The Happiest People in the World

by Brock Clarke

  “I know that, too,” the woman said.

  32

  Søren followed the woman back to Skagen, to a house, a holiday cabin, snug in the dunes of Gammel Skagen. Søren got out of his car, looked up, and saw smoke coming from the chimneys of all the other houses nestled in the dunes. Otherwise, it seemed like they were alone, alone with the gulls and the distant sound of the waves and the blowing sand.

  Søren and the woman walked inside the house, into the kitchen, where they sat across from each other at a scarred wooden table. The house had other rooms, and they’d passed through a couple of them on the way to the kitchen, but the kitchen was the only room that contained furniture. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “I know you,” the woman said. “You live on Lochersvej with your father. Your mother is dead. Your little buddy lives just down the street from you.”

  “Tarik?” Søren said.

  “No need to thank us for getting you and your little buddy those jobs at the boatyard.”

  Søren thought about that. Neither Tarik nor he had had any experience making boats, or fixing boats, or taking care of boats, or even being passengers on boats. And yet they applied for jobs and their applications were immediately accepted. “We had no experience,” Søren said.

  “You didn’t have any experience burning down buildings, either,” the woman said. “And yet . . .”

  Søren just looked at her in amazement. You know everything about me, he thought, and then he wondered whether she knew that he was thinking that. Was this what meeting Allah would be like? Søren wondered. You lived your life thinking that you had some control over it, that you were the one making important decisions, and then you met Allah, who said, Well, actually . . .

  “Why didn’t you arrest me?”

  “I knew you were thinking that.”

  “I hate you.”

  “And that’s why we didn’t arrest you. Because there’s lots of people who already hate us. If we arrested you, then other Muslims would have rallied around you. There might have been more fires. Someone might have actually been killed this time. We thought it would be better for everyone if we pretended the cartoonist was dead.”

  It wasn’t better for me, Søren thought. But was that even true? Was it worse to go to prison for arson or to stay free and believe you were a murderer? But it was impossible to say definitively, because he had only had experience staying free and believing he was a murderer.

  “Plus,” the woman said, “you didn’t seem all that bad. We didn’t think it was likely that you’d be killing anyone else.”

  “That’s true,” Søren said, before he remembered. It was difficult to instantly recall that everything you’d believed about yourself for four years was an absolute lie. “But I didn’t kill anyone in the first place!”

  “That’s right,” the woman said, chuckling. “Sometimes I forget that, too.”

  “I hate you so much,” Søren said.

  “Well, yeah,” the woman said. “But I bet you hate someone else even more.”

  Søren thought about that. He knew she was talking about the cartoonist. How much did Søren hate him? On the one hand, he hated that the cartoonist was still alive. On the other hand, Søren loved that he had not killed him. Meanwhile the woman was watching him think. “Because he definitely hates you,” she said. “Just in case you were wondering.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “I want you to kill him,” the woman said.

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “That’s a common misunderstanding about secret agents. We don’t usually kill people ourselves. We usually try to get other people to do it for us.”

  “We,” repeated Søren.

  “What’s that?”

  “You said ‘we.’ ‘We don’t usually kill people ourselves.’ ”

  “OK.”

  “But before that you said ‘I.’ ‘I want you to kill him.’ ”

  “I meant ‘we,’ ” the woman said.

  Did you? Søren thought, carefully considering her, and also the table between them. The table really was scarred—big random furrows crisscrossing the surface—and faded, too, like it had been left too long out in the weather. This was a table that had been abandoned, not sold or bought. The house seemed abandoned, too: it was cold in the kitchen, Søren could see his breath. The lights weren’t on, either. The woman seemed to see him assessing the room; she adjusted her hat, then adjusted it again. “You didn’t even know the PIN for your credit card,” Søren said.

  “Listen, Søren,” she said, putting both hands on the table. It wobbled a little when she did that. “Are you going to kill him or not?”

  Søren sat back in his chair to think about it. He thought about how awful it had felt when he’d actually believed he was a murderer and how he never wanted to feel that way again. But then Søren thought of that cartoon, and then of the cartoonist, out there somewhere, having a good laugh over how he and this woman and who knows who else had tricked Søren into thinking he was something he was not for the past four years, and suddenly Søren was overwhelmed by a sense of the world’s injustice: he could actually feel the injustice, in his head and around his eyes, like it was a sinus thing. It was the kind of feeling that you would do almost anything to get rid of. But did that include murder? “I just don’t know,” Søren said, and the woman nodded as though she’d expected that answer. She took her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and said, “I wonder what your father will think when I call and tell him about his terrorist-arsonist son.”

  “No!” Søren said. Because suddenly he could see his father’s face, the look on it making the journey from disbelief to disappointment to shame. The only thing worse than your father finding out about the terrible things you’ve done is thinking about your father finding out about the terrible things you’ve done. “I’ll do it,” Søren said.

  “I knew you would,” the woman said. She smiled quickly, showing no teeth, and then talked, in detail, about how Søren was going to do what she wanted him to do.

  PART FIVE

  33

  One o’clock, the first Wednesday in October. Henry’s office. Kurt, sixteen years old, fresh from driver’s ed, confiding in his guidance counselor, who in three days was also going to be his stepfather.

  “Dad seems lonely,” Kurt was saying, and Mr. L. crossed his arms, frowned. Kurt tried again. “Dad is lonely,” he said, and Mr. L. stopped frowning, as though to say, That’s more like it.

  “And that makes you feel . . .”

  “Like shit,” Kurt said, and then he waited to be reprimanded for his language. His mother and his father would have done exactly that. But Henry just looked at him, quizzically, the way he sometimes still did when confronted with the American vernacular.

  “And then I come here and talk to you and feel better,” Kurt said. He felt about Henry the traditional way you feel about your mother’s boyfriend, and also your guidance counselor: you didn’t want to trust him but ended up doing so anyway, although always with an eye toward returning to your original feelings. But the more time went by, the more distant those original feelings seemed, the more Kurt genuinely liked and trusted his almost stepfather, and the more he liked and trusted Henry, the more guilty he felt about his father being so lonely. “And that makes me feel worse than shit,” Kurt said.

  Henry frowned. “Worse than shit?” he asked. “Can one have that feeling?”

  Kurt shrugged. “One can. I can. My dad can.” Then he stared baldly at Henry. Sometimes he did this when the subject of his parents came up. Kurt did not really believe Henry was the cause of his parents’ breakup. Kurt knew, mostly because they’d tried so desperately to hide it from him, that his parents had been in the process of breaking up ever since he was old enough to pay attention. Still, sometimes he liked to stare accusingly at Henry to see whether he could make Henry act guilty. He never did. Kurt stopped staring. “I feel sad for him,” Kurt said.

  “He ha
s you,” Henry said.

  “Ugh,” Kurt said.

  “He has his brother,” Henry said, and Kurt said, “Ugh,” again, and this time Henry seemed to almost laugh. His uncle Lawrence was of course a well-known freak, but Henry’s almost laughing made Kurt turn perverse and want to defend his uncle.

  “Uncle Lawrence isn’t so bad,” Kurt said. He remembered a conversation his parents had had once, back when they were still married. Kurt’s mother had been getting on his father’s case for the way he treated his brother during one of their regular Sunday cocktail hour arguments. “You act like you don’t even love him,” she’d said. “Oh, I love him,“ his dad had said. “I don’t think that I trust him, but I do love him.” “Although I don’t think that I trust him,” Kurt said now to Henry. And then he stared baldly again at Henry, just for kicks. But Henry shocked him this time by answering his stare, out loud.

  “You can trust me, Kurt,” Henry said. And wow, Kurt wanted to hug him right then. Instead he said, “Ugh,” one more time and then got up to leave the office. But before he reached the doorway, Kurt turned and looked back at Henry.

  “That was a good talk,” he said, and Henry nodded gravely, as if he somehow knew it was the last good talk they would ever have.

  34

  Just before three o’clock, Henry looked up and saw a stout, dark-bearded, sleepy-eyed man standing in the doorway. On the door, which was open, was a sign that read MR. LARSEN, GUIDANCE COUNSELOR. On the other side of the cramped room was a metal desk, and on the other side of that was Henry himself. The stranger looked at the sign on the door and smirked. Then, still smirking, he looked at Henry’s face, and most carefully, too, like he was committing it to memory, like a traveler might read an itinerary, which, of course, in Henry’s case would have said Skagen, then Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Saint Petersburg, Paris, London, and so on and so on until finally here, in his office at the Broomeville Junior-Senior High School in Broomeville, New York.

  “Larsen,” the man finally said. “That’s a Danish name.”

  In response, Henry did what by now came naturally: he frowned. Because this was what you did as his patient, or student, or whatever you called the person who came to see the guidance counselor: you uttered a declarative sentence. And this is what he did as your guidance counselor: he frowned to let you know he disapproved of the inaccuracy of your declaration. Whereupon you tried again. This was Henry’s method, for which he was famous throughout the school, and into the town of Broomeville, too, a declarative sentence that, had he heard it, would not have caused him to frown. In fact, just before the stranger appeared, Henry had sat down with Pete Schuyler, a crooked-toothed tenth grader who’d gotten into a fistfight after the football game against Lowville the Friday before. It was Monday, and the cut below Pete’s left eye was still raw, still glistening with ooze. The fight had been with a senior at Lowville High, and when Henry asked Pete about the reason for the fight, Pete said, “Because he was a retard farmer.”

  Henry just frowned in response, as Pete must have known he would, as most anyone in Broomeville would have known he would. “If you’re from Lowville, then you’re automatically a retard farmer,” Pete protested. “Everyone knows this. It’s just common knowledge.”

  Henry frowned at that, too. He knew he was locally famous for his frown, for his method, and didn’t mind, because after all, he had been internationally famous for something else, and that, he had minded. That, he still minded. Now, Henry was forced to think of the other people who might mind learning about his international fame—oh God: Ellen, Kurt, not to mention the stranger, who might do more than just “mind.”

  “Larsen, that’s a Danish name,” the stranger had said a few seconds earlier. The stranger then repeated the statement. But before Henry could respond again with his famous frown, someone said, “Mr. L.?” A second later, Jenny Tallent stepped into the office. As usual, everything about Jenny seemed to be wrong on purpose. Her hair was cut lopsidedly and dyed a color somewhere between red wine and mud. Her pants were black and baggy, and off one of the belt loops hung a chain that wasn’t attached to anything. She was wearing a heavy, oversize black hooded jacket even though it was an unusually warm October afternoon; there were two strings hanging from the jacket on either side of her neck, and one of them was considerably longer than the other and looked wet. Henry guessed Jenny had been sucking on it, again. Her ears weren’t pierced, nor was her nose or either of her eyebrows or her lips, but there was a metal rivet lodged in the left side of her neck, at the center of a tattooed bull’s-eye. The bull’s-eye and the rivet seemed to do something to the stranger. He got up and, without saying any last thing to Henry or any first thing to the girl, walked briskly out of the office.

  “Who was that guy?” Jenny asked. Normally, her bull’s-eye and rivet spooked him, too. But just now, he didn’t think he’d ever been so relieved to see anyone in his life.

  Help me! Henry said to Jenny in his mind. Shut up! he said to himself in the same place. He’d been telling himself to shut up for two years, since he first moved to Broomeville. That he’d managed to do so was a major part of his happiness, not to mention his method.

  “I don’t know,” Henry told Jenny. Before she could ask him any more questions, he said, “What going on, Jenny?”

  “Principal Klock sent me to tell you: baseball.” She said “baseball” the way the stranger had said “Danish”: “Larsen, that’s a Danish name.” The stranger had said it twice: the first time he’d spoken in Danish, and the second in English, even though Henry had understood the Danish perfectly well.

  35

  Wednesday, October 6, 2011, 11:32 p.m.

  From: undisclosed sender

  To: undisclosed recipient

  Subject: Broomeville

  My first encounter with ”Mr. Larsen” in his office was interrupted by one of his female students. Nothing to worry about. I will visit Larsen again tomorrow and begin the next stage of our plan.

  36

  Baseball meant it was time again for the annual student-faculty baseball game. Henry had never completely understood why this game took place during football season, nor why it was called a student-faculty baseball game when the only students who played in the game were already on the baseball and softball teams, and the only faculty who played were the faculty who coached baseball or softball. The only thing that made sense about the game was that everyone—students, faculty, staff—was required to go to it: in the case of an out-of-season, inaptly named student-faculty baseball game, you had to require attendance if you wanted people to attend.

  The game had already started by the time Henry and Jenny arrived. Jenny went to lean against the fence with the other kids who dressed like something was wrong with them. Henry went to sit by Dr. Vernon, who was sitting by himself halfway up the bleachers. He was wearing a blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with parrots perched on either end of a branch. The branch was supposed to span the shirt wearer’s pectorals, but Dr. Vernon was hunched over in such a way that it looked as though the parrots were feasting on his nipples.

  “Hello, Henry.”

  “Dr. Vernon.”

  Dr. Vernon (his first name was Barry, but no one at the school ever called him anything but Dr. Vernon, with the italics) was the school’s long-term sub. If you went to Broomeville Junior-Senior High School, then sooner or later Dr. Vernon would be your long-term sub, but he would never be your regular teacher because even though he (supposedly) had his doctorate in something or other, he couldn’t be bothered to get his teacher’s certificate. He was that kind of guy. He was also the kind of guy who always wore loud Hawaiian shirts, including to the student-faculty baseball games, where he would announce loud, possibly comic, play-by-play calls of the game to the crowd. For instance, just as Henry sat down next to him, Dr. Vernon had yelled out, “Jared Johnson hits a scorcher to short,” when in fact Jared had hit a dribbler that had barely made it to the pitcher’s mound. It was unclear to Henry whether Dr.
Vernon’s commentary was meant to be optimistic or sarcastic, but in any case it was found by almost everyone within earshot to be incredibly annoying. “Why don’t you deck him?” Grace Vernon shouted to Henry. Grace was sitting several rows behind them. She was a home ec teacher at the school, and like so many who’ve had that calling, she seemed as though she’d blown in from some prairie in her long-sleeved sundresses and heavy braids and her crafty ways of making a little go a long way. She was also Dr. Vernon’s wife. “Why don’t you deck him already?” she asked Henry.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “He likes it when I deck him,” Grace announced. “It only encourages him.”

  Dr. Vernon turned in her direction. “That’s true, sweetie,” he said, beaming. Then he turned back to the field and said, in response to a lazy pop fly to the first baseman, “A Ruthian blast to right field. Going, going, going . . .”

  That was it: Grace charged down the stairs, the metal bleachers bonging and vibrating in her wake, punched her husband hard in the upper arm, and then ran back to her seat, where she was greeted with cheers. Meanwhile, Dr. Vernon rubbed his arm, still beaming, encouraged.

  “See?” Grace said to everyone. Then to Henry she said, “How you can stand to sit next to that fool anyway?”

  Stand to sit? Henry thought but did not say. Instead he waited a few seconds, then leaned closer to Dr. Vernon. The urge is great among those in hiding to casually test other people’s knowledge of the events that necessitated their going underground in the first place. Henry had resisted the urge for so long. For the past two years he’d resisted it so expertly that he didn’t really feel the urge anymore. But now that the stranger had shown up, Henry felt it again, more strongly than ever.

  “Do you remember a few years ago,” Henry said, whispered actually, “the controversy about the Danish cartoonist Jens Baedrup?”