December 4

December 4 is the book’s decisive day of destabilization: the narrator’s happy evening with Esther is followed by a terrifying dream, a dangerous drive down the mountain, warnings in the village, a reflection that behaves independently, the exposure of Susanna’s infidelity, and a failed escape that returns him and Esther to the same house. By the end of the date, perception, chronology, and physical space can no longer be separated from memory or narration.

A Happy Evening and the Dream

December 4 begins in retrospective contrast. The narrator recalls the previous evening as the best in a very long time, apart from the dream that followed it. He had volunteered to put Esther to bed and read her a picture book about a mouse that discovers the moon is made of cheese. The story’s nonsense pleases Esther, and her pleasure gives the narrator uncomplicated satisfaction. She snuggles against him; after he turns out the light, he sees glaciers in the distance and hears her regular breathing. The scene establishes a temporary image of domestic tenderness, with the child asleep, the house quiet, and the mountain landscape visible beyond the window.

The dream breaks that security through an empty room containing a naked lightbulb, a three-legged chair with one leg broken off, and a locked door. The narrator cannot understand why such a dream followed a blissful evening, but the room’s details recur later in waking reality. He recognizes the terrifying woman from a photograph on the wall in the laundry room, positioned just to the right of the Miele washing machine and dryer, a detail he had noticed on the first day. Her narrow-set eyes, deeply wrinkled face, and yellowish teeth make the photograph an apparently ordinary object that has crossed into nightmare. The narrator’s insistence that such a source is insufficient to explain the dream already introduces the day’s central uncertainty: whether the uncanny is produced by imagination or whether imagination has perceived something real.

The Descent and the Village

The narrator’s journey down the mountain is shaped by an unusually explicit distrust of his own abilities. He considers himself clumsy, absentminded, slow to react, and fundamentally uneasy behind the wheel. A narrow road of hairpin bends therefore becomes more than a route to buy groceries: it turns everyday competence into a survival test. He describes the car as a fuel-filled capsule in which dinner and a tax return can be followed, after a single clumsy steering movement or half-second of inattention, by deformed metal and flames. Social agreement normally defines driving as harmless, but his panic exposes that harmlessness as a convention rather than a guarantee.

Esther and Susanna shrink in the rearview mirror as the parking area beside the house recedes, and the first hairpin bend carries the narrator away. Blinding sunlight makes the valley swing from one side of the road to the other. The car slides too far outward at a turn; he brakes just in time, reverses, and starts again, with no barrier between the road and the abyss. At subsequent bends he repeatedly brakes, stops, and resumes, sweating as he tries and initially fails to keep to the right of the median strip. An abandoned barn briefly distracts him, but the distraction brings the abyss dangerously close and forces another emergency stop. The physical journey thus rehearses the later spatial disorder: forward movement requires reversal, and a familiar route becomes a sequence of near-failures.

After thirty minutes, the narrator reaches the village, where there is only one street and one shop, Gruntner’s General Store, opposite the church. He remains in the car with trembling hands until his heartbeat slows. The village itself appears constricted and inhospitable: low houses seem to cower, roofs are pointed, windows are tiny, walls are gray and peeling, and a gloomy bus shelter stands beside tracks without a station because the train does not stop there. The setting is not merely remote; it is organized around blocked passage. Inside the store, a bell announces his arrival, and a heavy, red-faced man with bags under his eyes emerges and studies him from behind the counter, reinforcing the sense that the supposedly ordinary errand has entered a closed local world.

The narrator later drives back upward. The return trip is easier because the sun has moved halfway behind the rocky ridge between the glaciers and the valley lies in shadow, while the higher green slopes remain lit. He notices objects missed during the descent: stones beside the ruined barn, a rusted tractor, and the car’s long shadow. Birds burst from a bush, wind carries them away, and a cloud glows deep orange. These observations briefly restore a world that can be seen in sequence and measured by movement, but the apparent calm only carries him back to the house, where he puts the groceries in the refrigerator and sits down to write.

Reflections, Records, and Doubt

The day’s optical disturbance is announced in the narrator’s notes by the recognition that it is happening again. He initially treats what he sees as an optical effect, yet it does not stop. He wants to write it down and photograph it, but cannot immediately find his phone. When the phenomenon stops, he stands to search for the phone and looks away from the windowpane. Turning back, he finds himself in the room and sees his reflection sit down when he does. He writes that both figures are sitting and writing, trying to preserve the event before it dissolves into uncertainty.

His written record does not stabilize the experience. He feels dizzy; although the event has just occurred, it already seems long past, and he anticipates that he will soon doubt whether it happened at all. Writing becomes an attempt to prevent a future denial, yet even while writing he thinks it must have been his imagination. The notebook therefore serves two opposing functions. It is evidence against forgetting, but it also records the narrator’s inability to trust evidence, including evidence produced by his own hand.

The narrator applies the same conflict to the question of waking and dreaming. He recalls having used the cinematic device in which a character discovers that frightening events were only a dream, but insists that when a person is awake, that person knows it. He states that he knows he was not dreaming, then immediately concludes that he must have been dreaming. The contradiction is not resolved; it becomes the governing form of December 4. The date repeatedly presents a rational explanation, only to leave behind an experience that the explanation cannot contain.

Marital Disclosure and Fragmented Memory

The domestic crisis unfolds alongside the disturbances in perception. When Esther’s voice comes through the monitor, the narrator and Susanna stop their confrontation so that she can attend to their daughter. Susanna runs upstairs and sings beside Esther’s bed while the narrator remains seated, feeling as though everything inside him has turned to stone. His subsequent memory survives only in fragments: shouting, something thrown onto the table, a fist pounding the tabletop, Susanna pale and speaking slowly, the narrator crying and then calming, questions, pacing, and repeated changes in who is seated, standing, or leaning against the window.

The quarrel intensifies as darkness becomes dense outside. The narrator wants to approach Susanna, touch her cheeks, and propose forgetting everything while declaring his love, but he knows that forgetting is impossible. He approaches anyway, and Susanna asks to be left alone, saying that he does not understand. Their voices rise until neither can hear the other. She eventually leaves through the front door, starts the engine, and disappears into the faintly rushing silence. The narrator writes down what happened but ends by admitting that he still does not understand it, echoing Susanna’s accusation and making his own account a record of incomplete comprehension.

The crisis is followed by another monitor disturbance. A high human-like voice forms words the narrator cannot understand, first seeming to come from the baby monitor while Esther remains visibly asleep and alone. He runs upstairs, finds no one in her room, and hears silence. The voice returns as he walks toward the living room; on the monitor a large figure leans over Esther’s bed. Only then does he recognize the figure as himself. He explains the image as a transmission delay and the voice as a radio signal, but the delayed image shows Esther sitting up, staring at the figure, and screaming. When he reaches her room, Esther is asleep. The explanation is technically plausible within the scene, yet it does not undo the terror or the sense that the house has made his own image into an intruder.

The Failed Escape

The narrator decides that he should have left, but believes he cannot abandon Esther. He lifts her from bed while she sleeps, carries her downstairs, and lays her on the sofa. Later, he takes Esther’s phone, grasps her hand, and tells her that they are not allowed to turn around because it is a game. They walk backward into the hall. The movement is deliberate and rule-bound: escape depends not on ordinary forward travel but on reversing the body’s orientation.

They reach a hall with wooden flooring and white walls. Beside the washing-machine room is a half-open door that seems not to have existed before. Inside is an empty room with a naked lightbulb and a wooden chair missing a leg, reproducing the architecture of the dream. The narrator feels an intensely confusing desire to enter but resists and pulls Esther onward. When Esther needs to use the toilet, he refuses to stop at first, then allows her a hurried interruption. After the bend, the passage becomes so dark that walking with open eyes makes little difference. He uses the charged phone as a flashlight and keeps hold of Esther’s warm hand with his ice-cold one. She asks where her mother is, bringing the disordered escape back into the ordinary vocabulary of a child seeking a parent.

At last the trees thin and a house appears through them. The narrator’s relief makes him lengthen his stride and nearly run; he switches off the flashlight, though the phone still has no reception. The illuminated window reveals the pointed roof, broad front door, empty parking area, long table, kitchen, and open door to the hall. The resemblance is not a mistake. The house is the same mountain house they were trying to leave. The escape has closed into a loop, transforming distance into repetition.

At daybreak, as Esther begins to stir, the narrator hears an engine and understands that he must move quickly. He carries her through a hallway that is no longer the one from the living room but a much longer second-floor corridor. The hall expands as he runs, and he fears that the passage may continue without end. He eventually reaches the stairs and bursts outside, where Susanna is waiting in the car with the headlights on and the windshield wipers moving in a fine drizzle. The apparent rescue is therefore also a separation: Susanna and Esther have access to the car and the exterior, while the narrator has been forced through an impossible interior route.

The Date’s Ending and Significance

After the rain runs over his head, the narrator looks up at the house and notices how different it appears. He slowly goes inside. The final record of December 4 returns to the window and its reflection: rain draws lines across the glass, the room can again be seen clearly, and the long table, cabinet, kitchen, and door are visible. No one appears in the reflected room, but a notebook lies on the table. This object recalls the narrator’s effort to write down the optical event and preserve his memory, while its presence in an empty reflection raises the possibility that the record has outlasted, preceded, or replaced the person who made it.

December 4 therefore functions as a threshold rather than a simple calendar entry. It begins with a father reading Esther a comic picture book and ends with an apparently unoccupied reflected room containing his notebook. Between those points, a routine drive becomes perilous, a village becomes a sealed interval, a reflection becomes an independent scene, a marriage breaks under the pressure of disclosed betrayal, and an escape route returns to its starting point. The narrator’s repeated attempts to explain events as dreams, optical errors, transmission delays, or imagination never fully restore ordinary reality. The date’s decisive significance lies in that failure: the family’s private crisis and the mountain house’s impossible geometry become inseparable, and writing remains both the last proof of experience and another object inside the mystery.