As was her wont whenever a library presented itself, Charlene got up and examined the collection of books. It was often easier to discover someone through his books rather than his words, to see the overlap and divergence between one’s taste and another’s and then to triangulate the rest of that person’s self appropriately. She had slept with plenty of people simply on the merits of their literary curation.
There was no obvious method of organization. Many of the titles were familiar; these were the same books that lived behind the sheets in her own home. Except that here, many of the standbys that had at one time nourished or tormented her were translated into Norwegian. A shadow army of all the classics, rendered through a peculiar Norse lens. She enjoyed trying to guess what each title was. She recognized Turgenev’s Fedre og sønner, Vonnegut’s Slaktehus-5, eller Barnekorstoget: en pliktdans med døden, Bulgakov’s Mester og Margarita, Calvino’s De Usynlige Byer, Conrad’s Det inderste mørke. Could these possibly be the same books that she had read? Had he ingested what she had ingested? She realized that with several of these books, she had fallen in love with a translation that did not exist in the original language, a fact that irked her to no end. Staring at this Arctic library, rendered so beautifully in a tongue she did not comprehend, she found herself wondering: When did a book — ushered across linguistic oceans by the unsteady sloop of translation — stop being the same book?
Leif saw her looking at his shelves. “If you can believe it, there used to be about twice this many,” he said. “I recently sent a shipment down to Africa, to a monk who is building a library along the Congo River.”
“How generous of you,” she said.
In contrast to the light chaos that ruled the rest of the room, she was surprised to find one large shelf in pristine order. Everything was arranged in neat little rows, with not one spine out of place. A shelf of twenty-five numbered binders. It was as if this section belonged to another person who was merely renting the shelf space. Charlene pulled down a thin purple volume, feeling almost guilty for disrupting the order.
GÅSELANDET: TEORIER OM IKKE-DELTAKENDE DRAMA OG ERFARRING, PER RØED-LARSEN
She looked at another. This one was also by Per Røed-Larsen. She looked again. Every single book on the shelf was by him. There were hundreds of them.
“Per Røed-Larsen,” she said aloud. It was not quite an answer, nor really a question.
“Yes,” said Leif. “He has set about the task of writing our history. Though if you ask me, his manner is a bit excessive. Not everything must be documented in such detail. Sometimes a receipt is just a receipt, if you know what I mean.”
“Why do you have all of his books here?”
“Per once wrote to me, ‘If it is not documented, then it never happened.’ Of course, I disagree, but I suppose it’s important for someone to record all of this. Sometimes you learn things when you see your work through the eyes of another. It offers a new perspective.”
“And Brusa? Do you also have his books?”
Leif walked over to another shelf, one of those that had fallen prey to bedlam. “His works are not as conducive to indexing. They impress an order of their own. But most everything is here.”
Charlene looked around the room. “So is anything in here written by you?”
“Surprisingly little. In keeping this place running, performing all of my roles, I can barely find time for myself.”
• • •
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Leif shepherded them back to the airport. They drove through a tundra of moss and lichen, tinged by tight clusters of black crowberry and nascent birch. The trees gradually grew denser until they found themselves back in the soft pine envelope of the taiga. Kermin sat up front, chattering away with their host about the secrets of miniature-television repair. It was in stark contrast to his silence on the ride in, several days before.
In the back of the jeep, Radar slept in Charlene’s lap. Since the procedure, he had been sleeping nearly all the time. Leif had assured them that this, too, was natural.
“His cells are busy at work. It’s exhausting to metamorphose — just ask a caterpillar.” The joke felt oddly misplaced. “But when the butterfly is revealed, all becomes worth it.”
Charlene leaned over and sniffed her son. The new scent had lingered, despite several vigorous baths. A scent gathered in transit. It left her uneasy. Smells are transitory by nature; they should not endure.
At the airfield, Leif wished them well and asked Kermin to stay in touch. “I wish you lived a bit closer,” he said. “We could use someone like you on the team. A genius with screens.”
“Not genius,” said Kermin. “I understand them, like we are friends. That’s it. No: like we are relation. We are family, with the same blood.”
As Leif walked back to his car, Charlene ran after him. She touched his shoulder.
“Leif,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I know who you are.”
“Oh? Who is that?”
“I know you wrote those telegrams.”
He looked at her strangely.
“Why tell us not to do this?” she said. “And then tell us to do it?”
He carefully removed her hand from his arm and got into his car. “Safe travels, Charlene. Good luck.”
“I’m not angry,” she said through the open window. “I’m just wondering why someone would do this. Why pretend you are someone else?”
He started up the car but then paused. “My dear, the mask cannot be the player,” he said. “And the player cannot be the mask.”
• • •
AS THEY WAITED in the terminal for their plane to land, Charlene put her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For letting us come here.” She rubbed Radar’s head as he slept in her lap. “I understand now. Things can be normal again.”
“What’s done will be done,” Kermin said as a low whine rose in the distance. “This is done.”
10
Two weeks later, Charlene found a sheath of dried dermis lying coiled around the leg of their armchair. She did not know what it was until she saw that Radar was missing a large patch of skin on his left thigh. The skin beneath was pale and raw. It blushed pink when touched.
Her heart sank.
She called Kermin at the shop, sobbing.
He was unmoved. “Leif’s a man to trust. This is what you wanted. This is what he gave you.”
“But I didn’t want this.”
“Then what? I gave you everything you wanted.”
“Kermin!” she cried. “Oh, Kermin! What have I done?”
Over the course of two months, Radar went through a series of four separate “peels,” in which his skin came away from his body in great translucent chunks, like a snake shedding its skin. She would find little pieces of him all around the house — beneath the furniture, caught in the door of the oven, inside her slippers. Like pellucid pages from an ancient tome. The skin smelled of wax and wet burlap and slightly rotten leather, sometimes with the thinnest lead note of citrus, a lemon or kumquat tone. She went around the house collecting the pieces in a small paper bag, which she kept hidden beneath the bed. And then one day she lifted the bedspread and found that the bag had vanished.