Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

But I resemble the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson in one way: I sit still. Thanks be to the fact that I sit still, ever in one place (a bedside), and yet I travel constantly.

  June 24, 1967

  I must beg forgiveness from my conscience. All night she avenged herself on me with the most terrible dreams.

  IV composition book

  I see myself in my nation’s streams,

  she turns away and does not want

  to see her image in me. I am feeble.

  I am freshly nourished on oxygen and I managed to go urinate and defecate unaided without needing Anna’s assistance to wipe myself that day which never reaches evening is not today I have resolved to live all of it the time is now half-five outside the weather is bright and ten degrees though August passes swiftly iceland is some kind of Hawaii

  8-9-1967.

  I sleep calmest and best when the weather is poor. I almost never use any of the protective weather gear that is in the cellar. Having it would be considered an advantage if I were fearful of the weather but I am very much the opposite, and consider this “advantage” to be an utter disadvantage in my tiny apartment. Ideally I would have some weather protection for when it is dry and windy and loose grit blows. The streets in this neighborhood are unpaved, at an early stage of their design, and there are foreign tourists. They got lost here, either drunk or insane, you would think the Town Organizing Committee had built some hocus-pocus, moving stone shacks into new streets (which in fact are old streets) or making construction rules in order to raise old houses instead of new ones. That is not so. The council, to which I have given my vote, seems to have totally forgotten this street, my “Tómasfield.” I have always cast my vote according to this rule: If the majority cannot get things done, neither can the minority. I am in what’s known as the first category of voters. In the second category are those who want to elect a minority and are activists and speak outside polling stations, from a distance, based on their belief, but under the cover of the polling stations their electoral convictions overcome them, and they cannot countenance this disastrous X-ing, their hands refusing to carry out the desired order which runs so contrary to the great trust the majority shows by kindly marking their cross. The second category chooses as the first category does and stabs their ballot into the box with a clear conscience: you were right to trust me; I will not betray those who put their faith in me. Generally, on election day this is labeled as undecided voting. On the other hand, the third category aims to rule in place of the first category, but chokes amid its party’s slush. In the rain, these relatively narrow alleyways between the houses become almost impassable due to mud and puddles. Only rats, pigeons, and cats can cross these urban marshes, and folk like me in galoshes. You could call Reykjavík the Venice of the Arctic. That name better fits the city than her real name, Smoky Bay: smoke is hardly ever seen here except from factories and refuse dumps that emit the vapors of innumerable citizens; here the air is so limpid, so cold, that farts hang behind their owners, white plumes drifting into the cold winter day. All the loveliest animals teem here: people throw trash in bins, the rats eat so, so much trash, the cats swallow the rats, the pigeons peck at the cat shit and the children feast on their dove eggs under the steps. As the saying goes, you can observe the cycle in all its nakedness, its original image, from the window of a house. I wade daily in my overshoes across marsh canals. On the way to work I cross ten open canals going over a Ponte di Rialto of Frónkex cookie boxes. Pieces of timber sail like gondolas along the water of the canals. The rain pools into deep mud and slush; I take a rag with me to work, and stop on the steps to my office to wipe the dirt from my leather shoe covers.

  do you remember the story of the rich shoe cover salesman, the time a fire broke out in the store and how his errand boy shot up to the fifteenth floor to where the shoe storage was in order to throw the stock down to the street to the salesman and risked his life for the company he wore pairs of shoe covers and another pair over each pair until he had the whole stock on his feet and to save them and himself in the face of the fiery tongues licking the window and igniting the paper bags he threw himself off the edge of the roof but because the material on the shoe covers was unbelievably elastic and the salesman only stocked first-rate brands the errand boy was hurled ever higher in the air nowadays he reconnects with the earth only every fifteen years and has gone grizzled gray do you remember this story about overshoes meant for toddlers and cats now I have told you it Títa you understand why you lift your head mewing into the sky just like everyone else you are waiting for some unbelievable miracle from above waiting for an errand boy in overshoes constantly on the alert remaining vigilanttomorrow he will come down to earth for the last timeyou long to become something more than what you are for example a bootied cat amid barefoot catsand on the next arc the infamous over-shoed errand boy will jump past the sky’s threshold helped by angels to whom he has promised shoe covers remember this story Títado not miss him tomorrow, but if he passes you, you can always live in hope the way the majority does that you will get to be a puss in boots with godwith hahahahayesterday it snowed. This morning, snow also. Dark over everything; storm winds and getting blown away. The window creaks though it is carefully latched on both hooks and the iron grate is shut. It is good to hunker indoors during rough weather. You feel a special ease and sense of security inside the walls of a house thinking about small birds. You fervidly wish for the weather to crash into the coming work day, thinking of your continual promised wish the electricity will fail (wretched men hanging from poles, creatures fixing the lines in dogweather) and the morning wakes you with a phone call. What are you saying—totally without power—the whole city. I just hope it’s nothing serious. Now you are free to think of the right moment opening up: poor them on their poles and poor sailors at sea and poor pilots in Loftleiðir planes and poor farmers in turf huts and birds shelterless in this bluster. You throw a handful of cereal out into the snow for small birds. In such weather conditions, in the period between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty, before the struggle with the oil-fueled primus stoves begins, it’s reckoned the population increases by 2.3%. Although the icy streets are treacherous I stagger along them with a loaded scrotum. I come across Bjössi opposite the entrance to the watchman’s apartment. He is beating ice from a rope mat and driving nails into the filter holes on the drainpipe, which the mat normally covers and which has become blocked. Totally unnecessary for you to hustle out here, he says. Everything is dark as coal. Electricity has reached us, I say; it is too difficult to earn Bjössi’s respect, he only respects himself. Unfortunately, it’s rare for a power outage to last a full day, rare for offices to close because of a polio epidemic, dysentery, or vaccines. No dangerous epidemic infests this town except numbness. And it is bad to meet Bjössi alone. For some reason I think he must been gathering information on me, saving it up for a future time. He must have been a bystander somewhere when Lóa was raped. The door of the watchman’s apartment is almost next to the store. All this may be my devilish imagination.

  In any case, I managed to wake rested and refreshed after a deep sleep as the clock rang Sunday in. I was in no hurry to dress. I needed to wake, yawn, put in my teeth, release the piss from my penis, lie back under the covers, drink from my half-thermos, and lie still on my back, my hands at my sides on top of the comforter, which swells with air and feathers, take out my teeth, doze for five minutes, wake for another five, turn again to sleep, and wake in five minute intervals. I manage at least ten hours of sleep. The flesh prefers dormancy once it has begun to pale and die. After this night I took to springing up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, frightened and scared. When a set rule has been once interrupted by exception, the exception stops becoming the rule. In such cases, a person is indeed liable to resort to great violence. By pure coincidence I learned from Bjössa that Lóa washes the floors early Sunday mornings while the city sleeps off the drunkenness from its body when no one is watching. I drew the clock under the c
overs. I scrutinized the dial. Four. I looked out the window. It had rained in the night. By nature I am very much an evening sleeper, an evening wolf. Such a nature must become rarer with each passing year in this nation. People shorten their days and lengthen their nights. Sleeping is not respected except for where there are sick people or the decrepit or those about to die. Before you die, you must be properly asleep. Preferable to die in your sleep. Hospitals usually turn off the lights at ten o’clock at night. I need my sleep dearly. But I would rather die than be frozen inside a retirement home. Once you get to my age, an orderly lifestyle is the surest defense against the force which fills graves. A long time ago I had to give up coffee with dinner. That was a great struggle. Almost impossible. Coffee in the evening, sitting in the comfort and privacy of a divan corner with the chair’s seat clamped between my knees, the thermos within reach on the ground, morsels of letters on the back of the chair and the cup steady in the seat’s depression, alone in your company, my puss, that was my life’s true purpose, my diversion. I heard Katrín screaming in the corridor: I’m coming for your life next. And the kids screaming at her: I’ll kill you you fucking snake, if you don’t shut up. I only go out at night if I want to. Sveinn was at home, that rare event, and I heard him mewl from inside the bedroom: Use common decency and don’t hit or lose your temper. I rose slowly to my feet, belched from the coffee and plucked the fuses from the board. Everything fell completely silent. I took out my teeth, exercised my jaw, undressed, and fell asleep. But you remember nothing of this. Feline instinct has little memory. Words spoken to cats in confidence are not used later in retaliation. The absence of coffee in the evenings. Life became empty and my environment impoverished in quality. So it ends. There comes a time you have to give up evening coffee and everything of quality in the world. I1 had the hint of a suspicion, when I got up having slept badly, that I would wake up with a bad taste in my mouth following this night’s tribulations, tired and bored and abused by evil dreams. I did everything as quietly as possible, with the utmost care. In the dark I plucked off my clothes. I would never dress in the dark, of course. Clothes put on that way are ill fitting. I’d go to seed before I let darkness clothe me. I justify my cowardice by saying in my head: I am sufficiently screened from the streetlights. Which of course is not true. Cowardice makes any act truthful. In fact, a tiny amount of light gropes its way past the ends of the curtains and through the slit in the middle. It is not particularly helpful given my weak sight. I hold to a constant rule: never get dressed before going to the bathroom and washing the sleep from my face. The rabble who rent from me sleep soundly at that time, having exhausted themselves first with quarrels and squabbles and then within their lairs, the couple engaging in an eternal wrangle with each other, and after wrestling heading to sleep. The corridor is deserted in the early morning. Anyone who rents past my little partition is awake at night and sleeps during the day. Early in the morning I am alone and proceed through along the hallway with my grooming tools. I can safely change out of my underwear. I can safely nose about in the refrigerator and cupboards to examine the negligence and junk inside. No one can know me in my sleep (except my dreams). I do not need to get to work until half past eight. Until that time, when it is time to prepare for my departure, I potter about in my room, tidying up around me. I am washed and brushed. I have cleaned the sleep from my face, my scrotum, and my hands with a washcloth. I brush the bad taste of sleep from my mouth with a toothbrush. I blow the sleep from my nose with a tissue. I wipe sleep from my eyes by closing them, rolling them five times in the sun’s direction then counterclockwise the same number of times. I never feel comfortable until I have scraped off my stubble. The day begins as soon as the night’s clamminess has left my flesh, the mind ready to start earning money. Dressed, I drink my morning coffee, of which I will also be robbed before long. Once in a retirement home, you get dishwater mix instead. I am prepared for the worst. I face it with the calm and tranquility of my early days. O yes. Inside the room I make my bed. A made bed makes the evening more manageable. I have opted for neatness. Difficult for one person to keep everything in order, unless he is by nature fastidious. I keep some hand soap on the radiator so that the air in the room is fragrant. It later gets used up in the laundry. It hardens when heated, and it is thrifty; it gives off a pleasant fragrance. On the other hand, the couple’s hand-soap is gobbled away night and day in a waterlogged soap dish on the bathroom sink. In my room, things sit in their given places. Complete anarchy reigns in the other parts of the apartment. The kids buzz around their parents’ heads, and objects buzz around the heads of both the kids and the parents. Blind, I could go to my closet, stretch out my hand, touch the key, turn it into a semicircle in the lock, open the door, and reach for the green pencil in a jacket’s breast pocket; I could do other tricks like this. Orderliness has come in handy now that I am blind and decrepit. I leave the house as soon as my internal organizing and planning voice says: Tómas, everything is in its ideal place within your room. Even my thoughts sit in an organized series within my cerebral cortex.

  My thought itinerary.

  6:30: I wake up; I realize that I’m alive, I need to wash; I’m bursting to urinate; then shave, groom.

  7: I start to clean up around me; subdivisions of thought: dust, chamber pot, tidying, etc.

  7.30: Morning drink; subdivisions of thought: I am lucky there is bread in the oven; chew thoroughly; clean your teeth using your tongue, etc.

  8: thoughts regarding getting myself to work.

  8:30: pleased that I’m seated in my chair and starting to make money.

  8:30 to 4:30: My money intake increases by the minute; withdrawal: young Miss Gerður, her fingers, thighs, breasts, buttocks.

  4:30 and after: my daily earnings today have reached the same as yesterday.

  10:30: I have added one day to the days of my life and shortened it by one day, too; I now lack this or that many days filling the week as age and remuneration touch; various thoughts about my bedtime, fold trousers, arrange shoes, check whether I have set the chamber pot exactly in place under the bed, the window, lock the door, turn the key so that it is not possible to drill it out with another key from the outside, etc.

  11: and after: freedom of thought.

  (I cannot control my thoughts and dreams during sleep.)

  More because of my training than the faint glimmers of light, I get safely and soundly into my shirt. I even did it up right. The best advice I know for buttoning a shirt correctly in the dark it is to take the bottom or top button first then move it over to the bottom or top buttonhole. If you follow in order carefully then the buttons all ought to find their way into the right buttonholes. I put on my socks and shoes. I was able to perform this all with total accuracy in the dark. I have a pair of shoes I reserve for Sunday use. Somehow, I cannot use my weekend shoes as Sunday shoes, which wear better than the shoes adults use only on weekends. In 1941, I took pains to use the word “boots,” though I never said shoe-boots, and then I started using the word “shoes.” But somehow I feel now that “Sunday shoes” as a phrase belongs to children: the shoes of adolescents. Well. Saturday night I put my weekend shoes on the floor in front of the divan, so that the polished toes point toward the wardrobe, the heels beside the bed. On Sunday morning I tuck my feet in the right shoes, wearing clean socks, of course. I hurry into my socks without touching my bare feet to the ice-cold floor.

  I sit there on the edge of the bed. I wait for them to leave. While I sit still in the dark no memories come to mind. This may seem strange and alien: inside I was empty.I struck my shoulderI discovered I had a body the body is dressed on its exterior in skin under the skin there is flesh on the skin there is hairI touch my bodyI have a bodyinside it: bones and entrailsBut I could find no memories inside the body. I had never thought that my travels were entrusted with memories. I was told that as age increases and the flesh softens, drowsy memories awaken in the mind. That is not my experience.for me, nostalgia awakens in th
e fleshI do not know if this is my nature or a characteristic that I have acquired on the job. Anyway, I sit there void of memory, like a banker accused of embezzlement or fraudtheir memories at some point eat the iceFor example, our CEO lost his memory after twenty million got lost somehow in the course of business and could not be found anywhere though people searched with beaming floodlights. Who is up to that awful responsibility of passing judgment on all the suggestions and speculations where an amnesiac is involved, asked young Miss Gerður. Would it not be more fitting to send him to a sick house and treat him with the appropriate remedies, rather than locking him away, forgotten, in some prison; as with similar conditions, he needs to be in that sort of place: if the director has committed a crime then the offense is no different from any other disease or disorder that needs to be cured through care and the continued confidence of his subordinates. So Tryggvi returned to his leather chair after a sabbatical year abroad and two weeks of rest at home while he got used to the change in climate (he had been sent to Switzerland, since it was customary to send amnesiac CEOs there and rejuvenate their blood. This transfusion was done in three phases, said Miss Gerður: 30% taken each time, and after the operation only 10% of their cerebral blood remains. But ten percent is probably sufficient to conceal the lost twenty million króna. And I do declare that whatever is innate in a man will not change, not in Switzerland and not here in iceland either . . .). What cured Tryggvi the most was being put back into his former employment, fully guaranteed, said Sigurður; the blood transfusion didn’t do him any good: if you ran into him out and about this past fortnight, you’d find him always out wandering. No, friend, protested Miss Gerður, science is the twentieth century’s only miracle. With new blood comes a new and unprecedented memory: the memory of the one who gave blood and of his spiritual need; the CEO in question remembers his womb-self and the future to come, so only natural they go crazy, believing themselves something they’re not, these CEOs with the fraudnesia disease. Afterward, they become a man with the blood of twenty men in their veins, which is no easy task. After the procedure, they are and they become these unknown men, with their powers, of course, which can be in conflict; what’s more, there’s no blue blood in them at all.