Sten’s room was floating at the edges, the floor was rocking and on Sten’s bed lay Toad, waiting. Completely still. All of a sudden, I saw that she was half-naked. A blouse, one of those thin, tight-fitting ones in an angry orange, but no pants, and she was lying on her back with one leg over the edge of the bed. The eyes were completely black in the dark under the sloped roof, and the place between her legs was hidden in shadow. My dick was sore, confined, and needed to be freed from my pants, but I was in Sten’s room, and someone could come in and see us together. Someone could reveal and humiliate me. Nobody stuck it up into the Toad.
“Utzon!”
A hand on my shoulder and darkness around me. The first thing I sensed was the gray square of the living room window in the middle of all the black. I had to touch the rough cushions of the sofa before I realized where I was. That I was lying on the sofa in Anders and Anton’s living room.
“Utzon!”
A pale face hovered over me, and although I knew it had to be Ellen because she’d called me Utzon, I didn’t answer. The terror and bizarre sadness of the dream weighed heavily on me.
“Are you awake, Jacob?”
It felt different when she said my real name. More serious. And now I could see she was fully dressed: long pants and a loose white shirt that made her almost luminescent in the dark. She smelled like nighttime and lilies.
“What’s happening?”
I sat up with the blanket still around me, suddenly embarrassed that I was wearing only underwear. Checkered ones that were a bit too small. My shorts were across the room on the chair. Far beyond my reach.
“I need your help with something,” she said. “It won’t take long, I promise.”
I folded the blanket around my waist, noticing how my stiff cock was trapped embarrassingly in my tight underpants.
“Of course . . . yeah.”
I rooted around for my clothes with my free hand and pulled on my shorts, standing with my back to her. My fingers were weak and clumsy after sleep. I pulled a T-shirt and sweatshirt over my head on my way to the kitchen, and when I’d stuck my feet into Anton’s shoes, she put a hand on my shoulder and opened the door into the summer night.
“What are we doing?”
She threw a quick glance over her shoulder and started walking down the road in bare feet as she shook a little in the cool air.
“I still have some things down there,” she said lowly. “My money and some . . . some personal things.”
I caught up to her in three steps, awaiting further explanation, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more at the moment. The problem had to be the ex-boyfriend. The long-haired hippie. He’d shouted at her and was probably responsible for the bleeding upper lip she’d had that day she’d been thrown out into the yard. I was sure I was taller than him, maybe stronger, too, and the thought of potentially having to fight him made my blood pump hot and fast.
There was something frightening about real fights. The serious ones, where people got beaten up and everything happened so fast. I’d only seen two of that kind in my entire life. One was in the schoolyard between Steffen and Mogens. At first, it had been quite normal. Mogens had said something smart about Steffen’s mother without knowing she’d just died. A mistake that cost Mogens two front teeth and a bent rib. Steffen had kept on beating him, even though he was lying down, the sound of fists on bloody skin ringing loudly. Like when we smacked a wet blob of clay to mold it. And then there’d been when those two guys had stumbled out from a bar in the middle of the afternoon and begun to fight wildly, swinging their arms, until finally an uppercut knocked one backward and he cracked his head on the flagstones.
Neither of those fights resembled the slow, lazy tests of strength that Sten, Jørgen, Flemming and I gave in to, two and two, when boredom got the better of us in the boys’ bathroom. One of us would inevitably be toppled onto his back while the others held his arms and legs tight, every muscle tense with resistance, a few quick jerks to get away and then long, sweaty pauses with heavy breathing and plenty of ridicule. “Wimp,” and “You want your mommy?” and “What are you going to do now, cry?” An oozing blob of spit on the loser’s throat and collarbones to complete the humiliation. Sharp, stinging slaps on the cheek that flared for half an hour.
“Thanks for coming with me.” She smiled, but her attention was somewhere in front of us.
“I’ve always been afraid of the dark—it’s so scary to wake up in the middle of the night,” she said. “It’s always a thought. Do you know what I mean? Whatever you think about at three o’clock in the morning is always terrible.”
I shook my head and threw a stone between a pair of whispering beech trees. Found a stick lying like a thick, black snake in the grass and picked it up. It sat nicely in my hand, and I felt better about everything after hitting the heads of some gray-black thistles in the ditch. A knot of little toads crawled across the road in front of us on their stumpy, thin legs, and we had to step carefully so as not to crush any of them.
Ellen stopped to listen.
“A nightingale,” she said. “Can you hear it? It’s down in the bog.”
We stood still, listening to its soft tones in the dark. I was starting to freeze a little now, as the cold dew settled on my bare arms.
“There,” said Ellen, pointing. “It’s just down there.”
In a hollow in the curve before us, a warm, flaming flicker appeared by the dark trees and the house behind. I knew the place well. The houses in Pinderup stood with their backs to the forest and the stone wall that had once been built in the woods by the neighborhood’s hunched farmers. My father had told me how all the stones in the yard had been plowed from the earth and gathered in piles that grew, year after year, in the damp, overgrown corners of the fields. Then, at some point, the farmers built fences with them so the animals in the common pasture didn’t escape into the woods.
A campfire had been lit in the commune’s neglected front yard. The flames were as tall as a man and smelled of burned rubber because someone had rolled a car tire halfway into the fire, where it glowed and pulsed like slow-flowing lava. As we got closer, I could hear singing and weak audio from a radio or tape recorder. A pair of long shadows danced on the wall of the house.
“Stay here,” said Ellen. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I remained standing in the cover of darkness and a very fragrant elderberry bush, watching Ellen’s slight, fluttering figure disappear around the back of the house. I could see she’d turned the light on inside, but none of the people swaying slowly by the fire reacted. I recognized the boyfriend, Karsten, among the others. He had lost the shirt and was painting wide, dark stripes on his cheeks and down over his bare chest. A cigarette glowed at the corner of his mouth as he hummed and moved around the campfire. He threw his head back in a wild jerk. Behind the fire, I caught a glimpse of a group of young people with beer in hand and a couple of children, around six or seven years old, who sat poking the flames with long sticks as they leaned in, whispering secrets to one another.
The mosquitoes had begun to buzz around me because I was standing so still. One had already settled on my throat, and I slapped it instinctively, although my father always said it was best to let them be. I suddenly had to pee, but Ellen was nowhere to be seen, and someone had turned the music up. The women had begun to dance. They weren’t so young, with sizable tummies and breasts, and danced in short judders as if constantly colliding with something hard, interrupting the movement they had begun. Their long, loose hair fell heavy and glossy around their pale moon faces.
Karsten was gone. Where he’d been dancing, a lanky boy in jeans was dragging a carton of beer through the grass to the group of teenagers. There were screams and shouts, an apelike jungle choir in the velvety-soft air.
Where was she? Uneasy, I looked at the illuminated window, but there was no visible movement there.
“Hey, man!”
I jumped. The music had been so loud that I hadn’t registered anything before someone put a hand on my shoulder.
“Alone in the dark, comrade? Where’d you come from?”
Karsten stood behind me, looking like he was about to keel over; I involuntarily pulled back a little. Not because he seemed threatening—in fact, he was smiling crookedly as he heaved his tight jeans all the way up and zipped them with a firm grip on the waistband. He’d obviously been out to pee. But there was the sharp smell of alcohol and something else about him, stoned and strange. The eyes that both saw me and didn’t. Once you’ve lived with an alcoholic all your life, it’s easy to recognize the signs of an out-of-control stupor.
“What are you hanging out around here for?” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, feeling my face turn red as I looked around for Ellen. She still hadn’t come back.
“Do you want to come sit with us?” He rested a hand on my shoulder again. “Guests are welcome. You don’t get too many of them out here in Boo-country.”
He grinned a little to himself, like he’d said something incredibly funny, grabbed my arm, and pulled me into the flickering light of the fire. The two boys had thrown a plastic tub onto the flames. It melted slowly as black smoke drifted across the ground.
“Ugh!”
He pulled me out of the path of the smoke and sat down on a piece of severed tree trunk that had been placed by the fire.
“Come, sit and relax.” He slapped the space next to him, and I obliged reluctantly. The trunk was damp and slimy under my bare thighs, but I didn’t dare stand back up. I just sat there and watched the others dance across the fire from us.
I recognized a couple of the teenagers from school around the beer carton. They were about four or five years older than me. One of them was the big brother of Anna, a girl in my class. A beefy guy with a bowl cut, fluffy sideburns and tight jeans. I saw the others around regularly, too, in the students’ center and the cafeteria. The girls worked at the nearby retirement home, I guessed. The five who sat there were part of the age group that had been left in the town while the rest went off to Aarhus or Randers or Rønde for high school or business school. And, as though to emphasize that point, Anna’s brother lifted his beer and blew a long, deep note over the neck of the bottle that ended with a thunderstorm of a fart, which caused the entire group to roll around laughing.
They drank like alcoholics.
None of them seemed to have noticed me. Only one little boy watched me long and persistently, the wide, dark eyes in his pale face illuminated by his homemade torch.
“Do you want a smoke?”
Karsten handed me a little packet of hand-rolled cigarettes, long and thin in gray paper, and I accepted without really wanting to. I should have left, but Ellen hadn’t come out yet, and she was why I was there. If it really was that she was afraid to go home alone.
Ellen’s boyfriend had lit a cigarette for himself and apparently sunk into his own train of thought while watching the dancers. We sat there for a while without saying anything. The cigarette tasted sweet and spicy and good because I’d started to freeze in spite of the heat from the fire. The mosquitoes had found me again, too, and I slapped a few on my thighs, fidgeting.
“We’re red,” he said suddenly, pointing at a slightly stocky young man with the tip of his cigarette. “He looks beefy enough to be a communist, doesn’t he? Those round cheeks . . .”
I laughed politely, but it didn’t seem like he’d said it for fun. Or to me, for that matter. He just sat there, stone-faced and staring.
The slightly too-large guy was still dancing with the ladies. His long hair smacked his round face hard, the whites of his eyes were very white and his gaze seemed to have moved on to me. I suddenly felt dizzy. Hovered a little over the rotten trunk I’d been sitting on.
“Is there something wrong with him?” I carefully formulated the words with my lips, but my voice was distorted.
Karsten didn’t answer. He leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. I could smell him very clearly. His hair was so greasy that a cross-parting had materialized, maggot white in the midst of the thick, curly strands. I turned away, forcing myself to look at the guy by the fire again. His pupils had slid up under his eyelids and his mouth was open. He was no longer dancing in time with the drummed rhythm.
“Hey,” I said again. Much louder this time. “Is there something wrong with him?”
The guy by the fire lost his balance, falling forward heavily. Away from the fire and half over one of the younger boys. The boy pulled away quickly, his little face vexed and distorted by pain. He whispered something to his brother, and the two boys disappeared into the darkness.
The man remained outstretched with his face in the wet grass.
The way he was lying there wasn’t right. My father hadn’t acted so strangely even during his worst trips—I wasn’t sure if the guy could breathe. I felt like I was being suffocated myself as I looked on. My mouth was dry, my heart banging against my ribs with its own little hammer.
None of the adults seemed to have noticed the crashing fall. The two women half sat, half lay on a quilt next to the guy. One lit a match, shielded it with her hand and let the other one, the blonde, light her cigarette with the flame. The blonde suckled the cigarette like a baby would its bottle, pouted and blew fancy smoke rings into the summer night.
I got up on unsteady legs and went over to the guy who had fallen. He was still lying motionless with his face to the ground. It wasn’t natural to fall like he had, without defending yourself. I got down on my knees, gently took hold of his shoulder, and pulled him over onto his back. A dark splotch had spread across the front of the tight velvet pants, and he stank of warm piss, but he was breathing deeply through his half-open mouth. He had a homemade ring in his ear, steel wire wrapped around a titmouse feather and stuck through the lobe.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
I turned my head. Karsten was sitting, looking at us with narrowed eyes. I looked around for Ellen again, but something about it was all wrong. There were colors in the dark that I’d never seen before.
“Utzon,” I said, wanting to get up. Wanting to go home.
Just then, I felt a violent pressure on my Adam’s apple. The force of it was so painful and sudden that at first I thought I’d been hit by something. Struck in the throat with a club. But then I was being pulled backward, and I instinctively reached out behind me so as not to overbalance. My hands groped over warm, wet velvet pants and skin. Then the guy moved, toppled backward, and I fell backward, too, and landed on him, still with his hands gripping my throat.
I uttered a kind of muted grunt, but my organs and vocal cords had no air, and the rest of the fight was a silent struggle as I wrestled, trying to loosen his fingers and free myself with wild, directionless blows. He was kneeling behind me, my head in his lap, face over mine and a black, unconscious look. His mouth, still open, was breathing heavily, and a thin thread of saliva hung from it.
Air.
I had to breathe, but there was only that terrible pressure in my chest and his wild, black-as-coal eyes floating just above me.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispered.
“Sorry.”
It hurt to spit out the word, and dark spots formed at the sides of my vision. I slipped into the outer edge of consciousness; sounds washed over me like waves and retreated again.
A shout. Angry voices.
Then I felt a jerk and my head thumped to the ground, making the same sound as falling apples. The grip on my neck was loosened and the pressure in my chest and head stung briefly before subsiding, leaving only a strong throbbing pulse in my temples. I breathed in painful, irregular gasps.
Karsten had grabbed the guy’s shoulders and pulled him away. Shoved him, shouting in his face. “Let go. Let go, dammit.” And behind him, the two women, petrified, hands in front of their mouths. A child screamed.
On the ground, in the wet grass, the guy turned onto his side, curled up and vomited.
“Ugh! Disgusting.” Ellen’s boyfriend looked away.
I was helped up onto my trembling legs and felt an uncomfortable damp spot in my underpants. I didn’t know what to say, so I just took a hesitant step in the direction of the road.
“Hey, you.” Karsten patted me hard on the arms like you do with someone who’s just come up out of ice-cold water. Pat, pat, pat. “He’s just having a bad trip. You don’t look too good yourself. Stay here for a few minutes so you can . . .”
He took a deep breath, spread his arms and exhaled. Smiled encouragingly. Already had a new, sweet-smelling cigarette in his mouth. My heart pounded. My breath was warm and putrid. My throat hurt, too. There was something wrong, something wrong with me, and I had to get away now. I staggered in the direction of the road and began to walk. One foot rambling in front of the other.
She caught up to me in the dark and hugged me hard.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. He’s really crazy.”
Cool fingertips over my face.
“Sorry, Utzon. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
I almost lost my balance and reached out for her. My hands brushed the fabric over her breasts, and for a short, quivering moment, she stiffened and stood leaning against me. As if she was waiting for something. My thumb slipped over her nipple. Again.
Then she uncoiled herself, took my hand and pulled me on.