The Embrace
What happens when we stop resisting the world?
The Embrace
The silence in apartment 4B was oppressive. The clock was ten, and the only sound Elias heard was a clock ticking. A metronome over life. He tried to synchronize his pulse with the clock. tick… tick.. tick… But it went too fast. Why should time—the one that plods one second forward, from here to eternity, at the same tempo—why should my body listen to it? he thought. I’ll speak instead. “Keys,” he said to the kitchen counter. “Where are you?” They didn’t answer, but something else answered. Through the walls, to 4C and 4A, the sounds came through like a straw into another reality. Laughter from 4C. Clinking glass in 4A. Coughing in the stairwell. It wasn’t ten anymore. Now life scraped against life. Elias stood in the middle of the room and had nothing to scrape with.
The kitchen counter didn’t answer, but it remembered what he said. The last syllable hung there, for a long time. The wall let it go, but the counter remembered. He had forgotten that he’d asked the counter where the keys were, but the counter would very much like to tell him. A small warmth reached him. Precise and local. It pointed at his ribcage. His pulse slowed. Elias laughed once, short and ashamed. Then the warmth grew weaker. Laughter was the wrong sound. “Thank you,” he said instead, and the warmth came back. Only then did he notice that the keys lay on the counter, and he thought it was nice and that he was grateful that the counter listened and gave him this joy.
Elias learned the rules fairly quickly. The transition between kitchen and living room—there the floorboard didn’t creak. It only sank a little, a slow exhale. A memory-dent, a kind of mouth-shape, and Elias understood that it liked him stepping there, so he made sure to step both carefully and gratefully on the threshold.
He had a radio, but he disconnected it. The radio interrupted. It asked no questions, but it did not listen either. The apartment did something else. The walls grew softer when he was calm and spoke low. Sound vanished into them as into thick textile. When he raised his voice, everything hardened: the glass in the window took on a sharper ring, the surfaces gained more resonance.
“You understand me,” Elias whispered one evening, his forehead against the wall.
Somewhere behind him something slid, like a muscle that had just tightened. He turned quickly. Everything stood still. He tried to catch it in the act and failed. The apartment didn’t do things while he watched. It did things while he was a human being—while he blinked, sneezed, or disappeared into a thought like into a hole.
The days slid into each other. In the evenings he sat on the sofa with his back against the wall that listened. Some nights he woke to a deep, slow humming behind his head. At first he thought it was the refrigerator. But every time he laid a hand against his chest, his heart beat in the same rhythm, as though it listened more than it pumped. When the humming stopped, it needed a couple of beats before it found its way back to its own pace, like an employee who’d lost sight of his boss in the hallway.
The invitation to a sporadic get-together came on a Thursday. Bar. Old friends. Long time since we’ve seen youuu. Come. Elias held the phone in his hand until the screen dimmed, then until it shut off. He looked at the armchair. It wasn’t where it had stood last time he saw it. It stood a little closer to the middle of the rug, angled toward him, inviting. Come and sit.
Elias thought. Then he stood and picked up the keys from the counter. The room grew colder. Not only the room. He too. It started in his hand. As if the apartment had pulled love back and begun at the point where the escape began. He put the keys down again. The cold vanished. “I can’t,” he said softly to the room. “They don’t listen the way you do.”
He wrote that he had a migraine and put the phone down screen-first. The air became a kind of skin. The armchair yielded softly when he sat, but not in a spring-way. In a will-way. The cushions met him like a memory of flesh. It was pleasant.
In time it grew quieter inside 4B. Sound was filtered away. Sirens and other noises from the outside world went flat against the glass and died before they reached him. The fog on the window drew itself into patterns that never ran, like an eyelid that no longer wanted to open. The view grew smaller with each day, until it felt more like a scar than a window. From the neighbors it also went quiet. The walls softened the sound—first so he heard it as distant voices, and finally he did not hear them at all.
He went barefoot now, and he noticed that the floor yielded under him in the same places every time, until the skin between his toes began to swell faintly, as though the woodwork was learning his anatomy by heart.
Then he did something he would come to regret. He left the apartment, only to stock up. The itching came at once. The longer he was gone, the more intensely the skin on his upper arms began to itch, as if the fabric rubbed against open wounds. He scratched while he shopped, while he paid, and all the way home. He ran. The key slid into the lock without resistance. It felt as though the metal in the cylinder had expanded to welcome him.
“Sorry,” he sobbed as he stumbled in. “I’m sorry I’m la—”
The apartment was different. The bookcase had adjusted itself to face the sofa. The sofa had turned its back to the TV and turned inward. Everything pointed toward one point: a converging. For him.
The air in the apartment settled against his face like a wet cloth. Elias threw the keys onto the counter and went into the living room. His heel sank into the parquet with a soft give. It was like stepping into a deep gash in firm flesh. He yanked his foot back, and he heard a sucking, wet sound. A thin, pale imprint of the tree’s rings remained in the skin of his heel.
He stumbled toward the sofa. His phone fell out of his pocket and fell on the floor screen-down as he sank into the sofa cushions. The textile at his back felt coarse and tight, like scar tissue. He sank deeper. The fibers of his shirt sifted into the upholstery. Small, thin threads of polyester bored through the fabric and searched toward the pores in his back. He forced his hand up from his body, tried to reach for a hold he could grip, but his elbow burned. It did not hurt in the right way.
The deep humming from the walls began again. Like the clock, with a rhythm. A metronome. Every time the house drew breath, his ribcage expanded. In the interval his heart waited a moment, uncertain, before it struck again in time with the next wave from the walls. After a few rounds he no longer knew which beat was his and which was the room’s.
He reached face-down toward the phone lying on the floor, one last attempt to reach a world with friction. He almost managed to touch it, but the joints grew heavy, one by one, as if someone were pouring plaster into them. The movement hardened in mid-attempt. He gave up.
On the window the fog had stiffened into a gaze that never blinked. Elias closed his eyes. There was no difference.
On the kitchen counter lay the keys he would never touch again.
When the refrigerator clicked off and everything became completely still, there was only one sound left: a low, viscous pulse from the sofa. The last remnant of Elias.
Original title: Omfavnelsen. From an anthology of short stories. ISBN: 9788292302170. Translated and printed with permission.