But then all of a sudden it makes sense, all of a sudden that’s the only thing there is: difference. That surprising leap, no matter the body, no matter the place, simply a feeling of this being: fatal. A span between breathing and drawing a face in charcoal. Shading the areas where the light doesn’t fall. A vegetable garden, the planning of it, a face, planning that, and watching both grow from out of your hands, outgrowing you. Writing some words down on paper and hoping they keep that tension inside. A gluttony, imperceptibly becoming necessary.
She is not breathing.
So she is no longer in that spiteful mood of emptying. When all you do is get angry and hollow.
So maybe you can keep yourself together after all.
So maybe you can exist a bit longer, or not a second more.
That kind of leap, that kind of balancing on tall, narrow walls between city courtyards, on the dykes facing the sea, she thinks to herself, that kind. And: that’s how it has to be; a real body, writing, everything else an insult, and imagining anything else as purer than is pretense. Thought. Whiter. Purer. More important. Choices like that don’t exist: between one thing and another. She’s not sure what she wants to be; and the worst part is she still hasn’t the slightest doubt that she would be easier to love. That way.
Without her self.
Purer, more pure, more: woman. More person, or just more an actual person. A white, West-European man, maybe even she could be, only as a woman, of course, not quite as valuable on paper, but worth a bit more in the belt. That would be where she could hang. First on her mother’s skirts, later on a man’s belt, a dangling head with empty lips, red eyes; take what you want, here’s person enough.
YOU’RE HOLDING SOMEONE’S hand, she says.
Silence then, on the other end of the phone. It’s as if the room closes in on her, she can feel it, a room whose walls are wool, shrinking as it starts to rain, and the rain is boiling water.
Do you know your voice is different when you’re in Sweden, she asks him.
No, I don’t.
She walked late through the city, along Søndergade, Bruunsgade, past Ingerslevs Boulevard and on up to Marselis Boulevard. Semi-trucks thundering along the roads; she has the feeling she needs to lift her skirt as she crosses Marselis Boulevard. Relentless traffic, a river that can only be crossed in that way. She’s been looking forward to their talk, or has thought about it, pushing it ahead of her like a heavy cart.
I miss you being here, she says, and plugs a charger into the phone. She wishes she was lying. But when she says it, it’s real. And there she is, tethered to the wall, that cable.
Come back.
Come back, I need you, she says, and that too becomes real. That too is real. Like it’s real that she will forget him every day, as she has already forgotten him. He is inside her, no matter how far away he travels on her money, his own; that’s how it is. Can you miss something that’s in the flesh. Maybe you can, she thinks. Or else it’s meaningless to talk about missing or not missing, maybe it’s more a question of wanting home. Whatever it is; the look in his eyes, mostly, his eyes on her, evoked in that way, in his eyes.
That’s how she thinks about it.
Is that a problem, she asks herself. With all that delay, all that displacement. Out of body and back again, the look of an eye, the sewing together of two who are dead. So that the heart may nonetheless pump sufficient blood; and then again the image of a beech tree, drawing water ten meters into the air, upward into a lush green crown that cannot keep itself together and yet defies all guidelines as to what colors actually are, what you can expect for your money, your blue eyes. She is not with him yet; she is alone, walking beneath the lilacs, on the path toward the church. She sits down there and is seven years old, eight perhaps. Toes cold, as toes always are cold in churches, the way you can always find someone to grieve for. The dead, or those who survive them. The dolmen in the field, a plough edging ever closer, ten centimeters a year. Yet still it is there, and snow may fall. You think about all those years, and then that snow rumbles in, leaving the face of the landscape immaculate. A face seen for the first time. This is what snow does. On top of everything living, everything dead.
He sighs, and says: I’m tired.
She nods, and stares out the window. In the building opposite, the lights are turned off in two different apartments simultaneously. It’s like the building is given a face. As if a face can ever be symmetrical. She has a tooth missing on the left side of her jaw; it never came out, all that appeared was an angular gap. Her nostrils, too, are different. A conception of symmetry where there is none; an eye, drooping; your eye, drooping as you drink. Terrible, crooked faces: all there is.
She exhales against the pane, as if the night could be expelled, as if the night could be extinguished.
Are you there.
Yes, she answers. I’m still here.
Do you miss Agri, her mother asks her one day; she is seven years old and they are on holiday. Captured on film. You see the child’s face change: yes, she says, her face a moon of pale bread. On someone’s tongue, a wafer dissolving, someone else’s body, someone else’s notion of homesickness slowly absorbing into the body.
Yes, she said.
What do you miss about Agri, the woman with the camera asks.
The answer never really comes. Everything, she says. By then the camera had been switched off.
THEY ARE SPLITTING the bill at the restaurant when her friend asks her who she grew up with.
No one, she says.
It hangs in the air; they laugh.
That’s why, she thinks. I never grew up with anyone.
Her friend’s eyes gleam with something that looks like sympathy, but is something else instead: recognition. When something alien is no longer alien, because it is voiced, that’s when you understand. The coming home in that, laid bare in the world together.
HE IS STRONG, and she wishes they were more like each other. Something other than always the opposite—the reverse. But then: that’s not how I see it at all. They’re waiting for word, her mother is sick. There’s been a long break, and she can hardly remember him. Always these breaks, crushed pearls in between, well, other crushed pearls, broken teeth. My dead man, she whispers. That’s what she calls him now. That’s what he is, even though he’s standing right there. Picking his clothes up off the floor; they are exactly as he left them, as if the trousers still contained his legs, as if putting on clothes becomes more difficult by the day, having to share the space inside them with himself, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Clothes too tight, so much body having gone before.
He doesn’t hear.
She is envious of him; his strength, if only she had his strength, dogged to the point of trembling, and always tired.
At the same time, it frightens the life out of her.
That kind of strength. Arbitrary. It’s there, and then it isn’t. She thinks: it’s like his strength isn’t his own. It comes, and may leave him, without predictability, without any rhythm besides: utterly rampant. His strength comes with anger, it assails and consumes him. Besides that—the X-rays show nothing. Strength as a tumor, a shadow, with arteries and veins, issuing out into the body and leaving again, leaving him behind. Looked at in any other way, it has nothing to do with strength at all. She just wants the same option of staying. Remaining in one place.
You always had to smoke.
I