Gabriel walked through to the forecabin and came back with the empty shell of the television with the skull inside it and set it on the table. ‘Shell within shell,’ he said, picking up the death’s-head. ‘Layer within layer.’ Jonas was almost expecting: ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ or, at the very least ‘To be or not to be’, but Gabriel’s face grew grave, and he said very softly: ‘Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unus’d.’ And with that he crossed over to the ladder, tossed the skull out of the hatch with a basketball player’s flick of the wrist, an act which was followed by a faint splash.
‘If you want to direct the course of events, this is the new stage,’ said Gabriel, pointing to the empty box of the television, which truly did resemble a miniature stage. ‘Being an actor is, after all, a particle option. Remember what I said? About my friend Niels Bohr? That people, like all matter, can take the form of either particles or waves? Okay. Now listen: to start with television, that would be something different, something new, a wave option. A chance to explore all the different inexplicable ways in which people can be influenced. A chance to make some totally new discoveries about cause and effect.’
With one firm blow, Gabriel loosened and removed the base of the television then slid the box over Jonas’s head, bringing it to rest on his shoulders. ‘There. I hereby crown you. Jonas, it’s time to reinvent yourself. Be a duke, be a king!’ Gabriel eyed his handiwork with satisfaction: Jonas’s face looking out of a television set. ‘Set your sights on television, lad. Dare to take that giant leap!’
Thus Jonas Wergeland made his first appearance on television.
Quantum Leap
The area championships’ meet was being held, for once, at the Grorud sports ground and not at Jordal Stadium, and Jonas Wergeland was getting ready for his last shot at the high jump. The bar was set at a utopian 1.60 metres. Clear that, and he was area champion — against all the odds.
Jonas was far from being the best in his age group, but sometimes luck was with him. Like today. From the minute he stepped out onto the field to warm up he had been feeling in incredibly good form, as if he were on pep pills. This was confirmed in the 100 metres when he beat his personal best by half a second to take third place; it was almost unbelievable. His trainer, surprised and disconcerted, came over to congratulate him, gabbling something about new training programmes and a free place on the tour to Finland.
The event at which Jonas really excelled, though, was the high jump, as he had discovered while still a small boy, when he and Nefertiti used to play on the sports field that the big boys had made all by themselves down by the stream that ran below the Solhaug estate — a pitch which was as legendary among all the local children as any Olympic arena. This sports field was a wonder to behold, with proper goals and nets, albeit handball size, and both a long-jump pit — boards and all — and a high-jump set-up. In one corner of the field was a shed where they kept such lethal pieces of equipment as javelins, discuses and shot, and which also acted, it has to be said, as a good hiding place for more suspect items: condoms in circular yellow packs, for instance, and a girlie mag, its pages gradually yellowed by wind and weather. When it came to the high jump, there was no talk here of simply scissor-jumping ingenuously over the bar; they also used a pole and even though many a suicidal attempt at a dive-straddle jump was made none of these could compare to the breathtaking flights made by the odd few with the aid of the bamboo pole — this last exotic enough in itself to lend the field an air of being part international arena, part South Sea island. Then again, there was nothing quite like being seven or eight years old and slinging oneself six feet into the air, sky-high so it seemed, on the end of a pliant bamboo pole, to land on a not very big and not exactly soft mound, sending the sawdust flying.
But this is for real, or at least more so, and Jonas Wergeland prepares for the decisive jump, for his one big chance to become area champion. He eyes the bar, one metre and sixty centimetres above the ground; it’s high, he’s never jumped that high, but he knows what Gabriel Sand, the old actor, will come to say to him, note my choice of words, will come to say to him, because they have not yet met, but they will meet and those things which will happen are already inherent in him, carried within him even now, so he knows that Gabriel Sand is going to tell him about the wave potential of human beings, about all the things we are but which we do not exploit because they seem so hard to fathom. Jonas knows that anything is possible, even the most unlikely things, when human beings have the muscle power to leap over a house, a fact which has been proved scientifically, in other words: the potential is there.
Jonas Wergeland also had something else going for him; that spring he had met Nina H., one of the greatest track-and-field athletes in the whole of the Grorud valley, in the whole of Norway, for that matter. They had been confirmed together in Grorud Church and had come to know one another well, very well, during confirmation classes in which the vicar placed particular emphasis on the seventh commandment and all the ins and outs of sexual morality, though this of course merely added a bit of spice to what were, otherwise, pretty deadly classes and, paradoxically, titillated those young confirmation candidates more than was good for them. To begin with, before they ever spoke to one another, Jonas had noticed how Nina H. glanced in his direction more than once, especially when the vicar referred, in his dry, roundabout fashion, to the untold perils and temptations of puberty, and Jonas felt that shiver which ran slowly from the base of his spine all the way up to the back of his neck, leaving an inexplicable tingling sensation between his shoulder-blades.
Like Nina H., Jonas was a member of the athletics side of Grorud Sports Club, which moved its training activities in the spring from the gym to the sports ground across the road, and it was here, one rainy training night when only a handful had shown up, that Jonas and Nina H. found themselves the only two left in the clubhouse. Nina showed such promise and was considered so trustworthy that she had her own key to the changing rooms. Jonas had showered and was sitting naked on one of the wooden benches, digging sand out of his spikes when Nina H. walked into the boys’ changing room, wrapped only in a towel. She said not a word, maybe smiled a little smile, before going down on her knees in front of him and stroking his thighs while she gazed into his eyes. ‘Just relax,’ she said. Then she gently cupped her hand around his ‘lingam’, as Jonas would have put it, seeming almost to weigh his penis in her palm, apparently rather surprised both by its consistency and its lightness, when in fact she was enraptured, studying the lines of his penis, its shape and proportions, following the course of every vein, taking in every irregularity in such a way that Jonas understood what his Aunt Laura was getting at with her pithy assertion: a good cock is worth its weight in gold. Nina H. looked as though she had found a treasure map, the sort they used to etch into walrus tusks in olden days.