I only let him.
    So one night I consent, and seconds later he’s on top of me, frenetically trying to grind away. There’s nothing erotic or loving about it; for him I’m not really a person, that’s abominably clear. Some creature is pawing at me and attempting to mount me, some creature without age or face, eyes or voice.
    I try to instruct him in what I like, in what we used to do. He hears me but keeps going, heedless. His rough snorting in my ear, his clumsy hands; a dog that only wants to hump. His cock bangs against me without him seeming to realize that I’m straining