Jón Gnarr
The Indian
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A lot of people will undoubtedly wonder whether this is a biography or a novel. It’s both. It isn’t totally true, although there aren’t any total lies in it either. I don’t believe in lies. In fact I think lies are the greatest obstacle on our path towards spiritual development. But I shift quite a few things around. I write from memory. There are some things I have absolutely no recollection of myself, so I’ve had to rely on other people’s memories. But all memory is fiction. Our brain is the greatest master of deceit in the universe.
A NOTE ON ICELANDIC ORTHOGRAPHY
The Icelandic alphabet is largely based on the Latin alphabet (as is English) but it includes ten extra letters, some of which derive from the runic tradition.
In addition to accented letters such as ó, í, and ý Icelandic also includes the letters ð and þ, known as “eth” and “thorn” respectively. They have slightly different pronunciations: ð, which comes between d and e in the Icelandic alphabet, is pronounced like the “th” in the English “that”; þ, which comes after y and ý, the antepenultimate letter of the alphabet, is pronounced like the “th” in English “thing.” (The former, ð, is known as a “voiced fricative” whereas the latter, þ, is an “unvoiced fricative.”)
The Icelandic alphabet has 32 letters: only six more in total than English, due to the fact that it lacks some English-language letters, including c and w.
THE INDIAN
I thought about all these names — not once, not twice, not even three times. I thought about them no more. They thought themselves into me, autocratic, ceaseless, an automatic mantra wiping everything else away, clean gone from my consciousness.
~ ~ ~
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said:
“Let there be light!”
And there was light.
That was right around midday, January 2nd, 1967. At that very moment, I came into being. Before then, there was nothing; I was merely a shapeless form in the universe’s consciousness, sleeping water, in water which wasn’t yet water in an eternity where time doesn’t exist.
At first, you don’t know anything about your head. It’s like someone has come up without warning and tagged you, and you’re It. You’re disoriented, confused. You don’t know quite what to do. But, over time, little by little, you come to see things in context. Murmuring becomes speech and words. Everything gradually clarifies, taking on a fantastic light. You get on intimate terms with your existence. You gain experience. You come to discover the existence of others. Everything you do modifies your experience. And each experience is its own glorious discovery. The brain remembers things, reaches conclusions, and comes supplied with fluid for logical continuation, appropriate to the conditions. The past begins to accumulate like unsorted junk mail. She follows in your wake, wherever you go. You bear her on your back like a black garbage bag. She is your guide to the future, your tools for the tasks that await you. Over time, as the past grows, the more glimpses into the future she has. Before you know it, the past and the future begin to fight for your affections. You stop being amazed about the miracle, the fine craft, of your existence. Everything becomes familiar.
Eventually, the fantastic loses its magic, becomes merely a sequence of everyday incidents. But deep within, lodged between past and future, is The Now, the place from which you came before everything began. The Now is like coffee. You finish it and find, sitting there, the grounds.
Also, you discover it’s best drunk hot.
~ ~ ~
My arrival was a total shock for my family. My mom was forty-five years old when she had me. Dad was fifty.
They knew they were too old to have a baby. Such a thing was out of the ordinary back then. Mom felt ashamed. She didn’t try to hide her belly but she wasn’t exactly waving a flag, either. It wasn’t planned. I was on my way thanks to the carelessness of a feverish May moment at Hotel Flókalundur at Barðaströnd. I was christened Jón Gunnar. Jón in honor of Grandfather, Gunnar in honor of Aunt Gunna.
The due date was New Year’s Day. Many people assumed that I’d be the first baby born that year, that there would be a picture of Mom and me in the paper. Mom flatly discounted the possibility. She didn’t want any unnecessary attention. She’s always kept to herself.
The doctors told her that, because of how old she was, it was very likely I’d be a retard. She was advised to have an amniocentesis to check for chromosomal defects. It was a fairly risky procedure; there was a risk of termination. Mom didn’t want one. She didn’t trust doctors; instead, she took the hand she’d been dealt without complaining or making a fuss. She’d learned from bitter experience to resign herself to her fate; she’d learned to accept the consequences of her actions. Mom won’t tolerate dishonesty or excuses. Also, she’d learned that the easy, comfortable route is seldom the right route. Because she had gotten herself pregnant, she resolved to shoulder the responsibility for it, to nourish the child and raise it, retard or no.
My birth itself: another blow for the family. I’m obviously not retarded. A relief. But after the birth, another scary fact reveals itself: I’m a redhead. It couldn’t have been more of a shock if I’d been born black.
Dad has dark hair. Mom has light hair. All my siblings have dark hair. There’s no one with red hair in the family. Not a one. Not for a long way back in the line.
Grandma Anna immediately suspected some kind of hijinks. She’d always borne a grudge against red-haired folk. Redheads were, in her opinion, Northern gypsies, inferior to other people, useless except as shark-bait. She’d never known an honest redhead. Redheaded folk were vagabonds; they had thievish demeanors.
This led to much debate and some gossip. People doubted my paternity.
— Alas, I think there’s not a bit of the boy I can call my own, joked Dad.
Grandma was not in the mood for laughter.
— I think you need to be home more often!
Grandma Anna never came to terms with it and never really took to me. In her eyes, I was a bastard, the black sheep of an otherwise magnificent herd, an ugly stain on the family tree. When someone praised or admired me, she readily muttered:
— Yes, he’s intelligent and he’s handsome, it can’t be denied…but he’s a redhead.
~ ~ ~
The new house is ready and we’ve moved in. It’s big and smells wetly of fresh concrete.
I put my nose right up to the unpainted walls and huff the weird smell. The smell becomes a memory, fixed in my thoughts. Forty years later, I can still remember the smell; I relive the emotions each time I enter a new building. Cement, sand, and water. The scent of concrete.