Free You Disappear: A Novel by Christian Jungersen

to a handicapped center? Can a man stand it? Men aren’t the same as we are when it comes to sex.
    Does it really suit him? His firm flesh, his short grey hair. Does he get a kick from having complete control over her? Sexually? Is he some sort of sick bastard?
    His muscles are working beneath the skin of his jaw. A handsome man yet with something wolfish about him—and it isn’t just the well-trained body and the grey hair on such a young man. He hasn’t climbed onto any pyre, that’s for sure.
    A woman at the other end of the table is saying, “Could we go around and each say something about guilt feelings? For instance, I know there’s no way I could have prevented Steffen from having a stroke, but it doesn’t feel that way. Especially when I think about our kids; I ought to have made sure it didn’t happen.”
    Ulla leans over so that her hanging breasts brush against the tabletop. “I feel that way a lot! I ought to have kept their father healthy. It doesn’t make sense.” She glances at Bernard. “And my kids are thirty-eight and thirty-six. What if they still lived at home?”
    Against my will, I find myself getting to my feet.
    “I can’t imagine how you manage it,” I say. “It’s truly impressive. And year after year.”
    I don’t give them time to reply, and I can hear I’m talking too fast. “What all of you put up with is much harder than what I have to. I’m not as strong as you … so maybe it’s me who … I don’t know if I ought to be here, I think I need to leave.”
    I bend down to the table and slide my cup over so that it stands in front of my chair, precisely in the middle, as if I’m tidying up on my way out. Andrea looks up at me with her small pale eyes and says, “But my husband is still himself, Mia. That’s the difference. That’s the huge difference.”
    I manage neither to sit down nor to leave the table.
    She continues, “My husband is still the man I’ve always loved, the same laughter and interests. He just has some problems now. Your situation is much more difficult. It’s totally natural that you think it’s hard!”
    “More difficult? Yes, but when I hear about you … the wheelchair, the two small children!”
    “
Your
husband’s injury makes it so you no longer know who you’re sacrificing yourself for.
That’s
hard!”
    My body got up without my deciding to, and now it’s on its way to the door, about to burst into tears without me having control over anything at all.
    “I think you’re right, Mia,” I hear Bernard say behind me. “You
aren’t
like us. It’s obvious that your husband isn’t nearly as sick as our spouses.”
    Such a weird thing to say.
You aren’t like us
. No one’s told me anything like that since I was a schoolgirl. But now I suppose I should understand the words as something positive. I turn toward him.
    “No I’m not. He’s not so very sick.”
    He gives me a reassuring smile, almost like Frederik or my father-in-law. “But that’s why you might find it interesting to hear about our very different experiences.”
    “Yes,” I say, “I might. And Frederik’s going to get better, of course.”
    “Exactly. He might make a lot of progress in the coming months.”
    I’m trembling, yet when I look at my hand, it isn’t shaking. And I feel something gnaw at me deep inside, far down in my abdomen, just like the cramps that used to plague me as a teenager. I never figured out if it was due to the mechanics of puberty, or to everything from my mother that I had to put up with—or being terribly infatuated with a boy two grades above me.
    At last my body begins to return to my chair. The group waits, considerate and curious, while I seat myself.
    “The first meeting can sometimes be a little overwhelming,” says a woman whose husband used to be a department head in the Ministry of Justice. Earlier she was explaining how he’s been stealing trash and odd items from the neighborhood and putting them into big