by Jenny Hval
Note the cruisers’ routes. Draw up a map, imagine that we mark it using a running app, and see how they use their old, worn-out cars and their noisy sound systems to sketch unnecessary and impossible alternative cityscapes. The streets of these villages that they know and are trapped in become their escape routes. With black marks from skidding wheels on the asphalt, they translate and rewrite the white towns. They skip school and work to blare their horns outside the Filadelfia Pentecostal centre. At the Betania Free Evangelical centre they skid across the ice on the parking lot, until a Parking for Visitors Only sign tumbles to the ground. They blast Snap and Scorpions and Eminem relentlessly from the benches outside the metal venues, outside city council meetings at the town hall, and at the annual conference for the People’s Movement Against Immigration. In these moments they don’t discriminate, and they don’t fight, they just disrupt and refuse to participate. Total misanthropy. Vodka in a Coke bottle and a cheesy ground beef sub on the dashboard. This is the Witches’ Sabbath of the ’90s.
In the latest ritual, Venke, Terese and I sneak past the ruins of the old Munch museum. The camera lens is zoomed all the way out now, and the image is of an undefined future, well into the next generation. We walk through the botanical garden, which looks the same as ever, with its arboretum, its alpine garden and its magical herbs. Beyond the garden is a college, the one with the classroom and the all-girls class. It’s since been modernised, with screens and algorithmic surveillance systems that only we can get past.
Venke is anxious about returning to college, and stays in the rear, gnawing her cuticles.
The students are lined up in the canteen. Reconnaissance cameras identify their faces, gender, weight and height, and as they are given access to the cashier, their data, registered diets and suggestions for lunches are displayed on a screen. At the entrance, tacked above the head of a girl who whispers and laughs into a clam-shaped smart phone, a poster advertises a particularly fun salad with the caption Seriously Excited.
We’ve painted costumes on ourselves that resemble their school uniforms. Pale neon stripes blink on our dark blue jackets. Someone ahead of us in the queue turns around and looks at us in confusion – our ruffled hair, the wrinkles beneath our eyes, the big visible pores in our skin, but most of them just look into the little flowers, animals or shells that are their smart phones, or look at each other, whispering to each other and shoving. The camera looks deep into my eyes. I unfold in front of the lens, revealing all the darkness inside. The screen goes black and the Seriously Excited picture starts to flicker, but I’m allowed to pass. The digital noise formula that we’ve written seems to work. Terese winks.
At the far end of the room is a big machine with a hole in the middle where the food is delivered. The students name the dishes, and a moment later they appear on the conveyor belt, emerging from the witch’s cauldron.
Oatmeal, one student says to the machine, and immediately a plastic bowl of microwaved cereal pops out.
Burger, says another one, and a thin patty in a buttered bun comes dancing out of the hole, packed in a translucent plastic box. Salad and dressing ooze and drip onto the napkin at the bottom. The food is reflected on the machine, as the small dishes flow down the little conveyor belt and are picked up by the students.
Muffin, says Terese. A compressed muffin rolls out of the machine’s hole, wrapped in plastic. Everything here is portion wrapped. Nothing is served from a communal pot or bowl, only lonely meals with clear boundaries separating them from the outside world, meals made for a singular I.
Aspic, Venke says, giggling, and out comes a plate with a trembling cube of jelly on it, with peas, crab sticks and slices of hardboiled egg inside.
Don’t scare them, says Terese.
Strawberry yoghurt, I say.
She should be happy I didn’t say smashed burger with béarnaise sauce. The crown jewel of Southern junk food.
The students sit down with their food and begin to eat. We sit down with them. A girl has her head deep in a pink screen and writes a poem or a diary entry. A group of girls sit throwing salad at each other. Seriously excited. In the background, orders of hamburgers, cheese sandwiches and pizza slices continue to slide out from the machine. Summoned by the youths. Summoned by the words. The objects obey and emerge.
Eat slowly, says Terese to Venke, and don’t play with your food. We’re not supposed to stand out.
Venke picks at the aspic and starts to chew a piece, transforming fossils into new layers of fossils down in her stomach.
I open the yoghurt cup.
Normcore, Venke whispers.
The students are eating salad, hotdogs and pizza and staring at their phones. A group of girls have gotten up from their table, staring fiercely at each other. Suddenly they begin pushing each other, shouting and pulling hair.
The camera drone bobs calmly up by the ceiling, filming the scene and transmitting it directly to the teacher’s lounge and the school’s popular SchoolMe livestream.
Two girls separate from the group and begin fighting for real. They punch each other, kick, pull at each other’s clothes. We realise that they are trying to grab each other’s little key chains, with tiny little memory sticks hanging on them, to see what they’ve written about each other. Neither is willing to reveal the contents of her memory stick to the other. But sooner or later this will be unavoidable, because nothing can be deleted and the internet keeps everything in its cold cloud-storage clutch. The data already oscillates between new sponsored school-related applications. This fight won’t wipe out anything. This fight can’t even really be called real; it’s a fight over formulas or streaming numbers. That’s why there’s no blood when they hit each other square on the nose or the mouth, and the spittle doesn’t drip. Their clothes don’t tear. Their faces won’t swell.
The girls drag each other down and wrestle on the floor. There’s no blood on anyone’s face. The girl with the pink clamshell, who has been watching them coolly, jumps up and runs to the scene with a bottle of ketchup from the canteen counter. She begins to squirt it at the two on the floor, and the ketchup splashes over their mouths and noses and collars and arms. At one point we see a jet of blood-coloured liquid squirt across the lips of one girl as she tilts her head back.
A teacher comes to the rescue and yells something at the students that we don’t hear. They glare at her but immediately stop fighting. The teacher grabs the hand of the girl with the ketchup bottle and leads her out of the room. The other combatants are left, and stand panting heavily for a moment before walking toward the classroom door, checking their phones as they go.
The rest of the students, those who sat calmly watching the scene, return to their lunch. In a moment the school bell will ring for the next class with an SMS-like ding. This usually makes the screens blink, causing the students to jerk and then rise and make their way to the classroom. But that hasn’t happened yet.
While they are still sitting calmly picking at the leftovers from their portion-packaged food, the room disappears behind colours. It’s as if an invisible glass wall or curtain has dropped in front of them, and this invisible curtain or wall is now being covered by splats of colour, or occult symbols, or squirts from the ketchup bottle that was just involved in the fight. Picture this: The students behind the wall move more sluggishly now, as though in slow motion, while they literally drown in colour, like crab sticks drowning in aspic. Then they are completely still, smartphones held in motionless hands, a fork frozen en route to a mouth. Frozen solid. As if the students have been rewritten into fossils, as if the wall in front of this room has stopped time, the space completely enclosed, and completely filled with something else.
The students won’t notice anything; this is only a brief flash to them, during a boring school day, far beyond the colours. Without their realising it, the band in here has split their time in two, and like prawns and peas in aspic they are stuck in there, while we’ve opened a space between two seconds where we own the cant
een, where we can remake it into our own venue.
This room between the seconds is darker. The small canteen tables have been pushed together to create a long, set dinner table. The scrape of chair legs, the buzz of chit-chat and laughter sound from corner to corner. There must be fifteen people here now. There are still more chairs than women sitting down around the table, but it’s beginning to fill up. Most are older than school age, and aren’t wearing a uniform. A few have been here all along, like us, disguised as students.
In the background we can hear the opening tone of the SMS-like ding that summons the students to their next class, but in the room between the seconds, time has stopped and the faint tone remains whirling in the air as food is served to us and our dinner party guests. Our food isn’t portion packaged, but arrives on big platters. Everything served is soft and gelatinous, to represent the dimensions: height, width, length, time, gelatin.
More aspic, I say. That was the password for the gathering: aspic.
An enormous aspic trembles in the middle of the table; it’s not as set as the one Venke ordered. In its gelatinous consistency it’s reminiscent of some man-made mollusc. Around the aspic platter are other dishes with more soft, smooth food: mushy peas, jelly, boiled eggs, soft custards and cheesecakes, Norwegian lye- softened salted cod, lutefisk, and a pasta sauce without spaghetti, swimming in oil. The food has been decadently arranged and partly spills onto the table.
The guests, who aren’t students anymore, but girls and women of all ages and shapes, start eating. We’re all excited, and more concerned with talking than eating. The food jiggles on our forks in time with the conversations; after all, we are in this faintly unstable space between time zones, where stuff connects a little more loosely and everything is a little more smeared than in ordinary reality.
Where’s the spaghetti? a younger girl asks. No one knows if there’ll be spaghetti, or where it might be found.
Fucking hell, I say. No one reacts; everyone continues with animated conversations in different groups, but we know what’s about to happen.
A new, different figure has entered the room, has perhaps already been here for a while. Someone looks up, jumps to her feet, nudging the table and making the delicate dishes jerk. The figure is dressed in black. The guests sit petrified for a moment, the food alone jiggles, nothing else moves.
The person looks like a mix of priest and demon. This new arrival stands in a corner at first, then one of the older women approaches and invites the person to sit at the table in one of the empty chairs. The figure sits, politely, is served aspic on a plate but remains seated without eating. Perhaps the figure participates in the conversation.
Gradually, the guests’ conversations resume. Spaghetti is requested once more. No one knows where it is this time, either.
More strangers arrive and are invited to the table. They have typical demonic characteristics, like cloaks and makeup, and some are the size of school kids, others so big they can barely sit on the chairs without crashing to the floor; they sit looking down between their legs to keep their balance. They appear masculine. One of them is completely concealed by a cloak. The demons’ conversation is annoying at first; they speak slowly and their accent is archaic. But the conversation picks up when they start talking about the underworld that they’re from.
One of the demons opens its cloak a little over the belly to illustrate a point and the spaghetti girl spots a spaghetti strand dangling inside. She grabs the spaghetti and starts to slurp it up toward herself. Venke claps her hands. Skin jiggles with every smack of her hands.
The girl slurps up more and more spaghetti. It turns out the body and head of this demon are made entirely of spaghetti, and it slowly begins to unravel. In the end, the cloak is the only thing left on the chair. The girl devours the last strand of pasta, and happily continues to eat what’s left on her own plate. As if the demonic spaghetti isn’t real food, but satisfies some other need.
The other guests start looking more closely at the new arrivals, every one of whom is now anxious and attempts to withdraw. We begin to find food scraps on the demons’ bodies, and slowly devour them, every last one, in a feast that looks more and more like a brawl. The demons are made of liquorice and cocoa powder, gingersnaps and celery, artichokes, cocktail berries and pineapple rings.
I study the demon that kept its face concealed under its cloak and slowly reach my hand toward the hood, pulling it down. A face appears underneath the fabric, or an inverted face, like HR Giger’s facehugger, that big insect larva that wraps arms and tentacles round and into the human face, covering the outside like a hand. Carefully, I sink my teeth into it. It’s soft and a little viscous. I hear a faint squeal coming from inside it, and I take my first bite of a demon. It coats my mouth like a kind of gruel or almond custard. Venke and Terese and several more people stand up and approach me and together we bite, slurp and lap it all up. Under the gruel facehugger’s spine, a half-finished screaming face is revealed, made of hardened chocolate sauce. We eat this face too. Some dip their fingers, or a strawberry or a pineapple ring in the sauce, while I lick and suck and slurp up the face, feeling it slide down my belly like a long, warm tentacle.
Now they’re all gone. That’s that.
Terese is sitting on the floor under the table, where she has found one final dessert. A marzipan sausage. It’s sliced and distributed around the table. We enjoy it slowly, already full and content.
One of us grabs three leftover spaghetti strands from a platter and forms a circle with each of them, like three snakes biting their own tails. Then she shifts the three rings so they partly cover each other, overlapping, like three occult Olympic rings, like the way we overlap each other, with legs, arms and chocolate sauce shared between us.
We doze lightly on our chairs and on the floor. I dip my hand in a blotch of chocolate sauce on the seat of a chair and draw shapes on the seat cover. Venke has taken out two bags and positioned herself at the end of the table. She removes red rubber gloves from one bag and puts them on, then she sticks her hand in the other. Her hand rummages through the bag. The rest of us sit up and watch. A few people start to giggle. Venke retracts the gloved hand. She’s got something brown and soft in her fist. Is it even more food, custard, fondant, or is it faeces? She turns and throws the thing at the wall behind her, the one with the petrified students behind it.
Is it shit? someone yells.
Is it? Venke asks in return. Or is it mud? Is it chocolate?
The rest of us squeal with joy.
If it’s shit, someone else says, then it’s ours. Our waste! Human antimatter! We’ve got to make something with it.
Venke holds the bag up and hands out rubber gloves. Some of us put on gloves and hesitatingly start poking their hands into the shit. It might be chocolate. More squealing.
Then everyone start flinging poo around, first cautiously, then more and more wildly, at the walls and at the canvas, like a pillow fight. The mood is warm and friendly, the pitches euphoric.
The effect of the chocolate, or faeces, grows greater and more powerful, clearer, as if it’s sedated us, or we’ve crossed some boundary. As if we’re taking part in a role-play in which our real personalities are increasingly concealed, literally and metaphorically, by all the shit. Fact and fiction are snogging. We’ve used hallucinations for paint, and stand on the other side of the mirror, where the students could have peered over at us, were they not stuck in time. We’ve opened up this space and stepped over into delirium, a ritual where everything can happen. We’re glued together by the faeces, like one long coiled-up snake that licks every one of its orifices, content and lazy.
A distant SMS ding is heard. Slowly the clogged room opens up again, and that one second out there in reality has become the next. It’s time to leave.
Someone is pushing the painted glass walls towards each other, we get closer and closer, as the space narrows between the room in the room and the time in the time. Finally we have to head off, out, an
d we discover that we’re no longer dirty and full, that we’re no longer smeared with brown gunk. We quickly disappear from the school, in every direction, just as mysteriously as we arrived. As I exit, I hear a backward SCREECH, as if someone has lifted the needle off a spinning LP, and suddenly I’m alone. I text Venke and Terese but don’t get a reply until much later, as if we’ve been scattered into different years on our way back to our own time and can’t reach each other.
I’m not sure the ritual itself ended in erasure, as if it never happened, or if it made itself invisible by some enchantment, and is still happening now we’ve returned to our daily routine. It’s impossible to know whether I’m covered in phantom shit or not. As a result I spend the entire day and rest of the week sniffing myself, something Venke and Terese later will confirm they did, too. None of us is sure if she smells or not, but we are all consumed by a constant hunt for clues, trying to figure out if any smell is there. We’re animals that sense something, that have caught a scent, perhaps our own.
This is the magic of magic; that it’s impossible to know whether it happens or not, since magic goes against reason and therefore necessarily becomes a question of faith. This afternoon in Tøyen we believe in phantom shit. It’s on the outside and on the inside, in the shape of the mass we chucked at each other and the chocolate-sauce face we ate. It’s magic double-sided tape, since the brown mass simmers both outside and inside us for the entire rest of the day. It burns on and under our skin, in our cheeks, in our jaws, our teeth, all around our gullet, stomach and intestines, and down toward our groins. When I close my eyes I can picture my internal form, a different form than the one I recognise as my own, a shape with new networks and escape routes marked by skidding wheels on the asphalt.