He fantasizes about the Soviet Union when he’s alone. His index finger skims over the pages of the atlas, all the way from Kaliningrad in the west to the Diomede Islands in the east. Ten thousand kilometers and eleven time zones he crosses. His finger tingling with the thrill of it.
Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, the Ural Mountains, the tundra, the Arctic Ocean, unfinished Soviet bunkers, the Siberian forest, limestone caves.
He likes being alone. He likes to imagine he was switched at birth, that he was cheated out of an eighties childhood in Soviet concrete, that he was placed in Southern Jutland by mistake, that they’re still waiting for him over there.
He cuts the Soviet Union out of the atlas. A vast piece of paper. He lays it over the other parts of the world. It covers the whole of the North American continent.
He reads about Glasnost and Perestroika, Gorbachev’s opening of the union, the communists’ loss of control, the secession and reclaimed independence of the small Soviet republics.
He throws a theme party and paints Gorbachev’s birthmark on his forehead with lipstick. His guests don’t dress up. They come in their regular clothes and say: That wasn’t a joke?
Denmark continues to disappoint him. It’s too slovenly and flat, what’s going on here. There’s nothing binding us together anymore, he says.
He meets Tom from Estonia at a dark club in Aarhus.
The dress code is masculine, or skivvies.
They dance until it’s light out, and then they walk down to the water. Tom could use some time to talk. He talks about Estonia, about his house in the forest by the Russian border, about Lake Peipus, which divides the two countries, about his silent family, about the cowherd Pille and her brother Priit with his crooked body.
One story leads to another.
Tom has large hands.
They eat mushrooms and talk about concrete buildings as they look out over the water, as their shoulders touch. They see many colors. They listen to eighties pop and make cabbage rolls. They fall in love. They start dating, and then they stop. They become good friends.
Tom goes back to Estonia.
His friends get married and have children and move to the suburbs. He’s welcome to visit them, of course. Whenever he likes.
But it’s just not the same. There are new rituals on the suburban streets. No more long nights with beers and Jäger bombs and we’ll-make-a-fucking-day-of-it attitudes. Now the children come first, and putting them to bed takes a long time.
He feels forgotten when they put the children to bed. He sits on their leather furniture as the light disappears.
His friends give him a knitted doll as a gift for his thirtieth. The doll is human-sized and it’s called “O. Pussyman.” It’s made of white yarn and has a surprised expression embroidered on its face, as if it’s always saying: Oh, did you just get here?
He joins a gym. He grows a reddish beard. He looks for men to fall in love with, but the stories from Estonia keep buzzing around his skull like a housefly against a windowpane.
He makes a list of pros and cons. The pros pile up.
He packs up his apartment and sends the boxes to Estonia by boat. He is thirty-six years old.
He discovers a blue mark on his hip. He doesn’t recall walking into anything. He gets on the plane.
The stewardess’s makeup is a mask.
The light is sharp over the clouds, the morning sun coming in from the east.
He tears open the bag of peanuts, and a small explosion of salted nuts falls to the floor. He bends down. The pilot says it’s a beautiful morning. The arrows pointing toward the emergency exits dazzle him.
He lands in Tallinn with blue marks all over his body.
His arms are purple. His tongue worries at an open wound in his palate. Something is happening quickly. He waits for his luggage by the conveyor belt. He finds a hospital made of concrete.
Stem cells are the mother of all blood cells.
Stem cells are made in the bone marrow.
He calls me and says: Sit down, I have some bad news. I’m lying in a hospital in Tallinn. Top floor. There’s a view of the forest. My bone marrow has stopped working. It’s turned to fat. It’s basically shit. They call it aplastic anemia. Only one in a million gets this diagnosis. I am the chosen one.
I say nothing. The silence has its dissonance.
I clear my throat.
He says: If you google my diagnosis, I don’t want to know what you find. I’m going to survive, just so that’s perfectly clear. I’m being flown to Denmark tomorrow. Maybe you could meet me at Rigshospitalet?
With that he ends the conversation.
I’m lying on the couch under the blue blanket. It’s fall. It’s Wednesday. I’ve just turned on the heat. There’s mold on the east-facing wall, like a gray shadow. It’s worse in winter. In summer the windows can stay open all the time. Mold has to be aired out.
I google his diagnosis: Aplastic anemia. Bone marrow failure. Most die of invasive fungal infections and bacterial sepsis.
Bone marrow looks like burgundy curtains. The picture was taken through a microscope.
My phone’s battery dies.
I sit up. The living room feels deserted. The dining table and the three plastic stacking chairs, the row of books on the windowsill, the outermost book turned over and pointing at the plant that stubbornly insists on living despite rarely being watered.
The bowl on the floor with yesterday’s oatmeal.
*
He lands on Rigshospitalet’s roof by helicopter. I meet him in a beige hallway. We smile at each other. It’s Thursday. I’ve taken the day off. The orderly pushing the stretcher has bad breath. We follow a dull line on the floor. We pull cords to make the doors open. We pass feeding tubes, oxygen tanks on wheels, next of kin, municipal art, metal carts with steaming food, exhaustion, buttoned-up white coats.
We end at hematology. This is where he gets his room. This is where he gets a clean hospital gown.
“If you pull on the red cord, we’ll come immediately,” the nurse says, “if you pull it twice, we’ll come even faster. That’s an emergency call. Then we know it’s really hit the fan.”
My sick friend won’t necessarily die. That’s what the doctor says. He stands there with the blood count report in his hands, laying out his plan:
There are different possibilities for treatment. You can reboot bone marrow with a serum from a horse, and if that doesn’t work you can try a serum from rabbits, and if that doesn’t work you can find a bone-marrow donor.
He shows us a schedule, a treatment algorithm that eventually runs out of possibilities.
He’s got a friendly face. You can clearly see what he looked like as a child. How he stood in the corner of the schoolyard, awaiting adulthood with pleasure.
“There’s going to be a waiting period, there are going to be fever days. You’re a rare case.”
He talks with his hands stretched out in front of his body, as if he’s conducting a symphony orchestra. An overture by Prokofiev.
“You have a strong heart,” he says.
We’re standing, exhausted, in a half circle at the end of his bed.
We’re eating the packed lunches his mother made: greasy rye bread and sausage sandwiches, southern-Jutland style.
My sick friend eats nothing. He says: Where are the pancakes? This is a really shit hotel.
*
The horse comes into the room as a clear liquid in transparent bags. The bags hang from the IV pole, and the liquid drips into his veins as we watch Game of Thrones. It takes five days. He takes off his jeans.
“Look at my purple bastards,” he says, pointing to his blotchy legs.
The immune system is the body’s response to foreign organisms. It consists of millions of white blood cells, each of which recognizes a specific type of unwelcome cell. The immune system is a well-trained army.
My sick friend has no immune system—the doctors are attempting to build their own army with antibiotics, but they can’t defend against every attack.
He’s in isolation. I’m welcome to visit him as long as I’m healthy, as long as I sanitize my hands before I approach the bed, as long as I sanitize my hands before I leave the room again. I mustn’t infect him, and I mustn’t take his bacteria with me into the hall and infect the other patients in the unit; they don’t have immune systems either. It’s best if I don’t go in and out much. It’s best if I stay in the room. I can, for instance, wear protective clothing.
I grow into the chair beside his bed. It’s nice here on the leather. Club-thoughts turn into cock-sweat here.
Over his bed is a hood inside of which an extractor filters fungal spores, bacteria, and viruses out of the air.
He doesn’t want to wear hospital clothes. He sits on the bed in his jeans and a gray t-shirt. He looks like his usual self, except for the purple arms. The hours in the gym show in his swollen chest, the strong arms with thick veins just below the skin, the sharp face. The bright mane. He looks good.
He explains, in gratuitous detail, the contents of the bags that hang from the IV pole by the side of his bed: thrombocytes, ciproxin, diflucan, aciclodan, blood. This liquid is constantly draining into him. A machine beeps when the bag is empty. A nurse flushes the lines with saline and sets up the next bag. He’s tethered to the pole.
The pole has wheels. He pulls it along with him to the bathroom.
He explains that he’ll soon be healthy again, that he’s on a mission.
He opens his mouth and shows me the bleeding sores in his throat. He eats ice and drinks protein shakes. I ask if he’s afraid. He says he isn’t. He’s battle ready. In a strange way he’s looking forward to the fight because he’s sure of victory. He can just feel it.
I give him a thumbs up.
The view from his hospital room offers a glimpse of everyday life: the Panum Institute with its brown brick walls. The afternoon traffic on Tagensvej. A small park where the invalids can breathe fresh air with one another.
I have a book about positive thinking.
My sick friend won’t have it. He says he’d rather think for himself.
He doesn’t want decorations in his room. No pictures, no cards with get-well wishes, no flowers. “I’m not moving in,” he says.
I pull the cord when I want a cup of coffee or a marzipan bar. A nurse brings it in.
He introduces me every time a new nurse enters his room. He tells them about the first time we met in my apartment in Vesterbro. He’d been sent out by his company to check for mold in the property. And there I stood in my sparsely furnished living room listening to New Order. I seemed like someone who didn’t know how to make a home, a young person who’d been pushed out of the nest too early. I seemed like someone who was looking for something that couldn’t be found.
“Some friendships are just immediate,” he says, “and eighties music only makes them move faster.”
He charms the nurses. They caress his face, his shoulders. They do it so naturally. I want to touch him too, but I don’t know how.
There’s a plastic curtain. It’s heavy and transparent and can divide the room in two. I don’t understand the curtain’s function. When would you need to divide the room in two with a see-through curtain?
*
My sick friend’s illness is highly valuable to the doctors. They compete for him during rounds. The illness is rare and presents an opportunity for one of them to rise in the ranks. Saving his life comes with a golden future. You can see it in their eyes when they lift the blanket to look at his body. You can see their ambition through the veneer of concern.
They zoom in on him until the picture blurs. They guess at causes and solutions. They fence blindly in Latin.
You can always do something other than what you’re doing now.
*
He wants to talk about the future in Estonia. He wants to talk about Tom.
Tom has a house in the forest bordering Russia. The house is big and rustic. There’s a well. There’s an outhouse and a sauna hut in the backyard. You whip yourself with birch branches and then jump in the lake.
The lake is called Peipus. It’s the fourth largest freshwater lake in Europe. Half of the lake is Estonian and the other half is Russian.
In winter the lake freezes and you can walk right into Russia. “Actually, you’d probably be stopped before you’d gotten that far,” he says, shooting me down with an index finger.
In summer the Russians swim in the lake. They walk over the onion fields in droves and throw their clothes down on the beaches before wading out into the water.
He talks about the Battle on the Ice of 1242, when German and Danish crusaders attempted to march over the lake and into Russia but were beaten back by the Russian army, led by Alexander Nevsky, the prince, the saint.
“I never know who to side with when I read about this battle,” he says seriously, “I’m Danish of course, but that doesn’t really matter, and it’s hard not to side with Nevsky. He was almost supernatural, he was taller than everyone else and I’ve read that his voice resounded like a trumpet, and his face could be read from a long distance. There was no doubt. He triumphed, but was never triumphed over. Here’s to Nevsky.”
He downs an invisible shot of vodka.
He dreams of buying his own house in the forest by the lake.
It has to be dilapidated; he’ll tear it down so he can build a new one. The new house should be small, there should only be room for the essentials: a bed, a chair, a table, a wood stove. It has to be a long way off from other people, and there won’t be a road right up to the house. You’ll have to drive over a field of tall grass. You’ll have to be precise about where you’re going or you’ll never find it.
He’ll forage for mushrooms and meet a bear. After storms he’ll split the fallen trees into logs and use them to heat the house.
He asks if I should be going to work. I say I’m currently unemployed, that I’m doing fine on my unemployment, that I want to be here. “We can call it community service,” I say.
The fever starts coming every day. It settles in as a crease between his eyes.
He struggles to find a comfortable position in bed.
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” he says, “my body feels like the mall during an electronics sale, like there’s been a stampede, I can’t explain it, I’m not like this.”
He rolls over. He rolls over again. He turns, soaked through with fever-sweat, and the sheet slowly slides off the mattress. I pick it up off the floor and attempt to get it in under him again. He growls at me like a rabid dog, strikes out at me. He pulls the cord and curses at the nurse: What’s going on here? Isn’t this a hospital? It's your job to make me feel better.
The nurse is out of breath. She says that they’re treating him with as many antibiotics as they can, but that they can’t catch everything.
Fevers happen when you don’t have an immune system. “We’re waiting for the drugs to start working,” she says.
He says it’s not good enough, that he deserves better.
She nods understandingly, sanitizes her hands and leaves again.
I hardly recognize him. I’ve never seen him short-tempered. He usually has a surplus of good temper when we’re together. He’s usually fixing things. He usually puts up shelves and knocks down a wall and says: You should call me if you have doubts about something.
The crease between his eyes grows deeper.
I don’t know how to help my friend. I wish someone would tell me what to do. I cry into my hands.
*
I move into the fold-out bed under the sink. I dream about the horse my cousin bought when we were children. It was black and its name was Prince, and I was afraid of it from the moment I saw it. When I visited my cousin he wanted me to climb on. “You’ve got to feel the freedom out in the fields,” he said, pulling me by the arm, but I found an excuse and remained standing in the grass outside the paddock. I knew the horse had seen through me, that it would throw me off immediately. It followed me with its eyes.
In a photo my cousin is sitting on the horse’s back with a silly look on his face. The horse is running toward the camera baring its teeth.
I wake up with a start and bang my head against the sink. My sick friend wakes up and pulls the cord. The nurse finds a bandage for me. There’s blood on my shirt. I borrow a hospital gown. My sick friend laughs from his bed.
“We’re a bit fragile, aren’t we?” he says.
It’s hard to control your thoughts in the dark. They pop up uninhibited against an illuminated backdrop, drowning each other out with monologues on the theme: This is all going wrong. Thoughts about my apartment, that I have no desire to be in it, that I don’t know what to do with my life, that I’m an adult but not really. And then come the shame-thoughts—shame over having those kinds of thoughts when he’s lying a few meters away from me, fighting for his life.
“Are you sleeping?” I say.
“No, are you?”
“No.”
And then it’s quiet again. And the thoughts.
*
“The horse isn’t exactly galloping across the finish line,” says the doctor, already regretting his cheerful imagery as the image comes out of his mouth. He points to the next node in the treatment algorithm: a serum from rabbits.
The rabbits come into the room as a clear liquid in transparent bags. The bags hang on the pole and the liquid drips into his veins. It takes five days. Meanwhile, we watch the US Open.
The Belarusian Victoria Azarenka hoots every time she hits the ball.
“She misses the Soviet era,” my sick friend says, “that’s why she’s moaning like that.”
He smiles and falls asleep.
She smashes her racket against the court’s blue surface.
A study published on August 4, 2011, compares the effect of horse and rabbit in the treatment of serious cases of aplastic anemia. A comprehensive review of one hundred and twenty patients shows that horse gave significantly better results than rabbit.
I eat a marzipan bar.
We couldn’t control the rabbits’ procreation. A new litter was born every day. Eventually we couldn’t keep them in the cages any longer, so we built a hutch in the garage and the rabbits hopped about freely, fucking each other left, right, and center. It was inbreeding on speed. We didn’t name the new litters because all the rabbit names had already been taken. They weren’t just cute balls of fluff that you could hold in your lap and entrust with your secrets anymore. They were an army of guilty consciences, and the army was growing. You could no longer see the urine-soaked straw beneath them. It was all fur. We put up flyers at school: Who wants a cute baby bunny? Every student took home a baby bunny. But that solved nothing. They continued fucking without restraint.
Then one day they were gone. We didn’t talk about what happened to them, but my father was oddly quiet. The garage had been hosed down with a power washer.
My sick friend has a nosebleed and mustard-yellow eyes and herpes sores on his chin. He’s waiting for them to bring in platelets to stop the nosebleed. I want to talk to him about death. He rolls toilet paper into small plugs that fit up into his nostrils.
The platelets come in as a yellow liquid in transparent bags.
The liquid drips into his veins. It takes an hour and a half. Meanwhile we watch a show wherein whoever can prove they suffer from the worst plight wins a free plastic surgery. “It’s awful to feel trapped in a body that looks as old as mine,” says a woman with two-toned hair. “Some days it’s a real strain. All I’ve ever wanted are beautiful thighs. My thighs really get in the way when I go camping. We have to set up a screen so that I can sunbathe in peace. My husband says: We look the way we look. I’ve always had big thighs, but it got worse after I had kids. I can’t find pants that fit my thighs. I don’t wear short skirts, not even in the swimming pool. It keeps me up at night.”
Lighting a cigarette, she begins to cry.
“It’s always nice to see someone who’s worse off than you,” says my sick friend, pulling the call-cord.
*
We’re waiting for something to work. I’ve brought lunch in a silver cooler bag.
“That looks like a square disco ball,” says my sick friend.
I bought it ten years ago because I wanted to have my birthday party in a park. So I made a bunch of sandwiches with a Canadian guy I met on the internet. He’d quit his job and moved to Copenhagen to be with me.
My brother came all the way from Jutland and said: Can you really throw a birthday party like this, out of a cooler bag in a park? Well . . . well . . . And the guests found us in the park. One of them gave me a coat hook, Laura. A silver-plated elk. It’s still in a drawer out in the hall. I actually rather like it, but I don’t know how you’re supposed to get it securely fastened to the wall.
The Canadian flew back home not long after. Things just got too explosive, being in such close proximity all the time.
I haven’t used the cooler bag since, but now it stands between us on his bed-tray. I present the contents: rye-bread sandwiches, mayonnaise, and fruit juice. He acts as though it looks delicious.
We watch last night’s episode of Survivor. It’s raining on the island. There’s a woman who steals rice from her teammates and hides it in a bag she digs into during hard times.
“She’s a bitch,” says my sick friend with light in his eyes.
I get him into the wheelchair and over to Fælled Park. I attach the oxygen tank behind the chair. We get some air for an hour.
They play soccer on the pitch. The sound of cheering when they score. He’s wrapped in blankets and searching for his sunglasses among the layers.
The day is really shaping up beautifully.
He throws up into a bag and wants to go back. We turn around. The pain scrunches his face into a grimace. There are holes in the asphalt and he groans every time the wheelchair lurches. I feel like a sadist. I’m raging at the municipality for not keeping the roads even. What the hell is the administration even doing in this neighborhood? They promise everything when they’re up for election and now here we are, searching fruitlessly for an even surface.
He relaxes once he’s back in bed. He sighs and sniffs at the clean sheets. He looks so happy.
“I’d like to be alone now,” he says.
I gather my things, throw the cooler bag over my shoulder, pull down the blinds and do a couple of laps around the hospital before going home.
There’s a plant in my apartment that I bought ten years ago at Ikea. I eat the last of the food from the cooler bag. The mayonnaise is still cold.
I sleep in the living room, on my couch.
The rabbits have drowned in his bloodstream.
“There are no signs of life, so we’ll move on to the next step of the treatment algorithm,” says the doctor, pointing to a piece of paper, “we’ll try to find a bone-marrow donor. But it’ll probably take some time, if we’re successful at all. There are millions of different antigen types and we have to find one that matches yours exactly.”
The doctor stands at the end of the bed in clogs and elastic-waisted, mint-green pants.
“You’ll have to be patient. There are going to be fever days,” he says.
We start waiting.
Do you want to listen to an audiobook? Do you want to learn to meditate? Do you want to go on a vision quest and meet your spirit animal? Do you want to talk about psychology? Do you want a softer pillow? Do you want to get pizza?
Should I open the windows?
Do you want my bone marrow?
I want to give him my bone marrow, but he says you’re not supposed to donate bone marrow when you have sex with men, “and of course you have, you dog.”
He smiles crookedly and makes sex signs with his fingers.
“Yeah, but it’s been a while,” I say, “and where did all the male nurses wind up anyway? There’s no one worth picking up in this ward. Waste of time.”
“So get out of here and get yourself laid instead of sitting here, staring at me pityingly all day. It’s getting a little old.”
I would have punched him if he had platelets enough to keep his shoulder from turning purple.
He wants a map of Estonia. I borrow an atlas from the hospital library. He rips out the page and says: “What are they going to do? Give me a fine? I have enough money.”
Concentrating, with his tongue sticking out at the corner of his mouth, he cuts out Estonia.
He lays the piece he cut out over Denmark. It almost covers it. He cuts out Lake Peipus and lays it over Zealand.
“Then Denmark disappeared altogether,” he says, “it was time for revenge. Did you notice it getting dark?”
He tells me about all the countries that have invaded Estonia by turns and made it their own over the years: Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Lithuania. They’ve waged their wars and crusades on the fields and in the forests and forced their languages into the children’s heads. They’ve attempted to delete all traces of the original country, but, with Glasnost and Perestroika, Estonia finally became free again.
“It’s baller, surviving those kinds of invasions,” he says.
He strokes the country with his index finger. The finger stops on a green area to the east: Here’s the house under the trees. Here’s where Tom lives. He’ll come soon.
I get a headache from all this hope.
The rhythm of numbers and progress nauseates me.
*
Tom arrives from Estonia.
He puts his backpack down under the television and says: I am here now.
Tom tidies up the room.
Tom airs things out.
Tom smears my sick friend’s feet with a thick cream.
Tom massages his legs.
Tom holds his hand.
Tom trims his beard.
Tom gets pizza.
Tom wipes his mouth.
Tom says: We should get a bigger room.
Tom drinks water.
Tom looks things up on the internet.
Tom’s mother is a hematologist in Estonia.
Tom calls his mother.
Tom goes pale.
Tom goes to yoga.
Tom does not eat sugar.
Tom eats sugar.
Tom smokes cigarettes near the entrance.
Tom presses the filter flat.
Tom reads about personal growth.
Tom passes on greetings from an Australian named Emily.
Tom cleans his glasses.
Tom wears a green T-shirt.
Tom wears a white T-shirt.
Tom squints a bit.
Tom buys him soft pajama pants.
Tom goes for walks around the lakes at night.
Tom gets a good idea.
Tom falls asleep in the chair.
Tom listens to audiobooks about the possibilities of consciousness.
Tom asks the doctor a lot of questions.
Tom meditates for exactly twenty minutes.
Tom looks older than he is.
Tom has a father named Tom.
Tom says that I should scratch between his shoulder blades.
Tom is staying in a house in the suburbs while he’s in Denmark.
Tom is learning Danish: Why is it called trillebøger?
