Trondheim, July 20th 2006
The time when Jon silenced the birds:
It was early in the morning and the birds were chirping and twittering in the hedge, but you and I and Jon were still sitting drinking at the kitchen table with our host – a guy from Molde who had just moved in (he had a pigeon chest and upper arms too skinny to accommodate normal-sized tattoos – “Is that a baby eagle on your bicep?” I asked, and of course he was offended). We were reluctant to call it a day, but all the bottles were empty and none of us was willing or able to cycle over to our place to fetch more booze so we just sat there on our kitchen chairs, trying to prolong the party by eking out the last drops in our glasses. Our host told us that he actually had a jerrycan of illicit liquor in the basement, but because one of his suppliers had just been charged with selling methanol he wasn’t a hundred per cent certain it was safe to drink (only ninety-six per cent certain as he said in an attempt at humour), so it was probably best not to touch it until he’d had it checked out, but you weren’t having any of that, of course, because you had suddenly spied a chance to do a Christopher Walken and play Russian roulette again. So, on the pretext of going to the loo, you snuck down to the basement, filled a half-empty cola bottle with what was either ethanol or methanol, and then there you were, back in the kitchen, all set to risk your life. “I’ll test your hooch for you,” you announced to our host with a grin and, thinking that you had mixed the cola with water and that this was all a big joke, he laughed when you put the bottle to your lips and started to knock back the pale-brown liquid. But when he saw the looks on Jon’s face and mine he realized that this was no joke. The smile on his face froze and after opening and closing his mouth a few times he got halfway to his feet and shouted out a stammered “It’s true, it’s true, it could be methanol, really,” but that didn’t stop you. of course. You went on drinking until the bottle was half-empty, then you lowered it and held it out in front of you. You burped, wiped your glistening lips with the back of your hand and then you grinned and asked if anybody else wanted to try it. You ran your bleary vodka-soaked eyes round the room and, knowing full well that Jon was as shocked now as he had been when you picked and ate an unidentified mushroom, you stopped at him. Then, in a gratingly jaunty voice, with all of his pathetic suicide attempts in mind, you said: “Hey, Jon, you wouldn’t mind tasting it, I’m sure, seeing as you’re planning to hang yourself anyway.” At these words Jon exploded. With a rage I would never have thought possible of such a weak and pathetic character he leaped out of his chair and knocked the bottle out of your hand, sending it spinning across the kitchen, out of the open window and into the hedge, abruptly silencing the twittering birds, then he brought his face right up to yours and yelled that you were the biggest coward he’d ever met. You tried to convince yourself and everybody else that you were brave, that this was a way of living more intensely, when in actual fact it was a way of running away, he roared, and after a long, furious tirade about how selfish and self-centred you were, he asked if you really thought he was so stupid that he didn’t know why you behaved the way you did. “You don’t dare say straight out that you don’t want anything to do with me any more, so you try to push me away by acting like an arsehole, don’t you think I know that?” he screamed, and I clearly remember the other people from the party, a bunch from Molde who had helped our host move in and were now crashed out, fast asleep on the living room floor, being woken by his screaming. Some of them lay where they were, only shifting a little like logs rolling in the surf, but a few sat up and stared at the two of you in alarm. You were still grinning and trying to look as if you weren’t in the least bit bothered by any of this, but when Jon, quite beside himself with rage and despair, turned to the guys from Molde and yelled, “We’re gay, you know; him there, he doesn’t dare admit it to himself or anybody else, but we’re gay and we’ve been lovers for almost two years,” the grin faded and I’m not sure whether the look on your face was one of hurt or sadness as you shook your head and told Jon that you were afraid there must be some misunderstanding. You weren’t gay, you mumbled and you had tried to tell him this many a time. Unlike him you tried to take the things you believed in and talked about seriously, you said. For you, it wasn’t just empty talk when you referred to Schopenhauer’s grand theory on mankind’s collective suicide or when you quoted Zapffe, saying, “be infertile, and let the earth be silent after ye”. You actually meant what you said, and since no child would ever result from two men having sex, gay sex was not only acceptable, it was the safest and best way for two people to have sex. “It’s just a pity that it doesn’t come as naturally to all of us,” you added.
Only later did I realize that you had actually been telling the truth. At the time I thought, as did the others I assume, that this was all nothing but a ridiculous excuse. Since we were sleeping together and I knew what you liked and didn’t like to do in bed, and since I knew how willing you were to experiment and try new things, sexually as well as in other ways, naturally the thought that you might be a closet gay never occurred to me, as it probably had to the other people present. I simply assumed that you were embarrassed by the fact that everybody now knew you had had sex with another man and had therefore seized on the first excuse you could think of. But the more I thought about it and the more I saw how unbelievably uncompromising you could actually be and how willing you were to stand up for what you truly believed in, the more certain I became that you really had “made a serious attempt to live as a homosexual”, as you later put it. Whether this fanaticism and refusal to compromise came to be seen as an aspect of the mental illness you were eventually diagnosed as suffering from, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t rule out that possibility.
That Jon, the only one who knew you as well as I did, doggedly maintained that you were homosexual was naturally just wishful thinking on his part. Although I was surprised when he confessed to being gay, once he had said it it seemed so obvious and apparent, not only because of his slight, girlish figure and rather effeminate manner, but also because certain things he had said or done that had puzzled me suddenly made sense. Suddenly I understood that it was the muscular half-naked guys that had been the real attraction when he insisted on watching even the crappiest music videos on MTV (although he had always laughed, of course, and said it was the fact that they were so crappy that made them funny) and suddenly I understood why he (and you) had been so shocked when his dad beat up that young guy outside the Quayside: not, first and foremost, because his dad would end up back inside, but because his dad clearly believed there was nothing in the world worse than being gay and because, as Jon (drama queen that he was) remarked to you later, “every time he hit that guy it was like he was hitting me”. Looking back on it, it was also clear to me that Jon, typically, had played on the role of fragile victim that being gay in a small town had accorded him, as you could confirm. You were the only person who had known that he was gay and you told me how sick and tired you had been of having to listen to his constant moaning, of always having to be sympathetic, having to console him and cheer him up, and of having to rush to his side at all hours of the day or night because he was threatening, yet again, to kill himself. He tried to convince himself and you that being gay in a small town was a nightmare, but in fact he loved it, you said, and what I had construed as sentimentality, self-pity and melodramatics on Jon’s part was nothing compared to what you had had to put up with.
When I think of all the stories you told me about this, about the extremes he would go to, and when I think of how Jon has not only never come out of the closet – even though that should be no big deal in 2006 – but has also had a long-term girlfriend, I’m almost inclined to believe that he isn’t gay at all, but was simply playing the part of the poor, oppressed homosexual to gain sympathy and closeness and to make himself seem interesting.
And naturally it was this side of him that eventually became too much for you. Instead of trying to alienate him by acting like real arseholes, a
s we had in fact been doing all that summer and autumn, we should of course have told him how fed up we were of constantly being dragged down into his black hole, how sick and tired we were of him killing all our enthusiasm and creativity by indirectly forcing us to feel sorry for him or to take a bleak view of things. But such things are easier said than done. We had kind of grown together, like an old married couple (if you can say that of three people), and right up until that morning after – the last time I would see Jon for many, many years (he did call a few days later, it’s true, but when, as usual, he said that he couldn’t remember a thing about the party, we let him know that enough was enough and that he needn’t bother calling again) – we had chosen to nag and snipe at each other rather than simply go our separate ways.
During the weeks that followed we flourished, you and I, both creatively and as a couple. Had it not been for the fact that we moved to different cities to study and hence, despite a few valiant attempts to maintain our relationship, gradually drifted further and further apart and eventually lost touch completely, I can’t help thinking that the whole of my adult life could have been very, very different.
The time when we shut ourselves away in a cottage in the mountains:
A stoat had got stuck in the chimney at the cottage and there it had stayed, rather like a tumour in a throat, until it froze or starved to death. After shovelling away some of the old, coarse snow, you climbed up onto the roof, and while I alternated between being inside, hunched down with my head half inside the chimney and my face upturned, and outside, peering up at you and shading my eyes with my hand so I could see you properly, you tried to shove the stoat down the chimney with the aid of a long fishing rod we had found in the cottage. And eventually you managed it. The emaciated, frosted body was stiff and rock-hard, I remember, and it hit the soot-blackened, though originally red, bricks below with a little clunk.
Afterwards I picked the animal up with both hands and carried it across the creaky cottage floor and out onto the front step. I was about to toss it into the dense thicket of gnarled dwarf birch, but you asked me not to and minutes later I was sitting on the step, nodding and applauding with wry formality while you presented what you called the first artwork of our stay. (Inspired by The Band, who shut themselves away in a cottage in the mountains to write what was to become Music from Big Pink we had decided to spend a week at the cottage up in the mountains at Dovre, being creative in all sorts of ways.) You nailed the stoat’s little back paws to the tree stump just outside the cottage door so it stood on its hindlegs like a tiny stuffed polar bear. That done, you took a step back in order to admire your handiwork along with me and talked about how great it would look when the sun came up and its warmth caused the creature to slowly cave in on itself like a whey-faced old man collapsing and expiring.
Later, once we’d lit a fire, eaten our cheese sandwiches and opened the first bottle of red wine, I presented what we recorded as the second artwork of our stay. While we were eating we had discussed how long we might be able to survive in this place without any outside help, and inspired by this conversation I wrote a story which – although, like the earlier piece I mentioned, I don’t remember it word for word – told how, hundreds of years after a nuclear disaster brought about by our own generation, our descendants crawled up out of the dark subterranean caverns in which they had been hiding and how, when their children – who had never seen the starry night sky before – asked what they were, those yellow things twinkling way up there, they were told that they were droplets of pee from a god who was shaking his cock.
Only now do I see that this piece was probably inspired as much by you and what you were going through at that time as by our entertaining discussion of how long we would survive in the wild on our own. Because, just as those descendants of ours in my story were in the process of inventing a mystical universe in which to believe and to steer by, so you were in the process of inventing a past in which to believe and to steer by. We had always made a big joke of it when you presented your countless theories as to who your real father might be, but even though I knew you didn’t say what you said just for fun, I didn’t realize how seriously you actually took it. You were already well on the way to developing the mental problems that would later lead to you being hospitalized and undergoing therapy, but I didn’t see that. Not even when the aforementioned fear that your father might have suffered from a serious hereditary disease turned into hypochondria did I realize that there was a problem. I shook my head despairingly when you began to read up on all sorts of different diseases and it disturbed and exasperated me the way you would detect symptoms of MS one day and some obscure syndrome the next, but it never occurred to me that this was one of several signs that you were gradually being swallowed up by your own imaginings and speculations. Looking back on it, it’s easy to say that I ought to have seen what was happening, but a lot of things that I would construe as symptoms today, now that I know you were actually ill, I merely interpreted then as interesting and intriguing aspects of your personality, and since we didn’t only endeavour to be open-minded and tolerant, but tended almost to cultivate the weird and the unusual, I couldn’t see that something was wrong. You were just different and the way we saw it, true children of individualism that we were, being different was almost always a good thing.
The time when we took a picture of the light with a capital L:
The sun was out, but it had just been raining and with every little puff of wind the leaf-heavy birch branches lifted slightly and sent a beautiful, shimmering shower of raindrops falling onto our driveway. I wanted to take a picture of it, but you felt it was way too kitschy. To some extent I agreed with you, but the trees looked so droopy and dejected, like a crowd of people mourning and weeping for someone they had lost, and I thought that if we could just capture that it could still make a good picture. So we stepped over the huge, shining puddle in the middle of the gravel path and made our way over to the postbox on its stand. We positioned ourselves with the sun behind us and you raised your new Nikon SLR only to promptly lower it again because, hanging from the beam in our empty garage, just a few yards away, was a narrow black cable with a solitary light bulb suspended from it. I totally agreed with you when you said that that light bulb made one think of a gallows, and that the image of a gallows would go well with the drooping, weeping trees in the foreground.
We took a few shots and if we had left it at that this incident would probably have been forgotten by now, but we didn’t leave it at that because, in an attempt to expand upon the narrative contained within the image, we fetched a thick length of rope from the basement (an old fire rope, as far as I remember) and used this to make a real hangman’s noose. We fixed this to the beam a little in front of the light bulb so that when we stood on the spot from which we had taken the first shot, we had the weeping crowd in the foreground, then the gallows and finally – as if framed within the noose – the light bulb, which was of course supposed to call to mind the Light itself.
As always when working on our art projects we were pretty hyped up and in our excitement we forgot to take the noose down again when we were finished. It wasn’t until late that same evening, some time after Mum and I had left for the hospital to see Gran, who was failing fast by then, that you went out to the garage to remove it. It was dark outside, and when Arvid came to drop off a bedside table, some board games and a box of books that you’d left behind when you moved out, his car headlights looked to you like the eyes of a wild beast at night, or so you told me later. He had turned slowly into the drive and kind of coasted straight towards the garage. Then he spotted you, standing on a stool, fiddling with a noose – a sight which caused him to slam on the brakes, fling open the car door and dash over to you, sure that you were about to kill yourself.
Nothing would convince him that this had not been the case – well, it wasn’t that long since Berit had died and he thought you were still devastated by her loss. I cycled down to the vestry and told him al
l about our photography experiment, thus confirming your version of events (or so I thought). But Arvid was convinced I was lying out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to you and he subjected me to a veritable tirade of platitudes on the nature of brotherly love. Not until I got home did it occur to me that the photograph would prove I’d been telling the truth, but when I mentioned this to you, feeling a little flustered and sure that you would be pleased, you told me that you had already destroyed both the photo and the negative.
You had never destroyed a negative before, nor would you ever have dreamed of doing so, it was a matter of principle with you so I knew you were lying, and since I could only see one reason for you to lie, namely, that you didn’t want Arvid to see the photo, I realized that at some point you had made up your mind to let him think that you actually had been about to do away with yourself, and this you did eventually admit, claiming that it was a part of the work.
Since this act constituted a realization, so to speak, of the narrative contained within the image, I could see the logic in what you said, but just as I had hated lying about what we had seen and heard during the Holseth Landslide, and just as I had hated leaving that ladies’ scarf in poor, dead Åge Viken’s car, I hated you doing this to Arvid. You would send him the noose picture later and tell him the whole story, you said, just as you had sent an anonymous letter to Anita Viken to explain how that scarf had come to be in her husband’s car, but it made me feel sick to think how worried Arvid would be about you until he received the photograph, and how let down he would feel afterwards. I got really mad, I remember, yelling at you and telling you how selfish and cold and cynical you were, but at the same time I couldn’t help admiring you for being so uncompromising in the pursuit of your ideals, and if I am right in suspecting that you have not in fact lost your memory at all, but that all of this is simply another art project that you’ve embarked on (you crafty devil), then I can only say that I admire you for still being as uncompromising as ever.
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