by Jo Nesbo
A human head.
The skull has been split open. Eyes, lips, cheeks, all the soft parts are gone, probably eaten up by at least one generation of larvae now matured into grown flies. But all the same, perhaps because of the bare and unusually egg-like shape of the head, it seems to me that I recognise the extremely intelligent researcher I once employed as my deputy and assistant, Bernard Johansson.
A breath of wind causes the rugs to flap into the room, sunlight floods in, a puff of warm air strikes my face.
‘The flies!’ shrieks Egger. ‘They’re heading for the light! Catch the flies!’
The men stare at him in puzzlement. Look up towards where the swarm has already magically disappeared; only a few flies are left now around the slowly rotating ceiling fan.
One of the men opens fire on them.
‘No!’ Egger shouts. He’s almost crying.
No one stops me when I get up, walk over to the window and lift aside one of the rugs.
I’m looking out on a hillside. There are roofs below me, and the settlement continues all the way down to a point where it suddenly stops, and desert takes over. And beyond that: just sand, and a sun that is either risen and on its way up through the sky, or setting and on its way down, it’s hard to tell when you don’t know which direction you’re looking in. It’s very beautiful. And speaking of the sky, I think of the flies which are now, for the first time in their short lives – the lifespan of the average fly is twenty-eight days – free and on their way up into the heavens, taking with them what they’ve consumed of Bernard Johansson’s head. I close my eyes and feel a remarkable freedom, in spite of the men with the guns behind me. I don’t know what it is, only that I’ve unburdened myself of something, and now feel myself as light as a…well, as a fly.
If they don’t intend to lock me up, are they going to shoot me now? Maybe, and if so then it’s for something I’ve forgotten, something I found it necessary to shred; that at least is the only image that emerges when I join up the dots linking the few clues I find here in this room. And if I were to summarise my allotted span before they shoot, what could I say? That I have used my life, my twenty-eight days, to develop HADES1, a medicine that might be the start of something that will reduce the suffering of humanity. So no, it cannot have been a completely wasted life. That’s fine. There’s nothing I miss.
But still I feel a curious emptiness somewhere inside me. As though an organ has been surgically removed, I can’t find any other way to express it. And there, in that emptiness, I feel that yes, there really is something I miss.
I miss having known love. Having had a woman in my life.
THE CICADAS
‘ready,’ i said.
‘Get set,’ said Peter.
‘Go!’ we shouted in unison and started running.
The deal was that the last to cross the imaginary finishing line between Zurriola’s beach and the lifeguard’s chair two hundred metres away had to buy beers for us both. But it was also training and a rehearsal for our participation in the bull run at Pamplona in two days’ time.
For the first few metres I didn’t give my all. Not just because I could afford not to but because I was pretty sure I would win and at the same time didn’t want to rub Peter’s nose in it in a way that would put him in a bad mood. Peter Coates’s genetic heritage hadn’t given him much practice in losing. He came from a line of scientists, models and businessmen, all of them successful and affluent and – those I had met at least – with unusually white teeth. But they weren’t a notably athletic family. I kept a couple of metres behind Peter and observed his energetic but not especially effective or elegant running style. He had muscles, powerful thighs and a broad back, but although he was by no means overweight there was something heavy about him, as though he moved through a heavier gravitational field.
I had to position myself directly behind him when the course narrowed between two sunloungers and some bathers making their way back up from the cooling waters of the Biscay, and the sand kicked up by Peter’s bare feet sprayed across my stomach. We got a few choice Spanish oaths tossed after us but neither one of us slowed down. I pulled out to the right of Peter, closer to the water’s edge, where the sand was firmer and nice and cool underfoot. When we planned our trip Peter had told me that not only did San Sebastián have some of Europe’s finest restaurants but was also known to be relatively cool when the heat of the Spanish summer was at its most ferocious. That San Sebastián was the place where the more sophisticated and less sun-worshipping class of tourists took their vacation. And fortunately the cloud cover and the steady breeze we’d experienced since our arrival there the day before had been a welcome relief from the stifling heat of Paris and on the train journey.
I went up a gear and ran alongside Peter and could see the look of triumph already on his flushed face with the finishing line less than fifty metres away, and how it gave way to a look of desperation when he saw me next to him. I still had a choice, I could still let him win. A defeat would cost him more than victory would reward me, so it wasn’t a case of what Peter had told me was called a zero-sum game in which the pluses and minuses all cancel each other out in the great reckoning. But the question was really whether it would hurt him more to realise I had let him win. Peter’s laboured panting, and the fact that he was giving it absolutely everything, didn’t they oblige me to show him respect by also giving my all? And wasn’t there a tiny little part of me that really did want to rub his nose in it, for being so superior to me in every other way? Thirty metres to go. Choices. They feel so free; but are they really? Wasn’t what I was about to do already written in the stars?
I sprinted and in a couple of seconds was past him. I could see him trying to respond but he didn’t have enough left; his running got more and more ragged and he lost what little rhythm he had had to begin with. I simply maintained a steady speed so as not to beat him by too much, but still he fell further behind. Five or six more paces and we’d be over the finishing line. I felt something hit my leg, lost my balance and tumbled forward. I just about had time to break my fall and to see Peter gliding past me.
He walked back towards me, hands held above his head, his white teeth gleaming, and I sat up, still spitting sand.
‘Cheat!’ I coughed as I tried to summon up more saliva.
Peter laughed loudly. ‘Cheat?’
I spat and I spat. ‘Tackling from behind, that was an obvious trip.’
‘So what? Was there anything in the rules against that?’
‘Come on, that’s a given.’
‘Nothing is a given, Martin. Rules are constructions. Constructions have to be constructed. Before that happens the ability to be –’ he held up his closed fist and raised a finger to accentuate each point – ‘problem-solving, to take rapid decisions, to see past rigid modes of thought, to ignore counterproductive moral conceptions and –’ he smiled as he held out a hand to help me up – ‘as well as to tackle from behind are as admirable as the ability to move the legs rapidly.’
I took his hand and pulled myself to my feet. Brushed the sand off my body. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to comfort myself that in one of your parallel universes right at this very moment I’m the one who’s tackled you from behind, I’m the one who’s giving you the lecture, and you’re the one who has to go and buy the beers.’
Peter laughed and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘I buy, you fetch, OK?’
* * *
—
‘Parallel universes do exist,’ Peter said again as he took a swig from the bottle and sort of wriggled himself and his towel deeper into the sand.
‘OK,’ I said, carrying out the difficult art of drinking lying down, and peered up into the grey sky above us. ‘I understand that I don’t understand your quantum physics and your theory of relativity, and that I’m sure what you say is right about there being enough dark matter to make a pa
rallel universe, but that there’s an infinite number of them, well, I have trouble with that.’
‘In the first place these aren’t my physics theories, they’re Albert Einstein’s. And his underrated and almost equally clever friend Marcel Grossmann.’
‘Well, I’m no Grossmann, Peter, so if you want to convince me you can’t use equations and numbers.’
‘But the world is equations and numbers, Martin.’ Peter opened his blue eyes beneath his sun-bleached fringe and smiled in my direction, showing his white teeth. A girl once asked me if they were real. Not that it was either Peter’s scientific brain or his teeth that had attracted me to him in the first place and ended up as probably his best friend. I don’t know what it was. Maybe that unforced, pleasant self-confidence that sometimes accompanies natural-born talents and inherited money. Because Peter was a boy who knew that, without any particular trouble, he would meet all expectations. It was curiosity that drove him, not his family’s ambitions for him. And perhaps that brings us closer to an explanation of why he chose a poor art student from the wrong side of town as his best friend. He was the one who had been attracted to me, not the other way round. Probably because I represented something he was curious about, the only thing his family lacked: the sensitive, volatile artist mind that, despite being vastly inferior to his when it came to mathematics and physics, was able to transcend the boundaries of logic and create something else. The music of the senses. Beauty. Joy. Warmth. OK, I wasn’t quite there yet, but at least I was working on it.
And it was perhaps also curiosity rather than respect that led him to accept the condition I laid down for our taking this trip together: that he wasn’t to pay for anything for me. It meant that we travelled on a budget that was affordable for me. So it was Interrail tickets from Berlin through Europe, nights spent on the train or at cheap hotels, and meals at reasonably priced restaurants or in rooms where self-catering was available. Peter made just one exception. That when we reached San Sebastián – our penultimate stop before the goal of our trip, San Fermín and the bull running in Pamplona – we should eat at the world-famous Arzak restaurant, and he would foot the bill.
‘Will it convince you if I tell you that Stephen Hawking was doing work on parallel universes when he died?’ said Peter. ‘The physicist, you know, the guy in the wheelchair and –’
‘I know who Hawking was.’
‘Or is. If the numbers add up then he’s still alive in a parallel universe. We all are. So in fact, we do live forever.’
‘If the numbers add up!’ I groaned. ‘At least Christianity makes eternal life dependent on a belief in Christ.’
‘What will be really interesting will be to check out this Christ figure when the time comes, when we can move in a controlled manner between universes.’
‘Oh? Meaning that it’s already taking place in some uncontrolled manner?’
‘Sure. Ever heard of Steve Weinberg?’
‘No, but I’m guessing he won the Nobel Prize for something or other,’ I said. My bottle was empty and I turned my gaze from the lazily swaying sea in front of us to the bar behind.
‘Physics,’ said Peter. ‘His theory is that we, as the collection of vibrating atoms we actually are, might find ourselves vibrating at the same frequency as a parallel universe, in the same way you can be listening to a radio station on one frequency and suddenly hear another in the background. When that happens universes split and you can enter either one or the other reality. Know who Michio Kaku is?’
I tried to look as though the name rang a bell but I was struggling to place it.
‘Come on, Martin. That rather affable, Japanese-looking professor on TV who talks about string theory.’
‘The cool guy with the long hair?’
‘Him, yeah. He believes that déjà vu might be a result of the fact that we’ve had a peek into this parallel universe.’
‘Where we’ve been?’
‘Where we are, Martin. We’re living an infinity of parallel lives. This reality –’ he gestured with his hand towards the parasols, the sunloungers and bathers – ‘is neither more nor less real than the alternative. That’s why time travel is possible, because there’s no paradox involved once you have parallel universes.’
‘Temporal paradoxes, self-contradictions that make time travel impossible, that for example you could travel back in time and kill your own mother?’
‘Yes, but think of it instead in this way. If you’re travelling through time, then you have by definition split the universe in two, and in a parallel universe, or in some other universe, two of you can exist. You can be both dead and living at one and the same time.’
‘And you understand all this?’
Peter thought about it. Then he nodded. It wasn’t arrogance, just honest Coates self-assurance.
I had to laugh. ‘And now you’re going to find out how time travel can be accomplished?’
‘If I’m lucky. First I have to get on to the research team at Cern.’
‘And what are they going to say when a twenty-five-year-old says he wants to send people off time travelling?’
Peter shrugged. ‘When Apollo Eleven landed on the moon the average age in the control room at Houston was twenty-eight.’
I got to my feet. ‘Right now I’m planning a voyage to the bar and I’ll be back with more beers.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said and stood up.
Just at that moment there was a scream and Peter turned. He shaded his eyes.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Looks like someone’s in trouble. Out there,’ he said, pointing.
We’d gone to Zurriola because it was the surfing beach in San Sebastián. Not because we surfed, but because it meant young people. And that meant cooler beach bars. But also bigger waves. I saw a pink bathing cap bobbing up and down between the blue crests out there. Now I heard a woman behind us start shouting. I turned automatically towards the lifeguards’ station, an overgrown stool on stilts a little further off down the beach. The chair was empty, and I couldn’t see any lifeguard heading for the water. I can’t remember making the decision; I just started to run without waiting for Peter who, for some obscure reason, was unable to swim.
I ran, keeping my knees high through the shallow water to get as far out as possible before I began swimming. The last thing I did before diving in – while I still had a clear view – was to fix on the direction of the person in the pink bathing cap out there. When I came back up to the surface and started doing my own version of the crawl, a self-taught but efficient enough technique, I said to myself that it was further out than it looked, and I would have to pace myself and find a rhythm that would let me breathe properly between strokes. How far out was she? Fifty metres? A hundred? It’s hard to judge distances across water. At every tenth stroke I took a short break to check I was heading in the right direction. The waves weren’t big enough to break out here, which was probably why there were no surfers in the water today, but they were still big enough for the girl to disappear – because it was a girl, I could see that now – every time I sank down into a trough. It couldn’t be more than ten, maybe twenty metres now. She wasn’t screaming any more; there had only been the one scream. So either she’d seen that help was on the way and was saving her strength, or else she didn’t have the strength left to scream. Or else she wasn’t in trouble at all, she’d just screamed, maybe a fish had brushed past her foot. This last possibility I dismissed as I was raised up by the next wave and saw the pink bathing cap disappear beneath the surface of the water in the trough below me. Up it bobbed again. Disappeared again. I filled my lungs, kicked out and dived down. I would probably have spotted her at once in sunshine and clear water, but because San Sebastián is famous for its clouds I saw only bubbles and shades of green in the dim light. I kept on swimming down. The water was darker and colder. I don’t often think about death, bu
t I did so now. It was the bathing cap that saved me. Or her. If it hadn’t been such a striking colour I would probably never have seen her, because her swimsuit was black and her skin too dark. I came closer. She looked like a sleeping angel as she swayed there, weightless and swaying in the slight echoes of the waves that reached this far down. And it was so quiet. So lonely. Just her and me. I put one arm around her ribs beneath her breasts and pulled us back up towards the light. I felt her warmth against my arm, and what I persuaded myself was the slow beating of her heart. Then something strange happened. Just before we broke the surface she turned her head towards me and looked at me with large, dark eyes. Like someone risen from the dead, someone who had crossed over into a universe where people breathed water. The next moment, as our heads made the transition from the watery region to the aerial world, her eyes closed once more and she floated unmoving in my arms.
* * *
—
I heard shouts from the beach as I lay on my back in the water with the girl’s head on my chest and kicked out for the shore. As we reached the shallows, Peter, the lifeguard and a man who said he was a doctor waded out to us and helped her onto dry land. I lay in the shallows, coughing up water and trying to recover my strength.
‘Baywatch m-aaa-n.’
I opened my eyes. A man with a red beard and an equally red, sunburned face was looking down at me. In a rudimentary way the wide grin was equipped with teeth, the kilt was dirty, as was the blue shirt which was – unless I was mistaken – in the colours of the Scotland football team.
‘You’re a true saviour,’ he continued in his slurred but nevertheless comprehensible Scottish English as he helped me to my feet. Once we were on our feet, however, I was the one supporting him, for the man was roaring drunk.