The residential neighborhood seemed faded and lifeless as I cycled my Raleigh Grand Prix over the potholed roads.
It was late in the afternoon, so nobody was in the gardens, the sandboxes were covered with boards and wire netting and the garden tools had been put away in empty garages, but our own house was alive in the midst of all the death. It pulsed and growled weakly in the silence between birch and fruit trees. All the windows were open, as though my father was trying to air out evil spirits. The long branches of the weeping birch whispered over the ground in the cool wind.
I’d hoped he wouldn’t be home, but where else would he be? I just had to bank on him being so deaf and blind from drink that I could sneak in unnoticed and get what I needed. But something made me hesitate.
I remained standing on the sidewalk, wavering indecisively in my rubber boots before finally getting it together. I took a deep breath and exhaled between my teeth, like we’d learned to do in soccer before a game. I carefully took hold of the door handle, which wasn’t locked. The hallway was painted a warm chocolate brown, and mom’s Bjørn Wiinblad poster, which had been relegated from the living room because Dad hated “the colored border,” was still on the wall. All the familiar smells, mixed with something wild and strange. Turpentine and spirits, and under all that, a presence of compost and rot. Someone had hauled a wide track of muddy boots over the new, light-gray carpet.
“Dad?”
I didn’t know why I’d called him, or why I’d whispered. The kitchen table was covered in unwashed dishes of dried leftover food. Half potatoes, brown and hard. Congealed sauce. Stewed strawberries in a solid border of dark-yellow milk. Pots with gray, cloudy water stacked in the sink. Through the closed door to the living room, I could hear a stream of curses. “Damn” and “hell” and “the hell I will.” Like a badly tuned radio broadcast from a dark, sad place. The scratch of glass over the coffee table’s red tiles.
I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs. I had some extra equipment for my bike in my room, new brake pads. And there were other things I might need. Socks, and underpants and an extra pair of long pants. It had grown cooler, and I’d put it off for far too long. I put my foot on the first step at the exact same time the living room door opened and a heavy man came out into the hallway.
“Are you not coming in to say hello to your father?”
I knew this man well. The hot temper, the blotchy red cheeks and the eyes almost hidden under swollen eyelids that made him look like he’d just been crying. I’d seen him a number of times before. Mathisen. When the weather was good, he sat at the entrance to the Hansen’s Drugstore warehouse, drinking beer. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others in a similar state.
“No.” I hesitated but continued past Mathisen.
“You could go to the drugstore, too,” he said, rummaging in his back pocket. The worn velvet trousers were needfully attached to his waist with a tight belt. A heavy, formless paunch hung out over his pants like a strange body part that didn’t fit the thin arms and legs.
I pretended not to see his outstretched hand with a curly fifty-kroner note. My dad had woken up in the living room, was rummaging with something.
“Jacob!”
I inhaled deeply and looked inside. The long, orange curtains were drawn, and the air was foggy with smoke, and sweat and beer, plus something stronger—whiskey maybe, or schnapps. My father’s indistinct form sat on the modular sofa. When he saw me, he straightened up so suddenly that he almost overbalanced off the sofa and sat there for a moment, swaying. He had a half-smoked cigarette resting between his middle and forefinger, the ash almost as long as the remaining butt.
“It’s so good that you came, Jacob,” he said. “I have guests, and we’re running out of . . .”
He gestured toward the many empty bottles on the coffee table. White ash from his cigarette sprinkled like snow through the dense smoke.
“I’m not staying,” I said. “But I can see you’re coping well.”
He grinned and shrugged.
“Things are fine, Jacob. As you can see. I’m in good company.”
Mathisen, who had sunk down into an armchair, was glaring at me with glassy, gray-shadowed eyes. Lost to the outside world. I stepped backward, crunched glass under my sneakers and heard my dad mumble something, then reach out for the radio on the windowsill, where he turned the dial. He landed on a crackly, static version of “Mandalay,” the slow one with Mogens Wieth. He liked that song, always had, but loathed the Four Jacks’ vulgar rendition of its melancholic sound, a subject on which he always lectured me. A crime against art.
“I’m going,” I said.
He nodded without looking at me, lost in the song and the smoke still coiling from his cigarette up to the ceiling.
“Go, just like your mother,” he said, smiling venomously. “I’ll just say, it’s good to have my friends. They don’t leave me. Otherwise I’d have been finished when you left, Jacob. People can actually die from it, you know.”
His brand-new friend Mathisen exposed his yellow teeth in a broad smile, nodding facetiously.
“But one thing before you go.”
I remained standing in the doorway. When he was in this mood, he never said anything nice. It was always so-called truth about either me or my mom. And it always hurt. But I couldn’t tear myself away and leave.
“Ask Anton why he locked Anders in all those years.” Dad lifted his eyebrows lightly, dropping ash beside the ashtray on the coffee table, and smiled at the sofa’s armrest. I turned and left.
“Remember to ask him, now!” he shouted. “Not everyone benefits from living as free as a bird.”
I later found Anders behind the chickens with Ellen, shoveling crushed beach shells into the feeders. He threw a shovelful over the back of the aggressive gobbler, then mimicked its alcohol-red wattle.
Ellen had bound a red scarf around her head, almost like a turban, and her lips glistened in the same color. Her clothes were new, too, less hippie: a soft white shirt and light-blue elephant pants. She’d been gone all day, as far as I knew, and must’ve taken the train to Aarhus early that morning. She laughed.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
She sniffed and gave me a quick look.
“Where have you been, Utzon? You smell like a bar. Your friend has asked for you. More than once. But he didn’t want to wait inside. He’s over there.”
She nodded toward the hedge out by the road, and I could see Sten’s figure flickering among the leaves.
He was watching us. Ellen, Anders and me. His legs and the rest of his body seemed strangely stiff. His face was backlit, his eyes nothing but shadows under the short hair. It was impossible to say how long he’d been in that spot, but I had a sudden, troubling feeling that he’d seen everything and for some reason he didn’t like it. Any of it. I didn’t want to talk to him.
I breathed in her spicy scent of chamomile and Lux hand soap, and something stronger underneath that I had the wild, irrational urge to taste.
“I saw him early this morning, too,” she said.
I nodded and waved to Sten, who bent over and picked up his bike from the ditch, characteristically nodding his head, which signaled for me to follow.
We walked slowly, side by side along the narrow dirt track down toward Bønbækken. Green corn plants towered on both sides, unripe husks with silky soft brown hair that was lifted by the wind. Cornfields were rare and adventure-like. You could hide between the rows of stiff, whispering plants and play tag. Last year, Sten, Flemming and I had chased each other with homemade bows made out of too-thin and flexible branches. The arrows were crooked bamboo sticks chopped from the bushes in Flemming’s mom’s backyard, sharpened with my scout’s dagger. The only bull’s-eye shot was when Flemming fell and I put my foot on his back so I could fire an arrow into his ass. But that was a long time ago. Today, everything seemed gray and sallow in the pale sun.
“What is it?”
Sten’s throat, hands and forearms were red and scaly from a rash I hadn’t noticed before. There were sores on his knees that he picked at while looking around at everything but me.
“This is because I can’t sleep at night. Not a wink.” He gave me a sidelong glance, as though he was afraid I’d laugh at him.
“What do you mean?”
Another look of uncertainty. “Well, I close my eyes like I usually do. But it’s like they’re still working in there. I can see my own eyelids and everything. And the darkness. I don’t fall asleep anymore. I’m completely . . .”
He held his head with his torn red hands, and there were tears now. He cried with a hoarse, whining sound while he rocked his hands and head. For the first time, I wondered if people could die of sadness. Or confusion, whatever it was Sten had been attacked by. It seemed like he was going crazy, and I had no idea what to do.
“What about your mom?” I said carefully. “Or your dad? Can they help somehow? Maybe you can get some sleeping pills or something.”
He shook his head, sniffed loudly and tried to pull himself together.
“Why did she do that?” he said. “Why did she have to go out like that? In that skirt. Why do I have to cope with everything alone now?”
“Sten, that . . . No one is saying you have to.”
He looked at me, ugly, his eyes swimming.
“Yeah,” he said briefly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “I have to do it myself.”
“What?”
There was a drizzle on the wind now, and nowhere we could really take shelter. I settled for digging my hands into my pockets and letting the rain come.
“You know what I think, Sten?”
He shook his head. Looked like a thin baby bird with his damp hair in sticky tufts on his forehead.
“I think we need to have some fun.”