The Seventh Child (57 page)

The shadow moved. The door closed, and the sound of the latch clicking reached him after a second’s delay.

Asger settled into his perch and soon fell asleep, as children often do, with the sky in a perfect arch above. Tears ran down his temples and dried at the edge of his hair.

When he awoke, he cleaned the lenses of his telescope, carefully rubbing the fine glass with a piece of leather. It was then that it struck him like a fist in the chest, knocking all air out of his fifteen-year-old body: he was still a stranger. His real mother no longer felt him. And his current parents had dreamed of another child. He might as well be dead. In a way, he
was
dead.

His head was swimming.
The most remarkable realization
…
then everything went black and he fell and fell and fell
…
An eternity later mission control reached him in the calm tone of voice he knew so well
…
do you copy?
He felt like he was in water and thought he heard the oxygen tanks sputter, and then big gulps of air streaming into his lungs. A couple of minutes later, the horizon came back into view, rising through a shower of gleaming lights to fall into its place in the blue stripe that held his world in balance. He spat out a couple chunks of gravel and removed a little chip off the tip of his tongue.

It was white like porcelain.

A few days later, he stood at the railing of the ferry
Princess Elizabeth
, watching the Coastal Sanatorium slide by on the starboard side. He still felt strangely alone in the world, but the red twilight over the cape gave him a sense of freedom that
he’d
never experienced before.
He’d
studied the little house for three days; the woman who was his mother came and went. Finally NASA brought his capsule safely through the atmosphere and dipped it into the ocean, where it floated. He fixed his eyes on the dark shadow to the right of the cape hospital, the small cluster of trees he knew so well, and tried to get another peek at her face. Susanne. But she wasn’t the one who stepped from the shadows. It was the blind girl whose name
he’d
long since forgotten. In the wind from the fjord it sounded as though she was shouting a warning to him—but he knew it was a silly thought. His exhaustion from Brorfelde was causing him to hallucinate.

Out of the blue, Ejnar came to his mind, and that was the first time
he’d
thought of him in the two years since their friendship dissolved in the darkness of the hole at Moesgaard.

He turned and headed into the ferry’s cafeteria.

The next day, at Atlasvej, he sat by the window studying the two people
who’d
been his parents for fifteen years. As always, they circled around the bird feeder, seemingly satisfied with their repairs. The window was ajar, and he heard Kristine say to Ingolf, “Asger can’t even remember what music they played at that festival!” He knew his mother knew that
she’d
lost him—and that she had no idea why.

He sneezed and glanced up at the sky.

A few days later, a group of young Danes strode into the crowds, disturbing the annual Fourth of July celebration at Rebild Bakker in Jutland, one of the largest of its kind outside the United States, and the strange televised photos of Indians on horseback brought his attention back to the planet on which he was born.

The following day, the boy whom his friends had given the nickname UFO-Ejnar—because he was always going on about alien spaceships—tried to call him. Same thing the following day, but now that earthly matters had interfered so significantly in his life, Asger didn’t have the energy to revive the drawn-out discussions about the character of the universe. He had to think about his relationship with his biological mother, and there was no room for Ejnar in his life anymore.

When they each began studying astronomy at college in 1980, they were put in the same class, but Asger saw that as a mere coincidence; he had, at any rate, put their shared, youthful fascination with UFOs behind him.

“You wanna go to Moesgaard and see if the UFOs are still there?” Ejnar asked, standing awkwardly in front of Asger in the university cafeteria. Like the time they’d argued about the universe, his face was flushed.

Asger shook his head.

Ejnar tried to play his only trump card: “But the hole in the ground might still be there!”

It didn’t work. Asger wasn’t interested in Ejnar anymore.

You wouldn’t think it was possible that Fate could weave its thread so invisibly and masterfully, given its reputation for laziness and improvisation—but it’s a fact that Asger’s thoughtless rejections during that first semester at college taught him a lesson
he’d
never forget. Week by week, these rebuffs sapped his old friend of the will to live. Ejnar was made of something special, something that usually disappears with boyhood. He didn’t contain that magical elixir that allows for sorrows and worries to be broken down and dissolved, instead they were carefully preserved and stored, and that was the problem. Around the New Year he suddenly disappeared, like dew in the sunlight. Rumors circulated that
he’d
gone to Copenhagen with a girl, but no one had ever seen him with one, and given his aura of loneliness, that theory seemed implausible. Some of his old school chums still called him UFO-Ejnar, but now it was more of a reference to his restless nocturnal roaming than to his fascination with other worlds.

They found him at the beginning of March, deep in the woods.

A jogger had just turned inland from the beach so that he could run on the narrow forest path leading to the main road near Bellehage, when he suddenly spotted some old wooden construction that blocked his way. It looked like a tower sticking up from the ground, resting against a thick tree. But it was a rickety ladder. The jogger squatted to catch his breath, and through the early dawn light he recognized a hat under the ladder, but it wasn’t a hat: it was a half-covered hole. He walked a little closer.

The smell made him stop—and take a few steps back. Shocked, he called the police.

They retrieved the body a couple of hours later. It was partially decomposed, with white knuckles jutting out of what had once been skin and flesh. At the astronomy department all conversation came to a halt. In the planetarium, the stars were turned off. Classes were cancelled. Nobody knew exactly what to say. Asger was the one
who’d
known him the best. But Asger didn’t speak to anyone on that day, or later for that matter.

According to the police, Ejnar had crawled into the hole to stare at the sky the way children do, displaying his remarkable patience one last time. He never crawled out again. Next to him lay a book by an author named Fred Hoyle—the officers found its title quite fitting, even though they didn’t know what it was about. The book was called
The Black Cloud
.

The police confiscated the book, unsure of whether it had any significance to their investigation. Perhaps some yawning deputy read the 238 pages for the sake of procedure, and then the case was dismissed.

In the church, UFO-Ejnar lay in a casket surrounded by white, yellow, and red flowers; and Asger, who was there along with the entire college, imagined with terror the nameless silence of that darkness. He imagined how the hollowed-out eyeballs touched the underside of the coffin lid just as they had touched the dome of the sky, but this time in blindness. He saw Ejnar’s father, the professor, in the front row crying over his only son, and he didn’t dare look into those red-rimmed eyes for fear
he’d
display the sense of triumph that he, to his horror, had brought with him into God’s house. In this moment, the old man had to know that the universe wasn’t in a steady state, and that it never had been; and deep within himself, Asger heard his own voice lecturing Hoyle’s disciples, both the professor and his son, who in reality
he’d
always envied and nearly hated for their faith and loyalty.

You wanted the universe to be static
, the voice said,
so that it could last forever with neither beginning nor end. But that’s not how it’s constructed. I tried to explain this to Ejnar, but I failed before he could crawl out of that hole. He didn’t have the patience required.
Subtly, he allowed his dead friend to take some of the guilt. And in the first row, UFO-Ejnar’s father raised his head as though
he’d
heard a very faint sound he couldn’t place.

The police had found a dirty sheet of paper with Ejnar’s body. It was addressed to Asger. Only a few of the detectives, the lead investigator, and Asger himself had read it.

You were right. From this position, you can see the Andromeda cloud very clearly. Without a telescope. It’s always been yours. And it is more luminous than ever.

Outside the church, Asger slid around the long line that wound its way to Ejnar’s father. He didn’t want to look into those eyes that had stared so defiantly at the white coffin inside, as if even in that moment, when they’d lost everything, they wanted to maintain that immobility was a mystery, not a scientific gravesite.

Asger shouldn’t have gone to Brorfelde that summer. Even if he didn’t know why, he knew it was true because everything is connected. That is the knowledge astronomers share with the very old. Ejnar had loved him with all the love found in the universe—it was that simple.

I think that Fate was more than a little satisfied that day, because the living have to fulfill the minimal requirements of thoughtfulness and consideration if they hope to avoid its reprisal.

The finest web, the most cautious gait
, Magna would have hummed.

“You’ll have to find her again.” Knud Taasing said firmly.

The journalist had arrived without Nils Jensen, and Peter Trøst had sent his regrets after having hosted the second episode of Channel DK’s
Roadshow
in three days. And like the day before, the late brunch sat untouched on the table, until finally the two assistants removed the dishes.

If Asger Christoffersen’s story of Brorfelde, death, and disappointment had any impact on Taasing, he didn’t show it. Instead, he turned to the astronomer and said, “You have to ask her whether she really gave up a child for adoption in 1961—you, that is.”

Gone was any pretense of journalistic objectivity. “I’m really surprised that you—alone—had no trouble finding your biological mother,” he said.

I held my breath and hoped that Asger had forgotten the important details, now so many years later. We were in the sunroom. Outside it was raining, and Susanne had lit the three lamps on the sideboard.

“Like I told you the other day, it was Marie who found the name for me,” Asger said. “There’s nothing to doubt.”

I froze at this disclosure—but thankfully Taasing directed all his attention toward Asger and didn’t notice me. Asger didn’t look like a man who wanted to return to Brorfelde and his dark memories. “For me it’s enough to know who she was,” he said categorically. “She wasn’t Eva Bjergstrand.”