“This is nothing.”
That was not even true, goddamnit. That much I had learned. Everything was something. Just ask Basho.
But now I said:
“Sure, OK, I will come, I will bring the girls,” and not until later did I realise that my two younger brothers were supposed to come too. That they could have dealt with the job, if it was help he wanted. That she might have had other reasons for putting pressure on me. And then I forgot all about it. Raymond Carver filled my days.
“Hello, are you still there?” I said.
“Yes, I’m here,” he said.
“Something has come up,” I said, “I can’t get away before Monday.” That was a sheer lie, and I knew as I spoke that I wished it unsaid, for the fact that he was the one to call really touched me. I do not know why, he had never touched me before, not that I could remember. But I had no possible way of getting tickets in two days, not for the Saturday before Palm Sunday. And now I really wanted to go. I could feel it. I don’t know what came over me.
“But then I will come,” I said. “I have borrowed a car and will go via Gothenburg. I am sure the problem with those tickets will sort itself out. They must have got hold of a boat since you have not heard otherwise.”
“Oh, well, they probably have,” he said, still with that hesitant voice old men have when they lose their sense of direction, but the conversation had ended, so we both understood. I was certain he knew I had lied, and at that moment it was not a nice feeling.
Two days later I was woken by the telephone. It was seven o’clock. I should have been up already.
“Switch on the TV,” the voice said, and then there was a click, and all I heard was the dialling tone. I did not catch whose voice had spoken, but it had to be someone I knew. Asleep beside me in bed lay the woman whose face I have forgotten, and the girls slept in their rooms with the light full on their faces. I rose and went into the living room and put the TV on. It was tuned to Sweden. The test image played, so I changed channel to NRK. The screen flickered, and suddenly there was a boat there on the open sea quite alone, filmed from the air, first from the one side and then the whole way round from the other, from in front and behind in continuous circles. A helicopter, I thought, and listened for the flapping sound of the rotor blades, but I heard nothing. It was morning and grey dawn, the sea was calm and blue, the boat was blue and white, and everything was quiet and a bit confusing. I had never seen that boat before. I was tired. I had been drunk the night before. I did not get the point. But there was smoke coming from the boat, white smoke and black smoke that rose in a column to the sky and spread and lay like a filter against the light, and the helicopter turned and flew down as low as it could get, and then I saw flames break out from the windows along the whole of one side and from the aft deck many metres up in the air. I did not see any people, but I saw the name of the boat. It was a nice name, a suitable name. And suddenly my feet felt icy cold. A paralysing cold which hurt, and I stared at the screen, I turned up the sound and heard the voice from the studio telling me why precisely that boat was on television so early on a Saturday morning, on April 7, 1990. The paralysis rose from my feet up my thighs to the hips, and then I could not stand on my feet any more, there was something quite wrong with my legs, I’ve got MS, I thought, it’s a wheelchair from now on, and then I slid down on the sofa and grabbed the telephone I had in the living room and dialled my brother’s number without taking my eyes off the screen.
“Hello,” he said wearily.
“Switch on the TV,” I said. He switched his TV on, keeping hold of the telephone. I heard the voice from the studio in the room he was in. I heard him breathe, but he said nothing.
“I should have been on that boat,” I said, “but I forgot, you know, I just forgot about it, and then it was too late. If I had not forgotten it, if I had just gone with them, then nothing would have happened.”
“Oh, God,” he said, his voice completely flat, “please, be quiet, please.”
I wake up once, and it is night. I must have gone on talking in my sleep, my lips are still moving and they feel swollen, and there is an echo of words in a hollow in my head. I raise my hand and run it over my face. It is soaking wet again. There is a pain in my side, and something in my throat burns and irritates. I cautiously clear it. Someone is breathing in the darkness beside me as if nothing has happened, as if life has stood still, and for a moment I do not remember who it is and panic and switch on the light over the bed. She smiles in her sleep and puts her arm over her eyes and turns, not away from me but towards me, and the relief I feel is overwhelming. I turn off the light and go back to sleep, and dream that my brother has made himself a fortune out of insurance shares and bought himself a sailing boat.
“We, the rich, have it made,” he says, “I wouldn’t have been poor for all the money in the world.”
We are on board that boat, just him and me, and there is a fresh breeze out past Færder lighthouse in the wake of bigger boats, and we lie so low in the water that you only have to lean over the gunwale to get a handful of foaming salt water. And I do that, I lean over the gunwale and scoop up the water in my hands and rinse my face and get some in my mouth and swallow and think: it has a new taste, it was not like this before. Then I tease my brother about his new sailing shoes, which only upper-class people use, in my opinion. I would not touch a pair like that even if someone paid me to.
“Is tennis the next thing then, or what?” I ask and laugh through clenched teeth — “or golf maybe, or buy slalom skis and mix with the in-crowd?”
“But it was Dad who made them,” he says through tears, “he wanted me to have them.”
“That is not true,” I say.
*
That dream plunges me into such despair that I wake up. I lie stiffly, holding my breath, and there is not a sound in the room. I am alone. I slide my arm over the pillow, it is still warm, but she has not left a note. I do not want to be alone. I jump out of bed and run into the hall. In the mirror I see a face, and I stop and without thinking grab the first thing I see, a metal box standing on the chest, and hurl it at the mirror. The glass breaks with an incredibly loud noise, it disintegrates into glittering fragments raining silver on the floor, and I stand there watching them spread all over the hall like the aftermath of an explosion in a film on TV. One of the fragments slices into my arm and blood trickles out, not much but enough to show red against the white skin. I raise my arm and lick the blood up, and then I hop slalom between the glass splinters into the living room. The boy has gone from the sofa, only the impression in the cushions reveals he was there. I run over to the big window gasping for breath, hand to my side, and I stop close to it with my nose on the glass, and stare across to the next block. She is standing at her window in her dressing gown. I am as naked as I was the previous time, and I see her turning and looking back at me, and we just stand there and then she lets her dressing gown drop without thinking of those who may be awake, as we are awake, and can see her from this side. Her skin shines dimly and is whiter than anything else I can see, and she lifts both hands and lays their palms against the pane, and then I do the same, lift my hands and lay the palms against the pane, and it’s as if it was just that one window, a few millimetres of glass between her and me on a night when the rain has stopped and the moon hangs transparent and clear above the block right in front of me, and I stand naked in my own living room with hands and nose on the window, and I hear my breath wheezing and my heart beating, but otherwise all is silence.