Justine (2 page)

I inherited his burned house. He wanted it that way.

“It's mine,” he said. “Hell, I built it. And now it's yours. Basta. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that it's worth millions out here, but you just go on and try to sell it, my girl. You just dare to.”

He died and it still isn't right. Not on the inside.

Grandpa built the house for Grandma. They had a little apartment in the city and needed some fresh air. All the Amager Allotment Society had was a tool shed. Grandpa worked the earth. Good, slow vegetables, he said. Healthy. And free.

He got the land right before the war, but he only built the house after the war was over. A wooden house. Forty square meters. With mullion windows and a blue door. Ample, he said, big enough. When Grandma died, he moved out there, and after he had emptied the house, he converted the place to a studio. All the furniture and miscellany disappeared. Paintings and siccative and French turpentine moved in.

I did the extension myself. After he died. Now he's died all over again. The extension became a workshop, which ate up a good part of the garden, though he would've been fine with that. He would've had a good laugh if he'd known just how much being insured meant. After all, it's just clean air and a good idea some suit dreamed up, just a swindle, what a humbug, he'd say. You're responsible for what's yours. Why invest in misfortune? No. You've got to be careful with fire, that confounded woodeater.

I know it. A bitter experience dripping with syrup. If the house burns, you can always build a new one, right, Grandpa? It's not the easiest thing in the world, and certainly not the cheapest, but in any case you can get it done. That's how you'd look at it. “Don't come here blabbing about money,” you would've said. You'd do it yourself for nothing, your muscles all supple, just nail some boards and go to town on the rest, and saw, hammer.

S
he's such an ass. No. Not an ass. She's the hole. The asshole. No, that's way too kind. A shit. The shit that comes from the asshole, that's her. Schluck, she hits the floor, splat, and, god, what a stench.

Maybe she's back now? She's obviously been at work in the herb garden. There are the tools leaned up against the side of the house. The straw hat hangs provocatively on the pitchfork and wants to lift off in the breeze, but it's still here. Vita really is no place at all.

She lives in the Society's sole brick house and that amuses her. To be suburban amid sub-urbanites.

I piss on the potatoes outside the bedroom window. That'll make them stink.

She hasn't put the extra key back in its usual place beneath the pot on the steps. I'll check again. Nope. She'd already removed the key the day after we quit. She said that's what happens when someone splits up. What a shitty thing to say.

“We're not splitting up,” I said. “When you split up, it's much more official.”

At that point she took the key.

“Is that official enough for you?” she asked.

One might've expected her to make an exception in this type of situation. Nope. Her key is still in my pocket, and there's also one to Ane's studio. They jingle.

I look through the kitchen window at a box on the kitchen counter. Green tops stick out. It's Thursday and she's obviously not
been digging in the garden. Today she's at the studio minding the sensitive casting process, as she calls it. Anything can go wrong at this point. Vita is a sculptor. With a large sculpture at the Kastrup Airport outside terminal three. She entices everyone. She rolls out distance like a carpet that can't be stepped on.

A
ne doesn't answer. I let it ring a time or two. She said that I should just let it ring. If that doesn't work, I should call again, because now that she's nursing she can't always reach the phone. She sets it down in various places. That's mommy brain for you, she says. C'mon. Pick up. Now she's picking up. Nope. That was just the answering machine. Now she's picking up.

She's spent the day with the baby, who got through an entire feeding without any problems, she says. Now he's down for a nap. I tell her I'm in the city nearby. I don't mention the fire.

At the door she already notices my hands.

“Oh no,” she says. “You've burned yourself.”

She's been waiting for tragedy to rain down like fire, and now it's happened.

“I can't help it,” she says. “All I really want is for you to have a chance at a normal life. Why did something like this happen to you? Honestly, Justine. Can it get any worse?”

Now we're in the kitchen of her apartment. The baby is awake and on its stomach across her arm, she rocks it soundly up and down.

“I just don't get it,” she says. “It's just too disturbing. Let me see your hands. They're completely burned. Who wrapped them? Don't you think you should have someone look at them?”

It's not all that bad. In some ways, it's actually quite wonderful that my hands hurt.

“Could someone have done it on purpose?” she asks.

The baby closes his eyes. I shouldn't have come here. I knew that beforehand, and now Ane tells me that Torben is on his way home. He had a gallery meeting.

“I mean it,” she says. “You can stay at The Factory for a couple of days until you find some other place. There's a kitchen in the hall where you can cook.”

“Star-crossed love is a costly thing,” I say. “She disappears, before long she's completely white.”

“That's a strange thing to say. Why did you say that? Did something happen with Vita?” she asks, putting a hand to my cheek.

I'm not a little child. Take that hand away, no, leave it there.

Ane disappears into the bedroom with the baby. She peppers me with questions while I sit in the kitchen waiting on answers, on her, on an exit.

“Thanks for not asking if you can live here,” she says, handing me a sleeping bag.

It's Torben's.

“You can have it. He won't need it anymore. After all, he's a father now.”

T
he Factory is still deserted. I'm a small body in a large building. My hands are unwrapped now. I thought it was worse. These are just beer-filled blisters.

I light a candle and lie down. Now I'm lying and falling, touching upon dream, reality, dream, reality. What's the difference? It's dark. Am I asleep?

There's Grandpa's house in flames again anyway. And here I come dancing along the rooftop, devouring red wood, licking the paint off with a bubbling tongue, window panes shatter. And now I hear it. Yes. It's really there. An itty bitty voice. I press my ear to the wall. It's just the flames' crackling, rather like suppressed laughter. Justi-hi-hi-hi-hi. Ouch. It's growing hot. It bites my flesh, I turn and run and run and of course don't get anywhere. So, it's a dream then.

Now I wake with my eyes. Light. Am I really awake? Oh; one of the candles has tipped over next to my head. Is it burning? The flame plays with paper sucks in wax, Torben's sleeping bag crackles. Holding the pillow before my face, I slap at the flames with a cushion. Black becomes gray, and now it's turning blue outside.

B
ehind a wooden board in the hall are several large photographs. A girl I don't know well, her name is Helene, has taken some self-portraits. She's a painter. In these pictures, though, she's obviously the photographer. Anyway, she's the one in front of the mirror. She's in her underwear. One hand holds out the camera that's taking the pictures. The flash is a white sun burning a hole through her body. She's unconcerned, her face beams. There are quite a few photos, a whole series of them, and in each one Helene is thinner. The bright eyes disappear in picture No. 7. She's standing in front of the mirror and looking at herself in obvious disbelief. In No. 12 and No. 13 she's holding a piece of paper with a date on it. No. 14 was taken on May 4, 1998. Here a sallow-skinned Helene leans against the wall inspecting a rump that's no longer a rump. Then comes the last picture, which was taken nearly six months later. Here Helene is different. She's in the same pose on skinny legs beneath an enormous body that hangs over the waistband of her panties like over-risen dough. She's smiling. A terrible smile. That smile gives me a bad feeling inside.

I let go; the pictures smack against the wall. That smile's a state on the brink.

And horribly, it reminds me of something else, Eske from the academy of arts, the guy with the depressed dad. His dad isn't all there, he calls Eske at home and leaves messages on his answering machine. Every single day. When the answering machine picks up, he describes how he'll take his own life. He's come up with any number of ways to do it. He'll hang himself from a tree. He'll eat caustic soda. He'll go straight out into the water and drown himself. Farewell.

Eske had an exhibit for a time with a white box you could crawl into. When you were all the way inside, you could press play on the answering machine and listen to his father's messages. “I'm going to do it. I'm really going to do it . . .”

I've been in that white space.

“I'll do it soon. I'll take my belt. The narrow leather one. I'll fix it right up for you all.”

A
ne and her paintings fill the space. My person is broken down to small fragments, flitting around, colliding with everything that isn't me, but rather her, and coalescing into a body. Finger. Print. That's always the gist of us, right?

One of Ane's paintings is a paisley landscape without up and down, near and far, or horizon. She's made a rip in which the colors blend in spirals inside the brain's winding coils, and amid a flock reminiscent of thought, an underwater life of seaweed. Fish with bird heads, birds sporting arms, little girls with bare breasts and rough hands, boys without legs, some laughing, some bleeding. Three girls in French braids display their buttocks, spreading their cheeks to show their deep assholes. A boy combs a longhaired cat, and in the midst of it all a dog-ape hybrid is shaving its legs.

I say it now: I think I'm some other. Or how should I put it? I've become some other. That other hasn't become me, though. She didn't exist before the fire. Or did she? She's a new condition. At once definitive and boundless. I have no clue where we're off to now.

To the bathroom, where all is gray, and I inspect her in the mirror. She looks like me. She holds the large scissors in her hand lifts a hunk of hair. It's my fingers that are chopping, my hair's a hunk that falls. I've kept my hair this long always it's lived a slow life together with me headed down toward the ground, ready to take root below. I cut again, graying the water, I keep cutting until I've come full-circle. The exact same woman in the mirror has an uneven pageboy. We're different. And now what we want is to fuck, not cut. The place is deserted.

H
e approaches from the front, a young man, well, a big boy really, with a smile on his open face. He approaches me and angles his head back so he won't get cigarette smoke in his eyes. Then he places the hot water kettle and cups on the table and extends his hand through the barrier of air. With a squeeze he says:

“Bo.”

Now he removes the cigarette from his mouth. His hair springs in large curls away from his head. He's sunburnt with eyes that are white in the white.

“You're the one who made that video of the woman doing the drum dance, right?” he asks.

He rummages about, not just with his hand, but with his whole arm, no, with his whole body in my space.

“I don't think so. I'm some other.”

“Some other? How can you be some other? Other than who?”

“Than myself.”

“I'm pretty sure it was you, and . . .”

“I don't think so.”

At this point, I've turned around and left, because he can't help it, after all, he's just that open, pure and simple. But he's unconcerned and on my heels, I can hear him, now he's reached the door, he collides with it, uses a hip to push it open and enters the workshop balancing two cups, “coffee,” he says. His voice is so wry and he's asked for it now.

“Do you live out here?” he asks.

The coffee makes a thin stripe down his hand and there's a nimbus around him. Youth, I think, and inhale, a distinctive odor, sharp and dry.